Gennaro Cuofano's Blog, page 221

August 24, 2019

10 Actionable Content Marketing Tips for Digital Entrepreneurs In 2019

Are you disappointed by the interminable hours you spend writing quality content, editing, checking and rechecking it, and yet not being able to garner a response you feel your hard work deserves?

After giving up so much of your time and effort, you surely deserve to feel that roaring and cheering audience praising you and being able to measure their pleasure through the sounds of their claps, even if in your mind, you deserve it!

However, if this is not happening, there must be something which is lacking, which isn’t quite adding up, right? This is where we hop in to help you identify the piece that joins perfectly in the puzzle to give you the result you desire.

First and foremost, you should never forget that there is cut-throat competition out there.

You are not alone in this quest for excellence and success, which means your quality content is probably heaped up, or even struggling to squeeze out from under the mountain of content by various entrepreneurs, people in business, and other marketers who are striving for a name as much as you are.

Some of them might be well ahead of you in the game!

You don’t need to lose heart. There is a way by which you ramp up your game strategy. You can design actionable content to boost your rankings and claim your success.

By creating actionable content, you give the audience what they want and add value to their knowledge. It is a fantastic and fruitful way to earn the spotlight through gaining confidence and trust of your audience.

You get them something different and valuable rather than feeding them with the usual boring and useless information.

You might get away with it with some corner niches but definitely not in the competitive ones like technology, gaming, and laptops.

You’d have the top-line content marketing strategy in place to up your game and dominate your competition and make it up to the SERP and other traffic channels of course.

Before we introduce you to some of the best and useful actionable content marketing tips, let’s first understand what content marketing is.

What is Content Marketing

To make all the mind-boggling definitions, you might across on the internet comprehendible, Content marketing is basically creating content that drives traffic in huge numbers to your website. You can get new customers, sell your products along with fueling brand awareness in the audience.

Internet is brimming to the seams with the content of different types for different purposes which the content marketing makes more official.

How Can Content Marketing Help?

Content marketing provides business with ample opportunity to flourish. Throughout any businesses lifespan, content serves as life support. Content marketing aids in:

More Visits to The Page

Quality content gets more views since it attracts people through invaluable knowledge. This, in turn, gets more traffic to your site.

More Brand Awareness

If your content has weight and meaning, it does a lot in spreading more about your brand. Increased brand awareness means you gain popularity and more clients.

Beneficial for SEO

SEO breathes in good content. The fresher and high-quality of the content you deliver, the more lucrative and productive the SEO will be. Content marketing is cheaper compared to outbound marketing, yet gets your three times more profit.

Now we can get to some of the best actionable content marketing tips, lift your spirits, it’s time to teach you how to get noticed for all the excellent work you do.

Fruitful Content Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs

Start From A Content Marketing Plan

Starting anything without a clear plan of what you aim to achieve gets you nowhere. The best execution happens when you have drafted a plan for yourself and you one by one follow it to get to the top.

Get into the details to have a clear insight into the topic. Know what you plan to do, who is your target audience, how can you attract their attention, is your content sitting well with the marketing goals or not. All these questions require deliberation in the begin, this clears your vision, and you are better able to see ahead.

Be Clear and Straightforward

You should be precise with your words as nobody stays on a website for long to go through all the unnecessary information. Everybody skims to get straight to the point they are looking for. This doesn’t mean you just write off a sentence and conclude your topic. You must be skilled to know how to keep the reader hooked to your content so that he/she keeps on reading. Make it simple yet comprehensive at the same time.

The Topic Should not Be Time-Bound

Writing about something which is no longer in demand is useless. If you pick a topic which has lost its charm and there are no frantic searches by people, you are wasting your efforts. You should always select a topic which is evergreen and is never getting old such as health-related or laptops and gadgets.

Imagine eating the same food daily even for a week, and you would hear your inside screaming for a change. Similarly, take a topic which never fades with time, but make sure you bring in new changes. This way, your content is always relevant and has the freshness of a newly concocted mouth-watering dish.

Ramp Up Your Media Tactics

Visually appealing content is able to sustain the attention of readers. You should make use of pictures or videos. However, the ground rule is, your video and image should be justifying or bridging your content to another relevant point. Don’t just cram the page with images or videos that have to relate to the content.

Your Content Should Be A Solution

Since you are marketing to reach to the users, you should be thinking about them while crafting the content marketing strategy too. Imagine being in the user’s shoes and the questions or queries that you would want an answer for, this way you will have a more profound connection with your readers since you will be able to reach their hearts and minds.

You will have a more comfortable time designing the content with a better understanding of what and how others perceive a thing.

Guide Leads Through Your Content Into Sales

Content has the power to reach your business goals. However, you should have the smartness to turn it around in your favor. It is because of this strength of content that B2B marketers spend heavily on content marketing. Make it interesting, concise, comprehensive, and useful to drive leads.

Use Guest posting

Despite the feeling of despair for writing for others, you must understand, that through guest posting, you get the ranking you want. It’s a give and take, and we have to live by the rules whether we want to or not. Look for authoritative websites that match your niche and send quality content.

Using Influencers To Increase Brand Value

Something that comes from the revered influencers has more weight. You can approach someone who might be interested in what you are offering, your brand value, and your ideas. A single quote or a saying form an influencer can top up your rankings many folds.

Strong Call-to-Actions

CTA’s are crucial for content marketing. You have to push people into doing something. Therefore, you have to come up with a marketing strategy where your content should be strong enough to get likes, and you have to ASK them to like it. You have to ask for subscription by creating a strong CTA to encourage people to sign-up. By giving in offers, you can give them a perfect incentive!

Walk Parallel With the MarketPlace

These are fast times, with things changing and evolving in an eye blinks pace. The market is similarly growing and undergoing constant change. Make sure you do not fall behind!

Key Takeaway

Content marketing is a superb method to grow your business. You become an expert in your niche, you sell your product, you have valuable input in the business world, and finally, no matter what your goal is, the whole learning process and execution opens up doors for future digital marketing success.

Business resources:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas

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Published on August 24, 2019 09:56

August 22, 2019

Strategic Analysis: Definition, Tools, And Examples

Strategic analysis is a process to understand the organization’s environment and competitive landscape to formulate informed business decisions.

Let’s look at some of the strategic tools you can use to improve your business decision-making process.

Business model canvas

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The business model canvas aims to provide a keen understanding of your business model to provide strategic insights about your customers, product/service, and financial structure;

so that you can make better business decisions.

Blitzscaling canvas

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In this article, I’ll focus on the Blitzscaling business model canvas. This is a model based on the concept of Blitzscaling.

That is a particular process of massive growth under uncertainty, and that prioritizes speed over efficiency. It focuses on market domination to create a first-scaler advantage in a scenario of uncertainty.

Pretotyping

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Pretotyping is a mixture of the words “pretend” and “prototype,” and it is a methodology used to validate business ideas to improve the chances of building a product or service that people want.

The pretotyping methodology comes from Alberto Savoia’s work summarized in the book “The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed.”

This framework is a mixture of the words “pretend” and “prototype,” and it helps to answer such questions (about the product or service to build) as: Would I use it? How, how often, and when would I use it? Would other people buy it? How much would they be willing to pay for it? How, how often, and when would they use it?

Value innovation and blue ocean strategy

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A blue ocean is a strategy where the boundaries of existing markets are redefined, and new uncontested markets are created.

At its core, there is value innovation, for which uncontested markets are created, where competition is made irrelevant. And the cost-value trade-off is broken.

Thus, companies following a blue ocean strategy offer much more value at a lower cost for the end customers.

Growth hacking process

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Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation, coupled with the understanding of the whole funnel, where marketing, product, data analysis, and engineering work together to achieve rapid growth.

The growth hacking process goes through four key stages of analyzing, ideating, prioritizing, and testing.

Pirate metrics

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Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at. At each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.

Engines of growth

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In the Lean Startup, Eric Ries defined the engine of growth as “the mechanism that startups use to achieve sustainable growth.”

He described sustainable growth as following a simple rule, “new customers come from the actions of past customers.”

The three engines of growth are the sticky engine, the viral engine, and the paid engine. Each of those can be measured and tracked by a few key metrics, and it helps plan your strategic moves.

RTVN model

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The RTVN model is a straightforward framework that can help you design a business model when you’re at the very early stage of figuring out what you need to make it succeed.

Sales cycle

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A sales cycle is the process that your company takes to sell your services and products.

In simple words, it’s a series of steps that your sales reps need to go through with prospects that lead up to a closed sale.

Planning ahead of time the steps your sales team needs to take to close a big contract can help you grow the revenues for your business.

Comparable analysis

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A comparable company analysis is a process that enables the identification of similar organizations to be used as a comparison to understand the business and financial performance of the target company.

To find comparables, you can look at two key profiles: the business and economic profile. From the comparable company analysis, it is possible to understand the competitive landscape of the target organization.

Porter’s five forces

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Porter’s Five Forces is a model that helps organizations to gain a better understanding of their industries and competition.

It was published for the first time by Professor Michael Porter in his book “Competitive Strategy” in the 1980s.

The model breaks down industries and markets by analyzing them through five forces which you can use to have a first assessment of the market you’re in.

Aida model

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AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. This is a model which is used in marketing to describe the potential journey a customer might go through, before purchasing a product or service. Variation of the AIDA model is the CAB model and the AIDCAS model.

PESTEL analysis

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The PESTEL analysis is a framework that can help marketers assess whether macro-economic factors are affecting an organization.

This is a critical step that helps organizations identify potential threats and weaknesses. That can be used in other frameworks such as SWOT or to gain a broader and better understanding of the overall marketing environment.

Technology adoption curve

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The technology adoption curve is a model which goes through five stages. Each of those stages (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggard) has a specific psychographic that makes that group of people ready to adopt a tech product.

This simple concept can help you define the right target for your business strategy.

Business model essence

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A Business Model Essence, according to FourWeekMBA, is a way to find the critical characteristics of any business to have a clear understanding of that business in a few sentences.

