How to use Content Marketing to Generate more Leads and Sales for your Business

Owen:    Hi, everyone.  My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and I’m the Committee Engagement Officer here at SweetProcess and you’re watching this interview because you want to discover a step-by-step content marketing process to use to generate leads and more sales for your business from a proven expert.  Today, my guest’s name is Dan Norris and he is the founder of Informly which provides you with actionable data to help content market as engaging your audience and create content that grows their businesses.  Dan, welcome to the show.Dan:      Thanks having me, man.  Looking forward to it.Owen:      Yes.  So the bigger idea that I want to learn today is basically we want to learn a step-by-step process that you currently use to create content for your blog and then second, be guided I want to discuss during the show is the step-by-step that you use after the content has been created and distribute that content so that you can use the content you just created to generate leads and sales for your business and I want to learn from how you’re currently doing it and the audience are eager to hear how you do it in your business.

Dan:      Sure.  I’m looking forward to it.

Owen:      So one of the things that I would like to do is I always want to get the audience to understand, draw out a quick result as to what you’re currently doing in your business like a highlight and let them know quickly, resourceful stats regarding what you’re about to teach them already in your business in terms of content marketing.  What’s one highlight to stats that you can share with us right now?

Dan:      Yeah.  I mean, I think when I see my business, I really get excited.  I sold my last book maybe 8 or 9 months ago and I have to start again from scratch.  I think everything is heading in the right direction.  I went from having zero visitors to a thousand visitors in my [00:01:58] markets stick to 10,000, last month it’s 10,000 so it’s kind of growing rapidly and getting up around a thousand conversions a month in my opt-in.  I mean that’s on a vanity metrics.  They’re probably not that impressive but everything is growing vertically.  Again, pretty much everything I’ve done is resulting to my content so I guess the stats are okay.

Owen:      Well, I mean the reality is that you started below from scratch and from zero visitors to where you’re at, you’re getting tens of thousands of visitors, that’s nothing to sneeze at, that’s something impressive and also I wanted to blog post I read the other day was how you show that someone who come to your site, you actually converted them into leads and also converted them to sales so that is actually impressive and so I just want to get to the listeners to get like a quick back story as to how you got started with this whole tool that you have now which is Informly, what need did you see that maybe say you want to bring it out?

Dan:      Right.  Well, I’ve run a web design company before and I did it for too long and by the end I was disappointed and one of it is I’m different, I really want to get into like software and I’ve building this product the same with my client’s reports and that eventually turned Informly that in fact there are two versions of Informly.  There’s an agency version which is more like what I’ve started building back in the days on my own agency which was a simple tool to basically give my clients a branded report with my logo on it that tell them how their result was going and link it to Google Analytics and then rank checking and all the other kind of stuff.  That became the agency version of Informly and it’s just a normal business that’s kind of a bloggers version that kind of evolved into a dying analytics product and that’s just kind of evolved then in last 3 months.

Owen:      And so we keep hearing about content marketing all the time and that’s like the new catch phrase.  I just want to give the listeners like a quick introduction as to what exactly is content marketing before we share your process with them.

Dan:      Yes.  Content marketing at least the way I talk about it is more focused on more of aspect of content marketing, at time content marketing can be pretty broad, I mean, like my football club has a TV show and that’s content marketing.  That’s pointing at content that’s appearing to their audience, that’s driving up membership.  But the content that I typically work on and then I focus on is all online and most of what you hear that marketing at least a small business and bloggers I point into which is entrepreneurs which is probably your audience is mainly talking about blogging, creating valuable content, exactly what you’re doing right now and engaging in audience and basically, building trust with them and getting them to convert and eventually, become a customer if they’re suitable.

Owen:      And so what I guess from content marketing is that this whole inbound approach where you’re basically writing content that your respective customer or find interest or maybe content that ask questions that they have in mind that brings them to your site and that starts the engagement within as opposed to outbound marketing way or maybe cold calling people, you’re sending direct mail or basically stuff ways, I mean or not even expecting you to reach out to them but content marketing is more, they raise their hands saying, “I want to find this content” and it just so happens that you have the content.  Is that kind of like quick distinction between both styles of marketing?

