#with actually useful topics and really cool keynote speakers

[we-re-always-alright]

I have so much knitting to do (and knitting I am avoiding) but I found out I have to go to Salt Lake City (🤢) for a conference (conveniently in the middle of every Mormon landmark 🤢🤢) so I am making some very nice mittens and a headband I will wear while in a terrible place so I can at least look cute while there

[lunarr-rrose]

Advantages Of Joining A Mastermind - Fernando Angelucci

https://u109893.h.reiblackbook.com/generic11/the-storage-stud/advantages-of-joining-a-mastermind/

For Fernando, one of the reasons why he is finding a lot of success and starting to exponentially grow his different business is because of his ability to stand on the shoulders of giants, to leverage other people, and the network.

For him, one of the most important things is joining the Mastermind group. Specifically, a Mastermind group that is not geographically tied to your little market.

What is a Mastermind group?

This is a collective of individuals in the same industry and in Fernando’s case, it’s the real estate business. They get together quarterly and between those 3 to five meetings each quarter they also communicate through zoom or phone calls.

The great thing about these Mastermind Groups is you can leverage the expertise of the other experienced and smart investors.

And, the Mastermind Groups always bring in the greatest keynote speakers.

If you are interested to know more about Fernando’s experience in joining Mastermind groups just keep watching this video.

Fernando O. Angelucci is Founder and President of Titan Wealth Group. He also leads the firm’s finance and acquisitions departments. Fernando Angelucci and Steven Wear founded Titan Wealth Group in 2015, and under his leadership, the firm’s revenue has grown over 100% year over year. Today,

Find out more at

https://www.TheStorageStud.com

https://titanwealthgroup.com/

Listen to our Podcast:

https://thestoragestud.podbean.com/e/advantages-of-joining-a-mastermind-fernando-angelucci/

---------------------------------------

So, one of the reasons why I've been finding a lot of success and, you know, really starting to exponentially grow my different businesses is because of my ability to, stand on the shoulders of giants and to leverage other people and the networks. So, one of the things that I think is super important is joining mastermind groups, specifically mastermind groups that are not, let's say geographically tied to like your little market. And one of the reasons for that is because, you know, then people are less willing to share. So, what is a mastermind group? A mastermind group is, a collective of individuals in the same industry or similar industry. So for me, it's real estate. We get together in person once a quarter. And then, throughout in between those three to five day meetings each quarter, we also do zoom calls, phone calls.

We run through, you know, best practices. And the nice thing about these mastermind groups is a, you can leverage the expertise of other super smart investors. With these investors, you know, you have people, you know, multiple minds, will always help bring up the collective, a rising tide raises all ships. And not only can I leverage these guys for tips and tricks that I see them presenting on, but another thing that's really cool is these masterminds will also usually bring in some really cool keynote speakers. So the way that the mastermind format is for most of the masterminds of my part of, is you come to the mastermind and then you'll have 30 minutes to an hour to present on a topic that is a gift. So, here is my gift to the group. Here's something I think will benefit you not only from a business standpoint, but it can be personal.

It could be from health, you know, a health angle. Half of the presentations we found are about business. The other half are about life and how to go through life as an investor or as an entrepreneur. Then, at the end of that ask, or the end of that 30 to 60 minute presentation, you'll usually have a slide or two saying, here's what I'm struggling with. Here's what I'm stuck on. Here's what I need help with. And then, everyone in the group will say, Hey, I can help you out with that. I've done X, Y, Z, or, Hey, I can't help you out, but I know this gentleman he's done this six, seven times, let me connect you with him and maybe he can help you solve your problem. So, it's all about this abundance mentality. This Go-Giver mentality, how when you give to others, it usually comes back tenfold.

The cool thing thing about this mastermind too, is because of the high caliber of investors that are in there. Usually you need to be doing 50 plus deals a year, just to get nominated, to get in. And once you get nominated, then you need to have people vouch for you. You need to go through a series of interviews. They look through your financials, they look through your transaction volume to just, you know, prove that you're actually doing what you're saying you're doing. So, once you get in there, because it's a high caliber group, because it's usually got a pretty high cost to attend these meetings they can bring in these heavy hitter, third party consultants, experts in each have their own fields. So recently, one of the things, one of the investors they brought in, or one of the consultants they brought in his name was John Burns.

And he is this research kind of economist, and he specifically focuses on single family homes, multi-family homes, build the suit, build to rent. And a lot of the large hedge funds and private equity funds will actually pay him for his services to get his reports and to get kind of what he sees in his crystal ball. So, one of the things that John was seeing as far as this crazy market that we're in. So, for those that haven't been kind of living under a rock in the real estate world, we're in the very interesting time, where one we're in the middle of it pandemic. So, just logically you think, okay, we're in the middle of the pandemic, that's going to trigger a recession. That's going to trigger home sales to drop and prices to drop.

But, what has actually happened is the exact opposite, because of this pandemic, people are deciding not to sell, not to trade up in their properties, causing a very artificially low inventory, because there's artificially low inventory. There's less number of sellers, but there's still the same amount of buyers, or if not more buyers, and this is causing artificial price increase. So, over time, what we've seen in the last six months is, properties are selling off. I mean, off the shelves quickly for way above what typically say 18 months ago, I thought they would sell for what they would be worth. You know, we're seeing 10, 15% increases on these ARV's. Not because of extra work was done to the house, but just because there's no inventory and people are really desperate to find a home that say has a home office or an extra room so that, you know, they're separated from the kids or they have a separate space that they can go work from, as opposed to, you know, working from the kitchen countertop or the living room, you know, coffee table, they want an actual place because they can't go into work right now.

They're working virtually. One of the things that John was saying is that, you know, we see this price pressure is going to continue for quite some time here. You know, he's still seeing rising prices in Q1, Q2 and Q3 of 2021, with maybe some starting to fall off in Q4 of 2021 or Q1 of 2022. So, very interesting to have these, you know, these experts that, if I were to try to go pay for John Burns services on my own, I'm sure it would cost an arm and a leg, but because we have a group of, you know, 140 investors from around the country. And I guess now, even around the world, because we have some international members as well, we can all pool our resources to bring in these heavy hitters, these huge experts to come teach us or to enlighten us on what's going on in the market.

Some other keynote speakers that I've seen recently in some of these groups are Chris Voss, which is a master negotiator. He worked for the FBI as a lead hostage negotiator for 10 years and created a system on how to negotiate with hostages, but which is also applicable when it comes to any type of negotiation, you know, your entire life is a negotiation. So, that was super cool. They brought in Mike Michalowicz, the guy that wrote the book, Profit First on how to get businesses to manage their money appropriately and how to take chips off the table and stash up an emergency reserve. So, really cool, really grateful that I'm a part of these groups. I've learned so much from them, every time I joined one of these groups. It's a little bit overwhelming, but very quickly you start seeing your trajectory of growth, just exponentially increasing because, you know, you're, you never want to be the smartest person in the room.

I actually prefer to be the dumbest person in the room, because that means everybody around me has a ton of information, a ton of value and knowledge to offer me. So, I really recommend if you're just getting started in real estate, or if you're just getting started as an entrepreneur, you know, make sure that you're spending a lot of time and networking with these individuals that are at the next level. You know, if you're here and everybody that you hang out with is down here, you're going to become, you know, the average of the five or six people that you hang out with the most. But if you're here and everybody that you're hanging out with and working with is up here, then just naturally over time, that's going to bring you up to these levels. The nice, another thing about these masterminds that are really cool is, the level of trust that gets created from being a part of these groups, these communities, because this trust is there and we're being vulnerable and we're telling people what our issues are.

And instead of just trying to beat our chest and say, Hey, look how cool I am. But just being very honest and straightforward with everybody, with what your issues are and how, you know, if anybody has ways to help you solve them, is this innate level of trust that gets formed, which allows you to do deals on handshake agreements. And I know that's super crazy to say, especially in this day and age, when everybody wants to sue and there's, you know, 40 pages of paperwork just to buy a pen from somebody it's ridiculous, but that has helped foster these huge relationships. I've raised a bunch of money in these groups. I've helped other people raise money in these groups. I found deals in these groups. I've sold deals to these groups. Just really awesome things. I really recommend that you get involved in some of these, that the two masterminds that I'm a part of right now.

The first one is called, Collective Genius, and it's a cross investment mastermind. So, there's a single family home guys. There's multifamily home guys. There's self storage. There is assisted living, there's notes, there's seller finance guys. It just land flippers, anything having to do with real estate, you name it, it's there. And the cool thing about that is, when you can look outside of your lane, you can start learning things from other industries or other asset classes that you can maybe apply to your asset class that may be novel in your industry. So, that was super cool, really love those guys. Absolutely wonderful group. The next group that I joined as well is, The Self Storage Mastermind. So, this is an asset specific mastermind. We only talk about self storage, not really any other asset classes. But it's kind of the same format where, you know, it's not only about business, it's also about life.

You know, we're in this together. If all you do is work, work, work, you know, on your deathbed, I've never heard of somebody saying on their deathbed that they wish they worked more, right? Usually it's a, I wish I had learned how to operate life, how to spend time with my family and friends, how to really be super efficient with my time. So, that I can spend my off time or my downtime with my family and friends with people that matter. So, I really loved that mastermind as well, bunch of trust. The guy that runs it actually mentored me. Taught me how to get into self storage. And he's actually partnered with me on a deal already in the past, pretty large deal. So, really excited to be a part of those, and excited to see what's what's coming in the future.

So, that'd be my recommendation to you. If you're looking to scale quickly, if you're looking to get better at your business, if you're looking to network with high level individuals, you know, you're going to have to pay for that, right? Because that's how you keep all the people that shouldn't be in the room away. You have to price it to a level that only people that are successful enough to take one of these big checks and write them each year to be a part of these masterminds are allowed in the room. So, you know, be prepared for that. But what our businesses do is we have a separate bank account, where that bank account is funded each month with a portion of our profits. And that bank account is specifically for mastermind, for travel, for basically that learning and knowledge and helping to continue the growth cycle of our companies as well as individually, as investors or as owners of those companies. So, stay tuned. I'll come back with some more tips for real estate investors and entrepreneurs in general. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to drop it in the comments, or shoot me an email or come to our website and connect with us that way.

[sephirose]

I posted 99 times in 2021

11 posts created (11%)

88 posts reblogged (89%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 8.0 posts.

I added 55 tags in 2021

#steven universe - 9 posts

#pink diamond - 9 posts

#invader zim - 7 posts

#rose quartz - 6 posts

#mahou shoujo - 5 posts

#bishoujo senshi sailor moon - 4 posts

#pretty soldier sailor moon - 4 posts

#sailor moon - 4 posts

#magical girl - 4 posts

#halo - 3 posts

Longest Tag: 58 characters

#mostly because michael bay's tropes are pretty predictable

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

I'll never stop being impressed by the fact that Halo 5 did The Last Jedi before Star Wars did. And that is not a compliment in the slightest.

17 notes • Posted 2021-06-02 23:36:58 GMT

#4

My ideal ending for The Handmaid’s Tale is a variant of the novel’s. An elderly June Osborne is the keynote speaker at a university years after Gilead has fallen. Instead of her experiences being told through people far removed from her trauma, she uses her own voice to tell her own story. 

33 notes • Posted 2021-06-17 05:53:39 GMT

#3

So basically, what I've got from the plot of Rift Apart is that we'll be facing off against the Chad Emperor Nefarious and the Virgin Dr. Nefarious

33 notes • Posted 2021-06-10 04:18:37 GMT

#2

Michael Bay’s Invader Zim

Zim is either a badass or a dumbass, depending on which mood the writers are in. 

Dib is either played by Zac Effron or Jesse Eisenburg with costume glasses. 

Gaz is played by a 10/10 supermodel who got her look at Hot Topic.

Gir humps various things three times in one movie. 

He humps a pug while Zim is apathetically watering the lawn.

He humps Gaz’s leg during a really intense mission. 

He humps a taco during the mid-credits. 

Lots of product placement. Krazy Taco? Nah fam, it’s Taco Bell. Poop Cola? Everyone drinks Coke products. Game Slave? Screw that, Gaz is a PC gamer goddess. 

Ken Jeong works in the Swollen Eyeball Society as Xing-xing who assists Dib in between being the butt of racist jokes. 

Irken females have breasts and wear your typical fantasy armor with boob plates and bared midriff. 

Lots and lots of American jingoism, with a nauseating amount of military worship. Professor Membrane has the American flag in his living room. 

Mark Wahlburg is Membrane’s himbo assistant whose lab coat is always sleeveless. 

The Empire is a totalitarian, fascist nightmare that’s actually pretty intimidating. Red and Purple have neat designs and personalities but are otherwise wasted. 

Fight scenes are pretty cool, so there’s that. 

FUCKING EXPLOSIONS. 

68 notes • Posted 2021-01-01 08:28:30 GMT

#1

The Nightmare Begins in 5 seconds

628 notes • Posted 2021-01-24 21:59:38 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[element-effect-blog]

#EmbracingTheStruggle of Public Speaking for the First Time

My last thought prior to strolling out on the IMPACT Live phase was," [INSERT IMPROPER WORD], I don't wish to do this!"

