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Pam Neely, award-winning freelance marketing writer

Earning Less Than $15 Per Hour as a Freelance Writer? Here’s How to Increase Your Income

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I’m glad you’re here. And while it sucks to earn less than $15 per hour, there is good news: You’ve got nowhere to go but up.

There are a lot of people who will tell you that earning $15 or less per hour is just the way it is being a freelance writer. They’ll tell you that website content doesn’t pay, that nobody gets more than $30 per blog post.

Sorry, but that’s bullsh*t.

I make $500 or more per blog post. I earn $140 per hour. And I am certainly not superhuman, or some business genius. I got here because I had big bills and no other options. And so I made it work.

You can make it work, too.

Here are a few ways how:

1) Focus on getting recurring work.

One of the most stunning takeaways from the freelance writer’s survey is how much recurring work “high-earning” freelancers (over $45 per hour) get versus low earners.

Want to earn more as a freelance writer? Get more recurring work.

So how do you get this recurring work? There are plenty of ways to go about it, but here’s the condensed version:

  • Write blog posts. Clients need regular blog posts for their websites. How regular they need them depends, but it’s at least once a month, and often once a week. You need to become their outsourced company blogger. Landing even 2-3 regular blogging gigs will not only dramatically reduce how much time you spend finding clients – it will also give you a more regular, predictable income. And if you can get your client to agree to a couple of blog posts titles at a time, if you do have downtime in your schedule, you can just work ahead of deadline for your blogging clients.
  • Do A+ work. Every single time. Here’s how I really made my way to $500 blog posts and being an ultra-high earner: I over-delivered. No matter how mundane or stupid or forgettable an assignment seemed, I turned in work that was several grades better than what was needed. And I kept doing it. You need to do this, too. Because what sometimes looks like a boring assignment for a one-off client can become ongoing, highly paid work. Submit every piece of writing as if you were auditioning for a job.
  • Ask for it. I know – it’s hard for some people to ask for things. I hate promoting myself, too. But friend, you need to earn more money, and that can be quite the motivator. So ask for additional work. Even better, get specific about writing you could do that would help your client. Always be thinking about how your writing skills can drive more business for your client. Then tell them about your ideas.

2) Work with better companies.

I will not lie to you: Some businesses and people are just cheap. They will not pay any more than nickles for writing. You need to stop working with these people. Wish them well, but dump them. Because there are companies and individuals around who do pay good money for good words. You need to get better at finding and identifying them.

One of the best ways to identify companies like that is by how many employees they have.

In my own work, I’ve found that companies with 10 employees or so don’t usually make for good clients. Now, I’m crazy expensive, so smaller companies could work for you for awhile. But in the Freelance Writers’ Survey, it clearly showed that freelancers who work with companies of 50 employees or more or agencies tend to earn more.

High and low-earning freelance writers do work with different types of clients

In my experience, there’s another good reason to work with larger companies. They’re less likely to not pay you. They’re also more likely to agree to ongoing work. They’re big enough to have a budget that’s worth talking about.

3) Become a better writer.

I’m not saying that you’re getting paid a terrible rate because you’re a bad writer. You can absolutely be a good writer – even an excellent writer – and still earn an awful hourly rate.

But improving your writing skills can help. So long as you do it the right way.

You see, many freelance writers think that “become a better writer” means bigger words, or more styled prose, or injecting their personality into their writing. It’s certainly good to have “a voice”, but it needs to support, not detract, from what you’re trying to say.

Depending on your client, what’s good may have a different meaning. But for almost any business client, here’s the outlines of what “good” means.

  • It’s easy to understand. Specifically, your copy comes in at less than a 7th grade reading level per the Hemingway Editor.
  • It’s easy to scan. Sorry… but very few people will read every word you write. It’s just that nature of reading on the web. So add subheaders. Use bulletpoints wherever you can. And consider using bold to help your reader find what’s most important fast.
  • It’s error-free. Do not submit another word to a client without running your copy through Grammarly’s free tool.
  • If it’s a blog post or other online content, your copy links to other pages on the client’s website about every 300-500 words.
  • It’s in the same mindset as your client’s other content. Always read at least five blog posts and five pages of content on any client’s site before you submit a piece. Look for the tone they tend to use, any style conventions, formatting – the works. Submit a piece of content that fits with what’s on their site.
  • Cut filler, flacid words.
  • Use examples wherever you can. Especially if you can find examples from your client’s clients or customers.
  • Read your work out loud before you submit it. When your ear notices a clunky sentence, fix it.

12 Surprising Results from the Freelance Writers Survey

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What’s the difference between the freelance writers who are earning a living, and the freelance writers who aren’t?

results of the freelance writers survey

That’s what I wanted to know when I launched this survey. What habits, skills, and connections do “successful” writers have the “unsuccessful” writers don’t?

I found out – and the results were surprising.

But first, we have to define “successful”.

This may not be the perfect measurement, but I’m defining it here as how much the freelancers said they earn per hour.

Thanks to the answers from 1302 freelancers, I can break the responses from this survey into three groups:

• Low earners: Freelancers earning less than $15 per hour
362 of the 1302 freelancers surveyed fall into this group

• Medium earners: Freelancers earning $15-$45 per hour
573 of the 1302 freelancers surveyed fall into this group

• High earners: Freelancers earning more than $45 per hour
367 of the 1302 freelancers surveyed fall into this group

how much do freelance writers earn?

The full report on this survey compares the answers of these three groups in detail and looks at the overall trends the freelancers reported. This post is just to give you the key takeaways on how high earners differ from low earners.

So here are the major differences between the writers earning over $45 per hour and the writers earning less than $15 per hour:

1. How much recurring work they have.

Low earners are seven times as likely to say they get “no recurring work” as high earners are. This may be one of the strongest determinants between who earns a living and who doesn’t.

How much recurring work you have is one of the major factors that decides whether you earn a living as a freelance writer - or not

2. How long they’ve been doing freelance writing.

Experience counts, right? It sure seems to.

High earners are six times more likely to have been writing professionally for 10 years or more. 54% of them have been writing for more than 10 years. 19% of them have written for between five and ten years.

It’s a different story for new freelance writers. They tend to be in the low earner group for the first few years. Then around years three to five, some will move into the high earners group, while some continue to be low earners indefinitely.

Some writers do break into the high earner category in their first year…. but only 4% make that hurdle. In other words, only one out of 25 freelance writers is clearing $45 an hour in their first year.

Ouch.

How much recurring work you have is one of the major factors that decides whether you earn a living as a freelance writer - or not

3. What type of clients they have.

High earners are nearly six times as likely to work with larger companies than low earners. They’re also more than three times as likely to work with agencies.

Not too surprisingly, low earners are more than five times as likely to work with content mills than high earners are.

But when it comes to content services – the types that pay at least 15 cents per word – low earners are just as likely to work for them as high earners are. This reflects what we’ll see in another chart below about where writers get their work. It appears that some freelance writers are actually doing fairly well with content services, provided the content service is more boutique/high-end.

What types of clients low versus high earning freelance writers tend to work with

4. How much time they spend doing paid writing every week.

Many of the freelancers who took this survey mentioned how they would like to do more freelancing. And it might be a good idea. Especially if you’re writing less than one day a week. Freelance writers who write less than 8 hours a week are more than twice as likely to be in the low earners group.

But there is good news. If you can manage to write more than 8 hours a week, you’re equally likely to be in the high earners group. And if you can cram in more than 21 hours of paid writing a week, you become three times more likely to be among the high earners.

Writers who work less than 8 hours a week tend to earn much less per hour

5. Where they get work.

Want to get more work – and more high-paying work? Boost your personal network and get more client referrals. They are clearly the best way to ensure you make a living.

Visibility on major writing platforms also appears to help. As does using bylined, paid work to attract more clients. And let’s give a hat-tip to those content agencies and boutique content providers. Some writers do well with them.