That can be used to analyze existing businesses. Or to draft your Business Model and keep a strategic and execution focus on the key elements to be implemented in the short-medium term.

FourWeekMBA business model framework

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An effective business model has to focus on two dimensions: the people dimension and the financial dimension. The people dimension will allow you to build a product or service that is 10X better than existing ones and a solid brand.

The financial dimension will help you develop proper distribution channels by identifying the people that are willing to pay for your product or service and make it financially sustainable in the long run.

TAM, SAM, and SOM

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Understanding your TAM, SAM and SOM can help you navigate the market you’re in and to have a laser focus on the market you can reach with your product and service.

Other business resources:

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Published on August 22, 2019 16:28

How Traditional Organizations Leveraged On Digital Transformation

Digital transformation or DX is a manner of transforming a business model and organizational processes, activities, strategies, models, and competencies into changes and opportunities that involve anything digital and associated with anything related to technology.

In simpler terms, digital transformation is an organization’s way of going paperless, not entirely abandoning traditional methods, but rather, adapting and depending more on digital processes. Now, there are a lot of digital transformation examples ranging from tools, case studies, companies, gadgets, software, and applications.

Today, while some companies are either failing or having a hard time integrating digital transformation into their businesses, some are also thriving.

In fact, lots of traditional-based organizations long before the digital age has been entirely introduced are now welcoming digital transformation with arms wide open.

Their leadership and status have not once hindered them to fully embrace new possibilities, opportunities, and areas of growth through technology.

As many businesses strive for success amidst the presence of competition, these organizations that have adopted digital transformation have eventually found ways on how to gain more competitive advantage and continuously leverage customer experience.

With that, here are some companies that reaped great rewards upon using digital transformation.

New York Times

Years and years ago, upon hopping on a train during rush hour down Manhattan, you would probably witness a pool of crowd, with each person’s nose buried on to newspapers as they read daily updates and the latest news.

However, today, instead of newspapers, you’d notice people’s attention glued to their mobile phones, smart tablets, etc.

As technology continues to grow and develop over time, so does the media industry. However, at first, most people didn’t like what technology was doing towards the media sector.

Basically, the digital age started killing the said industry as print newspaper revenue dropped from 60 billion dollars to 20 billion over the past 15 years or so.

In spite of that, the New York Times managed to see technology and the digital world as an opportunity to grow and accelerate its competitive edge. With that, the company decided it was time to produce online content and implement subscription models or options.

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This allowed the company to deliver high-quality journalism through digital content continuously. Being in the business for over 167 years, the New York Times has never viewed technology as a threat, but rather an opportunity or area of growth and innovation. Truth be told, the company’s way of pushing DX forward actually worked.

In 2017, reports say that the New York Times garnered almost 500 million dollars in merely digital income, which is far greater than any other digital income of varying, leading publications.

Disneyland Parks

Disneyland is definitely not a princess or a damsel in distress that needs saving. However, due to the constant changes in society and technology today, it’s best if the company takes the time to improve through impressive digital transformation efforts and processes.

Today, Disneyland parks now have Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and RFIDs used in the entire park. Guests who attend and visit Disney World are given “magical bands” with RFID technology, which are used to make their entire stay at the park a lot more magical.

These MagicBands can serve as payment, hotel room keys, and ride tickets. On top of all that, the MagicBands also helps Disney collect data, which they can use for further improvement and innovation to leverage customer experience.

Walmart

Small or startup retail companies are now beginning to drop like flies. With that, it’s only a matter of time before bigger retails are taken down by Amazon. I’m talking about Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Walmart.

However, over the past years, Walmart seems to be doing so much better than the rest, being able to take action rather than just sitting on the sidelines and wait for something that’s never going to happen.

Today, Walmart continues to make efforts in competing against Amazon as the company tries to improve its online policies and other processes. On top of that, Walmart also constantly seeks to develop and enhance its mobile app, enabling customers to be assisted by a virtual store assistant upon ticking off items from their list via a store map.

According to Harvard Business Review, Walmart is now becoming a “digital winner” as it constantly builds and improves in the e-commerce sector while also leading digital innovations and improvements as compared to other traditional retail companies.

Domino’s Pizza

Listening to clients’ feedback and welcoming digital changes have got to be the reason as to why Domino’s Pizza has finally passed through its long-time rival, which is Pizza Hut. With that, it’s no surprise that Domino’s sales today mostly come from its digital channels.

Nowadays, Domino’s Pizza is known as “an e-commerce company that happens to sell pizza.” This is because of the business’s willingness and determination to shift from old processes into new, digital ones.

Today, Dom the Pizza bot allows customers to customize and order their pizza through whichever [digital] channel they choose (Domino’s mobile app, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Smart TVs). As a result, customer experience is improved as it becomes more fun and seamless.

Wrapping Up

In summary, these companies are indeed growing businesses leaning towards digital efforts and strategies that are going to make other organizations and enterprises alike run for their clients’ money.

In today’s digital era, it’s quite impossible not to depend on technology, especially if your customers expect more from you more than ever. The real question here is: are you willing to shift from old, traditional strategies and processes to modern, digital ones that could help your company reap great rewards and climb the ladder of success?

Other business resources:

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Published on August 22, 2019 03:54

How To Grow Your Digital Business With This Content Marketing Process In 2019

Growing a blog is hard work but not impossible. In this post, I want to show you a few tweaks to hack the growth of your blog. The baseline is always great content!

Fasten your seatbelt because we’re ready to take off!

Pick the perfect title

Journalists know that the title can make or break an article. It doesn’t matter how good it is what you wrote if none will open it none will read it! For how trivial that might sound, this is even truer for blog posts. With over a billion websites and over four million blog posts; the title is a great shortcut for our brain to make sense of the clutter.

To make your headline catchy, sticky but also good from the SEO perspective then there are a few factors to take into account. The main ones are,

Is your title emotional? For instance, invoking good or bad emotions can be a powerful way to have people read your stuff.
Is the title short? Too long would be bad for SEO. Plus none will know it. The right length would be around 55 characters.
What are the first and last three words? In fact, apparently, when people skim content they look the first and final part of the title.
Are there keywords in it? Those keywords are not only meant to make your content read by search engines but to capture the searchers’ intention

In other words, it has to be:

Emotional
Short but meaningful
Focused on first and last three words
Searchable

How to meet all those standards without hassling too much on it?

Simple, use CoSchedule Headline Analyser

That is what I did to pick the title for this blog post. Therefore, if you did open it, it may be thanks to it!

For instance, I initially picked up a title,

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As you can see my score wasn’t that bad; However, I wanted to make it a bit better because it was too long and not as catchy as I wanted it to be!

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I tried several headlines, and my score got worse,

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Until I got the title, I was looking for!

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Can you do better?

Make your blog the fastest in town

With the staggering growth of content on the web, the demand for it seems to be growing at a slower pace compared to the offer. In other words, there is so much content out there that it becomes impossible to consume it all.

Therefore, when you do find what you were looking for you finally click on it, but the site is so slow that you eventually give up! That is even worse for mobile users.

For instance, on average if your website takes more than three seconds to load you might lose up to 40% of your users! That can make or break your business. Thus, there’s no surprise that site speed is one of the most important factors for optimizing your blog.

Good news is you can now improve the speed of your site up to 30/40% in a few minutes and with no costs. Go on and check your speed performance, as I did.

I went to check my PageSpeed with Google Developers Tools, and that is what I got,

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As you can see my site didn’t pass the test; Although not that bad from the desktop, it was bad on mobile. I can’t imagine how much traffic I lost due to that. How could I solve that? Google gives you some suggestions to make your website lighter, therefore faster.

Yet I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. In short, I was looking for a quick and efficient way to improve the speed of my website right on. I figured that the most important factor affecting the speed of the website is your Media folder.

That’s right! How many times did you unconsciously upload very large images? Well, now those images are burdening your site speed. It is time to compress them.

No problem though, I got the solution!

So I figured I could solve this issue very quickly through a WordPress plugin. That is called WP Smush. I uploaded directly from my WP website, installed it and activated it,

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Then into the Media folder, I clicked on check images and started to compress them

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After a few minutes, the compression was completed, and I had just saved almost one-hundred sixty megabytes in pictures. That’s impressive!

I checked my site speed again. I was impressed. My desktop speed went from 83 to 88. Ok not bad. What about mobile speed?

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As you can see with this tweak alone, my mobile speed increased by over 30%, from 60 to 80!

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That is how my website went from Sloth to Swift in the blink of an eye.

Time to optimize your images

When you write a blog post you often use images, right? We know for a fact that our brain loves pictures.

They are a faster and more effective way to communicate a thought, emotion and inspire action! Yet for how cool the image you picked for your blog post if search engines won’t understand it they won’t read it.

The consequence is that your content will be only in part read by search engines which are the intermediaries between your blog and your audience. How to solve this impasse? Use the alt attribute.

That attribute is crucial because it describes what the image is about in the context of your blog, or article. Now adding the alt attribute is not hard but time-consuming. For instance, if you add an image to your blog you will have to add the alt attribute manually as I did on this picture,

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You can partially automate this process by installing a plugin called Format Media Titles.

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If there’s a title for that image, the plugin will automatically save the alt attribute, which will make your image optimization faster and more efficient.

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Target Google‘s featured snippet

If you’re familiar with basic SEO, you know what a keyword is. In short, each time a user searches for something on the web it does so through a search engine’s box, like Google‘s

Until not long ago when search engines scanned your page (in SEO lingo called crawling) most of what they saw was based on keywords. Therefore, the more keywords you stuffed into your page, the more you would show up in the search, which in the SEO world is called ranking.

Yet things changed dramatically when a few years ago Google updated its algorithm. The algorithm now looks more at context and the semantics behind the content you write rather than matching simple keywords.

Also, common wisdom in the past would tell you to rank for short keywords (for instance “blogging”). Those keywords while can bring you traffic won’t bring you conversions.