Dan:      Yeah.  That sounds perfectly right.  It’s sort of mindset thing as well as like some people just are in business to kind of make money and the only way they know is to do the outcome solid marketing but other people are just passionate, like yourself about helping people and they love putting out content that talks to people and that ends up resulting in building trust with people and attracting an audience to your site that you wouldn’t have otherwise increase your Google ranking, increase the shareability of the stuff on social media or inspect your message and eventually build your audience and build your business.

Owen:      And so basically, is there a kind of business that maybe you think this whole idea of content inbound marketing will not work for?  Is it safe to assume that it will work for every type of business?  I’m just curious.

Dan:      I’m not really sure how to answer that, I mean, you have to look at some of the stuff with Marcus Sheridan it’s done, otherwise, have you had him on a show?

Owen:      The Sales Lion?  Yes, I know him.  Marcus Sheridan.

Dan:      Yes.

Owen:      Yes.

Dan:      Yes.  So I mean, inside a pool company like probably about pool company intended into the biggest company of its taught in the states and basically just [00:06:40] of that telling people how much it cost to build a [00:06:44].  I think he got the right mindset about this kind of stuff.  It can be very effective.  I think in many types I think it can be more effective in those top industry because he’s on the same level of competition, I mean, [00:07:00] looking between entrepreneurs and online marketers.  There are millions of podcast I can go to and blog post they can go to but for regional businesses, people aren’t doing this stuff, it’s a huge opportunity.

Owen:      And one of the things I learned from Marcus Sheridan was that basically, his style as he made it so simple ways.  He brainstorm a list of questions that his potential customers have and I think came up with at least 50 questions that they have based on the stage of where they are in the buying cycle because these are people are trying to buy pool, swimming pools for their houses and basically, all the questions that they have in mind, he brainstorm those questions and basically, wrote content that answers those questions and that’s essentially what he did for his blog in his content marketing process.

Dan:      Yes.  That’s it.  It’s a beauty of at least, he probably knew to answer these questions already like he’d put [00:07:53] during the week, one of his clients, I can’t remember the exact numbers of it but it’s something like a hundred blog post in 5 hours because he basically went through all of his team in his business, get a brainstorm sessions that “What are the questions that customers are always asking you?” and he got all of them to write 10 articles or something like that and before he knew it, he had a blog with a hundred article to bring all of these questions.

Owen:      And one of the reasons why I have you on the show is because I’m impressed by how you went from starting up your Informly blog from scratch and now you’re getting tens of thousands of visitors every month and you are like, you cleared a lot of content.  I mean, seriously, I said, I had to get you on here to discover your process behind.  So as to go behind the scene and talk more about how do you create content because I think I want to break this interview down into several parts.  There is the creating part of the content and there is the second part which is the promoting part, to get more eyeballs to see the content.  And so let’s talk more about the creation part, the beginning part.  What process you had in place where you’re researching and brainstorming the content in the first place?

Dan:      So, I suppose there’s a process coming up with content and then there’s a process coming up with good content and they’re probably two different things.  My process for having enough ideas on things to write about is very simple.  I just write down everything I think about having and I mean I can show you my Evernotes, the things I have control.  I’m never going to run out of ideas and you can, I mean, I get ideas from anywhere.  I’m sure I’ll get a few from talking to you right now.  I work in space, people mention things, if I can get an idea I’ll write that down, listen to a lot of podcast and get an idea, people come into my blog and tell me what their problems are, people reply to my e-mails and tell me what the problems are, people are using my software and tell me it would be great if you separated this and that tells me what kind of problems they’re trying to solve and I mean, yeah, just they show ideas just using Evernote and just getting a habit of writing down every time you have an idea, exactly where every single one of my blog posts start.