And after that my fellow colleague, Dan Baum informed me it was too late for that and assisted me on stage where our CEO, Bob had actually simply called my name and hundreds of individuals were waiting for me to speak.

This is the story of everything that led up to that moment ...

Angela, Brie, and I had discovered some research that showed men are by and large owning the speaking gig and obviously, we believed that was hogwash and said as much during our program.

Two weeks later, throughout a check out to HQ in Connecticut, Bobasked me if I would speak at our upcoming event, IMPACT Live.

IMPACT Live '18 was the second annual occasion under its name.Though previous years IMPACT had actually been hosting occasions, IMPACT Live was our noteworthy, deliberate neighborhood structure event. I, of course, said yes!A major part of my role

here at EFFECT is to not only guide and direct

my clients'technique in marketing, sales, and business but to develop my own individual brand. It is my task to not just reach the clients and group members I consult with weekly,

however to influence the higher marketing-world about the successes and lessons I'm discovering with each brand-new campaign and tactic. My first idea when Bob asked me to speak was that he 'd desire me to discuss ABM, nurturing funnels, user mapping, or any number of cool things we have actually been working on for customers. That's not what he asked. Bob asked me to speak to the audience at EFFECT Live about what high-performing marketers need and anticipate from their business. I quickly enjoyed the topic

and was deeply honored that he trusted me sufficient to share this details-as it's so vital. The Prep or Absence There Of Having actually never spoken with

more than a group of 8-10 in a customer call before, I had no concept how to get ready for this kind of event. I spent the very first few weeks

widdling away at some notes and after that reviewing them with Bob.I understood I was heading in the right instructions, so I mentally put the entire thing on the back burner as we went into our busy summer season(a.k.a. when our chickens LASTLY began laying eggs!). We likewise made a pretty significant shift in our company in client services at IMPACT at the exact same time, so I concentrated on supporting my group through that, the speech, I figured, would look after itself. Time to Consult With Marcus Can all of us just take simply a moment so I can Fan Woman Go crazy over the truth that I get to work along with Marcus Sheridan!.?. !?! But, seriously- he is merely wonderful, so generous with his knowledge, and a wonderful coach. Since a lot of us at EFFECT Live 2018 were newbie or still young speakers, all of us had the opportunity to arrange time with Marcus to examine our speeches. I was especially worried , not since he'sMarcus Sheridan, but because I'm extremely enthusiastic about the subject of high-performers and my speech is in fact

the public launching of a theory that I've been forming together

with Stacy Willis for the in 2015. The importance of not just communicating efficiently to the audience but ensuring what was shared is precise and actually useful for the people going to was not lost on me.Plus, I hadn't actually mentally dedicated time to it for weeks and the pressure to get it right was on. How to compose a speech How to write a speech that does not draw How to not make

a fool of yourself on stage How to convince yourself that you need to be on stage Dakota Hersey, an amazing Account Executive here shared notes from an INBOUND session a couple of years ago that Tamsen

Webster did and her resources ended up answering every single concern above. Using Tamsen's guide, I had a quite

solid summary of what I want to say on stage.Actually, her summary even wound up becoming the structure of a major area of the manuscript Stacy and I are co-writing on the subject of

high-performers, however I digress. The same Saturday that I wound up restructuring everything I had been working on, I presented the concept to Marcus. Leaving that meeting with him, I felt so empowered.He had wonderful insight on how finest to provide the information on phase and

actually helped me see that I was having a discussion on stage, not talking to a room full of

automobile test dummies. Getting Feedback Truthfully, in the weeks and even days leading up to the occasion, I wasn't very nervous.I desired to first ensure that my logic, data, and opinions were solid. I met with Stacy, Dakota, and a few other team members I extremely regard and understood would challenge me much, in the very same method

, somebody hearing this for the very first time might.

Each individual I met provided me a bit more confidence that I had something worthwhile to share.Seeing their faces illuminate and get delighted about the important things I was sharing was so cool. They likewise gave me invaluable ideas like: Don't talk

too quick(I do this generally)

Offer actionable items Don't present a lot of concepts at the same time Be yourself, yes, really, simply be yourself I'm so delighted I spent this time crowdsourcing concepts, feedback, and insights!A Fascinating

Observation Both nights of IMPACT Live we hosted Pleased Hours.Let's discuss Ann Handley for simply a moment. This female is whom I desire to be when I mature. Smart, funny, friendly, direct, and

actually incredibly pleasant. I might listen to her discuss shades of blue for hours. She was the keynote for the

very first full day of EFFECT Live and she had everyone hooked from the moment she danced on stage in her Party Pants. I had actually discovered the night before her

keynote though that she was slightly more reserved

than the person I viewed bring principles to life on phase. She was

still simply as approachable and kind, but perhaps a little

more reserved?Actually, Ann was so excellent she went DEAL WITH us throughout one of the Delighted Hours and talked about

this really thing! Check it out here: Remarkably,

I discovered the very same about Marcus Sheridan.I asked him about it and he shared that, as a speaker, you are offering a lot of yourself on stage, that some speakers prepare by going inward ahead of their

talks ... Even the most skilled ones. While I believed that was cool, I figured I didn't actually know what that suggested and absolutely ignored the discussion up until I woke up the early morning of my speech. It's Program Time! I awakened on Wednesday morning absolutely inward.That's so unusual to type, however it's real. I wasn't truly in the

state of mind to speak with a great deal of individuals, even the ones I enjoy, so I took extra time preparing yourself at the hotel. I went through my speech a few times before leaving the hotel, but doing that made me feel even worse because here.

[dylan38sanders]

Do Voice Assistants Need To Stay Out Of Events?

Unless you are living under a rock, you’ve heard of voice assistants such as Amazon Echo or Google Assistant, but have you thought about how to use voice assistants at events? We have to make sure as an industry we are always thinking about the purpose of the event and not just adding technology because it’s new and shiny. Could voice assistants really be a replacement for chatbots? What are the benefits of implementing voice assistants at events? Or do they have no place at all being at events? We will be covering all this and more.

In this episode of Event Tech Podcast, Will Curran of Endless Events and Brandt Krueger of Event Technology Consulting will debate the pros and cons of using voice assistants at events. They will speak to each side of the debate and share real-life stories of their experiences with this type of technology at events. If you are curious about using voice assistants at events and want an honest opinion you are in the right place! Click to listen below.

https://www.podbean.com/media/player/8dpee-a8d790?from=yiiadmin&download=1&version=1

Audio Transcription – Why Voice Assistants Need To Stay Out Of Events

Intro: Welcome to the Event Tech Podcast, where we explore the ever-evolving world of event technology every week. This show is brought to you by Endless Events. The event AV company that doesn’t suck. Now, let’s talk tech.

Will Curran: Hey, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Event Tech Podcast. This is Will Curran from Endless Events, and I am joined by the lovely …

Brandt Krueger: Brandt Krueger, from Event Technology Consulting.

Will Curran: Welcome to the show, Brandt. I’m really excited to have you again, and for us to be doing another episode of this wonderful, amazing podcast.

Brandt Krueger: Yeah, nice to be here.

Will Curran: So today, I wanted to talk a little about, this is a little of a pet peeve of mine. I admit that I think you have a dissenting opinion about this, so I think it’s going to create a healthy debate that we’ll have going for us. It’s about why voice assistants, for example, we’re not going to say them by name, but the one made by Amazon, the one made by Google, the one made by Apple. We’re just going to call them Guillermo, I think is the name.

Brandt Krueger: Guillermo, Madam A, and what is it? Schlomo. There we go.

Will Curran: Schlomo. Well, I like Guillermo because that’s my name in Spanish. We can just toot my own horn, and we just call it Guillermo. A little deep cut on the podcast, but basically, I want to talk about why these voice assistants need to stay out of events. There’s been this trend that people feel the need to stick an echo in the middle of the hallway, and say, “Instead of asking a person ‘Where is the show floor?’ Let me instead ask this speaker.” Then we talk about all the issues they’re going to have, but I usually find that it’s going to be annoying, and it’s not going to work out quite as well. I just wanted, I think that would really cool topic to do, and I want to talk about it. It sounds like you have a little bit of a dissenting opinion.

Brandt Krueger: Well, actually as you laid it out there at the beginning. Okay. Yeah. I can kind of see where you’re starting to come from, but as with all technology, it’s how you implement it. Right? Why don’t you lay out your case for against, and then we’ll take it from there.

Will Curran: Okay. Obviously, I think for the starting point, let’s start with my pre-bias for why I always get disappointed seeing this is that when I see this being implemented in events, I know it’s being primarily implemented by a lot of large technology companies. I will protect the innocent or the guilty, I guess you’d say in this case. Those people who are producing this assistant that’s being done, I know they’re charging up the ying yang for these things. My initial pre-bias is that I want to protect my clients from overspending in areas. When I see something like this, I think to myself, “Man, this feels like a big, gigantic waste of money.” I think my big worry with this is that clients are saying, “We need something new, something flashy that is going to make us seem hip, we’re on the bleeding edge, and we’re going to hire this company to create a voice assistant for us to have to come up and ask questions.”

Will Curran: My argument against is A) you’re spending too much money to be able to do this. If you can do it in-house, and program the assistant, and all the responses, and call and responses on your own, and you can do it in a weekend, and it’s going to cost you very little money, I think great. Cool. It’s a neat gag. It’s really exciting, but I had a client who flew in a company, that was not local, to set up these assistants. Therefore, because these new assistants were here, and it was a new piece of technology, had to incorporate that into the opening keynote to explain why people should use this, which then led us as a production company have to build it in as a gag as part of this presentation. What most people don’t realize is that these things are 100% reliable. When they went up there to do it, they thought it was going to be as simple as we’ll stick one up on stage, and maybe we might get up, or something like that. Then boom, you’ll be able to talk to it. It doesn’t work in that way when you have a loud stage. All these things. Also, we aren’t prepared for it to not work. We want it to work perfectly.

Will Curran: What ended up having to happen, and this is a little magic behind the trick that we did, is that we basically set up the Echo. We hooked up into our sound system. Then what we did is behind, the day before, we pre-recorded all of our responses because it was all scripted. He knew what he was going to say, the questions he was going to ask. We knew the questions he was going to ask. Every single question he asked, we basically did not only just ask the question to it, we had to do Simon Says. So if you ever say to Guillermo, “Guillermo, Simon Says …” and then say something, it will repeat what you say. For us to get the response we wanted in the script-

Brandt Krueger: Like in the Amazon, right? So the Amazon, I don’t think Guillermo will do that, just so we’re clear.

Will Curran: Okay. Guillermo is Google. Okay.

Brandt Krueger: Madam A, Amazon.

Will Curran: I’m going to say Lady A for Amazon because obviously, my friend calls it Lady A.

Brandt Krueger: Why don’t we just say Amazon for now?

Will Curran: So Lady A, basically … Yeah, or Amazon. Amazon, which I think that is a hot keyword though for some people, so I’m sorry if we’re firing off your assistant. “Lady A, Simon Says” and for example, we basically trained it to say the things we wanted it to say, so then when he would get up on stage, and he said, “Oh, hello, Lady A.” We basically had a prerecorded clip of audio that said, “Hello, David.” Everyone’s like, “Oh my gosh, it’s talking.” What we did is, to even help it, make it look like, we were really all in on this to help them make their vision happen. We even put the Echo on stage, but I had to make it so it wouldn’t actually talk because if it talked, it would be talking on stage something than what the prerecorded would say. Someone realized, “Oh my God. This is all prerecorded.” Blah, blah, blah.

Will Curran: What we did was we hacked the Echo, so that way it couldn’t make a sound, but the ring still lit up every time you talked to it. So it looked like it was responding the whole entire time. It was absolutely wild. It was so much work, and so much cost in order to basically create an assistant to answer 50 different questions that, to be honest, is anyone going to actually ask it? Can they look it up on the app? Can they just go walk up and find a staff member that works at the event, and get the answer faster? So, that’s my case.

Brandt Krueger: I see now because you’re coming at it from a production standpoint, and that’s why you’re definitely had a negative experience with it. It is also why the six most dangerous words in the English language are “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if”.

Will Curran: Totally.

Brandt Krueger: Because you know that’s how this started, right. Like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we had one of these digital assistants on the show floor, or whatever, and then we’ll have Frank come out, and he’ll talk about it, and all this kind of stuff.” You’ve just got this snowball, that all came from those six magic words of “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if”. Now, I’m starting to see where you’re particular flavor of angst is coming in.

Will Curran: Totally. My second piece of angst just comes as an attendee. I attended an event, I was actually technically speaking at it, but I guess that’s as close as you’ll get to Will attending an event these days, that they had this thing set up, basically. What ended up happening is that I just watched, and I was like, “You know what? I’m going to sit here for an hour. I’m going to see if anyone actually uses this thing.”

Will Curran: First of all, I think in finally like the ninth hour, someone finally went up to it, and talked to it. Looked at it, asked it a question. Obviously didn’t give the response, and went, “Meh. Obviously this isn’t going to work,” and left. It’s one of those things that as an attendee, when’s the last time that you went to an event that had one of these? Did you actually go up and use it? This is probably a question for the comment section down below. Leave it in the comments. We want to hear from you. Have you ever seen this before? Did you actually use it? Then I think if you haven’t, if you had the choice, would you choose a human over a voice assistant? I know everyone’s going to say human. 100%.