Therefore, if your objective is to bring more customers, you might want to change focus and look for long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is simply a very specific query of a user. An example? A question!

Also, addressing a specific question of a user a great way to convert that into a customer. Where do you find those long-tail keywords?

You can find them through a tool called Anwer The Public.

That is what I did. I digited “blog” and selected my target country, US:

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I got 158 questions users have about “blog.”

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Those questions have organized in clusters. Now I can use them to optimize my content by focusing on the specific pain-points my target has.

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With those questions, I can also target Google’s featured snippet,

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If you want to know more about how to get your snippet read the post I wrote on Search Engine People:

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Use data to build effective CTAs

The adage says “Ask, and you shall receive.” This saying is true in life like in marketing. In fact, CTAs (call to actions) are a powerful tool to prompt your audience to take action. For instance, you can use them to inspire your audience to subscribe, purchase or just click through. How does a call to action look like?

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Source: vieodesign.com

As you can see a call to action makes it easier for the users to go toward a particular objective that you set beforehand. Yet the most effective way to use CTAs is to A/B test them. In short, you will have two versions of a CTA (for instance, one button is blue, the other red) and see what converts more. There are several free tools to A/B test your CTAs. For this blog, I use Hello Bar.

For instance, my goal is to get more subscribers. I’m A/B testing my CTA,

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As you can see in the first CTA, there’s “join us!” in the second “subscribe.” Therefore, when landing on my homepage, some users will see the first version, while some others will see the second. It’s still too early to say what’s best. I will wait for at least a thousand view on each to say what’s best. For now, the latter version is performing better.

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All it takes is to register there for free, create an account and follow the instructions. In a few minutes, you’ll have your A/B test ready!

Key steps for the first part

Growing a blog requires a lot of hard work. Yet there are a few tweaks you can implement to grow it fast and effectively. I showed you how:

pick the best titles
make your site fast
optimize your images
convert users into customers
and A/B test your call to actions

Guide to syndicate your content

The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

How far from today’s reality does this statement sound? Would you say that who stated the above was a fool?

Yet that is what astronomer, author, and teacher Clifford Stoll said in his Newsweek’s interview on 2/27/95!

Yet before judging and feeling smart about yourself, I want you to take a step back. We were in 1995, the internet is still a marginal phenomenon, which was growing incredibly fast, but less than 1% of the world population was connected to the web.

Of course, it easy to see what’s in front of us today. It is easy to assume where the web is going. According to Internet Live Stats, more than 3.5bln people are connected to the web. Which means that over 40% of the world population is on the web!

The growth of the web was so wide and wild that none could have predicted how it would have looked like. To have a feel about it take a look at the graph below from Internet Live Stats!

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Yet there is an even more staggering stat that any blogger should be aware of. If you launched a blog or website in 1995, you could potentially reach about 45million users (that was the world wide web population in that year).

“Cool” you may think, “I am better off today!“

Yet you would be dead wrong!

Why? Even though you could only reach 45million internet users, there were only 23,500 existing websites. In short, in 1995 there were about 1,908 per website!

If you just said to yourself “Ok, not a big deal!” you have to keep reading!

As of 2015, the world-wide-web population has grown to over 3bln people.

Yet the numbers of websites/blogs has grown exponentially too.

In the same year, there were well over 800k websites.

This means that in 2015 each website had only 3.7 users!

Is blogging dead? Let’s see…

By looking at those stats it easy to conclude that blogging is dead.

But is that really the case?

I don’t think so!

Blogging is still a great tool to reach an audience.

Yet while a few years ago, blogging alone was enough, that is no longer the case.

In short, in order to make your online business successful, you must think it like an ecosystem, where blogging fits your overall business strategy.

In other words, if you want to succeed in online business you have to use your blog strategically.

The time of “I will blog and see what happens” is over!

Blogging entails that you set an editorial strategy.

I know it may sound too much, but if you stay with me for the length of this article you will comprehend why you need to treat blogging seriously.

Before we dive into it, let me give you a visual hook of how your online business ecosystem should look like,

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Blogging is the trigger, from which your online business cascade will fall.

The process that I am going to show you is pretty simple.

First, set up an editorial calendar.
Second, build the social platform, which will work as an amplifier.
Third, test what works.
Fourth, upgrade the most successful blog posts/articles to create a series of info-products (ebooks, online courses, webinars, and videos) around what your audience deemed useful.
Fifth, organize your first meetup!

At the end of this process, you will rinse and repeat!

Step 1: Start with an editorial strategy!

Making content go viral is not an easy task. Yet we can optimize the process of content creation and improve our chances of having that content go viral.

How?

As Aristotle already found out in 350 B.C. you have to leverage on:

Ethos (ethical appeal)
Pathos (emotions)
Logos (appeal to our rational mind)

We can put Aristotle’s teachings in a framework that Jonah Berger built in his “Six STEPPS,”

Social Currency (would your article make people look smart by sharing it?)
Triggers (are you writing about something that is interesting?)
Emotion (will your content arouse your audience?)
Public (is it getting shared enough?)
Practical Value (is it useful?)
Stories (do you have a narrative attached to it?)

Although we are going to use this framework as a reference throughout this guide, our objective isn’t necessarily to go viral.

Rather we want to make sure the content we are creating will have three main features:

Usefulness (is there a niche market for it?)
Upgradability (can we create other content around it?)
Non-perishability (what is its shelf-life?)

Practically speaking this framework translates in few simple steps.

Usefulness

How do we determine whether what we are going to write will be useful?

The concept of usefulness needs to be extremely targeted. We are not trying to be celebrities. We don’t want unneeded visibility. We are building a business!

Therefore, we are going to find a problem and a group of people with that problem.

To find a problem, we have to find a pain point that a group of people has (your niche).

Therefore, problem + small group of individuals = potential niche

Upgradability

The greatest lie ever told about content is to think of it as a fixed, never changing asset. Yet content itself can be reused and repurposed in several ways.

In other words, once you have picked a topic that is relevant to a small group of people, that content one day could become an e-book, a YouTube video, or a short webinar.

The question is, will the content you are creating have the potential to become an info-product?

This question can also be answered by looking at the last but not least important aspect,

Non-perishability

Usually, when we think about content, we tend to think of it like we do with biological organisms. In other words, we look at two articles, and we tend to read the most recent.

Yet that is a huge mistake. Why? Because of the Lindy Effect!

In short, when it comes to content, the opposite is true. Take the Iliad. It was written two thousand years ago. Yet we can expect it (probabilistically speaking) to be relevant for at least another two thousand years!

There is a caveat though. Each time you are facing your laptop, and about to write content keep in mind only one question:

am I about to write something that has the potential to outlive me?

If yes, you are ready!

Step 2: Be Social

There is no need to say the numbers and stats of users of each society to understand the importance of integrating them into your digital strategy.

Yet the major question is,

Where does my niche hang out?

LinkedIn? Facebook? Twitter? G+? Tumblr? YouTube?…

It is important to keep a presence across all these platforms.

Yet, it is crucial to understand where your niche hangs out and put most of your effort on that channel!

Step 3: The online world is your laboratory

So far we managed to decide what content to create. Also, we saw how to amplify it. We are ready to test what works and what does not. The next step will be to repurpose the most successful articles to convert them to other content formats. How?

Only look at your stats!

What posts had more success? Who are your marketing personas? Which article converted more regarding interactions (like and share) with your audience?

Step 4: Your content is like a cat. It has seven lives

There are several myths that affect our society, and it is funny to see how those same myths branch out.

For instance, while in Europe we say that cats have seven lives, in the US those lives become nine.

Besides the number of lives a cat has, there are many myths about content too.

There is often the feeling that content has a short life and that it can only be used once. But is that true?

Not really! It is time to have the words on your screen to jump out and become spoken words and images. It is time for some new fresh content!

Once again, the content upgrade will depend upon the channel where your niche hangs out.

For instance, if your audience is mainly on YouTube it will make sense to create a short video. If your audience likes reading and possesses a Kindle, then it may be the time to publish your first e-book!

Once again, no preconceptions. This is a business. Is your audience ready for it? Then you must be too!

Step 5: It is time to get offline

It has become so easy to interact with people through the web that we forget about the real world.

Often times we neglect our family to chat through the phones with individuals we never saw, neither met in real life.

Yet there is nothing stronger than meeting people. We can use all the senses to have others see who we are.

Also, there is no better way to build a loyal, trusted audience!

Start very small. Organize a meetup with no more than 10/15 people. Teach them what you have been writing about. Have them share their experience with you. That’s all!

Rinse and Repeat

Running an online business is not rocket science. Yet it takes time and dedication. Once you set up your process, it is time to rinse and repeat!

Advanced content syndication

In this section, I want to show you how to make sure to reach a large audience each time you write a piece of content. So that the time invested in producing it, won’t be wasted!

You wrote an excellent article. Strangely each time you put together a piece of content, it feels like that is the most incredible creative work you’ve done in your entire life. Therefore, high expectations arise.

You look forward to the moment when you will hit the publish button and see that content go through the blogosphere, go viral and get featured on Forbes or Inc. Magazine.

Yet that is all a dream. In fact, as soon as you hit the publish button you barely get your dearest friends to read it. Why?

Usually, who writes for passion believes that writing alone is enough to be read. Instead, when you start doing it professionally, you realize how deceived you were. In fact, creating great content is only part of the job.

The rest is about making sure it gets found, read and shared. That is why as a content writer you need to have a framework in place to make sure each time you write a piece of content you reach at least a few thousand people that are ready to engage with it.

Also, today many believe that posting their content around the web still give them control over what happens to it. Ownership is only part of the equation. Indexing is as relevant if not more than ownership of content.

Therefore, you want to make sure your content gets indexed on a platform you control before syndicating it anywhere else.

How Social Networks Hooked Us

In one of my previous articles, I talk about the Hook Model. I explain what it is and how to use it ethically to transform your product or service into a habit for the user.