That’s especially true if you compare the boutiques to Upwork, WriterAccess and similar platforms. Low earners are nearly three times as likely to say they get work from these platforms as high earners do.

The difference in who gets work from social media is also interesting. Sure, some high earners find work on social media, but it’s more a practice of low earners than high earners.

Where freelance writers find work

Given these responses, you might want to skip guest posting. Very few high earners – less than 5% – get good client work from guest posts. Instead, post your work on LinkedIn or to high-end writing platform sites like Medium.

And finally, fight for those bylines. They do attract clients.

What doesn’t make a difference

Freelance writers get a lot of advice about how to earn a better living. Most of it makes sense, but if you look at these responses, some of the advice we’ve been getting over the years doesn’t actually make any difference.

For me, this was the most surprising part of the survey – the things I thought freelance writers had to have or do, but that actually don’t make much difference when it comes to what they earn.

  1. Having a website does not have a huge impact.

Roughly third of low earners don’t have websites, compared to a quarter of high earners who don’t have them.

There are indeed differences between the two groups, but they’re not very large. Incredibly, having or not having a website does not make a major difference in how much you earn.

Do high-earning freelance writers all have websites? Here's what the freelance writers survey found.

2. The type of writing they do.

If you’ve been listening to freelance writing advice for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard that case studies and white papers are high-profit work. And given what the freelance writers survey found, that’s true. High earners are much more likely to write in those formats.

What’s interesting is how similar the two groups are for blog posts and web copy. Both high earners and low earners are about equally likely to do blog posts and web content/copy, and they do them for the bulk of their work.

This is good news for any low earners writing in these formats. You could raise your prices for blog posts and web copy, as many of your peers are earning significantly more for very similar work.

What type of writing do low versus high earning freelance writers do according to the freelance writers survey?

3. How much time they spend managing their business.

If you spend a lot of time promoting yourself and managing your business, you’re more likely to be successful, right?

Not so. Incredibly, there is no statistical difference between high and low earners when it comes to how much time they spend managing their business. (Though it is possible that the high earners are outsourcing some business management, as they can afford to.)

How much time do freelance writers spend promoting and managing their business?

4. Specializing in a particular niche does not make that much difference.

This one really surprised me. I had assumed that subject experts would command higher rates, or that they would at least work more efficiently so they’d earn more per hour.

Nope. There is really no significant difference between high and low earners based on whether they specialize in one subject or not.

There is no significant difference between low and high earners in terms of whether they specialize in one subject.

Do take note that low earners are about 30% more likely to write about anything than high earners do. But that’s hardly an earthquake in the data.

  1. Making your deadlines doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Got a point of pride about always making your deadlines? That’s great, but it’s probably not having much of an affect on your income.

There is no difference between high earners and low earners when it comes to keeping deadlines.

Does making your deadlines help your earnings? According to the freelance writers survey, it doesn't make much difference.

6. Having a huge social media audience doesn’t affect what you earn, either.

High earners are more likely to have larger social media audiences – particularly if that audience is between 5,000 and 10,000 followers. And low earners are more likely to have less than 1,000 followers.

But while there are differences, this data does not show that just having a big social media audience is going to result in you earning more work.

How large are freelance writers' social media audiences

One thing to note here: Remember how writers got lots of work from their networks? That is an asset you might want to grow. And social media can be a good way to begin to develop a network. So don’t ignore social media entirely, be careful about investing too much time it in. It’s the quality of your connections, not the quantity, that lands good work.

7. Whether you promote your content or not doesn’t appear to matter, either.

If freelance writers are supposed to get paid in part by how well their work does, and that performance is measured in social shares… wouldn’t promoting your work mean you’d earn better pay?

Nope.

In my own freelancing business, I do promote my work, and I had assumed I was earning a bit more because of that. Clients have told me they appreciate it. But there just isn’t any major difference in earnings between the writers who say they promote their work and those who don’t.

Does promoting your work make any difference in what you earn? Apparently not.

 

Key takeaways from the freelance writers survey

Want to be in the high earners group? Then here’s what you need to do:

  • Get recurring work. Nothing is more likely to win you a living wage than recurring work.
  • Work directly with companies of 50 employees or more. Consider working with agencies, too.
  • Have five or more years experience as a freelance writer. I know – this is not great news for those of you starting out.
  • Avoid being a part-time freelancer. The data shows that freelancers who write less than 8 hours a week are about three times as likely to be in the low earner group. Then, between 8 and 20 hours a week, there’s no real difference between low and high earners. But once you pass 20 hours a week or more of actual writing per week, you become three to five times as likely to be a high earner.
  • Get more client referrals. High earners are twice a likely to get referrals than lower earners.
  • Build your network. As with almost any profession, the old saying that “your network is your net worth” is true.
  • Publish on platforms like Medium or LinkedIn. Higher earners are almost twice as likely to say they get work through these places.
How to Succeed As a Freelance Writer Infographic

Solo Professionals Have 45 Minutes A Day For Marketing

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marketingforsoloprofessionals

Being a solo professional is a mixed bag. There are significant upsides to it, but there are also some challenges. Managing the business side of your business while still having enough time to earn a living is one of the most common struggles.

You went out on your own because you’re good at what you do. What you want to do is to practice your trade, not be a marketer or a financial person or an office manager (unless one of those things is your trade).

But there’s no way around it – basic business functions have to be done. Otherwise, there’s no new business, no ink in the printer… or your taxes get out of hand.

These business functions take up a lot of time, and this is particularly troublesome for solo pros. We’re severely limited on time. We’ve got to earn enough to live. The checks don’t just magically show up the way they do when you’re an employee.

We have to work a certain number of hours of every week. We also need enough time to sleep and to have a little bit of a life. The business side of our businesses – the finances, the marketing and everything else – has to fit within the hours that remain.

Yet it can be done. Here’s how to cover the business basics and get your work done, at least on the marketing side of things.

Why Your Marketing Has To Fit Into 45 Minutes a Day

Let’s start off by being kind. We’ll give you three weeks off each year. That sounds indulgent, but it’s not. It gives you one week of vacation, one week to be sick, and one week to do the sundry things of life, like move, wait for cable, or help a friend.

That leaves you 49 weeks every year.

According to the SoloWorkForce.com blog in 2013, most solo professionals log about 1,680 billable hours per year.

1680 hours divided by 49 weeks = 34.3 hours a week.

We’ll round down to 34 hours. You need 34 hours a week to earn your income – to actually do your work.

According to the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index, the average small business owner works 52 hours per week. We’ll assume you’re an average business owner. After you’ve completed your 34 hours of actual work each week, you’ve got 18 hours left for everything else. That “everything else” is the business part of your business.

Let’s split this remaining 18 hours of managing your business into four parts:

  • One for client management (unbilled hours)
  • One for financial matters
  • One for marketing
  • One for everything else

You’ve got 4.5 hours a week to manage each of those areas.

According to that same Fargo/Gallup Small Business report, most small business owners work six days a week. That’s forty-five minutes a day for each of those four parts.

What to do with the 45 minutes you have to market yourself

I could write an entire ebook about how to best use your forty-five minutes a day… but it might take you more than an hour to read. You don’t have time for that.

So here’s an outline of what forty-five minutes a day over the course of a month might look like. It’s 18 hours total. Forty-five minutes x 6 days a week x 4 weeks a month.

