Never underestimate the value of an email. Email marketing has proven itself again and again to be the one marketing avenue that consistently brings in the highest conversions for companies all over the world.
There is a reason they are always pushing to get customer email addresses.
No matter the size of your enterprise, you can benefit from building an email marketing list. The faster you do it, the sooner you will start seeing the results.
Marketing emails mean click-through traffic, greater sales, brand visibility, and direct customer engagement. Even social media doesn’t manage to bring in the ROI of emails.
Consider some email marketing stats:
40% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success (source).
80% of retail professionals in the US said email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention
On average, companies are attributing 23% of their total sales to the email marketing channel, compared to 18% in 2013. This equates to a proportionate rise of 28% in just one year.
Not only is that a significant increase for such a short period of time, but it proves that those who claim email is dead are dead wrong. It is a more powerful tool than ever.
There are many different ways that will help you rapidly build up an email list. These are some of the most effective.
1. Build An Effective Landing Page
If you have a website or product launching, you can create a simple landing page to begin building hype. Get customers early by putting up an email form for people to be alerted the moment you launch, and so be the first to know.
Services like LeadPages exist to help you do this more quickly. You could have a page up in minutes, and begin gathering those sign ups as soon as it is live.
The most important thing about a landing page many businesses miss: It should be fast! I can’t believe how many leads are lost just because the page doesn’t load.
2. Personalize Your Landing Page
3. Host A Webinar
Webinars are becoming more popular by the day, and it is no wonder. They give people all the benefits of going to a conference lecture without ever having to leave their home. It is convenient and a lot cheaper without the hotel and airfare.
Host a live webinar, and then put the recording on your website for people to see in their own time. Not only is this a great content strategy, but it gives you an opportunity to create a sign up form that includes both email addresses and other important data.
Tools like GoToMeeting and ClickMeeting makes it very easy to host, customize, record and invite people to webinars:
A single webinar can bring in thousands of emails.
4. Offer Premium Content
Let’s say you are reading this post, and you want more information. You get to the end and you find out there is a much more thorough, instructive version available. All you have to do is provide your email, then follow the confirmation link to this premium content.
This is another great strategy for both content marketing and email acquisition. Usually referred to as content upgrading, it is guaranteed to get your reader’s attention, and their info.
Check out IMNMarketing Resources page for a solid example of premium content we are offering:
4. Offer Emailed Incentives
When Google first released Google Plus, they took a handful of invites and gave them to early adopters as they anticipated the launch. Then those users gave out invites to their friends that wanted to try it.
The sheer number of invites that were sent out this way was incredible, and all done through email. It created a powerful force that made the G+ launch a busy and highly anticipated one. While they were not able to engage those users well enough to sustain the growth, it has worked very well for creating the initial buzz.
Offer users the ability to send special offers to their friends if they provide their email. The friend gets the offer, then provides their own email address, and passes it on.
Mailshake is a great tool to help creating that initial buzz. You can use it to reach out to niche influencers and invite them to your platform. Mailshake handles emailing and following-up and gives you a nice dashboard to monitor your progress:
5. Publish eBooks
eBooks are a great way to spread your content, increase authority, and gain traction in your marketing campaign. Offer your ebooks free for an email signup, and you will see your email marketing list grow very quickly.
Just make sure you are creating valuable and well written ebooks. Don’t sacrifice quality for a quick product that only exist to build your marketing list. That should be a plus, not the singular goal.
Conclusion
Building an email list is important, and will lead to greater conversions than any other method available. These are some of the most effective ways of gathering them. The sooner you put them into practice, the sooner you will start reaping the benefits.
Believe it or not, I’ve been working on Ubersuggest for almost 3 years now.
I bought it on February 13, 2017, for $120,000 dollars as a test to see if I could get more traffic from a tool than traditional content marketing or SEO.
Since then the tool has come a long way, in which I’ve added tons of features that competitors charge $100 a month or even more for.
But I’ve finally got Ubersuggest to a point where I can start releasing features that my competition don’t even have.
So before, you head on over to Ubersuggest to work on your SEO, make sure you read everything below because I’ve just changed up how you are going do keyword research (in a good way).
On top of that, I’ve also released a few other features as well related to link data and traffic estimations.
Here’s what’s new:
More keyword data
The biggest problem I had with keyword research was how to find the right keyword.
