But for all the good we like to talk about email marketing doing, there are limits. Specifically, if you don’t tell a good story and engage your readers as quickly and as often as possible, they are MUCH less likely to read or even open those emails. Sure they all get delivered, but if less than 30% of your emails are even being read, what can you change?

You tell a compelling story.

Human beings love stories – they create connections, they engage, and they practically DEMAND attention.

Let’s look at how to tell a good one in your campaign.

The Basics of Storytelling in Marketing

First, let’s forget for a minute what your emails are designed to do. Yes, you are trying to sell a product. But that’s not the REAL value of this sequence. What email does is build a relationship. It builds authority for you and your brand and shows you as an authentic source of information that readers can trust.

Now imagine what a story about your life or business does in this setting. It makes you seem more authentic and therefore more trustworthy. Here are some ways you can do this:

*  Write Naturally – You don’t have to be a trained copywriter to pen effective emails. You just need to be yourself. Write naturally – like you would to a friend or family member. Use short sentences, be brief and to the point, and always use second person voice “you” instead of third person “they”.

*  Use Copious Examples – If you send a message with “three tips on how to be more productive” tell readers how you’ve used those tips in your life. Tell people how others have used those tips. There’s no secret sauce here – just relay a quick story and your advice instantly has more gravity to it.

*  Weave Stories Together – You don’t necessarily need to serialize your emails to the point that you tell people stories they won’t get without reading every message, but you can reference past stories and future events to maintain high open and read rates.

The goal here is to get people engaged – to make them WANT to read what you are writing and always be excited to see an email from you hit their inbox.

Does It Work?

The success you see will depend on your audience, your ability to connect with that audience and the types of stories and CTAs you use, but yes it will work. Almost universally, when we see this type of tactic employed, it has a HUGE impact on the open, read, and click thru rate of an email campaign.

That’s marketing, and increasingly SEO is becoming a marketing activity. The days of checking off a list of technical tasks you could perform to build backlinks and generate traffic for your website are coming to an end. To be sure there are still quite a few technical tasks you’ll need to perform when it comes time to generate traffic to your website through SEO, but those things are increasingly less effective when it comes time to solidify your position in search rankings.

That’s where content comes in. But how do you use content effectively, both in terms of effort and cost? Here are three things good content will do to improve SEO when used properly.

Improve On Page Metrics

There are a number of important metrics that Google increasingly measures with its built-in analytics and Chrome tools. They include:

*  Bounce Rate

*  Time On Site

*  Return Rate

*  New Visitor Rate

*  End of Search

*  Pages Viewed

Each of these numbers represents how well your website resolves the query used by the visitor to find what they need. If someone searches for “how to grow carrots”, finds your article about carrots, reads it for 5 minutes, saves the site and returns four times in three weeks, that’s a very good sign to Google. If they land on a keyword stuffed page, find nothing of use and leave five seconds later, Google sees that.

Good quality content ends search and that in effect boosts your search engine value.

Generate Social Signals and Authorship

Social signals are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Google is giving them a disproportionate value right now. Combined with Google Authorship rankings and the fact that more content means greater authority in your niche, you have a perfect storm where more content means more readership and more readership means higher rankings.

Provide Marketing Materials for Backlink Generation

Finally, more content gives more targets for other sites to link to yours. If you have 100 blog posts every 3 months, that means 100 new pages that people can link to. If you have only one new blog post every three months, you’ll need to get very lucky or market like a madman to get backlinks to it.

That’s not all of course. Good content goes above and beyond simply reaching out to people and creating those connections. It is a permanent part of your website – consistently driving traffic to your website for weeks or even months into the future. If you can use it effectively, you will build an audience that lasts for years and a rank in search engines that matches.

However, what we don’t necessarily recommend is turning your blog into a shrine for the products you promote, or creating that site with the sole intention of making money. The best blogs are not created to build an audience or make money but to build an audience and create new relationships. So to help you bridge the gap between the goal of your blog and your ultimate financial goals, here are some tips for monetizing.