Yet one of the most powerful weapons social networks use to grow their user base is the feed.

The feed is the most addicting feature social media have. Not surprisingly we spend countless hours scrolling that feeds in the hope of keeping our excitement level high for as long as possible.

Almost like drug-addicted millions of people use the feed as the main source to get the information they look for.

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Source: mediakix.com

In other words, the average person spends five years and four months of his/her life on social media.

That is why if you want your content to reach a larger audience you must learn how to use social media feed to feed your blog‘s traffic.

However, if you’re tempted to stop creating content on your blog and start disseminating only through social media, there is something you’re missing out.

Indexing vs. Ownership of Content

In the past all you needed was copyright. In short, once published a literary work that copyright did allow you to have control over it. Thus, you “owned” that piece of content.

Nowadays this is only in part true. In fact, the concept of ownership of content has changed. With the advent of the web and how search engines crawl it, ownership lost relevance in favor of indexing.

Indeed, each time you write a piece of content. You hit the publish button. That is how you’re claiming authorship on that.

You want to make sure to have ownership on the publishing media outlet where your blog was posted. That is why your blog is the answer.

Start with your blog

In short, what matters is not who wrote the piece of content but where it was first indexed. For instance, let’s assume you wrote an article and published it on Medium.

It doesn’t matter where you’ll post that content next. Since the article got first released on Medium, Google indexed it there. Creating an irreversible relationship among your story and a platform you don’t control!

Therefore, each time you publish on Medium, Quora, LinkedIn or any other publishing outlet it is almost like you’re giving up part of the “web ownership” over that content. Unless you use the following framework…

Content Amplification Framework

That is a framework in three steps with one objective:

GIVE YOU TOTAL CONTROL OVER YOUR CONTENT!

How? In three steps. First, indexing; second, spreading; third, experimenting.

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Step One: Indexing

The first step is all about letting Google’s crawlers index your page so that your content is tied to your blog. Once drafted the coolest article in the blogosphere all you have to do is to hit the publish button!

As soon as you do so, billions of crawlers that are indexing the web will also walk on your page and understand where it belongs to. Time to take the second step.

Step Two: Spreading

Beyond the traditional sharing, you must do (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and StumbleUpon to mention the main ones). You want to syndicate your content on four major publishing outlets: Quora, LinkedIn Publishing, Medium, and beBee.

How to use Quora for Content Amplification

Quora is a social network where people post questions, and other people answer them. While Facebook is mainly about scrolling the feed passively, Quora is about actively engaging with a community of people that for the most part are interested in reading in-depth content.

Back in March 2016 Quora had already over 100 million users, and it is the perfect place to start to build a following and amplify your content strategy.

As soon as done go back and create your blog there.

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Go on the icon on the top right corner, click on it and then go to “Blogs.”

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On the top right corner click on “Create A New Blog.”

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Once done, repost your article there! Why? A few reasons:

First, Quora will give you visibility that otherwise you wouldn’t have.

Second, by having links that point back to your blog, you will drive traffic back to it.

Third, less intuitive you might also improve your rankings (still testing this strategy out). In fact, when Google notices that your content is getting found (the original piece of content got first published and indexed from your blog) it may traffic back to your site.

Another thing to do is to atomize your blog post and use it to answer specific questions people on Quora have.

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After personalizing the answer, you can insert a link at the end of the question so that people that want to know more can go back to your blog and read the entire article.

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How to use LinkedIn Publishing for Content Amplification

In 2017 LinkedIn, the most popular professional network in the world reached over 500 million users. Time to syndicate your content there.

If you don’t have an account yet follow these simple steps:

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Source: Linkedin.com

You can use LinkedIn for sharing your content and for writing posts with an extract from your articles.

Therefore the first step is to share a post as I did below,

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Since Neil Patel had retweeted my post on Twitter, I used that to reshare it on LinkedIn and get some extra visibility which brought few dozens of visits back to the blog.

Also, I got an extract of the post and written an article on LinkedIn,

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You could either repost the entire article if you wish or just an excerpt from it and then a link to bring traffic back to your blog.

Among the two, the former is the most successful to amplify your content as much as possible. For instance, each time I republish an article entirely on LinkedIn publishing I get way more traction compared to just an extract.

My assumption is the LinkedIn algorithm makes your story seen more in the feed the more in-depth the article is.

But at times it also depends on the time and day it got published. Also usually LinkedIn feed is like a diesel engine, a post or update you posted a few days before will be showed again to some of your LinkedIn contacts.

One more thing to do to optimize your profile for content amplification is to add your articles to your experience,

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In this way, anyone that is browsing your profile on LinkedIn will check your articles,

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Time to move on to Medium!

How to use Medium for Content Amplification

I don’t know this platform well enough. However, this is a media outlet with over 60 million unique monthly visitors.

Also, the audience on Medium is more selected, which makes a perfect place where to share your content.

Also, there’s an import feature that allows most to share your stories quickly. So why not to do it?

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Time to the last step of this framework, experimentation.

Experimenting

Growing a blog is one of those things you do if you’re passionate about it. In fact, it takes a long time to build your audience, hone your writing skills and learn the marketing tactics to make your content found, read and shared.

Yet it all starts with a mindset, which is about experimenting with everything that leads to growth. Eventually, you’ll consolidate the lessons learned, leave the tactics that don’t work and compound your growth with what’s left. It takes a lot of tinkering.

For instance, when I first started to write on my Blog, I used only to share my articles on social media without syndicating my content. Then I understood I had to change strategy. Now I use my content in multiple ways.

For instance, at times it makes sense to atomize an article and make it become many smaller posts on other media outlets like beBee, Medium or Quora. In this way, with the same level of effort, you’ll be able to get more leverage on what you wrote.

It is time for you to do some tinkering now!

The resources you need to get started with your business model:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
How to Write a One-Page Business Plan
The Rise of the Subscription Economy
How to Build a Great Business Plan According to Peter Thiel
What Is The Most Profitable Business Model?
The Era Of Paywalls: How To Build A Subscription Business For Your Media Outlet
How To Create A Business Model
What Is Business Model Innovation And Why It Matters
What Is Blitzscaling And Why It Matters
Snapshot: One Year Of “Business Model” Searches On Google In Review
Business Model Vs Business Plan: When And How To Use Them
The Five Key Factors That Lead To Successful Tech Startups
Top 12 Business Ideas with Low Investment and High Profit
Business Model Tools for Small Businesses and Startups

How To Use A Freemium Business Model To Scale Up Your Business

Popular case studies from the blog:

The Power of Google Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising!
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does Netflix Make Money? Netflix Business Model Explained
How Does Spotify Make Money? Spotify Business Model In A Nutshell
The Trillion Dollar Company: Apple Business Model In A Nutshell
DuckDuckGo: The [Former] Solopreneur That Is Beating Google at Its Game

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Published on August 22, 2019 00:27

August 21, 2019

Space As A Service (SPaaS) Business Model [WeWork Case Study]

WeWork business model, claims to leverage on the space-as-as-service model. It consists of a set of services meant to sustain the growth of the companies part of the membership model, consisting of four primary tiers: standard, configured, on-demand and Powered by We (Custom).

This model helps WeWork achieve its vision and mission. And it flips the traditional commercial real estate model upside down.

Where the commercial real estate model has pretty much focused on collecting rents from tenants, with a small part related to common area maintenance fees.

The space as a service (SPaaS) model introduces a set of products and services that makes space rented only the foundation of the whole model. Indeed, with space, this membership model leverages on several elements such as:

Data
Technology
Ancillary services spanning from health to lifestyle

Let’s give a glance at this model by looking at the company that pioneered, WeWork.

Quick glance at WeWork SPaaS model

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How the WeWork Platform is structured around the space-as-a-service model, where members get access to a set of services that space from Insurance, to Education, Technology, Lifestyle and more. (Source: WeWork S-1)

In other words, beyond the physical locations offered by the company, WeWork also offers a set of services meant to enable members to scale their teams.

Thus, WeWork presumably leverages on technology to build a platform able to offer a set of services to deliver what the company claims as “a premium experience to our members at a lower price relative to traditional alternatives.”

Thus, the core of the revenue model is a membership, and on top of that a set of ancillary, value-added products and services.

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WeWork claimed savings for its members, (Source: WeWork S-1 form)

As the company might leverage a growing number of members, it will be able to develop a set of products and services on top of those memberships. Thus, using the membership as an entry point for customers to build on top of it a sort of add-on model with more and more services.

The membership model WeWork launched revolves around four primary membership tiers:

Standard
Configured
On-demand
Powered by We (custom)

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WeWork members’ tiers based on its space as a service model (Source: WeWork S-1 form)

KPIs for WeWork space-as-a-service model

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WeWork membership revenues (Source: WeWork S-1 form)

As the WeWork space-as-a-service model is based on a subscription, membership, which implies a continuous relationship with its customers, that implies also a set of metrics that enable the company to track, on the one hand, its ability to reach the full capability of the buildings.

And on the other hand to measure and track the members’ growth and sustainability.

Workstation Capacity

As specified by WeWork “workstation capacity represents the estimated number of workstations available at open WeWork locations.“

This metric helps the company asses the capacity to sell membership on the platform.

Memberships

As specified by WeWork “memberships are the cumulative number of WeWork memberships and on-demand memberships.” Powered by We service is comprised within the other revenues, as explained below.

Quick glance at Powered by We offering

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Design services
Construction and delivery capabilities
Cost savings in the supply chain, from furniture to supplies;
Onsite community team to energize work environments;
Enterprise-ready technologies, comprising also workplace insights dashboards

Enterprise Membership Percentage

Enterprise memberships represent memberships attributable to enterprise members, which are organizations with 500 or more full-time employees.

As of June 1, 2019, that represented 40 % of WeWork memberships revenues.

Those enterprise members are extremely important because they sign agreements with longer-term commitments for multiple solutions across our global platform, which enhances our revenue visibility.