Brandt Krueger: Here’s what’s funny. You hear the same arguments being made in the chatbot discussion. As you were talking there, I suddenly had the idea of, for the amount of money that you have to pay an Amazon, because I think Amazon is the only one that’s doing this kind of customization levels. I haven’t heard of anybody doing it with Google, or really just Google at this point-

Will Curran: I think you’re right.

Brandt Krueger: Because (inaudible) basically disappeared. Maybe Siri, you’ve got the home pods, but you don’t really have anything more standalone than that. Anyway. That’s not the point that I was trying to make. The point that I was trying to make is for the amount of money that you would pay an Amazon to create the custom skills, to input the information, all that kind of stuff, you could literally work with a chatbot company, and pay someone to sit and listen to a speaker all day. Just have a dumb mic mounted in a kiosk, and come up with a fairly recognizable hot word, and pay someone to sit in a booth somewhere, and listen for the hot word. Then quick, text the chatbot out, and then come back on in robot voice, and then just say the answer.

Will Curran: That sounds very complicated.

Brandt Krueger: If you think about it though, it actually wouldn’t be that complicated. You just have a hot mic that you could put on a button, press. You could actually have a lot of fun with that. That would actually, that would be hilarious. To have a fake digital assistant where the person is just running it from the background.

Will Curran: Wow. That actually would be an interesting gag to do. Just set up a little microphone, a little speaker, and say, “Ask our voice assistant.” Then you basically paying someone to sit in a booth and wait for people to talk to it all day long. It’s kind of like the old carnival, or game shops that you would go to … This is really going to show how young I am. The arcades that had the magician that you could go up and ask it any question. But then, people always wondered, is there someone actually inside that box doing it? Sometimes you could do the gag where it answers. That would be really cool.

Will Curran: Again, we’re going back to this is a gag. This is-

Brandt Krueger: Right. It’s a gimmick.

Will Curran: I think the larger pivot, and I’m not sure if I’m doing this too early in the episode is sometimes I think we get so obsessed with technology for technology’s sake that sometimes technology isn’t making things better. It’s making things more complicated, and less easy to use. It’s just technology for technology’s sake.

Brandt Krueger: Absolutely. That’s something that I know we’re both passionate about. While we love our technology, I’ve seen your apartment. I know you’re into tech. You’re into the gadgets. When you start throwing it in just for the sake of it being new, that’s when things start going down a dangerous road. That’s “Wouldn’t it be cool if” is what it really boils down to. You’re not thinking about what actual benefits is it going to provide your attendee? What actual benefits is it going to provide you as the planner?

Brandt Krueger: That being said, if we start going down this road of the digital assistants for chatbots, and things like that, I’ve enjoyed the rise of chatbots. It’s easy to use, and it’s something that you get your answers right away without having to dig through an app. If you extrapolate that out, what if you have someone who’s really not comfortable using text? Or WhatsApp? Or a messaging, something like that? There are still a few people out there that aren’t fully invested into the smartphone ecosystem. Giving them something that they can walk up to and talk to, might be a way to open them up to that.

Will Curran: Oh, neat. I see where you’re coming from. Let’s get people, I do agree with this movement in general. Let’s get people off their apps and things like that. I think that if we can figure out a way to … Maybe the question doesn’t become “Why do they need to stay out of events?” Maybe “Why do they need to stay out of events for now?” Until the technology’s gotten so good because I think the … I can see that the future of this is that yes, we don’t need to have people. Robots can answer all the questions for us. Totally. I see that maybe in 10 years, whatever it is. Futurist Will puts his hat on and tries to guess at when things are going to happen, right. I think the interesting thing could be, yeah, how could we get to improve this technology?

Will Curran: I think for example, one of the biggest leaps that we have to get over is the idea that a lot of times these are placed in the middle of a hallway, right outside a trade show floor and boom. It’s so loud, the assistant freaks out, and can’t really help you at times. That’s something that I think would need to be a huge jump ahead. I think also, it needs to be smarter than just a call and response because all it takes, and as we see this is the same problem with chatbots as we talked about is that you have to know exactly what to say. If you somehow use a weird word, for example, let’s say because I’m recording this is in Germany right now if someone comes up and says, “Where’s the toilet?” And it’s not programmed to say toilet. It just wants to know bathroom, and it says, “I don’t understand you.” It’s just going to frustrate because they don’t know to use the word bathroom because that’s the keyword that you put in to program it. I think that we need to get beyond also just call and response, call and response. It has to be truly smart enough to compare across the English dictionary, and know, “Oh, toilet equals bathroom. They programmed bathroom, but they actually mean this. Let me give them the answer they want.”

Brandt Krueger: Yeah, I think if you ask the technology companies though, they’re thinking about that. If you talk to a Sciensio or something like that, they’re looking into that. As soon as they see something that doesn’t fit into it, they add it right away. If “Oh, yeah. We forgot that particular euphemism for bathroom,” I think they would add it in right away. That’s some of the advantages of these types of systems-

Will Curran:  True.

Brandt Krueger: Is being able to get it cooking, get up and running quickly, but then make changes on the fly. That is a disadvantage of if you do use one of these voice assistants is not having that ability. So yeah.

Will Curran: That’s very true.

Brandt Krueger: If the way you got it programmed through Amazon only covers X, Y, and Z, you’re not going to be able to go in through the backend, and say “Now add this.” At least as far as I know. I don’t think they’ve gotten it to that point. I think you’re still paying them to kind of set it up, here’s the information, here’s the things we want to be able to ask it, and I doubt you’d be able to say, “Hey, Amazon. It’s Tuesday of our three-day event, and we need to add something today.” I don’t know.

Will Curran: I think an app company’s developing the app, so they might be able to be a little bit flexible, but I don’t see it being as flexible … We’ve obviously sat down with Chuck from Sciensio, and he’s shown us the dashboard of how he can see the responses coming in that are … What does he call them? Confused, or whatever it is. He’s able to make those changes on the fly, for sure.

Will Curran: I think one of the big things, and this is where I think I’ll give props to chatbots over voice assistants is that unless a voice assistant can do what we currently do, and obviously a lot of these are installed, connected to the internet, so technically you could do this if, for example, Google opened it up on your phone, or Siri opened up on their phone, or Amazon opened it up in the Amazon app on your phone, but the thing I think I like about chatbots is that you can get the answers wherever you are. You can be in your room, whatever it is. With a lot of these assistants, I’ve only seen it where there’s maybe one every little bit. They’re not putting them everywhere. I think that if you need an answer, it’s similar to the problem that you have right now, which is where can I find someone? And what ends up happening I think is that the Echo is usually right next door to the info booth, so I’m going to lean towards the info booth immediately. Right?

Brandt Krueger: Right.

Will Curran: That’s obviously the easy thing. Me as like, “I don’t like assistants.”

Will Curran: I think that if we can get to the point where, for example, you can ask on your phone and boom, it’s available all the time. I think that ecosystem makes it better, whereas, chatbot. Boom. You can do it on your phone. You have right then and there. You get the answer you need immediately. You can be sitting also in the middle of the general session texting the answer for when’s lunch coming up, what you’re thinking about-

Brandt Krueger: Right.

Will Curran: Versus set outside, get an answer, “Oh, I missed the whole session.” Blah, blah, blah.

Brandt Krueger: Now, that is one of the things that I like about having the voice assistant on my phone is that I do have the ability to engage it, and then flip over to keyboard mode. I can still add reminders and all that kind of stuff on the Google assistant. Maybe the thing that we’re more against is the idea of the standalone device that’s sitting in the middle of the show floor, that kind of thing, as opposed to the concept in general?

Will Curran: Yeah, I’ll agree with that.

Brandt Krueger: Also, I want to throw out, if I’m wrong, by the way in my understanding of the implementation of these assistants, let me know on Twitter @BrandtKrueger, or send us an email. If you’ve implemented one of these things, and you think we’re flat wrong, it was the most amazing thing since sliced bread, let us know so that we can find out more about it, and enlighten ourselves. If you have implemented one of these-

Will Curran: I agree.

Brandt Krueger: And had a great experience, let us know. You had a terrible experience, let us know so that Will can gloat and tell us all that he was right.

Will Curran: You know that’s what I’m going to love to do, but I also love hearing that I’m wrong. I love realizing that something was wrong. I’m not going to lie. This definitely was supposed to be one of those things where I want to create a little bit of a polarizing opinion because I want to start a conversation. Sometimes if you just come down the middle, and you say, “Yeah, they’re okay. Yeah, they’re not bad. They’re not good.” No one really cares. If you take a side, we’re going to start a conversation.

Brandt Krueger: As always, we come back to the same thing that we talk about so often, is that just having the goals in mind. Having the goals of the event. We talked about my fictitious person that doesn’t have a smartphone that might be more comfortable talking to a smart speaker of some kind. You said you sat there and watched, and you know hardly anybody showed up. Well, granted, my little example is probably a fraction of a percent of your total attendees. You have to decide as the planner, “How much money, and time, and effort do I want to put in to benefit this 1% of my attendees?”

Will Curran: Totally. I say this all too without as much as I know that probably this is costing people a lot of money to be able to do it, to have a company implement it, I also have not seen the official quotes. I don’t know how much the dollar spend is on this. If it is one of those things where it’s extremely, significantly high, just outweigh your options too. I think, don’t get latched onto this idea, “Oh, it would be cool if,” then lockdown that. I think that’s one of the biggest things I’m learning a lot as I talk to people too is that don’t get locked into one single idea. “This is the only way it’s going to happen. This is the only way my event’s going to be a success.” You know, what it is. Always be willing to say, “Okay. We’ll go down this idea of doing this, but what’s the alternative for it?” A) Is there another thing that’s similar to this? B) There’s also the option of not doing it at all. Maybe you’ll be fine without it. Is this really an improving experience?

Will Curran: I think one thing to keep in mind too is that I’ve learned this actually as soon as the last 24 hours is that there was a software that I was so passionate about. I thought it was the coolest thing, and I thought they were the only ones doing i  think when it comes to these crazy ideas that everyone has, be always open to the alternatives, and additional ideas as well. Always keep in mind, yes it’s great to be the leading, bleeding edge, but let’s just say we can all show many examples throughout the entire history of the world where having the latest, greatest technology doesn’t mean that your event, not even that, your life is even going to become better. Right?

Brandt Krueger: Right.

Will Curran: Let’s talk about Beta. Beta versus VCH. VHS. Oh my God, I’m losing my mind. It’s really late here right now.

Brandt Krueger: That’s all right. Exactly. Yeah, it’s one of those things. Do your due diligence, and keep the goals of the event in mind.

Will Curran: I think you’re 100% right, Brandt. All right. I think that we should wrap this up. I think we’ve definitely beaten this one with a digital … Oh my gosh. I can’t talk right. We’ve definitely beat this one up with a virtual assistant, a smart speaker, to death, for sure. Thank you, guys, all for tuning in. If you liked this conversation, we’d love for you to give us a review in your favorite podcasting app. Again, as Brandt said, if you have an opinion and thoughts, or you use this, we want to hear from you. We want to turn this into a conversation. Feel free to leave a comment down below, and let us know how you have seen digital assistants and virtual assistants used for your events.

Will Curran: Again, also leave us a review. We love to hear that as well and know that we’re doing pretty well. We’ve been enjoying this so far a ton. I’m definitely rambling right now. This has been Will Curran from Endless Events, and I’m joined by the lovely, lovely Brandt Krueger from Event Technology Consulting. I think this is going to end episode three.

Brandt Krueger: We’ve been rearranging things, so yeah. We’ll go with three.

Will Curran: I love it. Awesome. Thank you, guys, so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next time on Event Tech Podcast.

Outro:  Thanks again for listening to the Event Tech Podcast. Be sure to rate and review us on your favorite podcasting app. Also, be sure to head to EventTechPodcast.com and leave us a comment about this week’s episode. We’ll see you next week on the Event Tech Podcast.

Resources:

Sciensio

Chatbots, Everything You Need to Know – EventIcons Episode 118

  https://js.hscta.net/cta/current.js hbspt.cta.load(430132, ‘740beca5-6763-439e-b576-de484f15317f’, {});

We want to know what you think leave us your opinion on using voice assistants at events below!

from Endless Events https://helloendless.com/voice-assistants-at-events/

[goodra-king]

Transcript of Learning to Become a Leader

Transcript of Learning to Become a Leader written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr CMS. It’s a modern cloud based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. You can find them at zephyrcms.com, more about this later in the show.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Hawk. He is a keynote speaker, author, advisor, and the host of his own podcast, The Learning Leader Show. We’re going to talk about his new book called Welcome to Management: How to Grow From Top Performer to Excellent Leader. So, Ryan, thanks for joining me!

Ryan Hawk: John, it’s great to have you, and I have to say at the top, before we even get into it… I’m not trying to hijack your show, but you gave me one of the most thoughtful gifts ever, a significant sum of money to Donors Choose, and because of you, I got to sit down with my daughters and choose incredible classrooms to donate that money to because of the very thoughtful gift. And all I did to earn that was just simply be a referral source for a speaking gig. And so, I thought you went…

Ryan Hawk: I still remember, it was probably over a year ago now, but above and beyond, gift-giving wise, and certainly created a cool experience for me with my family. So, I’m very appreciative of that, man.