When to Monetize

When you first start a blog, your goal should be to build an audience. Ten people on an email list or subscribing to your RSS or Facebook feeds are worth 100 random strangers via Google, so it’s important that you create content and generate relationships with this goal in mind.

Set a content creation calendar for weekly uploads, respond to comments quickly, submit guest posts to other blogs, and work toward building an audience that will read anything you write, not just the stuff they find in a search engine.

When you have this, you can start monetizing with affiliate promotions.

When is that? I like to recommend at least 50-100 people on an email list and 100 fans on Facebook as an indicator that your audience is growing. Alternately, if you are getting more than 100 hits per day to your blog with at least 30% return visitors, you are doing quite well.

How to Monetize

There is a good reason people like Pat Flynn make so much money through affiliate marketing through their blogs.

They are transparent, they have a loyal, active audience, and they provide exceptional value at every step to their readers. Hiding your affiliate links inside the body of your posts, tricking people into clicking review links or writing shady reviews will only sacrifice the trust and audience you’ve generated. Good affiliate marketing strategies on a blog include:

*  Only Review What You Use – Don’t write reviews of products you have not used. Most vendors will give you an evaluation copy for writing reviews (just remember to tell people you got a freebie).

*  Clearly Mark Ads – If you place ads in or near content, make sure they are clearly marked to avoid any confusion.

*  Test for High Performing Products – Remove ads or reviews that your readers don’t like or that don’t receive a lot of clicks. You want to maximize the value you offer your readers as well.

*  Offer Special Deals for Readers – Talk to vendors and get special deals, discounts or bonus offers for your readers. If you have a larger audience, this is very doable.

This is all honest promotion, mind you. Just saying you’re getting them a good deal (when every other site owner gives the same deal) is not enough. You need to go above and beyond the competition and your readers will thank you for it by clicking those links.

So how do you measure the value of a “fan” or of any other follower through a social media channel? How do you attach a value to a person who is just as likely to never interact with your brand again as they are to interact with everything you post?

It’s not easy, but with increasingly sophisticated tracking tools, more advanced marketing tools, and a growing audience that not only is willing to interact with brands, but enjoys doing so, it is quickly becoming easier to track these numbers.

Housekeeping

Before you can assign a value to any one person who follows your posts, you need to have as much data in hand as possible. That means:

*  Analytics Installation – If you don’t have Google Analytics installed for every page of your website, it’s impossible to know how any specific traffic source will perform. Don’t cut yourself short.

*  Customized Landing Pages – Create a custom landing page for every type of traffic you drive to your site. So a different landing page for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube. Know what works for each.

*  Minimum Fan Counts – Get to at least 30 fans on Facebook as fast as possible (even if you have to pay for ads to get there). That’s when you unlock Facebook’s statistics tools. More fans mean more tools as well – aim for 100 before you do anything substantial.

*  Profile Minimums – Don’t market your timeline unless you have a good cover, enough tabs and lots of information on there for people to interact with.

Once you have the basics out of the way, we can start measuring the value of each fan you get.

Real World Fan Value

You’ve probably seen numbers tossed around by various brands, but in reality, Facebook’s fanbase is the most diverse in the world – the value of a fan for a local restaurant will be different than for an international marketing firm.

Depending on your demographic, the average generic, vanilla ad for your page will convert at about 40-50% – so you’ll pay between $1 and $1.50 for each new like. The actual value of those likes can be much higher if you engage them actively.

For example, check to see how much viral traction any one post gets. A single share, for example could lead to 10,000 people seeing one of your posts – what’s the value of THAT one fan now?

The best way to ensure you maximize ROI on your Facebook Page is to keep track of these things. If you write a blog post, sponsor it for $50 and have 200 fans, how many new fans, how many clicks, and how many sales does that directly generate? Don’t stop there though. How many new subscribers to your list, repeat visitors, and twitter followers does that lead to?

There are so many paths to customer, but not many to trusted Fan. Track both, see how often they overlap and you’ll have a better idea of total fan value.