This is what you can get done:

  • Write one blog post a month. 3 hours to write, 1 hour to set up (with header image), 1.5 hours to promote. 5.5 hours a month. (12.5 hours left)
  • Send a curated email every two weeks. 2 hours a month. (10.5 hours left)
  • Manage social media updates and accounts. 1.5 hours a week = 6 hours a month. (4.5 hours left)
  • Participate in professional online communities/forums (either on LinkedIn or elsewhere). 4 hours a month. (0.5 hours left)
  • Manage professional listings (phonebook, online directories, Chamber of Commerce, other organizations you belong to). 0.5 hours a month. (zero hours left)

Other things you could do:

  • Comment on blogs. 4 hours a month. About 12 detailed comments if you can write one every 20 minutes.
  • Guest post. About 6 hours per guest post including pitching, writing the post and then promoting it.
  • Public speaking. 10 hours or more for each new talk. 4-6 hours for giving an existing talk.
  • Paid advertising. 2-6 hours.
  • Direct mail campaigns (like a bulky mailer). 6-18 hours depending on if you find the correct contacts and addresses, or if you hire an assistant to do it.
  • Webinars. 6-24 hours.
  • Conferences. Several days.
  • Send cold emails to pitch new clients. About 30 minutes to one hour per email.
  • Write a Kindle book. A few days, even for a 30-40 page Kindle book.

 

Why email marketing deserves to make your minimalist marketing list

An example of a short, effective email newsletter from a solo professional / freelancerWhile it is only one component of all your marketing, email pulls a lot of marketing threads together. Once you’ve got your opt-in forms set up and a template for your emails created, it takes surprisingly little time to get a message out.

Many professionals worry about what to say in their emails. You can always just include your latest blog post, or just curate the best content you’ve come across lately.

Or just tell your subscribers what you’ve been working on lately, like Belle Beth Cooper does.

Even if you’re under contract to not reveal who or what you’re working on, the odds are good you’re learning new skills or honing old ones. Write a few paragraphs about that.

Email messages don’t need to be long. A 300-word update of what’s going on in your work life is perfectly good content for an email.

Email list building in 45 minutes a day

If you can give me forty-five minutes a day for a month, I can get your email list building underway. Get my 30 Day List Building Plan for Solo Professionals.

List Building Plan for Professional Services FirmsClick on the image to the left to download your 30 Day List Building Plan for Professional Services Firms & Solo Pros. red arrow

6 Ways Search Will Change in the Next Decade

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2014 is whirling to a close. As Panda rolls out and a new year rolls in, I’ve been pondering the future of search.

But honestly, I’ve also just misplaced a jacket, and so I’ve been wondering if I’ll ever get a search function for my house. Or if there will ever be a way to search all my emails, social media updates, and the documents on my computer with one query. I don’t know if we’ll have a search function for physical objects in the next decade, or even a way to search every digital record, but here are six ways I’m sure how we search and what we search for will change.

1) Voice search

If you think mobile has shifted things, get ready for the next hit: Voice search. Siri may not be everyone’s best friend, but voice search is developing rapidly, with Google leading the technology ahead of other players. Even now, 55 percent of teens aged 13-18 use voice search every day. But while teens have no problem with voice search, 56 percent of adults (“adults” are those over 18) say it makes them feel geeky. But geeky or not, even us old folks are using voice search more and more.

Here’s how the two age groups differ in how they use voice search… at least for now.

These tasks are certainly interesting, but what about driving? There’s literally lives to be saved if we can get people to use voice search and communication rather than text at the wheel.

These tasks are certainly interesting, but what about driving? There are lives to be saved if we can get people to use voice search and communication rather than text at the wheel.

2) Wearables

Answer this: If mobile devices have altered search result viewing habits so much that you can see the behavior changes even when they’re using a desktop, how could wearables alter viewing habits on mobile and desktop devices?

And a few more questions: Will the Apple watch transform local SEO? Will grandmothers ever wear Google Glass?

Anything is possible. According to Business Intelligence, Google Glass sales could reach 21 million units per year by 2018, but that’s still just a fraction of how many iPhones are sold. In 2011 alone, 72 million people bought a new iPhone. It’s also possible that by the time 2018 rolls around Google Glass will seem positively passé compared to the far sexier surgically implanted chips some of us will be wearing. I really think the chips are really not an “if”, but a “when”… even if the when is 2028. The real question is where they’ll be implanted.

Even now, about 15% of us are sporting wearables. About half (48%) of the people wearing them are between 18-34 years old. “Fitness bands were the most popular devices (61%), followed by smart watches (45%) and mHealth (mobile health) devices (17%),” according to a Nielsen.com study done in November 2013. Of those three device types, expect smart watches to be the thing to really take off: The market research firm Gartner recently reported that they expect 40% of wristworn devices will be smart watches by 2016.

Maybe Google Glass is just too modern for mainstream adoption, but it’s quite possible we’ll see grandmothers wearing smartwatches soon.

Excerpted from SmarterWatching.com's Top 10 smartwatch companies infographic

Excerpted from SmarterWatching.com’s Top 10 smartwatch companies infographic

3) Shopping

Google considers Amazon to be it’s largest competitor. Seriously. “Eric Schmidt, speaking in Berlin earlier this week, said the giant e-tailer is its biggest competition” reports Motley Fool.

Here’s why: Google makes far more AdWords income from keywords people use when they have an intent to buy. Everyone who uses Google AdWords already knows this. But here’s what you might not know: One-third of all shopping searches start on Amazon. Only about half that many shopping searches start on Google. Amazon is beating Google on shopping searches.

Amazon is edging into Google’s domain with it’s Kindle content, too. When Amazon suddenly offered all the books and other content available on a Kindle for free, it basically created a vast library of free content… kinda like a smaller, but better edited, Internet.

Google is also going up against Amazon on same day delivery, advertising (you’ve noticed all those 3rd party product ads on Amazon, right?) and even cloud computing.

So next question: How will Google alter search results and other products in order to take out Amazon? And how much would you pay to be a fly on the wall while their testing teams battle it out?

4) More and more customized search

How soon will it be until Google knows if we prefer our content in video, or infographic, or Slideshare format? When will it get smart enough to show us content in the formats we prefer? Or (even scarier) when will it figure out how to take content made in one format and serve it up in another format, on the fly, for us?

5) “The Internet of Things”

What will it mean when your refrigerator can talk to your iPhone? Will we be able to search for refrigerator warranty information, product manuals and related purchases from a little screen over the ice crusher? Will our refrigerator be able to tell if we’re about to be out of our favorite special hot sauce, and then order that hot sauce from Amazon (or Google)?

Once again, Google is stepping in to shape that answer. They made their first major move at the beginning of this year, when they bought the home control company Nest Inc. for $3.2 billion. Scott Jensen, a Googler, also recently revealed a project called “The Physical Web” underway at Google that would remove the need for third party apps, so each device could tell you what you need to know without any app required. A bus stop would be able to tell you when the next bus was coming. Or, from the earlier example, your refrigerator might be able to print out your grocery list. If that’s so, you can already see the need for a 3rd party app, though – most of us will probably want our grocery list sent to our smartphones, rather than printed out.

This brings us back to getting a search function for my house – or yours. Given that so many of the products we buy now have Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Systems, let’s not pretend these things can’t be tracked. And if they can be tracked, I’d like to know where my jacket is.

6) How to manage for overload

The amount of digital information doubles every two years. Given that 99% of clicks go to the listings on the first page of search results, what does will it mean if every two years there is twice as much information available? Will Google automatically add more listings, so the top ten pages returned don’t hog all the traffic? Or will search become more and more of a winner take all game?

From Digitalmedianet.com, showing the IDC's (International Data Corporation) estimates of information created throughout human history.

From Digitalmedianet.com, showing the IDC’s (International Data Corporation) estimates of information created throughout human history.

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15 List Building Mistakes Ranked From Minor to Downright Evil

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Avoid these list building mistakes

List building is some of the most important marketing work you’ll ever do for your business. The trouble is, there are a lot of ways to screw it up. Check the roster below to see if you’re making any of these classic list building mistakes.

1) Your opt-in form button says “Subscribe”.

Unless you’ve actually tested this, the odds are very high you’re losing subscribers because of lame opt-in button copy. What’s the best opt-in button copy to use? It depends on your site. But most of the time, “Sign me up” or “Get weekly updates” or any other call to action that complements your opt-in headline are all good choices.

2) Your opt-in form is confusing or it has more than 3 fields.