Owen:      And so every time you have an idea, as it pertains to be maybe something that your perspective customer want to know about the product that you’re selling now, basically listening to this is right, you know, just put it down in some way basically like a container that has all this information of the different ideas and just keep storing it in there and now, I’m thinking from the listeners perspective, okay, we have the stories, let’s say we put all these ideas, what’s next?  I mean, how do we know which of them is next one to actually write about?

Dan:      Right, yeah.  So I think there’s a good idea that’s kind of pinned right to the top.  I don’t really have a process and the same thing that my software, I kind of have all of these stuff that could be done but remember they have a logical price to find which one get some first.  It’s more that the more people ask about something or the more something seems like a problem, the more it naturally gets dragged up the least.  But you know there’s a bunch of stuff I do which kind of determines if I write about something or if I create a basic content and it’s not normally to do with the idea.  It’s normally to do with like I got a bit of process that I use for creating something good out of any idea.  [00:11:17] Right, yeah.

Owen:      So let’s talk about that.  So what would that process be?

Dan:      Okay.  So the first thing I think about is strategy and that is the top of content I’m creating and system with the strategy.  So an example of this is the other day, you know, someone mentioned to me that video is working for them because they’re getting good comments on that blog.  Now, if they had started to engage that kind of blog rate is then, video would probably be doing a good job.  But if the strategy is to spread their message to a new audience, then looking at how engagement, their current audience is, is not really the best way to work out it’s not the best content to produce so that’s what I make sure.

Another example when I was first starting out, I did hate for me to get post because writing down an audience, I was starting from scratch.  This is just towards the end of last year and I thought of creating blog content of mine, blogging.  In fact, I’ve created really big post on the spot but think of traffic and [00:12:12] blogger.  I did a massive post on software about Rob.com.  Rob Walling’s blog.  It was three-part consists of 6,000 words, very very detailed.  Specific stuff on there was about all the pretty long stuff I did for Informly to build an audience before launching and I mean, it kind of killed me not to have that on my blog because it was the best content I could possibly come up with but the strategy was to build my audience and audience have an audience yet.  So putting out on my blog is not consistent with the strategy because now [[00:12:49]].  So that’s the first, it gives credit and content that is consistent with your goals.

Owen:      And I’m just curious for Informly, what other goals that you have?  I know for me, if I would write a blog post, my thing is to get people to sign up for our newsletter just because most likely they will not want to sign up for this SweetProcess ad itself immediately but if we get them to sign up for the newsletter to get like a checklist or some in any contents of summarization, that at least starts that relationship.  I’m curious from your stand point at Informly, what is that initial goal that you want them to accomplish I guess?

Dan:      Yeah.  It depends on the kind of pace of marketing I’m doing but normally it’s an e-mail sign up.  At the time it was really just letting people know about the name and letting people to stop with the site.  Like other time, I had no business, I invented this name.  He went into Google to put Informly in and it corrected it to “informally” and the name didn’t exist so my strategy at that point was getting the name out there so I was on a bunch of podcast and we’re just trying to help people as much as possible doing a whole touch of upstart stuff.  Getting people to my site, getting them to sign up for the pre-launch which eventually they went on my list and then at the moment it’s more like getting them on my list of contacts because I got bunches that who’d I responded in things built in.

Owen:      So let me even elaborate on that a little because I know what that was because initially when you started, the site did not even have content on it so because you are starting from scratch, you knew that the quickest thing to do was to leverage other people’s audience.  Maybe the professional people that you want to actually make use of Informly, you went to look for popular sites that move about content that your prospective users will find valuable and then you did guest posts for them so is it [00:14:42] guest posts on your blog, you actually give those posts the way to those other people and left maybe a call-to-action to get them back on your site and that was to build a list initially, right?

Dan:      Yeah.  I still do content to my own site.  I tell you, it’s my best content away throughout the people and I still did content on my site.  I didn’t do as much.  I’m like sure I have like 5 or 6 really good post on there and I produce that credibility to get posting jobs.  But yeah, now I do more stuff on site.  I mean, my list now 6,000 people and other sets 15,000 business demand so when I put content out now, that tend to get shared a bit more and if it gets shared a bit more, it means that it gives new [00:15:25].  I’m more confident that putting out stuff on my blog and that happens to give my best stuff away.