Google doesn’t provide a lot of direction when setting up an AdWords campaign, which is probably why the vast majority of first time PPC advertisers either blow a LOT of money and receive no results, or spend hours setting up a campaign and get no clicks. Here are some things to consider when designing your campaign that might help.

Core vs. Longtail

For a single AdWords campaign, it’s recommended that you have between 5 and 20 core keywords. These are the major terms being searched for by your prospects. So, if you are selling refrigerators via Amazon, your core keywords might include:

“new fridge”

“new refrigerator”

“replace fridge”

“fridge reviews”

“amazon refrigerator”

Those are very basic terms that will likely have thousands upon thousands of searches per month, which means very high cost per click rates and hard to crack quality score restrictions.

Which is why we turn to longtails. Once you have your core keywords, create an ad group for each term and start gathering longtails. You should never bid on the core keyword unless you A) have a lot of money and B) have an authority site that will match quality score.

For each ad group, a good number of longtails is between 100 and 200. If you’re doing the math, you realize that this means between 500 and 4,000 total keywords for your entire campaign – that’s a lot of research.

The Longtail Paradox

Sure, you need a lot of terms, but here’s where it gets a little easier. The following are different terms:

“new fridge reviews”

“new fridge review”

“new fridges reviews”

Every one of those terms is a unique longtail, and if you tack on a brand name you’ll have another set of longtails. As you can see, it won’t take a lot of research or time to reach the 4,000 keyword mark.

Is All This Necessary?

Yes and no.

The problem is that if you want to get significant traffic, you need a large audience, and for a single keyword to have a large audience, you’ll need to spend a LOT per click and have a good landing page in place.

On the flip side, if you use longtails that get less than 500 searches per month, you’ll need a LOT of them to reach a larger audience. The good part here though is that you are:

A)  Diversifying risk by using lots of low cost keywords

B)  Spreading out your lead generation to split test what converts

C) Gathering HUGE chunks of data so you know where to focus SEO efforts

It’s time consuming, it doesn’t always work, and it can still be quite costly, but if you play your cards just right, a good longtail PPC campaign can be a difference maker for your business.

So, your net conversion is 4% of total traffic and that tells you exactly how much money you can spend on traffic. The problem, of course, is that don’t necessarily have the money in your account to go out and get 100,000 clicks in the first month. You need to scale up to it – and preferably in a way that won’t put your funds at risk. Here are some tips to do just that for one or more sites in an ongoing media buy campaign.

Segmenting Your Buys

The first step is to segment the sites on which you purchase space. While you can measure and manage, tweak and adjust your landing pages to your heart’s content, the clicks generated by a banner ad will always be different depending on where they are being generated.

At the same time, most media buys are CPM – meaning you don’t control how many clicks you receive. Few websites will guarantee anything and some won’t even tell you the click averages. So you need to hedge your bets by segmenting. To do this, start with smaller buys on large sites. Get a smaller ad space on a site where you can scale up your ad over time. Find sites with at least 30,000 hits per month or more and choose an ad space on the sidebar or in context, but for less than $50 per month if possible (you can increase or decrease total hits if needed to reach this goal). It won’t be big and it won’t be pretty, but it will probably drive some traffic.

The goal is to make a profit. At the same time, by starting small you can purchase space on more than one site. Ideally you’re generating just enough traffic organically and through newsletters that you can afford to spend some money on ads each month. Aim to purchase at least 5 slots on different sites in this first month.

Measuring and Scaling

Because you’ve diversified the spend in month one, you can now look at the data and see where your “best clicks” came from. If one site is the clear and away favorite, consolidate your spend in month two to that one site. If two or three sites perform well, consolidate to those two or three sites.

When you do this, in month two your click through and profits will likely jump a LOT without any additional spend. But because of the increase you can now spend more in month three. If you keep split testing with a budget that is larger every month, you can have up to a million impressions on your ads by the end of the third or fourth month.

There’s no guarantee this will work for your site or your niche. You need a good offer. You need a good creative. You need good page views. It’s up to you to ensure these things, but if you are smart about how you spend your money early, the rest will come together relatively fast.