Your opt-in form has to look easy to fill out and easy to understand. People will not spend a moment trying to figure out your form. They’ll just ignore it. The easier your opt-in box looks to fill out, the more subscribers you’ll get.

Don't confuse your visitors with your opt-in form.

Don’t confuse your visitors with your opt-in form.

3) You haven’t customized your confirmation pages.

This isn’t the worst list building mistake ever, but it’s one you don’t need to make. set custom confirmation pages throughout your email signup process. Don’t just use the default pages your email service provider gives you. That’s a huge branding opportunity wasted, and a way to engage your subscribers enough so that they finish the signup process.

If you’re not convinced, here’s a stat for you – it’s not uncommon for up to 30% of your new subscribers to not confirm their email addresses in a double opt-in (also called confirmed opt-in) email signup process. So if you’re using double opt-in, and 30% of the people who start the first step of your sign up process never finish it, that’s normal. But if you add these custom confirmation pages, and you make the process engaging, you can save at least half of those otherwise lost subscribers. That means 15% more list growth, just from customizing a few pages. How much is that worth to you?

4) You’re not using a lead magnet or some other kind of signup incentive.

Whether it’s a free report or a 15% off coupon, you’ve got to give people a compelling reason to sign up for your list. Just describing how great your emails are is nice, but it’s not enough. Telling people they’ll get special deals and insider news is also good… but again, it’s not enough.

Remember – it’s not 1997 anymore. Nobody gets excited about getting another email. You have to offer your visitors a reason to sign up for your list that is stronger than their resistance to getting yet another email sent to their already overflowing inbox.

Adding a lead magnet or signup incentive can increase your site’s opt-in rate by 30 to 100%. It’s worth a bit of extra effort.

5) You’re not using a pop-up.

Whether you call it a popover, an interstitial, or a lightbox, or anything else – use it. Pop-ups can increase opt-in rates by more than 1000%. AWeber reported a case study from earlier this year where one of their customers increased her site’s opt-in rate by 1,375% just by adding a lightbox. The lightbox got an opt-in rate of 5.5%. The same site’s sidebar opt-in box had been getting an opt-in rate of only .4%.

If you’re still resisting pop-ups because you think they’re annoying, then adjust the settings of your pop-up to make it less invasive. Set the pop-up to show only after someone’s been on your site for at least a minute, and set the pop-up to show only once per visit. And, of course, include an incentive to signup in your pop-up, just as you would with any other opt-in form.

6) You’ve got a link to an opt-in page, not the actual embedded opt-in form on each page.

I know it takes up more space to include the full form, but if you want subscribers, don’t make people click through to another page to sign up. Put the actual form in, not just a link. This can double your opt-in rate.

7) You never defined a goal in your Google Analytics account for your email signups.

Not every list-building tactic you try will work. So set up a simple goal in Google Analytics so you know where your new subscribers are coming from. Then do what works to build your list, rather than wasting time on what doesn’t.

use an email service provider. Don't send out your email updates from your own email address.

Don’t send out your email updates from your own email. Use an email service provider.

8) You built your email list, then never mailed to it.

This is one of the most common mistakes I see. It’s OK – I’ve done this too. But you don’t have to. Just set up RSS to email in your email marketing service and every time you publish a blog post, your subscribers will get an email. It’s not as good as designing a weekly email combining a bunch of content, but it’s a good start.

9) You’re using a WordPress Plugin to manage and mail to your list instead of a full-fledged email service provider.

Don’t do this. WordPress plugins are no match for what a good email service provider can do for you. Besides, if you’ve got a list that’s less than 2,500 people, MadMimi will give you a free account.

Don’t go cheap with your list. It’s one of the most valuable assets your company has – it’s right up there with your website.

10) Your site looks untrustworthy.

Maybe it’s the eight different typefaces. Or the black background. Or how 70% of your page space is ads. Or that you’ve got articles about everything from weight loss to relationships to “Clickbank riches”. Whatever your offense, the result is a site that puts visitors on alert. And so you can do everything else right, but still get very few subscribers.

11) You’re hiding the opt-in form.

Add opt-in forms near the top and bottom of every page on your site. The worst version of this mistake has only one opt-in form on the entire site. If you’re doing that, and your list isn’t growing, it’s not hard to see why.

12) You bought an email list.

It certainly is a fast way to build a list, but it’s also one of the worst ways ever to build a list. There are many reasons why bought lists are a bad idea. The first is you may not be able to even use your bought list: Respectable email service providers don’t allow their customers to mail to bought lists because they often contain spam traps – bogus email addresses certain anti-spam entities release specifically to catch spammers. Mail to one of those addresses, and you’re branded a spammer and your deliverability rates tank. No good email service provider will risk this.

Bought lists are also bad because they tend to be brutally overmailed. You’ll get a ton of spam complaints (another reason good email providers don’t let you mail to these lists). Finally, you’ll just get rotten results. You can send a good offer to a list of 50,000 bought names and NOT GET ONE ORDER. Seriously. I made this mistake for you a few years back – please don’t insist on making it again for yourself. Of all the list building mistakes I see, this is the most painful. Bought lists can be very expensive.

don't make this common list building mistake

It’s not okay to mail to people who have not expressly signed up for your list.

13) You scraped your email list.

Deep under the seamy of the Internet, there is software that can go out and scrape up people’s email addresses and gather them into a list. Don’t you ever, ever use this kind of software. It’s NOT okay to “gather”, “collect” or in any way take people’s email address and then add them to a list without their permission.

Many marketers – even experienced, well-meaning marketers – sometimes wonder if they can’t just add their LinkedIn contacts to their email list. This is NOT okay. Do not mail to people unless they have specifically raised their hand to hear from you. Anything else is spam. This list building mistake can actually get you in legal trouble.

14) You stole someone’s list.

It’s unbelievable I have to include this, but I am pained to say I’ve actually heard of this happening, and more than once. I’ve even heard of new businesses being created from a stolen list. (No, I did NOT participate in that). If you do this, and then find nothing but frustration and failure and misery in running your business… YOU DESERVE IT.

And the #1 list building mistake is…

Never getting started. This trumps any other mistake you could possibly make.

Hey, everybody makes mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes. Get over it, or you’ll never have any list at all.

How Many Subscribers Do You Need?

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how many subscribers do you needKnowing how many subscribers you’ll need to accomplish your business goals is as important a question as “how much is a subscriber worth to you” or “why build an email list?”

Once we know how many subscribers you’ll need to accomplish whatever it is you want to do, then the rest of our list-building plan starts to fall into place.

How many subscribers do you need? It depends on what you want to do.

Not everybody needs the same number of subscribers

If you’re an ecommerce business, you’ll need far more subscribers than if you are consultant or a freelancer. If you want to build an audience to launch a book, or take a shot at crowdfunding your next project, you’ll need quite a few people. Affiliates will need a different number of subscribers, mostly depending on what they’re selling. If you want to earn $10,000 a month and you’re selling a $5 product, you’ll need far more subscribers than if you were selling a $5,000 product.

There are extensive reports of people launching very successful products and businesses with barely 500 subscribers. If you’ve got a super-responsive list and you’re selling a high-ticket item, 500 subscribers can be all you need.

Let’s get specific.

According to Epsilon’s quarterly email trends and benchmark report, the average open rate in the 2nd quarter of 2013 was 28.5%. The average click-through rate was 4.3%.

Those are helpful stats, but consider they vary enormously from one industry to another. Here’s evidence of that, from Epsilon’s own report:

Email Benchmarks by Industry - helpful for figuring out how many email subscribers you'll need

 

Other factors that determine how many subscribers you’ll need

Let’s pretend you’re in “Retail General”, per Epsilon’s table. If you have an email list of 10,000 subscribers, you’ll get about 500 clicks to your website from every email you send. If your site converts at 2% (which is average), you’ll get 10 orders. According to BigCommerce, “On average, 90% of e-commerce customers spend $54 per order”. That means your 10 orders will be worth about $540. That’s how much you’ll make every time you send an email, assuming your Joe Vanilla average.