Run-Rate Revenue

Run-rate revenue for a given period represents the revenue recognized in accordance with GAAP for the last month multiplied by 12. That is an operating metric.

Committed Revenue Backlog

Committed revenue backlog represents total non-cancelable contractual commitments, net of discounts, which will be recognized as revenue subsequently.

Contribution Margin

The contribution is defined as membership and service revenue less location operating expenses, adjusted to exclude non-cash stock-based compensation expense included in location operating expenses. This is another key operating metric.

Key takeaways

WeWork pioneered a model called space-as-a-service. Where the traditional real estate management company offers basic services for common area maintenance and a few other things.

WeWork leverages on its platform business model to offer a set of services which range from healthcare to lifestyle to help the organizations part of its membership program to scale while keeping the real estate costs relatively low.

Business resources:

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Published on August 21, 2019 16:10

WeWork Mission Statement and Vision Statement In A Nutshell

WeWork vision is that of providing a better day at work for less. And its mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness.

Quick intro

The aim of this piece is to show you how you can understand and imply a business model or a claimed business model from the language used in the mission and vision statement of any company.

It is in no way a judgment on whether the WeWork business model is viable. That only time can tell.

WeWork, at first sight, might seem a real estate company which primarily makes money by arbitraging from the spaces it rents from the landlord and what it charges to its tenants.

However, WeWork defines itself as space-as-a-service platform.

And in part, we can understand what that means by looking at its vision and mission.

WeWork vision and mission dissected

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Source: WeWork Financial Statements

The vision really helps us see the long-term goal of the company. And the mission helps assess how the company intends to reach that vision.

We have spent the last nine years building a founder-led, community company and executing on our vision of providing a better day at work for less.

More for less value proposition

The vision moves around a key long term goal of “providing a better day at work for less.”

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Source: Claimed results delivered by WeWork to its members

When a new player comes to an existing industry, rather than playing according to existing rules, it can try to redefine them by expanding the boundaries of an existing industry. This is called a blue ocean strategy.

The aim of a blue ocean strategy is to create an uncontested market where competition is made irrelevant. In WeWork case, the company claims to move beyond the boundaries of a traditional real estate company.

Indeed, WeWork is neither a real estate company nor a service company or a co-working space.

That is a hybrid between those two industries and it tries to leverage on a platform business model.

The key to this kind of strategy is about breaking the trade-off between cost and value and offer a value proposition revolving around the concept of more for less.

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The company highlighted:

We envision a future in which our global platform is a one-stop shop where members have access to all of the products and services they need to enable them to work, live and grow.

Three concepts that jump right away from the articulation of its vision:

Platform
Members
And community

Let me explain why those are important concepts and what they imply from the business modeling standpoint.

Understanding the term “platform” in WeWork vision and mission statements

First, when WeWork highlights the concept “platform” the company is claiming to be way more than a real estate company and it is claiming to be able to use technology and data to enhance its business model.

Indeed, platform business models are most of all driven by three things:

Users’ data or any sort of data which the platform can capture which is proprietary
A technology able to analyze, and leverage that data to create a competitive advantage for itself or for its members
Network effects, as usually, this implies strong scalability. Even for a company that relies mostly on managing physical spaces, claiming to build a platform business model makes it prone to scalability

From the business standpoint claiming to have a platform business model is also a way to enhance its valuation. In fact, today investors and venture capitalists mostly finance platform businesses, that have high growth potential.

The meaning of “members” to understand the revenue generation model

From the concept of “members”, we can understand that WeWork business model is driven by a subscription business model which they call space-as-a-service.

And to make this model work out, the company had to build a set of services and products around this subscription model, which should enable the companies that rent space with WeWork to have a sutained advantage.

Thus, in theory, a member which becomes part of WeWork is not just buying real estate space, but it is about a set of additional services that justify a membership model.

As WeWork highlighted in its financial statements:

Our global platform provides members with flexible access to beautiful spaces, a culture of inclusivity and the energy of an inspired community, all connected by our extensive technology infrastructure.

WeWork has to leverage its platform business model to provide “beautiful spaces” to help members build communities.

WeWork is a community-building company that might leverage data and technology, rather than a real estate company.

As WeWork explained further in its financial statements:

We have begun to build a suite of We Company offerings and develop a network of third-party partners to address our members’ needs.

With the support of our global footprint, our partners are presented with a unique opportunity to reach new customers and efficiently expand their businesses to new markets. While we are in the early stages of our platform journey, we are excited by the initial results and inspired by the potential.

The company highlights how the physical spaces are just a foundation to a business model that leverages on community building and a set of services for companies part of their network:

Our physical spaces are the foundation of our global platform and allow us to deliver differentiated products and services as we scale, further realizing our vision to deliver a better day at work for less.

WeWork mission statement dissected

We are a community company committed to maximum global impact.

Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. We have built a worldwide platform that supports growth, shared experiences and true success.

Usually, a mission statement represents a more practical statement compared to the vision. However, in the WeWork case, it seems that the mission statement is as hyped as the vision statement.

Beyond the buzz, we can extract a few key concepts which help us emphasize its business model.

First, “elevate the world’s consciousness” which might sound more like a religious credo, rather than the foundation of a company worth billions.

That can be justified by the fact that WeWork is navigating in unknown waters.

Therefore, it is trying to create a culture around its business model. Sounding more like a company looking to proselytize than a business trying to make money.

Yet do not be fooled, WeWork is a business and as such it has to make sense from the financial standpoint.

Value proposition from the customers’ standpoint

From WeWork S-1 form, we can extract some of the case studies showcased, that in some way can help us understand what members value about WeWork platform.

It is important to highlight that those cases are cherry-picked, thus not representative of all the customers that the company has. However, it might be a useful exercise to understand some of the elements that members find valuable. And the WeWork identifies with.

I’ve selected three examples.

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Source: WeWork S-1 Form

One common theme that seems to come up from these case studies is the flexibility of the solution that enables companies that are investing in growing quickly their teams to rely on WeWork as a partner that helps them keep their flexibility.

This means those members are looking for cheaper ways to scale while trying to manage the culture of their growing organization.

Key takeaway

In this article, we dissected WeWork vision and mission statements. It is important to highlight that companies use those statements for both internal and external reasons.

On the one hand, vision and mission help founders and key stakeholders to align around the same objectives and they help create a unique identity. Thus, working as the propeller for the company’s culture.

On the other hand, vision and mission also help explain to outsiders what the company is about. Thus, enabling the company to give a certain perception.

In WeWork’s case, it is interesting to notice how the mission seems to be plenty of buzzwords and grandiose claims. That might be justified by the fact that the company is indeed trying to open up a new market space, as as such it is trying more to proselytize.

On the other hand, WeWork is a business and a company which at the time of this writing is valued billions. If WeWork business model will prove viable that is something we’ll see in the coming years.

For now, we analyzed its vision and mission to emphasize how from those simple statements you can understand the perception that a company has of itself. The kind of identifies that it is trying to create internally. And also how the company wants to be perceived by outsiders.

Nike Mission Statement and Vision Statement In A Nutshell

Business resources:

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Published on August 21, 2019 13:27

August 20, 2019

Developing A Visual Marketing Strategy With Mind Mapping

Whether you work as a creative freelancer, a content creator or head of marketing in a large international company, visual marketing is an essential part of your advertising efforts.

According to Piktochart, only 28% of users read text-based content online, while four times as many consumers prefer to watch a visual content piece about a product rather than to read about it.

There is a genuine want and need for visual content marketing, regardless of the industry you operate in.

One of the best ways to integrate just that into your marketing strategy is through mind mapping, a popular and accessible brainstorming technique that doesn’t require special training or resources.

However, finding the right ways to implement a visual brainstorming technique into a legitimate marketing strategy can be difficult without the proper guidelines. With that said, let’s dive into why and how of mind mapping with the goal to create a visual marketing strategy for your business.

What Mind Mapping is All About

Let’s start by exploring the term “mind mapping” and what it’s all about before we dive any further. As we’ve previously mentioned, mind maps are a form of brainstorming which aims to help individuals with creative blocks.

It revolves around placing a single word or phrase into the center of a paper, with related words and phrases creating a “map” which branches out in all directions.

The exercise doesn’t have a concrete goal or limitation and can be used ad infinitum depending on your personal goals and expectations.

With that in mind, there are several advantages to using mind mapping over other forms of problem-solving in day-to-day office operations, including the following:

Greater creative freedom
Improvements to SEO due to keyword-driven brainstorming
A better mix of content types and topics
High return on investment due to the technique’s accessibility

Guidelines on How to Develop a Visual Marketing Strategy through Mind Mapping
Set Goals & KPIs Early

Now that we have a better understanding of how mind mapping works, we can delve further into how you can implement the brainstorming technique into a content strategy.

As we’ve mentioned before, mind mapping is driven by words and phrases, most specifically, the initial word or phrase which is placed at the center.

For example, if your phrase is “visual marketing”, all of your branching words should be related to the initial idea in some capacity.

This makes it important for you to set marketing goals early on in order to have a clear direction for the brainstorming activity.

If you don’t have a clear goal in mind, you can settle for several KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which will relate to your visual content’s performance online. Don’t go into mind mapping without a concrete goal or KPIs to guide you through the process.

Otherwise, the results of your creative efforts might be disjointed and not offer any specific solutions to your current marketing strategy problems.

Start with the Right Keywords

If you go into mind mapping with the wrong words in mind, you won’t be able to find a concrete answer to your creative questions. With that in mind, the best way to integrate a mind map into a visual marketing strategy is to treat words as “keywords”.

Platforms such as Google AdWords and SEM Rush offer extensive SEO research features for your business’ benefit. You can easily find relevant keywords and phrases which can later be retrofitted into visual marketing content once they are filtered through a mind map. Make sure to always search for keywords in your specific industry and local language to maximize the effect of the content you produce afterward.