Sure, there are metrics like CPC data, SEO difficulty, or even search volume, but assuming you find keywords with a high CPC, low SEO difficulty, and high search volume, it still doesn’t mean it is a good keyword to go after.
And there are a few reasons why…
Mobile searches aren’t worth as much – first off, if the keyword mainly gets searched from on mobile devices the conversion rate will be lower. It doesn’t mean mobile traffic is useless, it just typically means the keyword won’t be as valuable.
High search volume doesn’t guarantee lots of organic clicks – what happens if the keyword gets a ton of searches but no clicks? This sounds crazy, but it actually happens a lot. For example, when people search for “weather” in the United States, roughly 60% of the people don’t click any results.
Not all searchers are worth the same – some keywords get searched heavily by teenagers. Some keywords get searched heavily by people who are in their 30s or 40s. If the majority of the searches for a given keyword happen by a really young audience, chances are they won’t have a credit card and they won’t convert into a customer.
Because of all of this, I decided to change how the industry does keyword research.
Now when you type in a keyword like “marketing” into Ubersuggest, you’ll see this:
If you have been using Ubersuggest for the last year or so you may notice some differences… but if you haven’t let me break down what’s new.
First off, for any given keyword you will see what percentage of the searches are taking place from mobile devices or desktop devices.
For example, with the term “marketing” you can see that the majority of the searches are coming from desktop devices.
On the flip side, if you use Ubersuggest to look at the term “weather” you’ll notice that the majority of the searches happen on mobile devices.
And with any given keyword you can also see what percentage of the people even click on the SEO or paid results.
I love this bar chart because it tells me if I should even go after a specific keyword. Just because a term has tons of searches doesn’t mean you are going to get tons of clicks, even if you rank at the number 1 spot.
If you leverage paid ads, this bar chart is also helpful because it will give you a sense of how many people click on the paid ads as well.
Another chart that I’ve added is one that breaks down the age range of each searcher.
As you can see from the above image, Ubersuggest now shows what percentage of the searches take place between each age range.
This is really important if you know the persona of your ideal customer, as you only want to target keywords that your ideal buyer is searching for.
What’s also cool is this data is available for all countries within Ubersuggest and for almost all of the keywords within our database.
Now before you head off to Ubersuggest and test it out, there are a few more features that I’ve just released.
More backlink data
Over the last few months, I’ve gotten feedback that our link database isn’t as big as you would like, so we have been working on fixing this.
This chart will quickly show you if a site is growing in backlink and referring domain count over time or if they are declining.
On top of that, we are even showing the daily new and lost link count for a given site.
I know the new and lost link count chart looks a bit off, but keep in mind we started having Ubersuggest crawl more pages around the web faster and more frequently. Hence you are seeing a big spike in new and lost links.
But over the next 4 weeks, it should normalize, and you’ll see an accurate representation of new and lost links.
This will help you identify new link opportunities more easily. Especially because you can now clearly see where your competitors are focusing their link building efforts.
Better traffic estimations
Lastly in Ubersuggest, you can also enter in a URL and get data on any given domain.
From its estimated monthly search traffic to the number of keywords a domain ranks for to even its top pages based on link and traffic count.
We haven’t fully finished creating our new algorithm when it comes to traffic estimations, but the chart you’ll see now is much more accurate than the older one.
Even though this is a big improvement from our older charts, give it another 3 months and it should be extremely accurate.
When you are using the traffic analyzer report in Ubersuggest, keep in mind that this will give you a directional guide on how you are doing versus your competition.
I’ve made them in order to give you a leg up on your competition as the data in the tool is now something that most of you have never seen before.
And over the next two months, you’ll see some big launches in Ubersuggest. From a chrome extension to even more accurate traffic estimations to even an Alert system that will notify you when things are wrong with your site.
So, go to Ubersuggest and try out the new keyword features as well as traffic estimation and backlink features.
According to YouTube, tagging is one of the most important ways to rank your video in YouTube search results:
Tags help users find your video when they search the site. When users type keywords related to your tags your video will appear in their search results.
YouTube does consider user engagement as well (like number of views, views in common and user “retention”) but tagging is the *first* step to ranking your video in YouTube search results (and thus getting a good chance to get ranked in Universal Results as well).