Owen:      I’m curious.  I think maybe you slowed down a little bit on the guest post side of thing.  Basically, posting all the content on other guru site but I’m trying to give the people, the listeners a timeline, how long did you focus on guest posting, reaching out to other people and at what point did you stop doing as much and now focusing on content on your site after you’ve gotten the audience that you wanted and build the list?

Dan:      Well, I really started practicing on content on my side when I started to work that “How to create content and promote it?” to actually get decent sharing results.  Like if I had to post on the blog post on my blog, I might have got 5 points and 5 points from people I know.  I might have got 200 visitors, like 200 visits would have been a good result for a blog post when I first saw that.  Now, I’ve got posts on my sites that got 5,000 visits that I posted just last month.  So once you hit that kind of tipping point where you can put content on your own site and you can get thousands of visits for it, it starts to make sense to put that best content on your own site.

Owen:      Okay.  So basically, you basically came up with a benchmark and saying okay, at the starting point based on when you get the certain level of whatever kind of management you want to be, you could be sharing or even let’s say something more concrete, maybe a month that people could blog post, they sign up, I mean, you blog post, you put out and at that point you know, okay, you have a strategy that’s working and you can just continuously keep it up and scale it, that’s what you’re saying from that, right?

Dan:      Yeah.  I think that I like the e-mail list, is important because I thought of that with not many people on the post but now, I’ve got [00:17:17] not speaking, [00:17:17] getting the walls.

Owen:      6,000 is not enough.  It’s so small.

Dan:      Yes.  So if I e-mail people without any blog post then I know that at least maybe 500 of those are going to check that blog post, if it’s good, maybe 10% of those will share so if I can get like 50 tweets for a blog post then it means that my content is going to get in front of the new audience.  So I do really think of specific number but once I’ve done pretty at content with stating like 150 tweets, once you could do that online and blogging if you could follow the strategies and that’s when I really started focusing on my own content.

Owen:      Okay.  So I think I want to dive into that a little bit because initially, you didn’t have an audience for this new site so I’m trying to figure out at what point in terms of building the list did you now say, “Okay, let me now focus more on my blog” because now you knew that if people on your list, you send them the content, they’re going to share it more and that blow up I guess more attraction?  I’m trying to figure out, I just timeline.  What timeline would you start focusing on the guest posting and more on your own blog?

Dan:      Well, the courtesy is this, although I do in [00:18:22].

Owen:      Okay.

Dan:      I think yes.  So I was probably doing like 70% off-site and then 30% on-site and I’ve graduated, this winded up to more and more on site and just the last couple of months when I started getting these, possibly getting it a huge amount of fraction.  It’s more like when I started saying, “Well, I’m not going to do any guest post for a little while and I’m just going to focus on-site content and maybe do an 80%, 20% now so I’m still going to get content.”  I mean, I may not consider this guest content like there would other people’s podcast.

Owen:      Yeah.

Dan:      Probably my podcast.  So maybe like 20% to 80% rather than the other way around.

Owen:      Awesome.  And so tell us about that you’d put your content into a bucket so that you keep in then based on the questions you get from the people and let it bubble up and that’s the thing you’re processing and you have ideas in this bucket but based on the feedback you get it from the people in terms of questions and bubbles up and bubbles up and then when more people ask you about a specific topic, you’re now, “Okay, now this content in my bucket allow people,  I’m interested in it, I’m going to write about that.”  So basically, that’s kind of the process for figuring out what’s right about but when it comes to the actual writing on the content, is there some kind of process that you have for the actual where you’ve chosen a topic now.  Is there process that you use to right out of content, is that structural?  How do you do that?

