This post is based on Episode 117 of the ProBlogger podcast.
In the past four weeks, I have spoken about the four phases in which your readers were warmed up and turned into enthusiastic fans:
2nd First-time visitors interested in your blog
3rd More subscribers, followers and connections
4th Get people to engage with you and your blog.
This week I’m closing things up by telling how a blogger with relatively few readings used these principles to make more than $ 28,000. And she did it all with a single blog post, a SlideShare presentation, a lead magnet, an email sequence, and a webinar.
Donna Moritz runs Socially Sorted – a website where non-designers learn how to create high quality visual content for more leads, sales and impact. And over the years, she wrote some great blog posts that did really well, including 36 tools to create visual content that the professionals can’t live without. She also created a SlideShare for the post (a way to reuse your content that I talked about in something I spoke about) How to make your new blog known) that, according to Donna, “went crazy”.
She started writing blog posts for other people to promote her webinars and other events, and found that she could get a lot of traffic to what she was promoting. When asked to partner with Amy Porterfield, she wanted to write a “cracker” blog post (as she calls her) that would attract most attendees to Amy’s webinar.
The blog post
After spending a few weeks collecting information from influencers, she sat down and wrote 21 pro tips for a full house at your webinar or live event with visual marketing. It was a list post with a great title (don’t you agree?), Lots of pictures and lots of quotes. And it contained both an advertising banner for registrations and a lead magnet
As such a targeted blog post, he received less than a thousand shares. (Her two previous “big” positions received 3,000 and 6,000 shares.) But Donna had just started.
The SlideShare
She created a SlideShare presentation with 32 slides with quotes from influencers, which she had presented in her blog post. It was not just a link to the blog post, but also a link to the free cheat sheet.
When their slides ran out, they had subscribed to 700 people to get this cheat sheet. (That number has grown to 1,000 since then.) And these slides (which have now been viewed more than 21,000 times) still bring traffic.
The lead magnet
Donna’s next step was to create a key magnet by offering new subscribers a free cheat sheet related to the blog post. Using a Canva template, she created a nine-page PDF and gave the subscribers the link to say thank you. (Your current main magnet is a 14-page PDF with the title “99 video ideas”.) Subscribers will therefore receive two emails as soon as they register: the welcome email and a link to their free cheat sheet.
Donna believes the key to offering giveaways as lead magnets is to keep them going. “My mistake over a few years was not really traceable. They would download it and then it was done. “
And so she started creating her email sequence.
The email sequence
Donna admits that she was terrible at first. “I didn’t even know what that was.”) But she persevered and now has an email sequence that includes the following:
· The traditional welcome email
· A question (which I’ll talk about in a moment)
· An email explaining what to expect in later emails
· A few emails with tips.
And then they receive their newsletter.
Donna believes in giving value to her readers from the start. “I don’t want them to feel like saying out of the blue,” Oh, I have a webinar about “.” So when you sign up, you’ll be taken to a page on their blog that contains links to articles and interviews that contain lots of useful information.
The second email in the sequence asks a simple question: “Tell me your biggest challenge”. And more importantly, she reads everyone’s answers.
“This question was great,” she says. “I struggle to keep up with the answers, but I try to reach them all at some point. It’s like an ongoing poll. We will be able to analyze it better because the answers are amazing. “
And she gets pretty good opening rates with these emails. The first has an opening rate of 70%, the second of 60% and the third of 48%.
The webinars
In last week’s post, I talked about how you can engage your readers with live video (and win them over to your blog). But while Donna enjoys teaching and interacting with people, she doesn’t feel comfortable in front of the camera. And so she started holding webinars instead.
Webinars gave her the opportunity not only to interact with her readers, but also to provide them with great content. And while they usually end up promoting a program or event (“I’ll get better at the end of the sale”), she’s completely open about it.
To give you an idea of how good its content is, here’s a story she shared with me in the ProBlogger podcast:
I recently had a webinar in which our internet was right in the middle. They could still see my slides, but they couldn’t see me. I thought, Here we go. I’m just going to watch them all go.
But they all stayed. Throughout the webinar, more than 100 people stayed, saying, “We like the slides.”
The result
A blog post. A SlideShare slideshow. A lead magnet. An email sequence. A webinar.
The result? More than $ 28,000 in sales. This is the strength or warmth of your readers by giving them great content, getting them to subscribe and engaging with them.
Do you know any other bloggers who warm up their readers excellently? Let us know in the comments.
Photo of Denies Argyriou on Unsplash