Nobody is Joe Vanilla average, but it’s a starting point.

If Joe Vanilla, the ecommerce store owner, wanted to make $10,000 a month from email sales, he’d need to either

– Radically increase his average order size

– Radically increase his open rates

– Radically increase his site’s conversion rate

This is where it starts to get hazy on how many subscribers you need. But if I left out order size, conversion rate and click-through rates, I wouldn’t be giving you the whole story.

Will sending more than one email a week help?

Yes. Joe could also send his emails more frequently. Generally, when you send twice as many emails out, you don’t get twice as many sales. Usually you get 40-70% more sales, but with double the effort of sending out twice as many emails.

Putting all the numbers together

I am about to introduce a formula here. I hope some of you don’t freak out. If you do freak out, remember – this will help you earn more money. This formula is your friend.

How much you want to earn per month = # of subscribers * open rate * average order size * your site’s conversion rate * 4 emails per month

But this is only useful if it gives you specifics. So here’s your calculator:

Where the calculator’s default numbers come from

The default number for click-through rate is from Epsilon’s report. The default conversion rate of 2% is an industry standard. Average order size is BigCommerce’s recent research. You can change any of the these figures – just type in the number you think is more appropriate for your business.

How freelancers and consultants can use this calculator

People who do not sell products can also use this calculator. Say you’re a freelancer. Your average order size is going to be considerably larger than $54… probably more like $500. Your click-through rate may also be considerably higher than what’s in Epsilon’s chart. The click-through rates on my emails hover around 10%, and that’s for “unique” clicks – not one person clicking twice.

With the $500 average order size, a click-through rate of 10%, and a conversion rate of 2%, you’d only need 2,000 subscribers to earn $8,000 a month, and that’s sales directly from your emails – not from any advertising, any networking, or any referral business.

Mailing More than Once a Week

This calculator does not factor in what happens if you decided to mail more than once a week. Some retailers (like Fab) send daily emails. That’s completely fine if you’ve got the content to pull that off, and your subscribers don’t rebel (or they’re at least given the option of getting fewer emails). Remember that sending more than one email a week won’t double or triple your sales, and watch your open, click-through and unsubscribe rates. It’s a difficult, slow process bringing an over-mailed list back to life.

Why Build an Email List? 11 Reasons Why Building a List Should Be Your #1 Priority

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Why should you spend time building an email list? Because email marketing is still the revenue engine of most Internet businesses, whether they’re Internet marketing gurus, SAAS businesses, ecommerce sites or anything else.

As the saying goes, “The money is in the list.” Here are eleven reasons why building an email list should be your #1 priority:

#1 You could rebuild your entire business with just your email list.

If you lost everything (your website, your blog, your social media accounts) you could still run your business with just an email list.

As author Michael Hyatt writes, “my email list is still my number one business priority — and asset. I have literally built a multi-million dollar business on the strength of my email list. Ninety percent of my income comes from it.”

That’s the author of a best-selling book, a man who gets paid thousands of dollars to speak, saying he gets most of his income from his email list.

#2 You own your email list. No one can ever take it away from you.

You don’t own your search engine rankings, or your social media sites. They can be taken away from you at a moment’s notice, completely in accord with the terms of service you signed when you created your account.

#3 An email list is the cheapest way to communicate with your audience.

Let’s use AWeber’s pricing as an example. For $30 a month they’ll let you send unlimited messages to a list of up to 5,000 people. Say you send one email a week to your list. That’s 20,000 messages for $30 – a cost of $0.0015 per message.

Show me a paid traffic source that cheap. Please.

#4 People prefer email as a communication channel for commercial messages. People buy from emails.

There are plenty of statistics to back this up. Consider:

  • 74% of online adults prefer email for commercial communication according to customer relationship marketing agency Merkle.
  • According to ExactTarget, “email still tops both text and social as the preferred channel for personal communications—45% for email to text’s 36% and social’s 13%.” And email is vastly preferred for commercial messages: “A staggering 77% of consumers told us that they prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email.”
  • According to the Nielsen Norman Group, when asked which medium consumers would like to receive updates from, 90% preferred an email newsletter, Only 10% chose Facebook.

#5 Sending email updates is easy, fast and affordable.

Email service providers have made it extremely easy to send an attractive, functional message in less than 90 minutes. You’ll have hundreds of pre-designed templates to choose from. Just drop your text and images in, hook up the links, and you’re done. Email is so simple most six-year-olds can do it. You can create an email message in minutes.

Even if you hire a hot-stuff copywriter and get it designed by a genius, it’ll still barely cost you $1,000, and that’s the Bentley version of an email. Compare that to $50,000 (or $4 million) dollar television advertisements, or multimillion dollar postal mailings.

#6 Sending regular email updates is the best way to build trust.

Trust is everything. Without it, even the most tempting offer fizzles.

Because email messages can be personalized and segmented so narrowly, they can be written almost as if it was you talking directly to the person you’re sending the email to… as if you had sat down to write them a personal note. Over the course of five or ten emails, your subscribers will come to know you and trust you. As you deliver highly-targeted, valuable content, your subscribers will trust you more and more and more. Never, ever abuse this trust.

#7 Email marketing can be tracked down to each user’s click.

Email messages can be tested, segmented, optimized and personalized. You can know exactly what works and what doesn’t – and you can recreate what worked over and over again.

#8 Your list can generate massive amounts of revenue within hours.

If you treat your subscribers right, every so often, if you really need cash fast, you can pitch them your product or someone else’s product. And they will buy within hours. Don’t do this too often, but it’s nice to have that financial safety net.

#9 Email has the highest return on investment of any marketing technique.

Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300% according to the DMA 2013 Statistical Fact Book.

McKinsey & Company published a survey showing how email is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter. According to the report “That’s because 91 percent of all US consumers still use e-mail daily, and the rate at which e-mails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17 percent higher.”

Why build an email list? Because email gets 40x the results of social media, as shown by this chart from the McKinsey survey on customer acquisition channels

Notice the data is from 2 years ago. Consider this: Facebook was still losing to email by a factor of 1 to 40 even before Facebook slashed reach. Email probably beats it even harder now.

#10 Gives you a way to drive traffic to any page you want

As your list grows, you’ll find a significant chunk of your website traffic comes from your email messages. At a certain point, you’ll actually be able to run your business without search engine traffic, or any other outside traffic. Your list and referrals will be enough to sustain your business.

#11 Your list is an asset that can be sold

Know how direct marketing and Internet companies get valued for sale? Even if they have warehouses, inventory, and a great website, none of that is what the financial people focus on.

The value of the company comes from the list. That’s because the money’s in the list. It’s where the phrase comes from. Without a list, if you sold your business, you wouldn’t get very much for it. But with a list, well, tack some zeros on to the sale price.

So why build an email list? Because you want something to show for all the work you do. You want results.

Find out how to get results for your site. Get your free, customized 30-day list building plan now.

The Solution to Content Shock

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how to prevent content shockContent marketing has hit an interesting speed bump. It’s been dubbed “content shock”. That’s what happens when there’s more content available than people want, or are even able to consume. There are more insightful industry reports, engaging product videos and clever company-sponsored blog posts than anyone has time to read.

No surprise there. Maybe the content marketing community hasn’t had a name for it until recently, but anyone with an email account has been experiencing content shock for a long time.

And I was only referring to the company-created content. There’s also user created-content, and the traditional content of television, films, books, music, video games and all the other forms of entertainment. And there’s advertising, too, of course.

We are awash in content. We have been for a while.

What to do when content marketing no longer works

Content shock is a serious problem for content marketers. It signals an end to the very thing that makes content marketing work.

Content marketing worked (and still works) by getting above the noise of traditional advertising – to rise to the height of actual entertainment or education. But now that everyone’s jumped on the content marketing bandwagon, the noise level we used to associate with general advertising is now heard in content marketing.

