Cody Lister runs a pay-per-click management agency and he also runs his own blog and networks with influencers while getting his guest posts published by top blogs.
Here are the highlights of my conversation with Cody:
Does pay-per-click still exist?
- More companies are actually getting on it everyday.
- An effective way to drive leads for your business as long as you know your target audience well
- Make sure you’re targeting is on point to reach the right people and not waste ad spent.
How to utilize blogging to grow your business:
- Set up a foundation for your blog with pillar content or post.
Content or posts should be between 3,000 and 10,000 words long each that revolve around your target audience’s desires, fears, and what keeps them up at night.
- Make sure you have a unique position in the market.
Pick one niche that you’re going to focus on. Instead of just sales, make it sales to a specific type of customer within a certain niche.
- Start guest blogging.
Posting on other people’s blogs as a guest allows you to build back links and some traffic to your blog.
- Continue blogging and promote your content heavily.
Perform content pre-outreach by reaching out to influencers and other bloggers that share similar content as yours. Reach out to them via email. Search through BuzzSumo for similar posts and get Twitter shares and the email addresses of these people. Reach out to them to let them know and give a heads up that you’re about to publish a specific post about a topic they liked in the past. Scrape the commenters of different blog posts that relate to your topic. Get their email addresses and reach out to them as a content pre-outreach to give them a heads up of your upcoming post.
- Form a content strategy and build relationships with other bloggers.
Have pillar content in the middle and splinter off pieces of that content or talk in more depth of specific topics that relate to that content so it becomes a spider web.
- Seed your content with influencers on referral networks like inbound.org or GrowthHackers.
Once you’ve teamed up with bloggers, you can use one-click email opt-ins to get them to give you more subscribers. Through these tools, you get bloggers to email their list about you or about a link to something that you’re sharing with them. Once they click that link, you automatically get their email addresses.
- Build up your email base and funnel subscribers through an email automation sequence.
This allows you to nurture subscribers up to a certain pitch at the end.
- Advertise.
You can go on Facebook but if you don’t have experience, don’t just wing it or it will be a waste of time and money. But you can hire someone who does Facebook ads well. Promote lead magnets to build your email subscriptions through Facebook ads. You may also use Twitter ads through lead generation cards to drive new email subscriptions. Or use Outbrain and Taboola to use paid content promotion. Get on podcasts.
- Promote content through pre-outreach.
Build up the anticipation for a post you’re about to publish and make your content more epic than your competitor’s content including content upgrades and embedding those inside your post. Once you’ve clicked a link on your post, you can opt-in to your email list.
- Optimize your post for SEO.
This may take a while for you to get any return from this. Read blogs like Backlinko and Quick Sprout for advice on SEO optimization. Install the WordPress SEO plugin.
- Make sure the questions you’re answering in your posts are very specific.
Make sure it’s one question per post and really hit on the desires, needs, and wants of your audience. Make sure it demonstrates that you understand the language of your audience.
- Get good at copywriting.
Avoid using corporate jargons. You should be writing posts that feel like you’re talking directly to someone.
- Use giveaways to increase opt-ins to your mailing list.
Focus on your list growth. Learn from Bryan Harris of Videofruit who has great ideas for list building.
- Build a list and start getting opt-ins to your blog right off the bat.
Make sure you have a welcome gate on your blog that captures opt-ins. Make sure everything is focused on opt-ins and you have a sales funnel.
Strategies to make your posts more interesting:
- Leverage YouTube videos.
Blogs like Social Triggers and Marie Forleo publish a lot of video content that drive a fair amount of traffic.
- Infographics
These are effective but expensive. Invest in designers to make infographics for your blog as they tend to lead to more opt-ins and better content quality.
- Interactive content
Create many different forms such as an in-post interactive list such as Backlinko (Brian Dean’s blog) where he has SEO tool reviews which you can click and review interactively. Another example is a quiz or assessment by Social Triggers blog that funnel Facebook ad visitors to a sidebar opt-in.
- Slider calculators.
These demonstrate the value or investment of what you’re trying to convey to your audience. You can use this on sales pages and regular blog posts.
Tools to make images more captivating:
Cody’s Major Takeaway:
Don’t write off guest blogging because it’s how you’re going to build the high domain authority backlinks for your blog which is essential when starting a blog and for getting your content to rank on Google eventually. It’s a slow process but don’t overlook it. Reach out and get acceptance from other bloggers when they see you’re on authority and you’re published on top blogs.
Episode Resources:
Learn more about Cody via email cody@marketdoc.com or visit his website at www.marketdoc.com and download a free guest blogging guide at www.marketdoc.com/guest-blogging.
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