Generic relationship between tag and video content:
Tag identifies what the video is of at its most primary and objective level – no subject specific knowledge is needed to make this distinction (e.g. a video of a cat, tagged as ‘cat’ or ‘animal’)
General YouTube defined Category or Genre (e.g. Comedy, Entertainment, Music)
Specific relationship between tag and video content:
Tag identifies what video is of. Familiarity or some existing knowledge is needed to make this connection (this may be about names, locations, venues, etc).
Tag only useful to a minority of users, specific individual or group
Refining tag (Tag which cannot stand alone – only useful when looked at as part of the larger tag set (e.g., episodes of a series of videos specified by a number)
Self-reference tagging (e.g. “my dog”),
Irrelevant/Non Useful Tags (those may vary from attention-grabbing and misspelled tags to conjunctions and prepositions).
Obviously, the top three classes of tags should all be considered for ranking for various types of search queries (navigational search queries, generic search, category search, etc).
Brainstorming the Tags
Most YouTube pros suggest including as many relevant tags as you can (of course, that doesn’t mean you need hundreds of them but dropping the dozen of most essential ones is very important for your rankings). YouTube doesn’t restrict the number of tags as well which is good sign.
I do agree that we need to use quite a few tags, but the focus is on “smart” or “educated” tagging:
1) Include Your Brand-Specific Tags
This one comes first because it’s so often neglected!
You *want* to rank for your own brand name in YouTube search results;
You do want your own videos to appear in Google’s universal results!
So what you never want to forget is to “self-reference” your video:
With your own name (the one the world knows you by);
Your brand name: preferably in a couple of variations, like: [brand name], [brandname] and [brandname.com]
2) Use YouTube Auto-Suggest
What you do next is playing with YouTube search results a bit. Two things we want to do here:
See what YouTube suggests typing in when searching (you want to rank for all of those words);
Identifying a few videos that tend to pop up now and then for important search queries (especially in default “by Relevance” tab)
So what you are going to do next is trying a few random keyword-based searches in a row taking a note of the two things I’ve mentioned above:
Gotta love Auto-Suggest: each new letter you add brings up more and more suggestions:
3) Use YouTube Tool
The aforementioned YouTube keyword suggestion tool can be used to both extract keywords from your competitors’ videos and to generate suggestions based on your core term (just like Google’s Adsense external tool), so you may want to play further for even more bright ideas:
Adding the Tags
Now that you have thoroughly collected all the relevant tags, throw them into an Excel spreadsheet and use all sorts of sorting and conditional formatting to identify your best “core” words you want to include into your tags.
For example, you can use “Find and Replace” feature to highlight all the cells that have “free” in yellow (read more about organizing your keyword modifiers <- “oldie but goodie”):
Again, while you are free to play with the above tools to generate lots of keyword ideas, the main point of this step is to identify your most important core terms to build upon. After all, you don’t want hundreds of tags added. Instead, you want to add the best ones.
For this:
Omit “stop” words (especially articles “a” / “the”);
Go with plural variant of the similar phrases (this is usually your best bet);
Mind what YouTube suggests you using (it probably knows its stuff).
Also, the quick research you are invited to run in this article for each of the videos you upload will give you lots of data to find a great title for your video as well. Remember, while tags are important, the video title is what attracts clicks in many cases (and, per my experience, it influences rankings as well).
****So be sure to match your tags with title using the tag research tools listed above.
Any more tips on YouTube video rankings? Please share them in the comments!
Oh and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified of new SEO videos we upload!
A few weeks ago Google announced support for a new link attribute rel=”sponsored” (together with its sister attribute rel=”ugc”).
In addition, they also mentioned that rel=”nofollow” attribute will become even fuzzier than it used to be as Google was going to start using it as a “hint”
rel=”sponsored”: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
To sum up key points from the announcement:
There are now more than one way to inform Google of your linking patterns (i.e. to mark sponsored and user-generated links)
All of those link attributes are going to be used as “hints”, meaning that Google will officially use nofollow links to inform its algorithm of this signal
There’s no need to do anything with your current nofollow links
The announcement caused a good deal of discussions which I was monitoring for some time to create this summary.
SEO speculate that the new attribute was introduced in response to lots of “core” sites applying site-wide nofollow making it impossible for Google to understand which of those links should actually be taken into account and how to make sense of that.
Rel=”sponsored” Carries No Pagerank
Over at Pubcon, Google’s Gary Illyes shared that the link attribute carries extra information but passes no PageRank:
It is – again – confusing because Google states that all those tags attributes are going to be used as “hints” – so what does that mean if they are not going to flow Pagerank?