It’s a chilling prospect for content marketers. All their hard work is being drowned out.

But there is a way out. The secret to success in an overcrowded marketplace is to appeal to the right audience.

Change strategy, or optimize?

When a marketing strategy stops working, there are two choices: optimize, or change strategy. The strategy of content marketing is sound, or at least sound enough to keep. I definitely can’t come up with anything better.

So if the strategy is sound, then it’s time to optimize. But optimize what? Create better content? Improve your distribution?

Neither.

If your content marketing results are beginning to lose their luster, don’t obsess over better creative. Don’t spend more money on distribution. Go back to your customers and your clients. Go back to your audience. Those are the people who drive your business.

It’s all about the audience

This triad of creative, distribution and audience reminds me of another classic triad in marketing. Do you remember the old direct marketing question, asked way back in the days of direct mail?

“Which is most important? The creative, the offer, or the list?”

The answer is “the list”. It’s the list that controls the outcome of a marketing campaign more than anything else. Sure, the creative and the offer make a difference – sometimes a huge difference – but the list has the biggest influence. It’s why people say “the money’s in the list.”

The list was the audience. To improve your content marketing, and beat content shock, focus on your audience.

The money’s in the audience

In content marketing, understanding your audience means understanding personas. Personas aren’t anything new – they’re just a new way to describe customer groups. They’re a segmenting technique for content marketers.

While segmenting and using personas are a proven way to improve results, personas are the most common thing to be left out of a content marketing strategy. Most marketers don’t want to bother with them. Here’s why:

• The role of personas in marketing is not as clearly understood as the other elements of a campaign. This makes them easier to ignore, even if only a little. It’s human nature to gloss over things that aren’t easy to understand: Remember the fable about the man looking for his lost keys under the lamplight?

• Marketers can see what having personas suggests. It means more work: They will potentially have as many versions of content as they have personas. We all have enough work already; the idea of multiplying it three or four times over is downright scary. Do you want to rewrite your last free report three times – one for each of your audiences’ personas?

• Personas are hard to define. It’s not always clear that the lines we draw between one persona and the next are accurate. If we can’t even define them accurately, how can we trust everything else we build according to those definitions?

Personas for beginners

So if personas are the best opportunity (though a challenging one) for getting more results from content marketing, how can marketers get started with them?

Some companies will have an easy time breaking out the segments of their market. Real estate brokers have buyers versus renters. A service business might have residential clients versus commercial clients. An ecommerce company has buyers versus non-buyers.

That’s all a good start, but your competitors may have already gone that far. To stay ahead, you may need to go a step further.

Getting smarter about customers

It’s easy to get bogged down while you try to figure out who your customers are, what they want, and how to segment them. You’ve got website traffic reports, industry reports, customer service data, purchasing behavior, and probably some of your own research.

This brings up the issues around how to understand an audience. Do you design content (or products) based on what they say they want, or based on what they do?

Generally, it’s better to segment based on what they do, not what they say they want.

It’s also harder.

Some marketers ignore this, and survey their customers to find out what they say they want. And that helps. It’s far, far better than nothing. Just doing this can significantly improve your content marketing results.

Other marketers take the harder route, and segment based on what actually people do. If those marketers don’t get bogged down by trying to interpret too much (or the wrong kind) of data, they will get better insights than their friends who did the “ask them what they want” survey. They may get enough information to build a very effective automated marketing campaign.

But there’s an even better way. It’s to figure out what your customers want without asking them that directly. It’s to figure out the fears and desires that shape what they want. It’s to go one level deeper than “what do you want?”, down to “why do you want it?” To execute a survey like this, you would ask your customers in just the right way what they’re worried about, and what their problems are. And how they want to solve those things (Cheap? Fast? Online? Offline?) Then you build solutions according to those answers.

If you’ve done the third kind of survey correctly, you’ve got a shot at creating something completely new. Something that isn’t just an improvement over an old product, or a better approach to the same content you were creating before. Something that gives your audience what they can’t find anywhere else. That’s how your content marketing can still step out above the noise.

The Four Flavors of Content Marketing: Paid, Earned, Owned and Converged Media

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Almost ready to launch your 2014 content marketing plan? Step back away from the keyboard. Consider what you’ve planned through three lenses: Paid, Earned and Owned Media. A few minutes review might help you squeeze out some additional results.

Defining Paid, Earned and Owned Media

If you haven’t been introduced to these terms, don’t worry. Here are the most simple definitions of the three flavors of content marketing:

Paid Media: Advertising.

Owned Media: Company website, social media accounts, printed promotional pieces.

Earned Media: Articles about your company in magazines and newspapers, word of mouth or comments on social media.

Screen-Shot-2013-06-24-at-1.36.35-PM

An illustration of the three most common types of media: Paid, Owned and Earned. This example also places a value on which type of customers participate in each media. Customers engaged with earned media are judged as being most valuable.

Many marketers want to add a fourth kind: converged media.

What is converged media?

Converged media has become more prevalent as marketing platforms evolve. For example, it’s possible to refer to Facebook as converged media. If a company is advertising on Facebook (paid media), has their own page on Facebook (owned media) and is responding to comments and shares Facebook users have made about their brand or content (earned media), then for them, Facebook is converged media.

Another example of converged media would be if you publish a blog post on your website (owned media), tweet about it, and that tweet gets retweeted. The retweets are earned media, and so, in a sense, your blog post is now converged media.

Defining pieces of content as converged, earned, paid or owned media can get confusing fast. It can blur project scopes and make job descriptions vague. And, worst of all, after all the hair-splitting of what kind of media something is, there’s no increased results, and no productivity gained.

It’s best to not get too caught up in whether something is converged media or not. You’ll get better results if you just focus on the one kind of media that’s proven most effective.

Earned media is most effective

Of the four kinds of media, earned is the most effective. It’s also the only kind you can’t buy. It relies on outside media sources and customers to do the promotion for you, and that is exactly what it’s so valuable: Any earned media is a 3rd party saying your company or your campaign is worth talking about. That’s always going to carry more weight with people than an ad for your company or a post on your company blog.

Earned media is trusted media

So just how effective is earned media? Consider this chart from Neilson’s 2013 Global Trust report, which names word of month (another term for earned media) as the single most trustworthy marketing medium available. The chart shows 84% of people trust word of mouth. The next closest medium was branded websites, with 69% of people finding them trustworthy.

Nielson’s 2013 Global Survey on which marketing channels consumers trust most gave first place to word of mouth, one version of earned media.

Nielson’s 2013 Global Survey on which marketing channels consumers trust most gave first place to word of mouth, one version of earned media.

Earned media is not just trusted more. It also converts better – five times better. An article in AdAge reported earned media converts at a rate of 5%, compared to just 1% conversion rate from paid media.

Social media and earned media

Clearly, as social media grows and more people share more and more content, earned media is a growth industry. Combine the new opportunities for earned media with how well it converts, and you can see why so many marketers are intrigued.

Earned media even outperforms owned media, i.e. most content marketing. People may only consume owned media if

a) it’s useful

b) it’s entertaining

c) it’s needed

Beyond that, they don’t care. But if a friend tweets about a new phone, or a business partner can’t stop talking about a new app, it’s most likely your customer will take notice. They are as interested in the friend as they are in what the friend is saying.

Earned media comes at a price

While all this sounds great, it’s not the full story. Earned media takes work. You will, literally, have to earn it, and you’ll be competing with every other piece of information available online. That’s no small task. But if your content has just a few key elements, you might earn yourself a lot of exposure.

Earned media requires a story

If storytelling was gasoline, earned media would be a car. This applies both to social media shared stories, and to “brand journalism”, where publications like Forbes and Fast Company tell the stories of exceptional companies. Whether it’s a new way of doing business (like Zappos incredible customer service, or Warby Parker’s style) the companies winning the most earned media have the most powerful stories.