Dan:      There’s not that much science to it.  I mean, I write my book through Evernote, these [00:19:41], just expand on it and something should come naturally like I wrote a book just the other week that I think quite really, I think I had like 50 tweets and it took me two hours to write.  Other stuff I spend like the big one last month was [00:20:01] to credit content that converts and that was the one that got me thousand visits and that took me long time to me.  I mean, it probably took me a day or two full time over the course of the week or two so it’s just constantly going into adding more stuff and doing a bunch of research, looking on other sites, looking for the top content that other people are liking, doing all the graphics as well.  These are all stuff I kind of notice when I put extra time into these post and do the custom graphics and engage experts.  Get [00:20:30] some other place and link to them and probably just all that kind of stuff result in more sharing and best content.

Owen:      I guess [00:20:39] was that for me, I kind of like, if I was going to write a blog post, I have kind of like a template of what it should be and it basically becomes the thing I’m basically, I’m filling up the stubs inside.  I call it like a skeleton post.  Basically, I have an idea of what sections you have but I don’t have the content in there yet so my job is to go and figure each section, what do I feel putting to it.  Now, I’m just trying got figure out, is that how yours goes in terms of when you’re building on with the body?

Dan:      I don’t think so because I think that’s kind of giving a little limit to you.  I mean like one of the post, the first, you got to break out post I had in my site which got 50 traffic tips for content marketers and the way that post came about was I copied blogger and what was working for them and if you haven’t look at the sidebar, I will show that popular post and something like seven out of eight of them all of these posts.  So I felt, “Well, I’m going to do this post.”

So I had a whole bunch of ideas in Evernote that’s generating traffic.  I already covered 15 or 20 of them on Rob Walling post and I just documented a whole bunch over the years and I’ve also seen someone else had done like an interactive site post where you can match over a whole bunch of little circles and will give you a little bit more information but probably I’m relied to traffic but it was something to do with how to start up some advertising or something.  And [00:22:06] I think Rob had actually got a list of 50 hits or traffic which would be pretty crap.

I built an interactive thing way so it’s 50 buttons and all of them have a different kit and you must have the button.  It gives more information that he’s going to link through to the expert who provided me with advice to do that tip and so that combined the kind of graphical element, interactive element.  It can bind experts or e-mail a bunch of people and ask them first.  The tips only subjects and listed all of those in the post and I told them when I published that and that just kind of all kind together in this kind of interactive infographic which we work really well and I think if you are feeling like a structured ranking top style and you wouldn’t come up with something like that.

Owen:      Okay.  So you say just let it flow freely.  That’s your style.  It’s just let it flow freely.

Dan:      Yes.  That seems to be what works to me.

Owen:      Yes.  For me, definitely, I mean, that freestyle of writing is a little bit kind of hectic for me.  I just want to always have like stub.  Each sub section, what is sub heading should be, what goes into it and is there going to be an example in here, is there going to be kind of a case study that I’m referring to something to emphasize it well and then, if I know in each step what it’s going to be then it’s a lot easier for me to just build out a content.

Dan:      The problem with that is that it’s limiting you because even just using the word “writing” it’s limiting you because what I ended up was not a written based content, it was a graphical thing that was more like and infographic and if you think along lots of writing then it’s too narrow.  Content marketing, it doesn’t have to be writing.  It could be graphical, it could be a video, it could be a podcast, it could be anything.  It could be a TV show I mean, I take that point of view.  Set out a lot of blog posting.  I do know we have a bit of structure that I work around but if you set out to create a piece of content you don’t know what that content is going to be.  When you finish, then that’s when the structure is going to limit you I think.

Owen:      Definitely.  So in your case, once you’re done creating content that you post it into the blog, one of the other things that we want to learn about is your process for promoting the content and getting more eyeballs on the content?

Dan:      Yeah.  So I mean, the funny thing is that, my two biggest traffic sources, one is Google and I do any [00:24:27] and my Google traffic is going out between 20-60% a month.  Last month is more traffic from Google about 68% and I’d [00:24:36] just create, I mean, [00:24:40] I mean I’ve done the basic on sites.  You know, just create a content so just doing a good content and I’ve got, I think it’s easy, basic content marketing type of stuff but it’s not like backlinking or anything like that were composed on that. [00:24:56] from Google.  My second biggest referral is my e-mail list so every week I send out an e-mail and also include all my content in my courses so I’ve got three different e-mail.  I’ve got an e-book that I’m about to release today and all of that and all my other blog post as well, they all talk about other content that I’ve written.