John Jantsch: Well, and I’ll just take the opportunity to let other people know. You made a tremendous referral to me that was very valuable in terms of revenue and connection, and all that kind of good stuff; you had the trust to do that. But also, it took me five minutes of research to realize that that was going to be a gift that touched your heart because of the things that you’re into, and I think, I’m not patting myself on the back, I’m just saying, a lesson for people trying to create better experiences. It’s so easy to find out what people are into today and personalize things, and shame on us if we don’t do that.

Ryan Hawk: It was a fantastic, fantastic gift. Very thoughtful, so I’m very appreciative and have… The cool thing, too, is it has a ripple effect because not only does it impact the people that we donated the money to, but also it gave me the idea to give that gift to others who have similar values, and so more people have received that gift because I didn’t even think of it as an idea until I received it. So, thank you, man.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I actually like to support that organization, and what I love to do is go find teachers that are requesting specific books that I think are awesome, that maybe…

Ryan Hawk: Oh.

John Jantsch: Like For Whom The Caged Bird Sings or something like that for a classroom, and it kind of lets you support… even though that author’s not alive anymore, it really kind of lets you support the work, as well. I kind of have fun doing that.

Ryan Hawk: I love it, love it.

John Jantsch: All right, we’d better get into this topic here. A lot of times when I have people on my show, it’s like, “Here’s your new book!”, and everybody’s like, that’s the starting point of Ryan Hawk is his new book, right? How did you get here? Give us a little backstory.

Ryan Hawk: How much time do we have, man? No, I think that… My background, John, has been in athletics my whole life. And so, when it comes to leadership, I learned to lead as a quarterback of a football, and the point guard of a basketball team, and I pitched and played shortstop on a baseball team. Was fortunate to earn a scholarship to play in college, I played quarterback in college initially at Miami University; ended up trying extremely hard to be the starting quarterback but getting narrowly beat out… I say narrowly, but it probably wasn’t, beat out by another pretty good quarterback named Ben Roethlisberger, who later went on to, or is still doing it now, Superbowl MVP two-time winner with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Ryan Hawk: And so, I transferred and finished my collegiate playing career at Ohio University, graduated and then played in the arena football league professionally for a few years, before then making my way into the profession of selling, and I worked with a great go called Lexus Nexus with fantastic training, and I learned and grew and was able to then do well enough to get the opportunity to get promoted into a management role, then a director role and then ultimately, I was a vice president of North American sales for that company before I elected to leave. And the reason I left is midway through my career there, I had earned my MBA, I was considering going back to school again because our company gave us tuition reimbursement…

Ryan Hawk: And as I was looking at another graduate degree, I was very fortunate to have a dinner set up with a guy by the name of Todd Wagner. Todd Wagner is Mark Cuban’s business partner, and Todd, I got to dinner a little early and so did Todd, and we sat down one-on-one before anyone else got there, and I was peppering him with all of these questions about building broadcast.com, which is what he built with his business partner, Mark Cuban, until the final moment where he’s sitting across from the leaders at Yahoo!, and this is back when Yahoo! was like Google is now. Sitting across the leaders from Yahoo!, and he says, “Look, you’re going to either buy us or you’re going to have to compete with us. You decide,” and they walked away with 5.7 billion dollars.

Ryan Hawk: And I was just blown away by the intricacies of his story, and deconstruction of success and excellence; I was fascinated by it, and I thought, “I would much rather go directly to the sources of that knowledge, people who live the lives of that, as opposed to going back to school.” And so, I elected to create my own school, and that school now became known as The Learning Leader Show, which is my podcast. And now, five years later, 350 episodes, amazing opportunities come to you when you follow your curiosity and obsessions with great rigor. And I think that’s a big part of my story, that that’s where books come from, and keynote speaking, and I was able to leave corporate America two years ago, more than two years ago now, to do this full-time podcast, speak, consult, write books.

Ryan Hawk: And it’s pretty cool. It’s a pretty cool opportunity that I feel very fortunate to get to live in this manner.

John Jantsch: So, let’s talk specifically about the new book. The title, and even subtitle, suggests that this is for somebody for whom a management role might be new, or that might be an aspiration. Would that be an accurate statement?

Ryan Hawk: It is, John. I’ll tell you the reason I wrote it, and the title actually came… I would imagine it’s probably a mutual friend of ours, I had a number of early readers who were podcast guests of mine, and one of them was Liz Weissman, the author of Rookie Smarts and Multipliers, two incredible books, and she runs a fascinating, really helpful company out west. And Liz… because it was going to be, like, The Learning Leader, or Learn to Lead, or along those lines, and Liz says, “The title of this book is Welcome to Management, and here’s why,” and we walked through it.

Ryan Hawk: And the reason is the focus of the book is the time in my career when I went from individual contributor to manager for the first time. The purpose of the book is to help people who are going through that, or who will be going through that, to make far fewer mistakes than I did. And so, it’s a combination of stories and science from my life as well as the lives of the people I’ve been fortunate enough to interview for my show, and I combined all of that together, and fortunately, when I wrote the proposal, the great people at McGraw-Hill decided they wanted to buy it and publish it. So, that’s where we’re at now.

John Jantsch: So, I’ll stick with, because of your background in sports, I’ll stick with a pretty common sports analogy. The managers of particularly baseball teams are rarely the star center-fielder shortstop. They’re always the catcher.

Ryan Hawk: Right. Or the backup quarterback, yeah.

John Jantsch: Or the backup quarterback, right, yeah. So, is there a message in that?

Ryan Hawk: Well, actually, I would say… and that’s a great point. I would say the great ones seem to have that makeup, John, of the catcher or the backup quarterback, right? Because they had to grind so hard just to survive that they needed to understand the game at a deep level, and because of that, they were able to teach it to other people, whereas the star player, it’s a little bit more, in some cases, natural or intuitive, and they’re not as good at explaining it. I’ve had math teachers like that, that they were gifted and intelligent when it comes to doing the math problem, but they couldn’t explain it very well.

Ryan Hawk: What the issue is in my profession I grew up in and in the profession of selling is, typically when there’s a management opening, the leadership teams look at the top of the sales stack rankings and they say, “Those top three or four people, we’re going to interview them for the job,” and then just hire one of those people. And that’s exactly how I got the job.

Ryan Hawk: And unfortunately, what it takes to be great at a role of leading and serving other people has almost nothing to do of what it takes to be great as an individual contributor in the role. There’s a little bit, but not much. And so, that’s why I wrote about the mistakes and the learnings that I made myself in that role, that I just wasn’t prepared, I didn’t have a clue of what it took to lead a team of people when it came to the business world, and I had a lot to learn.

Ryan Hawk: And so, my hope is that people can read this work that I’ve put a lot of effort into, and not make the same mistakes that I made. They can learn from the mistakes of other people, and I think we call that wisdom. That’s my hope is what happens with this book.

John Jantsch: Well, I think I know how you’re going to answer this, but a lot of people would suggest that leaders are kind of born, that there’s certain makeup, certain mentality, certain level of patience, that not everybody has. But I’m guessing you are going to suggest that, while there may be people that are more suited naturally, anybody can learn this.

Ryan Hawk: What do you think? Not like, what do you think I think? I’m curious, what do you think?

John Jantsch: I think anybody can learn anything they’re willing to learn.

Ryan Hawk: Including leadership?

John Jantsch: Well, I think there are experiences in leadership that probably teach you a lot of things, but I think your own sort of self-evaluation and awareness is what you’ve got to learn first.

Ryan Hawk: Yeah. I think, much like many areas of life, the answer is not black and white. I mean, the world in general, I don’t love the thought of having to pick one or the other in anything. In anything, including politics. I just don’t identify that way.

Ryan Hawk: And I think when it comes to leadership, certainly there are inborn, innate traits you’re born that could help you, but when it comes to, do we all have the capacity or the ability to learn and grow and improve, and lead in our way within our personality? Absolutely!

Ryan Hawk: I’ve been fortunate to speak with people on all ranges of personality traits and assessments that you could go through, on all of them ranging from one end to the other end, and yet, they’ve all had that one thing in common is, they have found a way to sustain excellence. So, yes, I certainly believe it is a learned skill if you desire and if you want to do it.

Ryan Hawk: But, yeah, there may be bits and pieces, when it comes to I think there are some people who have… Like Jocko Willink told me, he’s like, “Well, you didn’t get to choose to have the voice, literally the sound of your voice…” Sometimes in the military, in his case, as a Navy SEAL, that is helpful. That’s not everything; that doesn’t make you a leader. But it is helpful to have a voice like Jocko’s to lead as Navy SEALs.

Ryan Hawk: So, there are little things that certainly can help you, or that make it harder for you, but for the most part, yes, it’s a learned skill.

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John Jantsch: Let’s talk about, a lot of people, especially since you are suggesting Welcome to Management, a lot of people, their only guide has been how they’ve been managed.

Ryan Hawk: Yeah.

John Jantsch: So, do you find that sometimes that there’s sort of a need to un-learn?

Ryan Hawk: Well, when I was a rep and a new manager, I had a great mentor, and he was a senior VP of our group; his name’s Rex Caswell, and Rex said, “I want you to keep a notebook. On the left side, write all the great things that your manager does that helps you, that inspires you, that makes you perform on a high level. And on the other side, write all the bad things. Because someday, you’re going to become a manager, and I want you to not do the bad things, and only do the good things.”

Ryan Hawk: And as you can imagine, I still… growing up in that age, I didn’t have any terrible bosses, but that right side was still far bigger than the left side. And so, I think the problem, even something like an example of how you run a meeting, or how meetings are done, there’s a lot of bad things out there about meetings. You just follow what your manager does, for the most part, because you don’t know any different. You don’t know any better. And that happens in across all aspects of management, and leadership is… especially if you’re like me, you don’t really have any other experiences so you just follow what the person before you did.

Ryan Hawk: And unfortunately, that can be bad. And that is why it’s so impactful and why I chose to focus on this specific area for my first book, is because you have so much… and I mean this in a good way, but you have so much power, and I want people to use that power and influence for good because if you do all of these, if you understand how to do all of this part of the job well, think of the impact you’re going to have on people because the people that report to you, they’re going to follow you. They’re going to act like you act, and so, you are creating more leaders, more managers in the world, as a good one, so let’s use that power and influence for good. And that’s my hope with this.

John Jantsch: Do you think, even over the last few years, cultural changes… companies seem to be not quite as hierarchal, generational changes… Have those things, those dynamics, brought kind of new attention to this type of manager as a top performer, perhaps, or as a leader? And again, I suspect every generation says the same thing. “Oh,” you know, “This next generation coming up has to be managed differently.” Is that just the human condition, or are we living in a time where the change is more dramatic?

Ryan Hawk: I think there is a lot more awareness and knowledge when it comes to this. There’s so much written about all of this, so I do think there is more out there about it. The problem…

Ryan Hawk: So, I did some informal research as I was writing this book, John, and I spoke with… I work with leadership teams in companies of all shapes and sizes, from the Salesforce.coms to small businesses here in Ohio where I live, and all over the world. And the one question I asked anyone who was in a leadership role was, “Tell me exactly and specifically the process of your training when you got your first promotion. What was it? What did you do? Remind me.”

Ryan Hawk: And I was blown away because the overwhelming majority, and these are even some that are at world-class companies that you read about, the overwhelming majority was extremely underwhelming, meaning there may have been a half-day boot camp, or a binder, or like, “Hey, go to this virtual meeting.” And some actually had nothing. So, that tells me…

Ryan Hawk: And some of these were years ago, so I would imagine some of these companies have gotten better, but for the most part, I was amazed at the lack of training and preparation for people as they make what I think is the biggest leap in their career.

John Jantsch: You, and hopefully I’ve set this up enough, I mean, you present a framework for how to do this. Is there a way for you to briefly describe to people what a framework for being an excellent leader looks like?

Ryan Hawk: Well, one of the frameworks I think, when it comes to behaviors on a daily basis, that I illustrate and I think that I’ve built for myself based on learning from so many other incredible leaders on my show, one is just to have a mindset of, “How am I going to behave on a daily basis?”

Ryan Hawk: So, for me, and I call this… what Charlie Munger might say, of how you build your learning machine. It’s really four parts. The four parts every day when it comes to, I think good, good leadership, as far as how you disperse information. So, starting with…

Ryan Hawk: I think we all need to be consumers on a regular basis. You need to create an intake engine of information, of knowledge. So, read books, listen to podcasts, watch TED Talks, have one-on-one conversations with mentors. Do that on a regular basis.

Ryan Hawk: Two, you can’t just be a learner. You also need to be a doer. Experiment. Put some of your learnings into action, actually put them into play, see what happens. Have an experimental mindset. Third, we must take time to step back and reflect on what we’re learning and what we’re experimenting, what we’re doing. Whether it’s, for example, a new way to do a one-on-one with a person, or a new way to run a meeting, right? Let’s take time to reflect and analyze on how we’ve done, why it worked, why it didn’t, and what we’re going to do moving forward.