Branch your Map through KPIs

Once the right words and phrases are in place and you are ready to approach your creative brainstorming, you should still keep your business’ marketing KPIs in mind. KPIs serve to guide companies into achieving their business goals during individual marketing or sales campaigns.

With that said, KPIs can be your “Northern Star” during the mind mapping process in order to narrow your field of creativity to relevant words and phrases. For example, if your initial word is “visual marketing”, a phrase such as “case study” won’t help you find relevant results. Make sure to keep your KPIs close by during your brainstorming and refer to them any time you feel like you are at the edge of your creative capabilities.

Cut Out Irrelevant Results

Chances are that even though you had KPIs and marketing goals to use as a reference, you have still come up with brainstorming results unfit for your company. After your initial brainstorming session is done, you should review your findings and eliminate unnecessary or irrelevant results from the mind map.

According to Larry Kim 81% of people online simply skim content in search of relevant keywords or visual elements, while their first impression is formed in the first 50 milliseconds of coming in contact with your content.

This makes it essential for you to use only the most relevant mind mapping results in your visual marketing strategy brainstorming to avoid unnecessary filler content which would have the opposite effect. Make sure to take every word or phrase into consideration as a viable digital marketing strategy before you eliminate results on a whim.

Combine Found Keywords into Phrases

Once your irrelevant words and phrases are eliminated, you should attempt to combine as many mind mapping result terms as possible into new keywords and ideas. Given the fact that you have eliminated irrelevant words by now, the remainder of your brainstorming results should be easy to combine into new terms and phrases.

For example, words such as “social media” and “live Q&A” can be combined into “live social media Q&A” and give you a great visual marketing idea to implement in the future. These results will provide you with the best creative ideas for visual marketing strategy creation, no matter what platform or capacity you are willing to go forward with.

Integrate into Visual Marketing (Conclusion)

Lastly, the most important aspect of mind mapping with the aim to improve your overall marketing game is to actually implement your findings into content production. Reach out to your content creators, head of marketing and other responsible individuals with your findings.

Explore the possibilities your creative findings can offer your business and how they can improve your overall visual marketing strategy going forward. The only way to know whether or not your mind mapping activities were successful is to try and integrate their results into your brand marketing.

Once that happens, use the same logic as before and eliminate underperforming activities while bolstering the ones that exceed your expectations. Before you know it, you will have found a more-than-viable and proactive solution to creative blocks in your marketing department without excessive resource or time expenditures.

Author Bio: Marie Fincher is a content writer with a long history in marketing, the technology of marketing, and BI. She is a frequent contributor to blogs on data science and those related to marketing in general. As well, she is on the regular writing staff of Studicus.

Other business resources:

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Published on August 20, 2019 23:59

What Is SEO Hacking? SEO Hacks And The SEO Process For Startups

SEO hacking is a process of quick experimentation that aims at efficiently growing the organic traffic of web properties. Where traditional SEO strategies look at steady growth, SEO hacking finds unconventional ways to quickly gain traction. That is a process well suited for small web properties looking to scale up organic traffic against large media outlets.

In this article, we’ll see SEO hacking in action on how to steal featured snippets from large and authoritative websites!

The origin story of this blog

When I started blogging back in 2015, I thought I only had to produce the so-emphasized quality content to rank on Google.

Quality content seems almost a utopia in the digital marketing world. Everyone talks about it, we all agree on it. Yet we all think about different things.

So what do I mean when I say “quality content?”

In my mind quality content can be summarized in three simple ways: in-depth but essential, useful and well researched, educational yet actionable.

In short, you don’t need to write a 2000+ words article, just because Google is thirsty for content. You need to follow the length that is congenial to the article, based on the topic you’re covering.

Of course, quality content might mean – at least for me – something that is useful for an audience and well researched. Many small business owners are too busy focusing on keeping their enterprise profitable to spend time on researching SEO or other related topics.

Last but not least, you want to make sure people learn something they can apply quickly. However, it doesn’t have to be dull. In short, also a “how to” can be compelling if adequately written.

Long story short, when I started to write content that fit those guidelines, I didn’t get any traffic. Nothing at all! What was going on?

I simply missed the proper mindset. In this article, I want to show you the SEO hacking mindset. Based on continuous experimentation, curiosity and lack of preconceived ideas of what works and what not to compete against large publishing outlets!

The power of the SEO hacking mindset

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As you can see SEO Hacking makes you think in terms of 10-100x growth. When that mindset kicks in you start thinking what strategies might be more effective to get there. This will make you neglect many other strategies that are too incremental.

Let me stress one aspect though. SEO Hacking is not about shortcuts or tricks. It is instead a mindset of experimentation, quick testing, and very few assumptions. Thus, when you start executing under the SEO Hacking framework, it doesn’t mean you will achieve great results with no effort.

This would be the wrong message. It takes a lot of effort to execute under a 10-100x growth framework. However, this effort isn’t far from the effort of someone that thinks incrementally. But the primary difference is that the SEO Hacker will not believe in what others say until it will be tested.

The basis of SEO Hacking

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It all starts from a mindset of quick experimentation. You often need to ask the right questions. If you ask yourself “how do I improve my traffic by 10% this month?” chances are you will look for the wrong answers and solutions. Indeed, you’ll probably find hundreds of articles about that on the web. None of it will help you go far.

Instead, if you’ll ask yourself “how do I improve my traffic by 100% by next month?” this will change it all. All of a sudden you’ll probably find a couple of worthy articles on the web about that. Yet even those article won’t help you much.

Suddenly you will need to think for yourself. How do I get there? You will draw a list of ideas, and you’ll need to test them up.

Therefore, you’ll start from the growth mindset, elaborate a strategy, and after seeing that work over and over again, have a framework. It is important to remember that frameworks work by time to time, and the more they get implemented by others (so the more they become a “best practice”) the less impact they will have.

This doesn’t mean best practices don’t matter. But only that they won’t be enough to generate 10x growth. To create that kind of impact you will need to go into the uncharted waters and be willing to experiment.

SEO Hacking Process

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To me the SEO Hacking Process follows seven steps:

Set a 10-100x goal: this is critical to make sure you’ll think differently in terms of possible solutions and ideas that will get you there. Setting a 10-100X goal is the most powerful way to switch your mindset
List ideas: only when the ambitious goal is set, you can start coming up with ideas. You won’t need complex tools, a simple piece of paper and a pen would do! The more ideas you write down the better
Prioritize ideas: This is the step where you keep only a very few ideas (from 5-10 might be good) that you can experiment. You need to balance between time, budget and the difficulty of tracking the impact of those ideas
Test ideas: Testing is all about execution. In this phase, it is critical to determine what you expect in terms of impact from each idea
Check the impact: Not by change I call it “impact.” We don’t care about “results” or “improvements.” We want to create an impact! Things that move the needle. Thus, you won’t need complex metrics to track. Actually, when you look for impact there will be no tracking issue. As the impact will be evident to
Keep what works: Once you identified what’s working and creating an impact, or has the potential of generating it, you’ll need to double down!
Execute at high speed: When things start to work out, you will need to speed up the execution, move fast, to make sure to gain as much traction as possible from these ideas that worked. You’ll need to do that because the framework you came up with won’t work forever. And if you figured it you will need to push it thourhg with maximum speed and determination, no looking back!

Once you get there, you’ll need to reiterate the process, over and over again.

SEO Hacking Case Study

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A few weeks back in one of our daily conversations with Andrea Volpini, WordLift’s CEO, we were discussing a few SEO strategies.

With Andrea, we often discuss at great length about SEO, the future of the internet and how search engines, Google, in particular, react to that.

Our conversations are a way to brainstorm ideas. That day we were walking through Via Giulia, an old street in the historic center of Rome; a road that runs parallel to the Tiber River.

One of the most famous streets in Rome during the Renaissance, Via Giulia became the home of antique dealers in the past decades. Yet today due to the crisis of antique trade, the street has become the home of modern shops.

Among those shops there is WordLift. A small startup that operates at the cutting edge of semantic technologies applied to the web. That is where I work as a Head Of Business Development.

When we walk through Via Giulia, a feeling of being part of something greater permeates us, and it feels like you go back to the past, when Rome was the most powerful Empire ever existed. These feelings make ideas flow incessantly.

In that scenario, Andrea had just revealed to me a secret about Google.

I’ll summarize in this way: images have their own life in Google’s SERP, and if you take the time to produce original images and redirect them to your blog. That can become an effective SEO strategy to bring traffic back to your site.

It all started from there. When I heard that I began to run a few experiments.

This strategy is beginning to pay off. In this featured snippet on the keyword “cash conversion cycle” with a volume of 18,100 Google is picking the content from Investopedia and the image from my blog.

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You’ll notice that the image redirects back to my blog. In this article, I show you what I did and how you can do it too.

Let’s take a few steps back.

It all started with an editorial strategy

Many think of an editorial strategy as a calendar filled up with articles for the next year. That is not the way I see it.

An editorial strategy for me is about having clear in mind what are the 2-3 topics you want to cover at great length.

Based on that you need to be flexible, and opportunist. In short, you want to keep an eye open for opportunity windows that allow you to rank on large volume keywords.

Long story short I’ve implemented an editorial strategy on FourWeekMBA.com by creating content that targeted specific keywords around business modeling.

Yet those articles would hardly rank for those keywords as I was competing against large websites like Investopedia.

What to do then? Either I had to change my editorial strategy or be doomed to failure. Unless…

All you need is passion and an audience

I didn’t want to change my editorial strategy. In fact, I’m passionate about business modeling, and I know I can keep researching this topic for years.

Also, that is a topic with a broad audience. Thus, I had the two conditions I believe are critical to building a profitable website. I also needed a secret recipe to start ranking on those keywords though.

I began creating companion infographics with my articles, which had the size of a LinkedIn post. The aim was to provide a snapshot of the business, quickly.

Those graphics would target the same keywords in the article.

Why?

Images have their own life on Google SERP, take advantage of that

If you look at the percentage of search results from Google there is one phenomenon to notice:

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In this analysis by SparkToro in collaboration with jumpshot one thing is straightforward: images play a key role in Google search results.