Owen:      Okay.

Dan:      That’s really really big because and copy [00:25:19], it is like done up to today an e-mail marketing course.  I’d say the internet marketing course or it either is going through to the blog post.  So they must be getting huge amount of traffic from just their e-mail, their auto-responders.  So yes, that’s the big thing and then on top of that, I post to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn through HootSuite.  I state for reply to comments and I reply to those.  I have my virtual assistant [00:25:52] first thing to groups, some Facebook groups, maybe LinkedIn groups so I write comments and she logs in my name and post a content and then if anyone replies, I’ll go and reply to those conversations.

She posted too like an aggregation site like how I can use inbound [00:26:10] like this sugar, another one.  She [00:26:17] my signature, you know, the forums that I participate in to include my live blog post.  I’ve also got a wide standard I put in my e-mail signature in GMail.  It automatically links to my latest blog post.  Sometimes I [00:26:30].  If I’ve got something that’s particularly unique, I’ll get a bunch of research to find out what questions need to be answered from Cora.  I can go and run to those.

Our dimension tweets by mentioning people on my podcast, on my blog post, show a tweet that says, “I want to mention in each episode” which sometimes people will make tweet.  I pretty have some pretty big [00:26:54] sometimes and just say, “Look.  I’m just posted a blog post.”  I didn’t took my podcasting guide.  Actually, I had already created this guide and then what I’m going to do is e-mail a bunch of influences and ask them to contribute, they not even exist.  I’d say, “Look, I’ve written this guide but I want to make opinions on it” and I’ll link it with a guide, I got about 30 responses from also it’s [00:27:18] quick browsing and also the podcast has demands, always to the people.  I thought that they could post their thoughts and advice that made the content better and often most people share the post as well.  So even it’s called e-mailing, people works to.

Owen:      So it’s even seems more like on the back end is even more work and focus on the actual promotion of the content and in your case, that you have Google doing this work as a search engine.  It indexes your site and brings people via search engine optimization back to your site and you’re not even doing anything than just put in the post out there, making sure that you have optimized on page, SEO on your site but you’re not any kind of backlinking or anything.  You just let Google do his work.  The next one I’m getting from is the e-mail because you’re building your list then when you get a new blog post, you’re sending a new blog post to the people on your list and also because you have e-mail courses that people auto-responds, that people receive as a result of joining your list, it also pushes people to your old content as well.

Dan:      Yeah.

Owen:      And then you mentioned something about how your virtual assistant now goes into all of the LinkedIn groups that you are part of and basically shares the content with them as if she was you and saying, “Hey, I have this new content on here, this is why you should look at it?”  Basically, give me a summary selling the content and that brings more eyeballs back to the content.  Kind of the three main ways, did I miss any kind of the summary that I just gave?

Dan:      There are also sites like sites like [00:28:49] and [00:28:51] inbound at all, stuff like that.  They tend to be the top things like something tend to go really well.  If your post goes well and [00:29:00] and you just get smashed with traffic.  But generally they’re don’t like even [00:29:04] back in you.  I very rarely had anything go too well on those sites but they usually bring a little bit of traffic and if they do work and they work well, forums are the other things like my forum signatures.  The thing with LinkedIn groups is LinkedIn seems to be smart enough to be able to tell what is good content and kind of ride back to the topic of people comments on that and they lock it and whatever.

So you can just go down into a LinkedIn group generally, I mean, look at the rules.  But generally, it is going down just to pay to link your content and ask people to comment on and ask them if they like it.  You can’t really do that in the forum.  Normally, it goes to the rules because forums are stupid and they don’t understand the difference between a good person or bad person, you just need to put much reason on one first.  But what you can do in a forum is have the forum speak in tongue and be active and a lot of forums also let you reply to existing phrase with a link to your content that can be useful too.  So going in there, finding out what problems people are asking about and just, I mean, if I go into a forum and they’re talking about content marketing, I absolutely guarantee, whatever they talk about, they’ll be something on site that is relevant because I bring so much stuff.