As affiliate marketers and Internet marketers who have been promoting the digital revolution for years, this is a good time for us. We are seeing a huge surge in trust from consumers that are finally growing comfortable with the idea of paying for something they can’t necessarily hold in their hands.

Thank You Amazon

The digital revolution started a long time ago. When it comes to the mainstream, we can probably thank Apple for starting the iTunes store, but the Kindle has had an even bigger and more profound impact.

Portable music made sense. A single device that could play thousands of songs for hours and fit in your pocket – that’s a hundred times better than carrying around a pocket full of batteries and a discman that skipped every time you went over a bump.

For eBooks, however, it was a harder sell. People LOVE books. Not only that but there is an inherent value assigned to a physical thing. CD’s were already technically digital. You couldn’t see the music. You can see the text of a book. The Kindle platform has revolutionized how people read to the point that eBooks now regularly outsell print editions of bestselling books.

What does this mean for affiliate marketers? Everything.

Digital is the Future of Consumer Media

People are growing used to reading books on digital devices. Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and their phones – it’s normal now. And that means, when you promote an eBook about weight loss or dog training, it makes sense.

Forget the part about those devices making it easier to access that information on the go (they do). Let’s focus on what makes eBooks such a compelling format as a whole. They are small, they are portable, they are flexible and can be shared. People see this now and are willing to accept that there are no limits to the value of data that can be included in a digital book.

Riding the Wave of Renewed Trust in Digital Content

As technology makes digital content easier and faster to create, bandwidth makes video streaming simpler and faster, and eBook readers convince consumers to trust PDF’s and online eBooks, the market for information products will boom. People need the information in these products. They always have.

The difference was always the willingness of those people to trust the information being presented and pay someone for access to it. Today, more people than ever before are doing this. It’s why the affiliate marketing industry will boom to nearly $4.5 billion by 2016 and why so many people are actively producing digital products or self-publishing on Amazon, even top rated authors.

If you are an affiliate marketer, embrace this new paradigm because it means good things not only for you, but for the industry as a whole.

His perspective, he explained, was that, while email marketing was a good thing to do, he couldn’t in good conscious recommend it to his clients because SEO and other technical changes were a better investment. We promptly got into a bit of an argument, because if you read this blog much at all, you know we think email marketing is easily one of the best investments you can make.

Immediate Value vs. Long Term Value

The problem we see people have with email marketing is that, even in an ideal scenario it takes time. You won’t see results overnight because even if you sign up 1,000 people to your list tomorrow, it will take a few weeks to drip feed them the emails you’ve prepared and build the trust you will one day leverage into conversions.

It’s a slow play.

But it’s also one of the highest percentage moves you can make in terms of creating a recurring, passive income stream, and while we don’t like comparing SEO to email marketing (two very different goals), let’s take a look at how it pans out.

SEO vs. Email Marketing

Search engine optimization is designed to do two things – increase trust from your prospects and improve your position in the search engines so more people can visit your site. So, ideally, a good email list will help with both.

The problem is that most SEO’s and the people they provide services to don’t see it like that. They see the ultimate goal as traffic. More traffic and higher SERPs mean you’re doing something right.

But, tell us this. Would you rather have 30 top ten SERPs, 50,000 hits a month and no conversions, or 5 top ten SERPs, 5,000 hits a month and a conversion rate of 8%?

You could have 20 visitors a month and if you convert more sales, it’s a better site. Email marketing is not about getting traffic but retaining it once you’ve gotten it. The return on investment is subsequently massive. The one time investment to create an opt-in and the one time investment to create a series of emails is a pittance compared to the fact that any one prospect could be on your list for months, buying multiple products or services and building your brand.

Smart Investment Thinks Long Term

SEO is a necessary investment for any website. You can’t ignore the value of a good content marketing and inbound link creation campaign. However, if you go to all the trouble of generating that traffic and driving it to your site, do yourself a favor and do something with it. Keep it active and increase the chances that any one lead could convert in weeks, months or even years. That’s what email marketing does for you.