As pointed out by Rand Fishkin, there are two things to take into account. Number one, “Google Images shrunk, but almost entirely because Google web search took that traffic for themselves (dropping the tabs to image search, embedding more image results in the web SERPs, etc.).”

Number two “given that Google Images is sending out an even more significant portion of traffic (due to their recent changes on “view image”), investing in visual content that can perform there (and appear in a web search) feels like a no-brainer for content creators.”

In other words, Google is integrating more and more images in the search results, thus making them part of the user experience. Therefore, you should be not surprised to see your pictures floating around the web, disjoined from your content and inserted in other contexts.

In fact, more and more often, images appear in the so-called featured snippets. Other times they are included in the knowledge panels.

That opens up an exciting opportunity: having original images might be a critical strategy to power up your SEO strategy. And I want to show you how to use them to gain featured snippets on very competitive keywords.

However that also opens up another challenge: as Google is thirsty for relevant content, be it text, image or video, it will happen more often than these contents will be stripped out from the context of your website to get offered in different formats.

From search results, featured snippets, knowledge panels, or voice assistants. It doesn’t matter how Google will serve that content; it will be Google to make the rules of the game unless you make sure to follow two strategies.

Number one, bring all the traffic generated through those graphics or infographics toward the original blog post that features them with a simple redirection.

Second, make sure to label your images with your brand, website or whatever can help you build awareness and help you build up search volume around the so-called “branded keyword.”

We’ll see those two aspects more in detail in a few paragraphs.

How to find featured snippet opportunities for your images

The first step I took when I was looking for featured snippet opportunities by using original graphics was to look at featured snippets where Google only had text. Some examples below:

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As you can notice from this example, this featured snippet is very competitive as you might be going after Wikipedia, the same applies to the other examples:

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One thing you might have noticed though is that this featured snippet only comprises text. There is no image in it. Why?

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One possible reason might be that Google didn’t find relevant images to include in those featured snippets.

In short, even though Wikipedia is a trusted source of information, it doesn’t seem to provide original, and valuable images that Google can use within the featured snippet.

That is where the opportunity to get in that featured snippet comes in!

Let’s go back to our case study and what I did to get there.

Target a competitive keyword, but with your original infographic

When I was looking for featured snippet opportunities, I had identified a long-tail keyword with a large volume: amazon cash conversion.

That keyword, at the time of this writing, has an 18,100 in monthly volume. Even though that keyword was already taken and it looked like this:

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In other words, Investopedia had a text featured snippet, but there was no image. The reason being they didn’t have any compelling infographic in the text, as you can see from below:

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That is where I could have an opportunity even though there was no way Google would have taken my content in place of Investopedia. So I wrote the piece and worked on an original “companion” infographic.

Make your infographic relevant, compelling by targeting the featured snippet

I went on and produced the piece on Amazon cash conversion cycle, and that is the infographic I produced associated with the article:

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There are a few aspects you will notice.

The infographic is informative, it is quick, and it is branded.

I also picked a color that resembled The Economist infographics. Thus, making it more trusted at first glance (at least for people that know The Economist).

Structured data is the foundation of your featured snippet strategy

Structured data is about converting your content in a format that search engines can efficiently process. In other words, to make your content more sticky for the Google algorithms, structured data has become a must.

For instance, in this specific case, I used WordLift to mark up the content on my blog posts:

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The significant part is the WordLift converts my content in structured data in a few clicks and with no coding so that Google can better process it. And it does that by using a format called JSON-LD that doesn’t affect the performance of the page:

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WordLift passes up a set of metadata to search engines that describe the context of the page. That also includes relevant information about the infographic featured in the article!

Redirect traffic from your infographic back to your blog post

As I use WordPress as CMS, I used a simple plugin to have traffic redirected from the image – in case it ranked through Google – to the original blog post it belonged.

In short, when you have a website, you have a list of pages that you can prioritize based on a so-called sitemap. Put it shortly; the sitemap is the way you want Google and other search engines to look at your website.

That doesn’t mean Google will stick to it, but that is an indication that helps it understands a website.

Within the sitemap, you need to have also your images. In this way, you allow Google to more easily index, thus rank them (again Google will decide whether or not it makes sense, yet you give it an indication).

For that, I use a simple plugin, XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress.

Once I had the images in the sitemap, I made sure those images would be redirected via Yoast Plugin:

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Within the “Search Appearance” on Yoast, you need to go inside “Media” and set as “Yes” at the question “Redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself?”

Here you go:

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When you click on the image of the featured snippet it will open it up:

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If you click on that image, see where it goes:

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Exactly, back to my blog post!

Create search volume for your branded keyword

Another critical aspect of your infographic is about generating search volume for your branded keyword. A branded keyword is merely a keyword that represents your brand.

For instance, in my case, that would be FourWeekMba, or four-week-mba and other possible variations.

Why is that important? A branded keyword is significant for several reasons.

First, gaining search volume on a branded keyword might tell Google that your brand/website is relevant.

Second, when you build up volume over time, you also start diversifying your marketing mix.

Thus, you’ll notice more direct traffic to your blog. That’s good as you don’t need to rely solely on Google for a consistent stream of traffic.

With those infographics I’ve been building a bit of search volume around my brand:

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Of course, that is still very small. Yet when I look at my search console you can see some interesting findings:

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For the sake of simplicity, I’m just showing you the main branded keyword. In fact, in my search console, I have other variations (like fourweekmba).

What’s interesting here is that on this branded keyword the click-through rate is pretty high (47,83%).

In fact, the click-through rate shows how many times, based on the number of impressions from the search results, the user clicks on my page.

That is critical as that points to Google that this is what the user was looking for. Thus, that – in theory – should make my website more trusted (this is wholly speculative).

There is also another aspect that is critical for this story.

SEO is not a short-term game

I published the article on February 26th, 2018 and for a while I just let it rank organically.

A few days ago, at the beginning of July I started to notice in the last days I was getting some organic traffic on the keyword “cash conversion cycle” yet I could not find it on the SERP:

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In fact, I was on the third page. So that made me think, and I went to check right away what happened and that is what I saw:

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In short, after about three months I managed to gain a half featured snippet with an image with my small blog by competing with Investopedia, one of the largest and most trusted sites when it comes to business.

If you’ll be implementing a strategy based on positioning your images on the featured snippet, how can you make sure you’re doing it right?

How to check the traffic coming from images

One way to keep track of this strategy is by using the Google search console. All you need is to go in Search Traffic > Search Analytics and filter it by images:

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In this way, you can track your marketing effort in gaining organic traffic via original infographics.

A key takeaway for the case study

As search engines evolve new opportunities arise. Thus, by keeping an open eye, you can take advantage of those opportunities even if you have a small blog.

In fact, in this case study, we saw how you can take advantage of existing text featured snippets by following this process:

look for featured snippet opportunities: when you see a featured snippet that has only text there is an excellent opportunity to position your infographic
create content on that featured snippet opportunity together with a compelling infographic targeting the same keyword
use structured data as the foundation for your featured snippet strategy
set up redirections from those images toward the blog post to which they belong
brand those infographics to generate search volume around your branded keyword
be patient and wait for it to be positioned in the featured snippet. SEO is not a short-term game!
By the time to time, you can check whether your effort is paying back by filtering the search traffic to see organic traffic from images
when that happens, double down on that strategy to gain more visibility

One key aspect to keep in mind. SEO hacking is not about finding the latest trick to win some traffic.

SEO hacking is a mindset – that mixed with limited resources, experimentation, and creativity – allows you to gain traction even on competitive terms. You just need to think unconventionally and experiment quickly.

Oh, wait! There is another critical aspect. That pertains to voice search. What do I mean? Look at this short video:

When you shift your mindset and start targeting featured snippets, interesting things can happen.

Indeed, this is even more interesting than the featured snippet itself. In fact, in the featured snippet the image is too small for users to click on. Yet on the voice search assistant on your smartphone, the opposite happens.

The infographic “eats up” the text coming from Wikipedia!

In fact, not only the image seems part of Wikipedia (Google is tricking you) but when you tap on it you land on my blog!

But that is another story we’ll tackle in another case study

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Published on August 20, 2019 12:11

A Guide To Risk Management For Startups And Small Businesses

90% of startups fail! One of the primary causes of this failure is poor risk management. Risks are scary, and closing down a business is worse.

While it’s essential to focus on how your business will succeed, it’ll be foolish to ignore risks that can cripple it in no time. Some potential risks are fire, fraud, fire, or hurricanes, among others.

Securing your business against such risks will ensure future success. How can startups manage the curveballs thrown their way? Keep reading to find out.

What is Risk Management?

Before we even delve into detail, you must understand the meaning of that term. Risk management is the process of identifying and analyzing risks that could be encountered as a project continues. After identifying potential hazards, the manager helps the business meet its goals by following the set direction despite disturbances.

Risk management not only involves planning but also reacting to situations because there is a need to find solutions to risky situations.

Risk Assessment

This stage begins with assessing different risks your startup is exposed to and analyzing them. How is your business exposed to both positive and negative risks? Once you determine the potential risks, check on what manner they can affect business operations.

It’s essential to estimate the damage that could be caused by the occurrence of adverse risks. Some of the risks to consider in this stage are financial and operational risks. A country’s economy may lead to financial risks.

Strategic risks, on the other hand, include branding and competition. Identifying all these risks and planning how to counter them is an excellent strategy.

Risk Evaluation

At this stage, it’s crucial to measure the potential severity or frequency of identified risks. During risk evaluation, you have to consider several factors such as regulations, laws, finances, technological malfunctions, socio-economic events, and potential competitors.

You should use a heat map as a tool to determine how beneficial or dangerous a risk is. Remember to include severe and frequent risks.

You need to invest in many resources to solve or prevent severe risks. At the end of this stage, a manager will know what risks to prioritize and how to spend resources wisely.