Owen:      And I’m curious, is there a way, I know that some of the stuff they do when it comes to the back end of promotion of your content you make use of your virtual assistant for that but are there ways to kind of automate the promotion of the content?  Is there any ways out there to automate the promotion?

Dan:      Probably, probably.  I’m not really into automation.  I mean, the extent of my organization is delegation really.  It’s just getting my virtual assistant to sum up for me.

Owen:      Yeah.

Dan:      Yeah.  Automation, I don’t know.  I think it’s just comes down to creating good stuff.  For me, I do what works for me and automation and SEO link building kind of doesn’t work for me.  What works for me is creating good stuff and then engaging with people and just commenting and helping them and so that’s the way I’ll do it.

Owen:      So I like how you share the ways in which you promote your content so now we’ve got eyeballs on your new blog post.  What are the ways in which on your site now because the whole goal it seems is to be the e-mail list because you have like the series of auto-responders that gets nurtured and give them more and more content and get them to eventually buy which is a sign of Informly which is a tool you’re selling, right?  The tool that basically, what you’re selling but I’m trying to figure out what process you have in place, new eyeballs come to your site or your blog post, whatever, what process you have in place to get them converted into a lead?

Dan:      Right, yeah.  So this post that I wrote last month about credit content to convert is really all about this.  My [00:31:37] bring that today is all that [00:31:38].  It’s practically, there’s a whole of bunch [00:31:45] content have a big content have a big impact.  I mean, if you’re just going and creating content and just doing what writers do, just create a whole bunch of text then and with now kind of strategy behind it that they kind of entices people to opt-in and you’re not going to get people converting.  So one thing I have to do is I have to learn from copywriters and I learned about the structures that they use to get people to convert and I apply those to my blog post.  So that I’m not just creating text, I’m trying to build interest in my blog post.  I’m still trying to generate some kind of interest in and they opt-in which if possible would be related to the blog post.  So it will be a specific opt-in went possible so that it’s actually related to the blog post and that will convert a million times better than having just a general opt-in on the site.  There are all bunch of stuff.  [00:32:36] last week so I’ll link you up to that.

Owen:      Definitely.  What I get from that is basically you’d try to make the context in high relevance in the sense that if your blog post was about a specific topic, yes you have opt-ins on the side bar, opt-ins on the bottom of the blog, the end of the post, before they write comments and maybe like opt-in link at the very top.  At the end of the day, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make sure that whatever call-to-action you have in is very relevant to what they just read.  It’s not just…

Dan:      Yeah.

Owen:      Okay.

Dan:      Ideally and if you look at what Hot Spot does, like they’d go to one of their post, they opt-in below their post are very smart.  Not only really it relates specifically to the post but they also want to show you stuff you’ve already opted into and that’s kind of somewhere I want to take informally which at the moment is basically telling you who’s opting in on your side and getting you to connect with them on social media but I’d like to explore the idea of actually putting smart call-to-action on there where you have a kind of hierarchy of call-to-actions where people don’t get the same thing over and over again and even just side bar thing.

I mean, I didn’t have a side bar on my side because I find it doesn’t coverts very well.  So I’m just testing what converts well on your site is really important too and continuously changing that.  I’ve got a scroll up in.  It comes up with works quite well for me.  I know pop-ups worked on, I locked them.  I don’t want to piss off my users so I don’t use them but just testing all that stuff and doing what works can have a huge impact.  The other thing I did last month, the last month is my conversion is actually doubled and so the bunch of different things I did.  One of the things I did was in the side bar of my blog, there used to be like a recent posts.

Owen:      Yeah.