What Are Enhanced Campaigns?

Increasingly, people are customizing their advertising campaigns to target people by device and time of day, among other variables. Someone standing in the mall searching for “puma sweatshirts” is ready to buy one and just needs to find the store that has them, whereas someone at home on their desktop may just be looking to see what’s available.

In the past, advertisers needed to create separate ad groups and campaigns for different devices and conditions. What enhanced campaigns do is streamline all that and make it possible to run a single campaign from one place for all of the variables you want to target.

Using Enhanced Campaigns

There is no one way to use enhanced campaigns. Every business must consider the benefits of this tool directly and whether the added complexity will make it easier or harder to maintain your current ROI and conversion rates. For example, retail businesses with physical locations are almost certainly going to want to use this tool. Too many people search for restaurants, hotels, clothing stores or sales when out of the house on a mobile device. It is too profitable NOT to take advantage of that.

Will an Internet marketer with an eBook just launched have the same luck? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what you are selling. People often look up medical conditions, weight loss information or fitness tips on their phones, especially when at work, but rarely look up things like “how to make money online” on a phone. So, if you are in an urgency niche that would be searched for on a mobile device, enhanced campaigns are worth considering.

The most important thing here is the measurement of context. With the ability to target ads on phones versus tablets versus desktops versus notebooks, you’re going to find a LOT more options for how you present the same ad. Even if location doesn’t matter, the wording of an ad will based on that location. For example, someone using a phone has no interest in a “download this for free now” ad. However, “free content delivered to your inbox” would be more enticing because it doesn’t require them to read it right away.

New Metrics

One of the coolest new features here too is the ability to measure specific actions other than clicks. Clicks are great, but if the user doesn’t complete the goal you’ve defined AFTER that click, what good are they. With enhanced campaigns, you can define “calls”, “downloads of an app”, “searches on a map” or “emails sent” as goals that are readily and easily referenced in the campaign.

Enhanced campaigns add another layer of complexity to an already complex PPC advertising platform, but for those that use them and use them well, they will almost certainly provide more robust data and higher ROI. If that applies to you, I strongly encourage you to take a look.

The idea is very simple. When someone lands on your website, a cookie is put on their machine. You can then choose which sites your ads will be placed on and present banners and animations that entice them to return and finish their purchase order or read more about your products or services.

How Retargeting Works for Affiliates

Paid advertising for affiliates is a mixed bag most of the time. It can work when done properly, but more often than not it is done improperly and the effects are not good. The problem is that affiliates either lack the brand awareness of a larger company that uses these techniques or they don’t take advantage of the brand they have.

Good retargeting requires three things:

1. A clear product, service, or idea to sell
2. A clear audience to target
3. A clear metric for success in conversion

So if you haven’t yet defined these three things, media buys in general – let alone retargeting – could be a wasted endeavor. You need to know what you are selling, how to define a potential customer when they land on one of those pages, and how to determine if the conversion is successful in the future.

For an affiliate, that most often means creating landing pages with free content that builds trust with your audience (and promotes products) and retargeting people who land on that page, spend more than 10 seconds there (i.e. don’t bounce) and don’t sign up. If someone takes the time to read your landing page (or a review you write for a product) and doesn’t convert, that is a great targeting option.

Where to Buy Media

The point of retargeting is that you go and find a prospect where they already are and show them your ads. But some locations are better than others. For example, impressions on a news or magazine site are often empty – meaning the prospect rarely actually sees the ad.

On the other hand, banners and ads placed on a blog or a forum where the user might see the ad many times and spend a large amount of time on that page reading a post or interacting with content, is much higher. At the same time, it seems more likely that they would see the ad and the “creepy” factor is decreased (at least marginally).

If you choose to use retargeting in addition to your traditional media buys, make sure you take the time to create a plan. Know exactly who you want to target and why you want to target them. Spending big money to retarget anyone who has been on your site is a waste if your site is authoritative and filled with articles – why retarget someone who was only looking for a quick answer? These questions can save you a lot of money.