Understand Your Financials

Knowing how you get money and how much you spend is vital. It’s equally important to store some cash for rainy days. Manage to book-keep by yourself or hire a professional. Seeking the services of an expert is the better option.

Establish good relations with vendors and suppliers so that they can pay you in advance in case you encounter a financial crisis. What will you do if you lose your best client? What if your most profitable product stops selling today? Ask yourself these questions and prepare how you can counteract predicted financial risks.

Take Protective Measures against Cybercrime

Nowadays, cybercrime is not something that any business should overlook. Any start-up can fall prey to it. Hackers are now focusing on cloud-based systems which most organizations use.

To secure your startup against cybercrime, educate employees on how to use the internet safely, create safe passwords, and ways of protecting company data.

Seek Legal Aid

Most entrepreneurs find it expensive to hire legal aid during the first stage of their business. However, for a startup to succeed, legal advice is needed. Hiring a lawyer or an accountant to protect your assets and take care of financial liabilities will bear fruit with time.

Similarly, it’s crucial to hire an attorney to advise you on daily business affairs. Listen to close advisors who can point out mistakes and express their doubts.

Say No to Long Commitments

Some entrepreneurs are overwhelmed during the onset of a business, and this could be the path to their graveyard. You’re not sure about your future even after taking calculated risks. Long term commitments could bring a severe financial burden.

Do not sign a long term lease for business premises. During the initial years of the startup, a lot of dynamics are involved. Customers change and regulations might turn unfavorable. Your scope may also change with time. Flexibility is crucial for all startups in the first few years. You need to adjust in case anything happens.

Implementing Solutions

Once you identify potential solutions, allocate resources to each. Resources needed to implement a solution could be time, workforce, or money. Organize and plan everything at this stage to avoid confusion and delays.

Every employee involved in the process of risk management should be formally informed. This way, subjective differences won’t be encountered along the way.

If you keep procrastinating risk management, you’ll get caught unawares, and your business will fall in no time. As you enjoy the growth of a startup, predict potential risks, and plan how you can prevent them. If you follow the above guidelines, your startup will prosper despite the occurrence of any risk.

Other business resources:

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Published on August 20, 2019 00:38

August 19, 2019

How To Start And Grow A Reseller Business

Reseller programs have been eagerly embraced by online entrepreneurs in recent years. Because of the intense interest, so many guides have been written about how these programs can be used by first-timers to build a new operation.

However, reselling holds as much promise, if not more, for established businesses who are looking to expand. Reselling can be one of the most effective ways for any existing operation to diversify what they do and offer a more complete product to their customers.

I learned that firsthand using reseller programs to rapidly expanding my own business—Loganix.

In this guide, I’m going to show exactly how that can be done. First, an explanation of the reseller business model followed by a look at how I’ve used this model to drive new sales. Finally, advice on how you can use what we’ve learned to power your next revenue stream.

What is the Reseller Business Model?

To understand how you can create a profitable reseller model, you need to understand how reselling works. Fortunately, the term is pretty self-descriptive.

What is a reseller?

A reseller is someone who sells products that are sourced directly from a producer or manufacturer.

As a reseller, you don’t need to carry or manufacture any products yourself. You’ll also rarely have exclusive access to the products you’re selling. Your business plan depends on you being able to add improvements to the way the product is sold.

This isn’t as hard or as limited as it may sound at first. You can do this in several ways. For example, by…

Targeting an untapped segment of customers more effectively
Driving sales with more experimental marketing
Packaging the product with other products to create a compelling bundle

The reseller business model can look a lot like the affiliate marketing business model detailed here. To be successful, you’ll need…

A trustworthy partner who can provide the product in a timely manner,
A customer segment that hasn’t already been targeted by the producer and;
A commission that makes the venture worthwhile.

There are two business models at work when it comes to any reseller program. Whether you’re the producer or the person reselling the product, you need the relationship to work out in your favor.

What is the Difference between a Reseller vs Distributor?

While both focus on delivering a product to consumers, there are important differences between resellers and distributors.

Distributors will take possession of a product and then hold it while they are trying to sell it. Resellers will not hold any product. They will only facilitate the sale and then take a commission when the producer ships the item.

As a result of these incentives, distributors and resellers tend to behave differently. Distributors need to unload stock quickly to reclaim their space, so they tend to rely on tactics like markdowns. Resellers, on the other hand, have the freedom to move more slowly and are incentivized to maximize the value of each sale.

Distributors tend to be more aggressive when making deals with producers. They may demand bulk discounts or deals that allow them to return unsold merchandise for a refund. Resellers do not need to purchase the product, so they will usually market it at the MSRP, minus the cost of their commission.

Most large-scale producers cultivate relationships with both distributors and resellers. Distributors ensure that a successful product is always in supply for customers. Resellers are useful for targeting segments of the market that are missed by large-scale marketing campaigns.

Why You Should Become a Reseller

There are many reasons you should consider becoming a reseller or working with resellers. No matter what is involved in the operation, reselling is a low-risk, low-investment way to accomplish all of the following.

The Advantages of Being a Reseller

Choose your own products
Easily expand into other verticals
Limit your expenses to what it costs to reach customers
Choose the amount of time you want to invest, and pause when needed
Negotiate your own margins
Create your own packages of products

The Advantages of Working with Resellers

Our story, coming up next, is about how we made those incentives work for other people. Of course, we had our own incentives for wanting to work with them…

Build relationships with partners who sell at a high volume
Provide your products at full price with no loss at high volume
Increase market exposure with no increase in marketing budget

Our Success Story: How Loganix used SEO Reseller Programs to Grow

Loganix began by offering a small suite of different SEO, web design and content services. As we fought to get the business to grow, we realized that our best relationships were with other agencies who were using our services to fill in the gaps of what they offered to their clients.

We leaned into that and developed our current model by focusing on agency clients and offering “white-labeled” reporting. If you don’t know, white-labeling is when branding is stripped from a product or report. Blank spaces are left behind so that the reseller can insert another brand before shipping it to their own client.

This presentation was the key to our reseller-focused business plan. It’s the extra feature that allowed us to multiply the number of orders we could attract by letting smaller agencies resell our product.

Our business model worked by…

Identifying SEO resellers (Our key partners)
Shifting our services to emphasize the needs of our new key partners (value proposition)
Creating a dashboard to organize and deliver services (customer relationships and distribution channels)
Tracking to ensure our profit at volume (cost structure and revenue streams)

Identifying SEO resellers (Our key Partners)

As the first step in our business model, we needed to discover our customer base. We were concerned about finding a sufficient number of resellers to justify the model because SEO reselling can be complex. After all, these services often need to be customized for the client receiving them.

We already knew that some agencies (by request) advertised our services as part of their marketing packages. Then, they placed an order with us when their client requested that specific service.

In order to develop our customer base, We just had to turn that practice into a process where they could access the services they needed in a timely and safe way.

Shifting our services to emphasize the needs of our new key partners (value proposition)

Most businesses who participate as SEO resellers are also involved as agencies. That’s why they can so easily produce the information needed to provide custom services (such as the customer’s keywords, goals, and properties).

Knowing that we shifted the way we offered our services to cater to this type of customer. Instead of getting what they wanted by approaching us and working out a deal, they could simply select this type of arrangement at checkout.

In order to meet and appeal to our ideal reseller agency we…

Introduced and advertised white-labeling as a standard service
Provided agencies with significant savings through a coupon
Standardized and partly automated our key activities (SEO services) so that they could be repeated at a larger scale

Creating a dashboard to organize and deliver services

To ensure close customer relationships—and to make sure that we can fully supervise the distribution channels that delivered services to these clients—we created our own dashboard.

Instead of delivering services to our clients by email, we encouraged them to log on to a dashboard they can use to monitor all of their services at once. This was welcomed by clients who had us handling 20+ different orders at once.

We were able to build closer relationships and to help agency clients feel more comfortable trusting us with high volumes of work at one time. While our first dashboard was a great learning experience, the volume made it practical for us to move to an established platform

that could serve our clients even better.

Tracking to ensure our profit at volume

One of the positive consequences of standardizing our services and making them highly repeatable is that we were able to more effectively control costs. As we moved into high-volume work, we needed to implement more advanced tracking to ensure that our volume discounts weren’t costing us more than we were bringing in revenue.

This tracking made early mistakes (such as stacked discounts) easier to identify immediately and correct.

The results

Our model produced nearly immediate results. In a single quarter, using our coupons and improved compatibility with resellers, we were able to…

increase revenue from agency resellers by 108.80%
increase total transactions from agency resellers by 63.30%
increase our avg. order total among agency resellers by 27.86%

Our model continues to undergo development, but the model we’ve mapped out so far has allowed us to achieve a massive amount of growth.

But what about the risks?

There are some risks to outsourcing that are helpful to understand from the perspective of both resellers and providers.

The true risk with outsourcing is the threat of losing credibility. A client may ask ‘if you’re hiring someone else for this, why don’t I just work with them?’

White-labelling is it’s own solution here. It protects the outsourcing agency from having those kinds of awkward conversations. Their clients have no reason to doubt that the agency performed the work itself.

The ones providing the services to resellers must be equally concerned about their reputation. If resellers are advertising the services through spam links, or aggressive appeals that are badly-positioned, it could damage the brand.

These risks should be taken seriously, but they’re also easy to control. Keep your client’s confidence if you are approached by 3rd parties. You are not obligated to share any client data. In the other case, you have every right to refuse service to a client who won’t respect the integrity of your brand.

How to Use a Reseller Program to Grow Your Business

Now you understand what resellers are, what they’re motivated by and how a reseller business model is executed in the SEO industry in particular. This model can be adjusted to apply to either general or highly-specialized services. Even only one service.

All it takes is understanding the specific needs of reseller clients, developing distribution channels that meet those needs and shifting your profits to work by volume.

Business resources:

The post How To Start And Grow A Reseller Business appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

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Published on August 19, 2019 16:49

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