Dan:      And instead I [00:34:33] so it formally tells me what content is basically high in terms of shareability.  Kind of tell me like what percent each people convert on a particular post.  So I fill that side bar with my post that I’m more likely to convert people and that I’m more likely to be shared.  So rather than just putting your top post in there or putting your most recent post in there.  Put the ones that are more likely to be shared, more likely to convert people and that’s kind of have a big impact on conversions and giving people less options.  Like when they go to my blog, there’s not really anything they could do.  I mean, there’s no recent post, no related post, there’s only three menu on buttons at the top.  There’s no side bar opt in.  There’s not really anything that they can do as to opt-in through e-mail or hit like one of the top post.

Owen:      And I got two main points from what you said, in regards to really what’s the eyeballs on your side, getting them your biggest goals to get them to sign-up but the ways in which it can enhance the opportunity for them to sign-up and one of the ways you’re doing it is that, the opt-in tools you have on each blog post, you’ve made it so that it’s so relevant and so that the call-to-action is specific to that blog post itself and not just generic.  So that increases the conversion rate and the other thing that I got from that was also the fact that you’ve reduce any kind of distraction that people might be distracted when they get to your site.  Maybe some sites you go you see Facebook, LinkedIn and all that, you just take out all that stuff and made it so minimal so that there is only two things you could do.  Either you leave a comment or sign-up with the opt-in.

Dan:      Yeah.

Owen:      Yeah.  Less choice leads to more opt-ins.  I like that.  And Dan, one of the things that before we end the call, the listeners that listen to this so far is seem to value off content marketing to generate leads for their business which eventually via nurturing of the leads in form of an e-mail system or whatever, gets them into sale.  What’s that first step that the listener listening to this can take to get started with this whole content marketing process?

Dan:      Well, I like that Marcus shared, the thing where he basically just rocked in a bunch of questions that are the top questions that people are asking them.  I’m guessing your audience is pretty like setting up with this kind of stuff and I’d probably already have a blog.  If that’s the case, then I would say, get more strategic around the top of content that you’re creating.  Make sure that you’re hitting that kind of keeping point where your content is really getting shared a lot and if it’s not, then copy what other people is doing and that’s what I did.  You copy what I’m doing.  If it’s relevant to you like get a lot of experience to come in any content.  Do probably graphical stuff, do something interactive, do something that research is a lot of post, equips a lot of data.

A lot of the post that I do I just reveal a whole bunch of information like I do my monthly reports that are really popular.  People really love to see that data, to see what’s working, what’s not working and I think this create better content.  If your content isn’t getting that kind of high level of shareability then there’s only two problem one is you don’t have enough eyeball and two, is that it’s not good enough content so it’s a major two great calls-to-action for that and one of them is not creating more of that same content.

Owen:      Definitely and Dan, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this interview and sharing all this good stuff about content marketing and what’s the best way the audience, the listener listening to you so far, what’s the best way for them to connect with you and thank you for doing this interview?

Dan:      Yeah, sure.  So my site is inform.ly and on that page you’ll just see the information about the software which helps you basically understand this converting on your site and helps you create better content by knowing what’s working and inform.ly/blog is my blog and all my social stuff is up there.  I actually quite like Facebook.  I’m on it quite a bit so add me on Facebook or hit me up on Twitter or whatever.  But inform.ly is where I am active. So yeah, thanks for having me, man.  It’s been cool.

Owen:      Thanks for doing the interview and as a listener, you’re listening to this, if you found a valuable, please reach out to Dan and thank him for doing the interview and also check out Informly because if you’re doing all this content marketing, you need to be able to justify, you cannot improve what you cannot track so you need to be able to justify and figure out, “Okay.  Is this content really helping me to generate leads which I can actually turn into sale?”  That’s what Informly does for you.  It helps you to justify the content that you’re creating.  So if you find this content valuable, also share it with another entrepreneur who you think will be interested in learning how to get better in content marketing.  You see how I just made the call-to-action relevant?

Dan:      That’s it.  It’s going well.  Yeah.

Owen:      Go ahead.

Dan:      If you have comments and stuff on the episode as well, I’ll make sure I jump on your site and respond to those comments.  Some people have comments then just feel free to put them on your site and I’ll come over and answer any questions.

Owen:      Thank you very much for doing the interview and we’re done.