Ryan Hawk: And then fourth, the best leaders that I’ve found in my life were fantastic teachers, and the reason why teachers I think develop so much knowledge and wisdom is because the process of preparing to teach somebody is the essence of learning. What you’re forced to get… just like you know; you’ve written six books, right? When you’re forced to write it down with the thought of teaching it or sharing it with somebody else, that’s when all of the learning happens. So, I think regularly putting yourself in positions to be a teacher, whether it’s in written form or speaking or both, is really helpful. When you see these incredibly smart professors or keynote speakers who’ve been doing it for a while, they really know their stuff. Why? Because they’ve regularly got clarity of thought.

Ryan Hawk: They’ve regularly sat down to think about, “What do I think? What do I believe? I have to add value to the lives of the people I’m getting ready to teach. I need to know my stuff!” Right? And so, that takes a lot of time and effort to put that together, and I think that four-part process, for me, has been extremely helpful as I’ve implemented it over the years.

John Jantsch: Do you have a personal kind of… whether it’s morning or evening, routine to kind of get your head right, and before you go out there and do whatever it is you’re going to do? Do you have kind of a practice or ritual?

Ryan Hawk: I have to be a morning guy. I know morning routines are spoken about far too much now, but I think for me, that is a big deal because… married, we’re raising five daughters; I need time to myself to prepare for the day, and so that usually happens before everybody wakes up. So, I am a big morning routine guy when it comes to writing, reading, getting my mind going, stretching my body, moving my body. A big morning workout guy. It gets me in the mode to do work, to create the stuff that I create, or to prepare for a podcast or a speech.

Ryan Hawk: So, I do a lot of that hard work early in the morning before my family wakes up, and then to get them off to school, and then it’s time to get to work for that day. So, as trite as it sounds and as overused as this is nowadays, for me, though, that’s a big deal. And so, I have created a ritual around what I do first thing when I wake up, and it’s been very helpful for me in order to get the rest of the day going.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I actually… kind of the same thing. When my kids were small, I started that ritual, and I’ve just never given it up.

Ryan Hawk: Really?

John Jantsch: Now, they’re off grown, and…

Ryan Hawk: What do you do?

John Jantsch: Well, I get up about five o’clock, and meditation’s one of the first things I do, and then I read, and then I journal, and I exercise just about every day.

Ryan Hawk: Wow! Do you use a guided meditation app, or…

John Jantsch: I’ve been a big fan of Deepak Chopra for a long time, and he does have a guided meditation app that has… something new shows up in it every single day.

Ryan Hawk: Wow! Nice! Nice.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I don’t want to turn this into a commercial for me, but my most current book, recent book, is actually a daily meditation guide, so to speak, almost. But written in the context of entrepreneurs. So, I kind of wrote the book that I wanted to have with me every morning.

Ryan Hawk: Love it! I love it, man. Yeah, that’s good stuff.

John Jantsch: One last question I want to… Culture’s a really hot kind of almost buzzword these days in business. A lot of what you are writing about seems to really be the essence of culture in an organization, isn’t it?

Ryan Hawk: It is. I think there are really two different types of cultures. There are more, but I’ll talk about two of them. And I’ve worked in both. And the saying that I really believe in is that compliance can be commanded, commitment cannot.

Ryan Hawk: And I want to work with leaders, I want to help leaders build committed organizations, committed teams. And so, that takes the leader acting in a manner in which somebody wants to follow, right? We all can picture right now, if you pause for a second and think about that boss or coach or leader that you were so committed to, you loved following that person; he or she was fantastic at helping you see kind of the vision, and helping you add your part in order to achieve whatever that mission or goal is.

Ryan Hawk: And so, for me I think that’s why my book starts with leading yourself, and that’s the first section because you can’t really build a committed organization, a committed culture until you take the time to lead yourself first, and then you can build that and continuously lead it. So, really, it’s packed full of kind of the actions, the thoughts, the behaviors, the commonalities among leaders who have built sustainable, excellent businesses, cultures, teams to say, “Okay, let me learn from them to say, what could I, again, test, implement into my world to see what works best for me.”

Ryan Hawk: That’s the whole purpose of doing it. And then, obviously, it gets tactical as well because there are some tactical aspects of the job that I just wasn’t aware of when I got promoted, that I’m hopeful to help with, too.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I’m sure you’ve interviewed a lot of folks on your show, and probably a resounding message comes out that it has to be intentional, that you have to practice it, that you have to keep it top-of-mind because it’s really easy to slip into bad habits. And so, good leadership habits are something you practice, aren’t they?

Ryan Hawk: 100%, yeah. I mean, it’s really… We have a phrase, “You’ve never arrived. You’re always becoming.” It’s just an iterative process that is always taking place, and I think the people who really… the comparison game is really just comparing yourself versus your previous self, and that’s hard, but I think a very valuable way to view leadership, to view life in general, is to be in a constant comparison with your previous self to say, “Am I getting better? Am I growing?” And that’s been a big, big mindset shift for me that’s been helpful.

John Jantsch: So, I’m visiting with Ryan Hawk, author of Welcome to Management. Depending upon when you’re listening to this, the book is available January 28th. You want to tell people where they can find out more about you, Ryan, and your work?

Ryan Hawk: Absolutely! If you’re listening on your phone and you don’t want to go to a mobile website, you can text the word “learners”, L-E-A-R-N-E-R-S, “learners” to 44222. So, text “learners” at 44222, or if you want to see just about everything that I do, you can just go to LearningLeader.com and all of my podcasts, books, everything I do is at LearningLeader.com.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Ryan, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully next time I’m in Ohio, we can connect up in real life.

Ryan Hawk: I’d love it, man! Thank you so much, John.

from http://bit.ly/2ujLM6n

[kinetic-elaboration]

October 24: Conference 1

First day of the conference done. I’m so tired, and even though I’m glad I’m in my own apartment tonight instead of in a hotel, I still kinda can’t stand the thought of getting up again tomorrow and doing the whole thing again.

We were a little late getting in, but still had more than enough time to pick up our registration stuff before the opening speaker. Opening remarks and the key note took up the whole morning, and then we had time for lunch (at a diner-type-place in the hotel) before the afternoon sessions. There were four total, but between the third and fourth was time to look at posters (= science fair for adults, library themed) and the exhibition hall (much, much smaller than ala but still Too Much for me lol), and after that, we were both so tired, and so uninterested in the specifics of the session four offerings, that we decided to head back. Also the sessions were already starting and if we attended them and left after, we’d get stuck in the Dreaded Tunnel Traffic, allegedly.

I had a good time but it was a bit overwhelming. Or, rather, it feels overwhelming in retrospect. I felt like the sessions were really practical, and yet also not really for me or my library. Like, even if the topic was interesting, the lens was more ‘here are the realities of how this works/how to do this’ rather than theoretical or broad, which makes sense, but made it less interesting and less understandable for me.

The first session I went to was one I actually thought would be really useful to me but it ended up being focused on managerial issues and worrying about supervising people is actually the opposite of where I am in my career so... oh well lol. The second was my personal favorite, about digitization projects, although again it was so in the weeds that I found it a bit hard to follow, and sometimes they’d mention something that sounded really cool, but not really pursue it. Then I went to a Cataloguing/TS forum that definitely broadened my mind and got me out of my law-library bubble but was also, by the same token, hard to follow because I really don”t know much about public libraries at all. I didn’t tend to know what the products/services/tools they were referencing were. So I had to follow this conversation that basically didn’t have nouns in it because all the nouns were just nonsense to me.

So, an experience. The keynote, on diversity in books, was actually probably my favorite part.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a bit shorter/easier... There are two sessions, lunch, and two more sessions, ending at 3:15, and I don’t think there’s anything after that that applies to me particularly... at least I hope I’m right about this. I wouldn’t mind getting home at 4:30 or so tbqh. I’ve really been burning the candle at both ends this week and I’ve gotten a lot farther than I thought I would be able to with this behavior but it’s definitely catching up to me.

[philipfloyd]

Seasonal or Evergreen Content | Does Topical Content Bring More Traffic Than Evergreen Content?

Content is the weapon of SEO. And SEOs like to use a twofold weapon, one that would win them the fight both on short-term and long-term. They call it seasonal (or topical) content and evergreen content. And, as always, there’s a debate between them: evergreen content vs topical content. Which one is better?

  The thing is, is it a matter of “and” or “or”? Do topical content and evergreen content go hand in hand, or go separate ways?  This debate is not only applicable to content marketing but to social media marketing as well, as both share the same types of content.

  Nearly everybody tilts the scale in favor of evergreen content arguing this is the bee’s knees. But where does seasonal content stand in this? To what extent can holiday articles, Google updates, or top lists for a particular year really help and trigger ROI?

    Seasonal or Topical Content

The Long Seasonal Content Story Short

Seasonal Content Benefits

Seasonal Content Downsides

How to Craft Seasonal Content

Evergreen or Timeless Content

The Long Evergreen Content Story Short

Evergreen Content Benefits

Evergreen Content Pitfalls

How to Craft Evergreen Content

What’s the Ideal Mix?

In Conclusion, Is It “Vs.” or “And”?

  Each has their fair share of advantages and disadvantages. That’s where managing the right content strategy is an act of balance, like gymnastics, ballet, or figure skating. David Harry from SEO Training Dojo said in a cognitiveSEO talk that “Content strategies everything” and that is why you should know how to wield it in order to gain and not lose from it.

    Although everybody tries to solve the crossword puzzle and find out which one has a stronger impact in the SEO blogosphere and on which one they should focus their efforts on, we’re all somehow chasing our own tails.

We shouldn’t be picking a single content type. Topical content and evergreen content actually intertwine. They need each other (more on this later). 

This evergreen content vs topical content debate is similar to the one regarding passion vs love. The latter is everlasting and stronger, while the other is quite ephemeral, although fiery. Often times, you don’t even need to choose: you can have the best of both worlds.

  However, you have to always think in the long run –what’s in it for you, is it worth deploying to earn money from this, is it relevant over a long period of time? But let’s discuss this over a cup of evidence and pros and cons listing. Then, you should be able to take a decision. 

    Seasonal or Topical Content

  The Long Seasonal Content Story Short

  Seasonal content also goes under the name of topical content.

A usual seasonal content definition would say it refers to content that is related to what’s trending, catering to the industry dynamics.

It usually delivers updated, relevant, and targeted information to an audience that is already well versed and familiar with the topic you’re writing on. Topical content is relevant during certain times of the year only and is usually pretty hip and niche disruptive.

    Topical content posts are very common in industries that are constantly changing, such as tech and fashion, or to brands that usually have this kind of activity – news outlets, bet houses, and finance. Topical content titles go like this: The best country to spend your summer holiday in 2016, Winners and Losers of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Robinhood App is Available in Another Two US States, so on and so forth.

  Seasonal content is divided into 2 categories:

time-based (certain seasons such as winter and summer, but also years as the cycle repeats every year) 

event-based (Christmas, Easter, Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, Concerts and even Movies, although they end up becoming evergreen but lose traffic over time).

  Some would add a third category, known as “true” topical content which, theoretically, is visited each recurring season or event relevant for that particular content (holidays, events, sales etc). However, seasonal content marketing is said to also include another category known as holiday-based seasonal content. But I personally think this is redundant, as this is already covered by event-based topical content.

  A more reasonable use of the term topical content can also exclude seasonality. For example, a single time event such as an important politician making an outrageous statement can still be topical content, but isn’t necessarily seasonal. Same goes with shows such as “Got Talent” or “The Voice”. They are seasonal, but each have their own particular topic (artists names or different jury members).

  Seasonal Content Benefits

  Everybody says evergreen content weighs heavier from an SEO point of view. Yet, why does seasonal content still matter so much?

  Should we analyze each blog, we’ll most likely discover both topical and evergreen content. And often times, seasonal content has a fair share in the blog post ratio. For example, here on our search engine optimization blog we write both evergreen content (general SEO questions) and seasonal / topical content (questions about SEO Google Trends, Google Updates, Tweets of  Google officials, etc.).

  Trendy, fresh, breaking new content is way catchier than general truths or case studies are.

News and fads get more attention.

When you’re publishing a piece of news, you will generally trigger an audience’s interest more than when you’re publishing on a topic they’ve seen countless times already.

  One plus topical content has is that it can be transformed into evergreen content at almost any time. For instance, a How Did the SEO Landscape Influence Your Rankings in 2017 article could easily be updated to fit the year 2018. 

  Here are some top benefits you can get out of your seasonal content: 

  Seasonal Content Benefit #1 Writing seasonal content can greatly benefit your brand image. It sends the message that you care about the latest trends in the industry and like to be up-to-date. It shows interest in novelty and advanced information. This is how your audience starts trusting you and also becomes a client. Topical content shows that you want to stay relevant in your niche and you put your audience first. You care about what’s needed right at that moment. Topical content can easily satisfy readers’ needs and interests. By constantly providing fresh and up-to-date content, you are pushing forward the image of a trendy funky brand.