Take note: Storytelling and branding are sisters. If you’re having a hard time developing a story for your company or product, take a hard look at the brand – it may need some work itself.

Earned media requires distribution

Sure, word of mouth can happen even with the electricity off (but so can a Twitter campaign, as Oreo taught us earlier this year at the Superbowl), but often, the marketing campaign with a great distribution plan will win over a marketing campaign with a mediocre one.

In the last year we saw the term “content distribution” gain exposure as marketers realized content has to be great to get shared, but it also has to get found in the first place.

If you had to pick a great distribution plan versus a great story, a great distribution plan might win out. But if you can, get both the story and the distribution plan.

Another tip: Distribution can get a big boost if you use technology to make the sharing worth people’s effort. Ask yourself: What’s in it for them? Why should they share this content? Why would you share your content?

Earned media requires understanding your audience

If you want your customers to spread your message, you’ll need to know what they like to spread. We see this everywhere online. For example, visual content tends to beat out written content. So, if you want your content to be shared, make it visually appealing.

Is your audience more likely to love cats, or dogs, or muscle cars? Whatever the answer is, add the appropriate image on your content.

Rather than randomly testing what works (or spending hours using Facebook’s graph search), marketers can survey their customers to find out what matters to them. Surveys are not a perfect tool, but they can go a long way to getting you on the same page as your customers. Take what you learn and put it into the DNA of your content, and your shares will likely take off.

Hopefully, there’s a journalist somewhere in your audience, so you’ll get some press, too.

Get 200-300% more website traffic by blogging

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increase traffic by bloggingWhat if you could double your website traffic… for free? What if you could triple it?

We all know that having a blog is essential now. That does not necessarily mean that everyone reading this has gotten their blog up yet.

If you were still one of the last few marketers on the fence about the benefits, what I’ve got to tell you might change your mind. If you were resisting the idea because of the cost, read this post about figuring out the value of each blog post.

There are four different sources that show a 200 to 300% increase in website traffic due solely to blogging once to three times a week for six months. Let’s look at the evidence.

Exhibit A: An SEO blogging survey

A survey from TopRank Blog revealed that 54% of business bloggers saw an increase in website traffic within 3 months. 94% saw results in 12 months. The 6% that didn’t see results did things like turning off their comments (never do this) and not posting more than once a month.

Exhibit B: What 6 months of optimized, regular blogging can do

Brian Gardner increased traffic to his blog by 267% over six months simply by writing more often, adding a sign up box, and setting up some simple social media prompts.

Brian was also smart and went after long-tail keywords when he optimized his blog posts. Blogging is particularly good at getting traffic from long-tail keywords, which make up over 90% of searches.

Long-tail keywords, by the way, are often the highest-converting keywords. Take a deep look into your AdWords and Analytics account to confirm this. Then take that list of keywords and write blog posts around each one. Include a call to action.

Exhibit C: Traffic lost when blogging stops

This is my favorite example. It has data points aplenty. It compares data for two specific sites and shows the difference in ROI between two companies – one that takes a 6 month blogging hiatus and another company that keeps on typin’.

The blogger (a dentist) who blogged for six months, stopped, and then started again, A dentist’s blog was being updated every

Exhibit D: Guest blogging is the new article marketing

Do you remember article marketing? It worked beautifully until about 2009 or so, and continued to work for awhile after if you followed some best practices. The best practices were

      1) you submitted only unique content – not “spun” content
      2) you submitted content worth reading
      3) you submitted it to sites that weren’t trash
      4) you varied the anchor text like crazy, even putting in “wild card” keywords

Google updates from the last couple of years have made even high-quality article marketing harder, mostly because they revoked most of the authority of the big article marketing sites like eZineArticles.com.

But now that blogs are the new websites, and bloggers are talking much like part-time Internet marketers were five years ago, we’ve got the bloggers’ answer to article marketing: guest posts. Guest posts are reasonably well-written content that gets put up on someone else’s site. They get free content and you get a link back.

Successful guest blogging usually means going after sites with good authority and high readership. This post does a very good job of highlighting the best practices and gives a lot of tips on how to find relevant, high-quality sites to link from.

Just don’t tell the blogging community it’s all link building. Call it guest blogging or you’ll get their dander up.

How to Calculate Email Subscriber Value – And Why You Should Care

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emailsubscribervalue2Email subscriber value is the most important metric for list building. It’s more important than your opt-in rate or your unsubscribe rate. Why? Because you aren’t doing this email marketing thing as a hobby. You’re doing it to make money.

Every list building tactic has a cost. Maybe it’s “only” a time cost, but that’s a cost, too. Once you know how much an email subscriber is worth to you, then you’ll be far better informed about which list building tactics are worthwhile.

Have you seen the Email Subscriber Value Calculators? They’re cool.

Just so you know, there is a default email subscriber value many gurus like to toss around. It’s this:

Each email subscriber is worth $1 per month

Ie, you can make $10,000 a month from a list of 10,000 subscribers.

Take that figure with a grain of salt. Or maybe a pound.

Here’s what it would take to pull that $10,000 a month off. Let’s first break it down by week. You have to earn $2,500 from your list of 10,000 each week.

With an average click-through rate of 3.5% (per MailChimp), you’d get 350 clicks coming to your landing page/product page.

With a 2% conversion rate (that’s average), you’ll get 7 orders. To make your $2,500 that week, you’d need to make $357.14 off of each order.

If you think you’re hot stuff, and can beat the averages, consider this: You get a 5% click-through rate, resulting in 500 clicks to the landing page. You get a 3% conversion rate, resulting in 15 orders. You still need to make $166.66 profit from each order to make your $2,500 goal.

Very, very few people actually pull off the $1 per subscriber per month goal. And if they do, the vast majority of them do it once, and then never again.

Do not expect to make $1 per subscriber per month.

So how do you really know what your subscribers are worth? (Aside from using the Email Subscriber Value Calculators)

Here’s how:

1) Figure out how many email subscribers you have.

This is pretty easy on the surface. You log into your email account and check the subscriber count.

But wait – there’s more:

Before you count every one of those subscribers, consider some list hygiene. Check how many of them have been inactive for six months or more. By “inactive” I mean they haven’t clicked any links or opened any of your messages.

Consider lopping those subscribers off your list. Don’t count them for this subscriber value calculation. You can make a project out of re-engaging them, but consider this: You’ll have hit it out of the park if you get even 10% of those inactives back.

OK, let’s move on. Now you’ve got a reasonably clean list that you’re counting from. Use that count to calculate how much each email subscriber is worth.

For example, let’s assume I had a list of 30,000 names. But a third of them have been completely inactive, so I lop those 10,000 off. Now I’ve got a nice clean list of 20,000 names.

2) Figure out how much revenue you’ve made from your list over the last year.

Let’s talk about that “last year” part. Ideally, what we want to calculate here is Lifetime Value, aka LTV. Usually that is calculated over a three year span.

Here’s when it’s good to use three years instead of one:

– If you’ve been in business for three years or more

– If you’ve been tracking sales from your email list for three years

– If you’ve been selling roughly the same amount of stuff from your list for the last three years that you are now.

I mention those three things because many of you haven’t been in business for three years, so the one year time frame is better. Also, many of you might not have been actively selling or even tracking the sales from your emails for the last three years. If up until last year you were just sending out blog posts that had no call to action to buy something, then it’s best to not use the three year time frame.

Here’s another reason I’m not in love with the three year window: List churn. iContact estimates “31% of email subscriber addresses will be lost during a single year.” Another reason I shy away from using Lifetime Value to calculate email subscriber value is that not all email subscribers become customers. If you can know what a customer is worth, and then what percentage of your subscribers become customers, then do use that method.

So let’s get back to the one year time frame.

a) Figure out how much revenue you’ve made directly from your list in the last 12 months.
b) Figure out how much revenue you’ve made indirectly from your list in the last 12 months.

Yes, these two figures are different. The sales that came directly from your emails – the clicks on those email links that created order confirmations – those can clearly be credited to email.