This has now changed. All the link attributes — sponsored, UGC and nofollow — are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search
So far tests show no difference in using rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored”.
It’s Not For You, It’s For Google
Many people were left wondering why would they use the attributes anyway. What is there for website owners?
Well, basically nothing.
Over at SMX advanced Gary Illyes stated that the new link attribute was optional and Google needed it to “to understand linking patterns and how people are linking”.
And SEOs reaction was ranging from favorable to sarcastic, and sometimes it is hard to tell one from another:
Inspired by @dawnieando I hereby pledge to use rel=“sponsored” and rel=“ugc” for no other reason but to help Google make better sense of the web and improve its results. Not expecting any benefit to myself or my clients. https://t.co/AdjC8ToL6X
The Future of the Attribute is Likely to be That of Rel=”Author” and Rel=”Next”
In most cases, SEOs remain skeptical expecting Google giving up on the attribute after failing to see a wide adoption, just like they gave up on rel=”author” and rel=”next”/”prev”
SEOs can add
rel="sponsored"
rel="ugc"
OR
wait for enough SEOs will add them so that Google ML will be able to understand these links without even tagging them.
Still, many of us think that helping Google “train” its systems and understand web patterns better by using the attribute may be a noble cause, even though it may have no future.
I am saying “many of us”, not meaning I personally share that sentiment.
Others suggest that introducing rel=”NoOneCares” might be a better idea showing that Google’s algorithm is mature enough for it to handle linking automatically without forcing yet another tag on us.
Waiting for rel=”NoOneCares”, when Google is finally smart enough to decide for itself what is good vs what is popular among the 0.01% of the population who post links on the internet.
Time will show but let’s not forget that Google did manage to force rel=”nofollow” on us, despite all odds, so it will all depend on how aggressive Google is going to be with this one.
WordPress has already announced their official support of rel=”ugc” attribute making it a default for the comment section starting from WordPress 5.3. The change went into an affect on November 2. So update your WordPress if you want to be in.
With WordPress joining so quickly, there’s hope for the link attributes.
SEO Tools Showing Rel=”Sponsored”
Not many tools have caught up with the announcement yet, but we know at least two that have added support for the new attribute:
And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.
So then, what should you do?
Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?
Seriously.
So, what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?
Well, this story will help explain it…
The old days
When I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.
Getting rankings!
Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).
Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.
You could literally see results in less than a month.
SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.
I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.
In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.
So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.
I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.
I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.
In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.
Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.
So, what’s the strategy?
Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.
These days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.
So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?
I know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.
Here are the stats for the last month:
Rental fees: $24,592
Outreach costs: $3,000
Legal costs: $580
Copywriting and monetization costs: $1,500
Total monthly cost: $29,672
Now guess what my monthly income was?
It was $79,283.58.
Not too bad.
Now your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t need a lawyer.
And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.
Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.
Here are the exact steps you need to follow:
Step #1: Find the terms you want to rank for
If you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.
If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.
Head over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.
Now click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of keywords that each page ranks for.
I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.
Keywords with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.
When you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t be able to monetize the traffic.
Step #2: Search for the term
It’s time to do some Google searches.
Look for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to rank for.
Don’t waste your time with page 2.
What I want you to look for is:
Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.
A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)
A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).
Step #3: Hit up the website
Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.
If you can’t find their details, you can do a whois lookup to see if you can find their phone number.
What’ll you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.
It just doesn’t work well over email.
If you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes something like this…
Subject: [their website name]
Hey [insert first name],
Do you have time for a quick call this week?
We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.
Let me know what works for you.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
[insert your company]
[insert your phone number]
You want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more calls.
Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.
Point out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need some more information before you can make your offer.
At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).
Once you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next few days after you run some numbers.
Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?
You’ll want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too heavily or else you may lose rankings.
Once you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.
Typically, most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page in the first place.
Step #4: Monetize the page
If you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the products you are selling.
For example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add links from the article to your site.
The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.
Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.
As for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people can fill out their lead information is great.
Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.
I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.
When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page.
Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.
I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out with a 30-day notice.
The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.
And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.
Conclusion
SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.
Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.
The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to scale.
If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.
The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.
So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?
Never underestimate the value of an email. Email marketing has proven itself again and again to be the one marketing avenue that consistently brings in the highest conversions for companies all over the world.