  Seasonal content means that you care about the needs of the consumer in regard to various occasions and times of the year.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #2 What’s more, it can be relevant more than once, if the subject is trendy again. As previously mentioned, there’s a content subcategory which goes under the name of “true seasonal” and refers to content which can get back under the public eye. These posts can be revived on various holidays or sales occasions.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #3 Another strong advantage is that topical content is good for selling things. People look for seasonal content to purchase stuff. This kind of content serves the user intent better and provides instant gratification.  Whenever you craft and post a topical content piece, you help your well-versed audience make a better decision from a marketing and purchasing point of view.

  People look for seasonal content with the intent to buy.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #4 Moreover, topical content is very important when it comes to growing an audience. It helps you when building brand reputation and brand recognition. It creates buzz around your brand, although followers might lose interest at some point in time. Instagram is a great place to do that and get instant gratification, as well as Twitter. Topical content is top notch for instant success, word-of-mouth, gratification, and conversion. The down part is that followers can eventually bounce off once they stuffed their bellies with the info they were interested in, and never visit you again. 

  Seasonal content allows you to put your brand in the race.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #5 Seasonal content usually triggers mobile-optimized strategies to help audiences land on and stay on your page longer. Seasonal content seeks to be concise yet comprehensive, all of that to satisfy their audiences with info delivered on the spot. This kind of straightforwardness needs the right user experience and interface. And that’s where mobile-friendly versions became the cool kids on the block.

  In the seasonal content marketing realm, competition is far less to worry about. And this is because almost every business opts for evergreen-only content strategies. 

  Seasonal topics allow for fresh content creation with limited competition but a long enough lifespan to make a rate of return on the content creation cost.  Lukasz zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

  Fireproof your content by creating topical content and FOMO, which is fear of missing out. Dictionaries say that it talks about FOMO as being an “anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media”. 

  Seasonal Content Benefit #6 Last but not least, seasonal content usually gets a great deal of traffic. But who doesn’t know that? Most probably, that’s the only reason people would rather deploy such content piece out on the blog. Sure the burst lasts only a while, but it’s big.

  If you time it right you can also get a lot of backlinks to these types of posts. For example, we all hate spoilers but they sure do get shared a lot on the web. Movie fan theories, news about actors or future plans for series always get a great deal of attention on the web. You can then use an internal linking strategy to boost your other articles which get less links and you won’t have to rely on link building techniques to get your off page SEO done.

    Seasonal Content Downsides

  Although topical content has a great wealth of advantages to be deployed as a content technique, it also comes with a good share of disadvantages. And the sooner we accept and own it, the sooner we would spare ourselves of disappointment.

  Seasonal Content Downside #1 Unfortunately, unlike evergreen content, topical content has an expiry date. It doesn’t sustain the same stream of traffic and social applause like on its first day after being published, and this goes over a long period of time. It creates short-term engagement, however grand and satisfying the engagement was first. And this is because topical content isn’t relevant all the time. It is a quick-decay content and has a limited lifespan of usefulness and relevancy. 

  In the end, topical content doesn’t deliver sustainable results.

  Seasonal Content Downside #2 What’s more, topical content kind of splits audiences and targets only those with advanced knowledge on the topic. It can register a massive hype, yet this is coming only from the well-versed ones, bearing no meaning to the rest of the readers.

  Seasonal Content Downside #3 Moreover, to new the users who want to enter the group, seasonal content can seem a little complicated and hard to digest, given the great amount of novelty and jargon. 

  Seasonal Content Downside #4 People can lose their interest little by little, either because of the aforementioned reason or because something else has already caught their attention. You just need to remember the news featuring who won the US presidency which was met with massive engagement, but shortly after they lost popularity as something of greater freshness and relevancy caught their attention, such as new laws proposed and adopted by those in power. 

  Focusing on topical content means you have to work your fingers to the bone to stay continually relevant and updated. You have to do your research day by day and never lose sight of what’s important in the industry, and hopefully be the first to release the news. Take the example of crypto news, where there’s so much fluctuation, speculation and breaking news relating either the rise of a particular coin or people who nailed it at mining, owning, or stealing digital coins. Such was the case, for example, for the massive news regarding the hugest bitcoin heist that took place lately. Other news on different topics took its thunder shortly after.

    Another, say, disadvantage seasonal content bears is that although it brings something unique, the event happens just once in a while and has relatively too less of an authority over its audience. Furthermore, it needs a certain kind of audience for its content, and some might very well bounce off the page or spend very little time on the page due to their lack of advanced knowledge of the topic. Sometimes, readers are just curious people who drop out reading sooner than you realize.

  How to Craft Seasonal Content

  There are some common sense rules when it comes to crafting seasonal content. Make sure you follow them if you don’t want to waste time!

  Firstly, to create successful seasonal content, focus on always making it useful and relevant – don’t write something if you only want to enlist in the seasonal post bandwagon. In addition, do keyword research very carefully. 

  Did you know?

In order to nail a seasonable content piece, you need seasonable keywords. These keywords can be regular keywords + the current year, but they can also be keywords related to recent events, such as concerts or movies. These only will bring you the targeted seasonable traffic. This is what you need and you win should it rank well in SERPs.

The Keyword Tool & Content Assistant can help you with both keyword research and content writing, according to the type of content you are interested in ranking for. 

  Secondly, be prepared beforehand and do an editorial calendar with events and seasons you want to cover and get your content ready. Seasonal and even topical content can be prepared ahead of time, if you have some details about the event that’s going to happen.

  If you know a movie is going live in a couple of weeks, you can prepare your topics, but you can also write about it upfront as people will be searching for it. Is it a series? Then you can also mention past events.

  Thirdly, let your team know the impact indexation has on your content marketing strategy when setting up the topical content calendar. One of the main reasons would be that most people do their research on seasonal content (be it time-based or event-based) months before the actual time. What’s more, you need time for your article to be indexed in between the time you make it live on your platform and the time of user search.

  So make sure that you start creating your seasonal content a little early, before users start searching for it and also leave a buffer period for it to properly get indexed.

  source: seosmarty.com

  As you can see above in Google Trends, interest for Christmas related queries begins somewhere in October, around two months before the actual event. You could be driving a lot of organic traffic all this time and you can also benefit from some social media marketing. But for that, you’ll need the content upfront.

  That’s why having an editorial calendar will be very useful. You’ll know exactly when the content should be written, published and promoted.

    Evergreen or Timeless Content

  The Long Evergreen Content Story Short

  Evergreen content is content that passes the test of time and remains relevant at all times. It usually develops a greater audience and traffic along time, but its growth is secure, constant, and sustainable. Evergreen rarely to never has traffic spikes, and although you don’t necessarily see results overnight, in the long run, you’ll benefit from constantly getting visits and backlinks.

  Evergreen content is a love story shared by two: the content provider and the reader. They will always need and stick to each other.

  Evergreen content is essentially made to educate audiences. It never gets out of style because people will always need this kind of content. Case studies, statistics, walkthroughs, product reviews, how-to guides, beginner’s guides, lists, top industry tips, best practices, checklists, tutorials, podcasts, common problem solutions, failure and success story, pros and cons article, all these are instances of evergreen content. 

  You can easily spot evergreen content ideas when bumping into titles like How to Tie a Bow, Cookies and Cream Fudge Brownies Recipe, 8 Steps to Kick Off an Ultra-Powerful Link Building Campaign, How to Book and Pay for a Room With Bitcoin.

  Whenever crafting evergreen content, pay attention to providing unique and relevant informational data. Make your content engaging, as readers could easily lose patience given that most evergreen content posts are quite long. Make clarity one of your guiding lights, as you wouldn’t want your audience to bounce off your page for finding your text exhaustive. In addition, always seek to write on topics of interest. Try to bring something new and authentic in your piece of evergreen content, as nobody likes to bump into the same thing everywhere. Although they might need the same thing over and over again, they’re expecting different or at least new results and insights.

  If you can provide a quality answer to a timeless question, there will always be value in that answer. Lukasz Zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

    Evergreen Content Benefits

  Evergreen Content Benefit #1 The number one plus evergreen content has is that it is timeless. Evergreen is a wealth of constant leads, traffic, shares, and social sentiment. Traffic to evergreen content will stay the same, meaning it will increase slowly but steadily, with slight differences, with the chance of rising even more and improving in accordance with the course of the website authority. 

    Even though evergreen content asks for more time and effort, given the nature of the posts (how-tos, case studies etc, all requiring strong research), they ensure continuous traffic on your content. At the same time, evergreen content is less demanding to produce, than seasonal is (and we’re not talking data and stats here). There’s no rush to find the news, no secondary resource problems.

  Evergreen Content Benefit #2 Another pro would be that timeless content builds brand trust in the long run, especially when researched properly. Readers will bookmark you as a source for quality, in-depth info when writing evergreen content, knowing that they will always find their answers on your website. Moreover, evergreen is proved to cater to the needs and interests of both new and old readers. 

  Social media profiles and blogs will carry on growing thanks to evergreen content. steve Conway Inbound Marketing Expert at ConvergeHub

  Evergreen Content Benefit #3 Evergreen content stays relevant all year round, and it doesn’t matter the time you post it. This means it can be shared any time of the year. It is everlasting, should the website stay fresh and never get closed by the admin. In other words, evergreen content is timeless, anti-aging. It is content that creates long-term engagement. This type is content that doesn’t depend on the whims of seasonal events and topic, hence how to do a braid will always be in vogue. Evergreen content never expires.

  Worthy to mention is that evergreen content also makes great use of topical content, by literally being relevant regardless of the season. It can be updated: lists, tops, case studies, or how-tos like the one available in the below screenshot. However, evergreen content rarely needs minor periodic updates to keep its usefulness. Evergreen content is not time-sensitive, and can easily be refreshed so as to keep its relevance over time, if needed. And search engines encourage webmasters to update old articles with fresh content as this would help in boosting your overall rankings. Quick tip: use the “compare and contrast” update technique, which means when you refresh some old seasonal content, make the update seem legit and relevant. Make it bring something new to the ideas expressed in the article.

    Evergreen Content Benefit #4 What other pro arguments in favor of evergreen content might be, you might wonder? Well, evergreen provides your website with greater authority thanks to the continuous diverse traffic flow. And this is because evergreen content is always trendy. It can gather backlinks much easier over time, while topical content is facing a rather difficult time at this. Evergreen content isn’t serving just the page well, but also the entire website.

  Evergreen Content Benefit #5 Last but not least, it is said that in terms of per-piece value, evergreen content is superior, empirically speaking. It ranks every week and every day compared to seasonal. Evergreen content is always trendy and in season, but the vice-versa is not (seasonal being evergreen). We can even say that whenever an evergreen piece of content is published, it officially starts its open season of continuous traffic and engagement.

  If wondering how to make and repurpose evergreen content to get as many results as possible, check CoSchedule’s case with evergreen content.

  source: www.coschedule.com

  Evergreen Content Pitfalls

  Compared to seasonal content, evergreen posts have way fewer disadvantages. And this is because evergreen content is more stable, and it pays off eventually along the time.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #1 One con argument is that evergreen content can somehow tell the obvious and basic stuff. The information can reach a point where it becomes somehow worthless because there are too many sites that already provide that specific information.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #2 Another pitfall is that there’s too big of a competition on evergreen content, therefore you’ll face harder times at getting noticed and ranked high in Google SERPS.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #3 Not to forget that evergreen content also requires a great deal of research, when done well and quality is a rule of thumb. It is indeed more comfortable to write a timeless piece of content than a topical one, as you don’t have to rush to the first news provider, but it needs valuable resources such as time, in-depth research, and the spark of originality in order to bring something new to an already crowded and saturated content industry.

  How to Craft Evergreen Content

  Evergreen content might be a little bit harder to create. Compared to seasonal content, where time and sync are of the essence, with evergreen content quality is of the essence.

  The first step in creating successful evergreen content is to choose the topic and keywords well. Some pieces of content are more evergreen than others. For example, an article optimized for the keyword “SEO Guide” will last as long as search engine optimization itself exists. However, an article an a particular ranking factor might not last as much, as we all know that in our industry, things change very often. Articles on ��meta keywords”, for example, are not so popular anymore, as this isn’t considered a ranking factor anymore.

  Perform keyword research and select queries that have a decent search volume. Those are the best evergreen content ideas You can always try to optimize a piece of content for multiple keywords. You can also use the topic clusters & hubs strategy, where you have big general topics surrounded and supported by other relevant topics.

    The second step is to make sure you answer every question about that topic. Don’t be fooled about competition. Sure, competition can sometimes be though, but there’s always a gap, be it in information, design, trust or tone of voice. A surefire way to make your digital content last is to try and answer all the frequently asked questions about your topic. If you don’t answer the users’ questions, they will leave and look for it somewhere else.

  Structure in this case is very important. Users don’t really read an article from top to bottom, but rather skim through it. In order to keep them reading, you need to let them know upfront that their question will be answered.

  For example, this article is optimized for both “evergreen content” and “seasonal content”. However, we’re answering multiple questions:

  What is seasonal content? What is evergreen content? How to create seasonal content? How to create evergreen content? We also added the benefits and downfalls of each, so that users know what lies ahead.

  Structuring it properly allows us to have the article navigation menu at the top. This means that the users will know if the answer to their question is there or not.

    The third step is to update your evergreen content regularly, to keep it relevant. You might notice that the image above differs from the current article navigation menu at the top of the article. That’s because this article was updated with some fresh information, to keep it relevant.