But what about other sales? This can get murky. Let’s say you’re a consultant, and your emails help you get work because it builds your authority and keeps you top of mind with prospective clients. But very few of your subscribers will use the link in the email to directly buy your services. They might email you separately, or just call you. That can mean tens of thousands of dollars a year in “sales” that won’t show up in your calculations as being directly attributable to your emails.

So what do you do?

You fudge.

If you’re a consultant or anyone else in this email sale haze, take a careful look at the data you’ve got and figure out what proportion of your annual revenue can be attributable to your emails. To say it another way, how much income do you think you’d lose if you weren’t sending email updates?

If you’re a consultant, you could take a look at how many clicks from emails end up on your “contact” page, or how many of those clicks end up in completed creative brief or project inquiry pages. If you send out monthly emails, consider tracking how much business comes in a week or so after you send an email. Every business is different, so you’ll have to figure out what’s the best method for you. Just try to base your email sales estimate on some kind of quantifiable data.

3) You calculate Email Revenue / Email Subscribers to Get Value Per Subscriber

OK – so at last you have your figure for annual revenue from an email subscriber. If you want to do the easy version of this calculation, just divide how much revenue you got from your emails by how many subscribers you have.

Like this:

Annual revenue attributable to subscribers / Number of subscribers = Subscriber value

Here’s an example

$40,000 in revenue from email /  20,000 subscribers = $2 subscriber value

Don’t forget overhead costs for email production and your time

Let initial calculation is a good start. If you want to be more precise, you could take your gross income from email, then substract how much your emails cost. How much your emails cost comes from both your email service provider costs and for your time or any other expenses.

Here are some typical costs:

– email service provider, monthly cost for list of 20,000 names: $60. Annual cost = $720.

– Time required to create each weekly email: 1.5 hours. Value of time = $100 per hour. Cost = $150 each week or $8,250 each year.

– Email template design: $500.

Total email costs per year = $9,470.

So now we have

($40,000 in revenue from email – $9,470 in email costs) /  20,000 subscribers = $1.53 subscriber value

So now that you know what your subscribers are worth, what do you do with that information?

For starters, you can add this subscriber value to your Google analytics account. You’ve probably set up a goal in analytics to track when someone signs up. Now you can add a dollar value to that goal.

 

How to create a goal and add a dollar value to it in analytics

1) Log into your analytics account and go to the site you want to add the goal value to.

2) Click on “Admin” in the upper right hand corner.

3) You’ll see three columns. Look in the far right column for “Goals” and click on that.

4) Click “create goal” just like in the screenshot below.

CreateGoalAnalytics

5) Add a description to your goal.

GoalDescription

 

6) Paste in the page that people see after they have confirmed their email address (via double opt-in, of course). See screenshot below.

7) Click “on” by Goal Value and add your email subscriber’s value.

AnalyticsGoalValue

8) You can also add a “funnel” to track the steps of your opt-in process to see where people fall out. I use double opt-in, and with the funnel set up like this, I can see how many people are entering their name, but not clicking the confirmation email.

 

How to use email subscriber value to measure your list building tactics

You now have a way to measure all your list building efforts. This is huge. Here’s an example of how this might work:

Let’s say you’re running an AdWords campaign with a squeeze page to get new subscribers. You now know how much you can bid and what you can spend to get each subscriber. As always, remember to factor in the value of your time in addition to how much it costs.

For example, let’s say you’re spending $1 to get each subscriber on AdWords. On the face of it, that looks great – you’re “buying” subscribers for less than what they’re worth to you.

Never ignore the cost of your time

But how much time are you spending managing that AdWords account? Some of us (ahem… me) have a habit of checking our AdWords account three or four times a day. Just futzing with your AdWords account can easily take up an hour a day. If your time is worth $100 an hour, that’s an extra hour a day you’re spending to get those subscribers. If you’re getting 20 new subscribers a day, between time costs and dollar costs, you’re spending $6 to get each subscriber, not $1. ($6 because $100 divided by 20 subscribers is $5 each. Add $5 to the actual adspend, and you’ve got $6 per subscriber. Or a bad habit of checking your AdWords account too often.)

That’s an extreme example, and we could definitely get lost in the weeds discussing what time is worth. Instead of the $100 figure, you could work out your hourly value by what you have to earn each day. Divide that by 8 or 10 (if you can work 10 hours a day), and that may give you a better hourly value of your time.

For example, if you have to make $250 per day to make ends meet, and you can only work 8 hours a day, every one of those 8 hours has to produce $31.25. If your time is worth $31.25, you spend an hour on your AdWords account, and your adspend for each subscriber is $1, then you’re spending $2.56 to get each subscriber.

Subscriber value and your time

Figure out how much time each list building tactic requires, and include that when you calculate subscriber value.

Your time is finite. It’s easy to spend days setting up a list building tactic that delivers only 20 or 30 subscribers. Unless your subscriber value is through the roof, that list building tactic may not be a good choice for you.

Now that you know the background on how and why to calculator subscriber value, head on over to the Email Subscriber Value Calculators to see what your subscribers are worth.

Local SEO for Independent Retailers

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mapimageforblogpostRoughly one in three searches on Google.com are local. That’s 33 billion per month –more than a billion a day. Would you like to get some of that free traffic? It’s easier than you would think, and these six tasks will help you get there.

1) Claim your free local search listings. Sign up for free accounts at these five websites. It will take you about 15-20 minutes to fill out all the information at each site, and may well be the most impactful thing you do that day.

Google Places
Yahoo! Local Listings
Bing Local Listing Center
Yelp
Foursquare

Expert tip: Paste your website’s information into a plain text file. Copy and paste from that. This saves you from having to re-type your business information over and over again. It also makes for fewer typos.

2) Incorporate local search terms into your site. Add your town’s name and your neighborhood name (if that makes sense) to your website’s title tags, meta tags, and image alt tags. If you don’t know what that means, ask the person who maintains your website to do this.

If you have a blog, there are excellent plugins, like Platinum SEO Pack or WordPress SEO that will make it easy to edit the keywords. Also add your town’s name to your pages’ headlines and subheads.

Don’t go overboard with adding keywords. Think of salting a steak when you add keywords – add a dash, not a pound. Use Google’s free keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool) to add the right keywords, not just any keywords.

3) Add a Google map to your “Contact” page. This helps Google find and locate your website and will help the search engines know where you are, so they can direct customers to you.

4) Make sure your store’s information is accurate in all business listings. There are a lot of incorrect business listings online, and some of them may be yours. It becomes very hard to correct these listings if you don’t go directly to the databases that supply your site’s misinformation to all websites “downstream”. Fixing the downstream listings won’t work, because with every update your corrections will be overwritten. Avoid this by going to the sources. They are:
GetListed.org
Yext.com
Whitespark.ca
USPS Address Listing Checker

5) Get technical. If you’ve got some website skills (enough to create and upload an XML sitemap), create a free KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file with GeositeMapGenerator.com. It will take about 15 minutes. KHL files give location information to search engines and other location-based tools. Adding a KHL file will get your site to show up more often and more accurately in those location-based tools, and in all of Google’s tools.

6) Add schema.org or “rich snippets” markup to your pages. Those are two names for the same thing. This is an even more advanced SEO technique, but it can increase your traffic by 30% or more.

Rich snippets are actually very simple. You or your web person will add 3-5 lines of code around certain elements on your pages, like your address and phone number. A human viewer won’t be able to see any difference, but hundreds of tools, including the Google bot, will be able to grab that information and display it in a way that will make your listing stand out from the rest. Think of rich snippets as an advanced version of getting your store name in bold in the phone book.

Ask your web person to spend some time tinkering with your site’s markups and how they appear in the search results. Google has an extensive set off resources and a great preview tool, and there’s a huge set of resources at schema.org. It may take some tinkering to get the formatting right, but isn’t 30% more free traffic worth it?