  Unlike seasonal content, where each update is a separate event that must be published under its own entity, evergreen content stays relevant by getting updated. For example, if you write an article on “how to get your car registered”, you might have to regularly update it depending on how the laws change, in order to keep it relevant. There’s no point in writing new articles for each change in the law, as users will have a hard time following that on your website.

  So make sure you regularly update your content if you want it to last.

  What’s the Ideal Mix?

  And now we remain with the ultimate question: what type of content is more relevant to your business? Or, if willing to use both, what mix is more suitable for you?

  Web content can be compared to perishing flowers, seasonal plants, and evergreen trees. lukasz zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

  So which content flora will populate your website the most? Many content marketers rush into dismissing topical content for all the abovementioned disadvantages.

However, if we are to look at the pros and cons ratio only, although topical content has more cons than evergreen does, it is still richer in benefits (we’re talking numbers here).

Maybe it’s because evergreen content is too mainstream already.

  Both content types can trigger organic activity to your website, that’s sure thing.

They both join powers to bring the best results to your content marketing strategy: evergreen content can suit all kinds of readers, at all times, while seasonal content suits only those well versed in that specific topic or industry, the ones who want to be kept up-to-date with advanced, upgraded news.

The smartest thing would be to make great use of both types.

  Both types of content are equally important and necessary. So my answer to the question “Which one is better?” is: both are equally important as each contributes to the well-being of your blog in ways neither of them can cover for the other.

  The path most webmasters take is that of writing a piece of content that is nearly topical to evergreen, one where they talk about something already established but with the twist of something that they’re selling or believing in at that point in time, hence making it rather trendy and relevant to the moment of speaking.

  Others tilt the scale to evergreen content. Atomic Reach suggests a ratio of 1:4 – one seasonal piece of content to every four evergreens. It’s crucial that you strike the right balance. The ideal mix depends a lot on what you are looking for for your business – your objectives, your target audience, what they need and appreciate the most. It depends on your marketing goals: educate or convert into clients, fast or slow, now or everytime they land on your website.

  source: semrush.com

  Take this cognitiveSEO example: Unmasking The Hidden Digital Marketing Strategies of 9 Successful Startups is an article that brings us continuous traffic over time and it doesn’t show to stop anytime soon. It is a hit among our followers and a constant go-to source for information, data, and inspiration.

    On the other side, there is this Google Penguin 4.0 Goes Real-Time! Massive Google Fluctuations article which we intended to be a seasonal article. And this is what it was: a smashing piece of content on a topic that was quite hot at the moment. We registered massive hype and engagement at the time of publishing and also a couple of days after, but metrics never displayed the same amount of visits and traffic as in those days. And this is because topical content gets you traffic spikes but rarely promises a neverending love story between the article and its readers. 

    By deploying both tactics, your message to the readers will be that you have a well-rounded perspective of your market needs and interests. Topical plus evergreen content equals the win of all kind of readers, bringing a diverse range of clients to your business.

  Finding the balance between evergreen and seasonal content can set the tone of your feed. danielle thomson Lifestyle Blogger at hashtagpaid.com / @linerglttrgloss

  Given that both have their fair share of advantages and disadvantages, you shouldn’t’ opt for a one-only tactic, but take them both and use them in your content marketing strategy. One tip: always create contextual links from your evergreen content pieces to your topical content so to help search engines like Google better index them.

  We tend to always divide content up into two kinds of groupings: seasonal versus evergreen. But you always want those, those are very important. And then, for the obvious fact that you need things to go out and get visibility to get Google-even. So you need stuff to always have out there to be alive and current and vibrant. David Harry Search Engine Algorithm Analyst  @SEOdojo / seotrainingdojo.com

  In Conclusion, Is It “Vs” or “And”?

  When comparing topical content vs evergreen content it’s like you’re putting a sprint and a marathon face to face. It’s not about which types of evergreen content or topical info is good  and which is bad, but it’s a matter of merging.

  Give yourself the treat of short-term buzz and long-term outcome, both promising to provide conversions and hype. Experiment with both, check out the ideas and examples tackled above, and see how each one works for you in terms of results (which one drives traffic for you).

  And don’t forget: if you’re after more consistent posting and bringing in followers back to your site, use topical content, and if you seek to build up the pillars that give you better SEO results and a chance to reach out to new readers, also use evergreen blog posts.

  Opt for a hybrid model: get the best of both worlds and include evergreen and seasonal content in your digital marketing strategy.

  Also, never forget that content, be it evergreen, topical or seasonal, must be promoted properly! Share your content on social media and even promote it with ads. Most of the times, it’s not enough to just write content and publish it.

  What strategy do you use on your website? Do you use seasonal content marketing a lot? If yes, do you also try to include evergreen content? Which one do you think is better? Let us know in the comments section!

  The post Seasonal or Evergreen Content | Does Topical Content Bring More Traffic Than Evergreen Content? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/18774/seasonal-evergreen-content/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Seasonal or Evergreen Content | Does Topical Content Bring More Traffic Than Evergreen Content?

Content is the weapon of SEO. And SEOs like to use a twofold weapon, one that would win them the fight both on short-term and long-term. They call it seasonal (or topical) content and evergreen content. And, as always, there’s a debate between them: evergreen content vs topical content. Which one is better?

  The thing is, is it a matter of “and” or “or”? Do topical content and evergreen content go hand in hand, or go separate ways?  This debate is not only applicable to content marketing but to social media marketing as well, as both share the same types of content.

  Nearly everybody tilts the scale in favor of evergreen content arguing this is the bee’s knees. But where does seasonal content stand in this? To what extent can holiday articles, Google updates, or top lists for a particular year really help and trigger ROI?

    Seasonal or Topical Content

The Long Seasonal Content Story Short

Seasonal Content Benefits

Seasonal Content Downsides

How to Craft Seasonal Content

Evergreen or Timeless Content

The Long Evergreen Content Story Short

Evergreen Content Benefits

Evergreen Content Pitfalls

How to Craft Evergreen Content

What’s the Ideal Mix?

In Conclusion, Is It “Vs.” or “And”?

  Each has their fair share of advantages and disadvantages. That’s where managing the right content strategy is an act of balance, like gymnastics, ballet, or figure skating. David Harry from SEO Training Dojo said in a cognitiveSEO talk that “Content strategies everything” and that is why you should know how to wield it in order to gain and not lose from it.

    Although everybody tries to solve the crossword puzzle and find out which one has a stronger impact in the SEO blogosphere and on which one they should focus their efforts on, we’re all somehow chasing our own tails.

We shouldn’t be picking a single content type. Topical content and evergreen content actually intertwine. They need each other (more on this later). 

This evergreen content vs topical content debate is similar to the one regarding passion vs love. The latter is everlasting and stronger, while the other is quite ephemeral, although fiery. Often times, you don’t even need to choose: you can have the best of both worlds.

  However, you have to always think in the long run –what’s in it for you, is it worth deploying to earn money from this, is it relevant over a long period of time? But let’s discuss this over a cup of evidence and pros and cons listing. Then, you should be able to take a decision. 

    Seasonal or Topical Content

  The Long Seasonal Content Story Short

  Seasonal content also goes under the name of topical content.

A usual seasonal content definition would say it refers to content that is related to what’s trending, catering to the industry dynamics.

It usually delivers updated, relevant, and targeted information to an audience that is already well versed and familiar with the topic you’re writing on. Topical content is relevant during certain times of the year only and is usually pretty hip and niche disruptive.

    Topical content posts are very common in industries that are constantly changing, such as tech and fashion, or to brands that usually have this kind of activity – news outlets, bet houses, and finance. Topical content titles go like this: The best country to spend your summer holiday in 2016, Winners and Losers of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Robinhood App is Available in Another Two US States, so on and so forth.

  Seasonal content is divided into 2 categories:

time-based (certain seasons such as winter and summer, but also years as the cycle repeats every year) 

event-based (Christmas, Easter, Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, Concerts and even Movies, although they end up becoming evergreen but lose traffic over time).

  Some would add a third category, known as “true” topical content which, theoretically, is visited each recurring season or event relevant for that particular content (holidays, events, sales etc). However, seasonal content marketing is said to also include another category known as holiday-based seasonal content. But I personally think this is redundant, as this is already covered by event-based topical content.

  A more reasonable use of the term topical content can also exclude seasonality. For example, a single time event such as an important politician making an outrageous statement can still be topical content, but isn’t necessarily seasonal. Same goes with shows such as “Got Talent” or “The Voice”. They are seasonal, but each have their own particular topic (artists names or different jury members).

  Seasonal Content Benefits

  Everybody says evergreen content weighs heavier from an SEO point of view. Yet, why does seasonal content still matter so much?

  Should we analyze each blog, we’ll most likely discover both topical and evergreen content. And often times, seasonal content has a fair share in the blog post ratio. For example, here on our search engine optimization blog we write both evergreen content (general SEO questions) and seasonal / topical content (questions about SEO Google Trends, Google Updates, Tweets of  Google officials, etc.).

  Trendy, fresh, breaking new content is way catchier than general truths or case studies are.

News and fads get more attention.

When you’re publishing a piece of news, you will generally trigger an audience’s interest more than when you’re publishing on a topic they’ve seen countless times already.

  One plus topical content has is that it can be transformed into evergreen content at almost any time. For instance, a How Did the SEO Landscape Influence Your Rankings in 2017 article could easily be updated to fit the year 2018. 

  Here are some top benefits you can get out of your seasonal content: 

  Seasonal Content Benefit #1 Writing seasonal content can greatly benefit your brand image. It sends the message that you care about the latest trends in the industry and like to be up-to-date. It shows interest in novelty and advanced information. This is how your audience starts trusting you and also becomes a client. Topical content shows that you want to stay relevant in your niche and you put your audience first. You care about what’s needed right at that moment. Topical content can easily satisfy readers’ needs and interests. By constantly providing fresh and up-to-date content, you are pushing forward the image of a trendy funky brand.

  Seasonal content means that you care about the needs of the consumer in regard to various occasions and times of the year.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #2 What’s more, it can be relevant more than once, if the subject is trendy again. As previously mentioned, there’s a content subcategory which goes under the name of “true seasonal” and refers to content which can get back under the public eye. These posts can be revived on various holidays or sales occasions.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #3 Another strong advantage is that topical content is good for selling things. People look for seasonal content to purchase stuff. This kind of content serves the user intent better and provides instant gratification.  Whenever you craft and post a topical content piece, you help your well-versed audience make a better decision from a marketing and purchasing point of view.

  People look for seasonal content with the intent to buy.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #4 Moreover, topical content is very important when it comes to growing an audience. It helps you when building brand reputation and brand recognition. It creates buzz around your brand, although followers might lose interest at some point in time. Instagram is a great place to do that and get instant gratification, as well as Twitter. Topical content is top notch for instant success, word-of-mouth, gratification, and conversion. The down part is that followers can eventually bounce off once they stuffed their bellies with the info they were interested in, and never visit you again. 

  Seasonal content allows you to put your brand in the race.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #5 Seasonal content usually triggers mobile-optimized strategies to help audiences land on and stay on your page longer. Seasonal content seeks to be concise yet comprehensive, all of that to satisfy their audiences with info delivered on the spot. This kind of straightforwardness needs the right user experience and interface. And that’s where mobile-friendly versions became the cool kids on the block.

  In the seasonal content marketing realm, competition is far less to worry about. And this is because almost every business opts for evergreen-only content strategies. 

  Seasonal topics allow for fresh content creation with limited competition but a long enough lifespan to make a rate of return on the content creation cost.  Lukasz zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

  Fireproof your content by creating topical content and FOMO, which is fear of missing out. Dictionaries say that it talks about FOMO as being an “anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media”. 

  Seasonal Content Benefit #6 Last but not least, seasonal content usually gets a great deal of traffic. But who doesn’t know that? Most probably, that’s the only reason people would rather deploy such content piece out on the blog. Sure the burst lasts only a while, but it’s big.

  If you time it right you can also get a lot of backlinks to these types of posts. For example, we all hate spoilers but they sure do get shared a lot on the web. Movie fan theories, news about actors or future plans for series always get a great deal of attention on the web. You can then use an internal linking strategy to boost your other articles which get less links and you won’t have to rely on link building techniques to get your off page SEO done.

    Seasonal Content Downsides

  Although topical content has a great wealth of advantages to be deployed as a content technique, it also comes with a good share of disadvantages. And the sooner we accept and own it, the sooner we would spare ourselves of disappointment.

  Seasonal Content Downside #1 Unfortunately, unlike evergreen content, topical content has an expiry date. It doesn’t sustain the same stream of traffic and social applause like on its first day after being published, and this goes over a long period of time. It creates short-term engagement, however grand and satisfying the engagement was first. And this is because topical content isn’t relevant all the time. It is a quick-decay content and has a limited lifespan of usefulness and relevancy. 

  In the end, topical content doesn’t deliver sustainable results.

  Seasonal Content Downside #2 What’s more, topical content kind of splits audiences and targets only those with advanced knowledge on the topic. It can register a massive hype, yet this is coming only from the well-versed ones, bearing no meaning to the rest of the readers.

  Seasonal Content Downside #3 Moreover, to new the users who want to enter the group, seasonal content can seem a little complicated and hard to digest, given the great amount of novelty and jargon. 

  Seasonal Content Downside #4 People can lose their interest little by little, either because of the aforementioned reason or because something else has already caught their attention. You just need to remember the news featuring who won the US presidency which was met with massive engagement, but shortly after they lost popularity as something of greater freshness and relevancy caught their attention, such as new laws proposed and adopted by those in power. 

  Focusing on topical content means you have to work your fingers to the bone to stay continually relevant and updated. You have to do your research day by day and never lose sight of what’s important in the industry, and hopefully be the first to release the news. Take the example of crypto news, where there’s so much fluctuation, speculation and breaking news relating either the rise of a particular coin or people who nailed it at mining, owning, or stealing digital coins. Such was the case, for example, for the massive news regarding the hugest bitcoin heist that took place lately. Other news on different topics took its thunder shortly after.

    Another, say, disadvantage seasonal content bears is that although it brings something unique, the event happens just once in a while and has relatively too less of an authority over its audience. Furthermore, it needs a certain kind of audience for its content, and some might very well bounce off the page or spend very little time on the page due to their lack of advanced knowledge of the topic. Sometimes, readers are just curious people who drop out reading sooner than you realize.

  How to Craft Seasonal Content

  There are some common sense rules when it comes to crafting seasonal content. Make sure you follow them if you don’t want to waste time!

  Firstly, to create successful seasonal content, focus on always making it useful and relevant – don’t write something if you only want to enlist in the seasonal post bandwagon. In addition, do keyword research very carefully. 

  Did you know?

In order to nail a seasonable content piece, you need seasonable keywords. These keywords can be regular keywords + the current year, but they can also be keywords related to recent events, such as concerts or movies. These only will bring you the targeted seasonable traffic. This is what you need and you win should it rank well in SERPs.

The Keyword Tool & Content Assistant can help you with both keyword research and content writing, according to the type of content you are interested in ranking for. 

  Secondly, be prepared beforehand and do an editorial calendar with events and seasons you want to cover and get your content ready. Seasonal and even topical content can be prepared ahead of time, if you have some details about the event that’s going to happen.

  If you know a movie is going live in a couple of weeks, you can prepare your topics, but you can also write about it upfront as people will be searching for it. Is it a series? Then you can also mention past events.

  Thirdly, let your team know the impact indexation has on your content marketing strategy when setting up the topical content calendar. One of the main reasons would be that most people do their research on seasonal content (be it time-based or event-based) months before the actual time. What’s more, you need time for your article to be indexed in between the time you make it live on your platform and the time of user search.

  So make sure that you start creating your seasonal content a little early, before users start searching for it and also leave a buffer period for it to properly get indexed.

  source: seosmarty.com

  As you can see above in Google Trends, interest for Christmas related queries begins somewhere in October, around two months before the actual event. You could be driving a lot of organic traffic all this time and you can also benefit from some social media marketing. But for that, you’ll need the content upfront.

  That’s why having an editorial calendar will be very useful. You’ll know exactly when the content should be written, published and promoted.

    Evergreen or Timeless Content

  The Long Evergreen Content Story Short

  Evergreen content is content that passes the test of time and remains relevant at all times. It usually develops a greater audience and traffic along time, but its growth is secure, constant, and sustainable. Evergreen rarely to never has traffic spikes, and although you don’t necessarily see results overnight, in the long run, you’ll benefit from constantly getting visits and backlinks.

  Evergreen content is a love story shared by two: the content provider and the reader. They will always need and stick to each other.

  Evergreen content is essentially made to educate audiences. It never gets out of style because people will always need this kind of content. Case studies, statistics, walkthroughs, product reviews, how-to guides, beginner’s guides, lists, top industry tips, best practices, checklists, tutorials, podcasts, common problem solutions, failure and success story, pros and cons article, all these are instances of evergreen content. 

  You can easily spot evergreen content ideas when bumping into titles like How to Tie a Bow, Cookies and Cream Fudge Brownies Recipe, 8 Steps to Kick Off an Ultra-Powerful Link Building Campaign, How to Book and Pay for a Room With Bitcoin.

  Whenever crafting evergreen content, pay attention to providing unique and relevant informational data. Make your content engaging, as readers could easily lose patience given that most evergreen content posts are quite long. Make clarity one of your guiding lights, as you wouldn’t want your audience to bounce off your page for finding your text exhaustive. In addition, always seek to write on topics of interest. Try to bring something new and authentic in your piece of evergreen content, as nobody likes to bump into the same thing everywhere. Although they might need the same thing over and over again, they’re expecting different or at least new results and insights.

  If you can provide a quality answer to a timeless question, there will always be value in that answer. Lukasz Zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

    Evergreen Content Benefits

  Evergreen Content Benefit #1 The number one plus evergreen content has is that it is timeless. Evergreen is a wealth of constant leads, traffic, shares, and social sentiment. Traffic to evergreen content will stay the same, meaning it will increase slowly but steadily, with slight differences, with the chance of rising even more and improving in accordance with the course of the website authority. 

    Even though evergreen content asks for more time and effort, given the nature of the posts (how-tos, case studies etc, all requiring strong research), they ensure continuous traffic on your content. At the same time, evergreen content is less demanding to produce, than seasonal is (and we’re not talking data and stats here). There’s no rush to find the news, no secondary resource problems.

  Evergreen Content Benefit #2 Another pro would be that timeless content builds brand trust in the long run, especially when researched properly. Readers will bookmark you as a source for quality, in-depth info when writing evergreen content, knowing that they will always find their answers on your website. Moreover, evergreen is proved to cater to the needs and interests of both new and old readers. 

  Social media profiles and blogs will carry on growing thanks to evergreen content. steve Conway Inbound Marketing Expert at ConvergeHub

  Evergreen Content Benefit #3 Evergreen content stays relevant all year round, and it doesn’t matter the time you post it. This means it can be shared any time of the year. It is everlasting, should the website stay fresh and never get closed by the admin. In other words, evergreen content is timeless, anti-aging. It is content that creates long-term engagement. This type is content that doesn’t depend on the whims of seasonal events and topic, hence how to do a braid will always be in vogue. Evergreen content never expires.

  Worthy to mention is that evergreen content also makes great use of topical content, by literally being relevant regardless of the season. It can be updated: lists, tops, case studies, or how-tos like the one available in the below screenshot. However, evergreen content rarely needs minor periodic updates to keep its usefulness. Evergreen content is not time-sensitive, and can easily be refreshed so as to keep its relevance over time, if needed. And search engines encourage webmasters to update old articles with fresh content as this would help in boosting your overall rankings. Quick tip: use the “compare and contrast” update technique, which means when you refresh some old seasonal content, make the update seem legit and relevant. Make it bring something new to the ideas expressed in the article.

    Evergreen Content Benefit #4 What other pro arguments in favor of evergreen content might be, you might wonder? Well, evergreen provides your website with greater authority thanks to the continuous diverse traffic flow. And this is because evergreen content is always trendy. It can gather backlinks much easier over time, while topical content is facing a rather difficult time at this. Evergreen content isn’t serving just the page well, but also the entire website.

  Evergreen Content Benefit #5 Last but not least, it is said that in terms of per-piece value, evergreen content is superior, empirically speaking. It ranks every week and every day compared to seasonal. Evergreen content is always trendy and in season, but the vice-versa is not (seasonal being evergreen). We can even say that whenever an evergreen piece of content is published, it officially starts its open season of continuous traffic and engagement.

  If wondering how to make and repurpose evergreen content to get as many results as possible, check CoSchedule’s case with evergreen content.

  source: www.coschedule.com

  Evergreen Content Pitfalls

  Compared to seasonal content, evergreen posts have way fewer disadvantages. And this is because evergreen content is more stable, and it pays off eventually along the time.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #1 One con argument is that evergreen content can somehow tell the obvious and basic stuff. The information can reach a point where it becomes somehow worthless because there are too many sites that already provide that specific information.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #2 Another pitfall is that there’s too big of a competition on evergreen content, therefore you’ll face harder times at getting noticed and ranked high in Google SERPS.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #3 Not to forget that evergreen content also requires a great deal of research, when done well and quality is a rule of thumb. It is indeed more comfortable to write a timeless piece of content than a topical one, as you don’t have to rush to the first news provider, but it needs valuable resources such as time, in-depth research, and the spark of originality in order to bring something new to an already crowded and saturated content industry.

  How to Craft Evergreen Content

  Evergreen content might be a little bit harder to create. Compared to seasonal content, where time and sync are of the essence, with evergreen content quality is of the essence.

  The first step in creating successful evergreen content is to choose the topic and keywords well. Some pieces of content are more evergreen than others. For example, an article optimized for the keyword “SEO Guide” will last as long as search engine optimization itself exists. However, an article an a particular ranking factor might not last as much, as we all know that in our industry, things change very often. Articles on “meta keywords”, for example, are not so popular anymore, as this isn’t considered a ranking factor anymore.

  Perform keyword research and select queries that have a decent search volume. Those are the best evergreen content ideas You can always try to optimize a piece of content for multiple keywords. You can also use the topic clusters & hubs strategy, where you have big general topics surrounded and supported by other relevant topics.

    The second step is to make sure you answer every question about that topic. Don’t be fooled about competition. Sure, competition can sometimes be though, but there’s always a gap, be it in information, design, trust or tone of voice. A surefire way to make your digital content last is to try and answer all the frequently asked questions about your topic. If you don’t answer the users’ questions, they will leave and look for it somewhere else.

  Structure in this case is very important. Users don’t really read an article from top to bottom, but rather skim through it. In order to keep them reading, you need to let them know upfront that their question will be answered.

  For example, this article is optimized for both “evergreen content” and “seasonal content”. However, we’re answering multiple questions:

  What is seasonal content? What is evergreen content? How to create seasonal content? How to create evergreen content? We also added the benefits and downfalls of each, so that users know what lies ahead.

  Structuring it properly allows us to have the article navigation menu at the top. This means that the users will know if the answer to their question is there or not.

    The third step is to update your evergreen content regularly, to keep it relevant. You might notice that the image above differs from the current article navigation menu at the top of the article. That’s because this article was updated with some fresh information, to keep it relevant.

  Unlike seasonal content, where each update is a separate event that must be published under its own entity, evergreen content stays relevant by getting updated. For example, if you write an article on “how to get your car registered”, you might have to regularly update it depending on how the laws change, in order to keep it relevant. There’s no point in writing new articles for each change in the law, as users will have a hard time following that on your website.

  So make sure you regularly update your content if you want it to last.

  What’s the Ideal Mix?

  And now we remain with the ultimate question: what type of content is more relevant to your business? Or, if willing to use both, what mix is more suitable for you?

  Web content can be compared to perishing flowers, seasonal plants, and evergreen trees. lukasz zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

  So which content flora will populate your website the most? Many content marketers rush into dismissing topical content for all the abovementioned disadvantages.

However, if we are to look at the pros and cons ratio only, although topical content has more cons than evergreen does, it is still richer in benefits (we’re talking numbers here).

Maybe it’s because evergreen content is too mainstream already.

  Both content types can trigger organic activity to your website, that’s sure thing.

They both join powers to bring the best results to your content marketing strategy: evergreen content can suit all kinds of readers, at all times, while seasonal content suits only those well versed in that specific topic or industry, the ones who want to be kept up-to-date with advanced, upgraded news.

The smartest thing would be to make great use of both types.

  Both types of content are equally important and necessary. So my answer to the question “Which one is better?” is: both are equally important as each contributes to the well-being of your blog in ways neither of them can cover for the other.

  The path most webmasters take is that of writing a piece of content that is nearly topical to evergreen, one where they talk about something already established but with the twist of something that they’re selling or believing in at that point in time, hence making it rather trendy and relevant to the moment of speaking.

  Others tilt the scale to evergreen content. Atomic Reach suggests a ratio of 1:4 – one seasonal piece of content to every four evergreens. It’s crucial that you strike the right balance. The ideal mix depends a lot on what you are looking for for your business – your objectives, your target audience, what they need and appreciate the most. It depends on your marketing goals: educate or convert into clients, fast or slow, now or everytime they land on your website.

  source: semrush.com

  Take this cognitiveSEO example: Unmasking The Hidden Digital Marketing Strategies of 9 Successful Startups is an article that brings us continuous traffic over time and it doesn’t show to stop anytime soon. It is a hit among our followers and a constant go-to source for information, data, and inspiration.

    On the other side, there is this Google Penguin 4.0 Goes Real-Time! Massive Google Fluctuations article which we intended to be a seasonal article. And this is what it was: a smashing piece of content on a topic that was quite hot at the moment. We registered massive hype and engagement at the time of publishing and also a couple of days after, but metrics never displayed the same amount of visits and traffic as in those days. And this is because topical content gets you traffic spikes but rarely promises a neverending love story between the article and its readers. 

    By deploying both tactics, your message to the readers will be that you have a well-rounded perspective of your market needs and interests. Topical plus evergreen content equals the win of all kind of readers, bringing a diverse range of clients to your business.

  Finding the balance between evergreen and seasonal content can set the tone of your feed. danielle thomson Lifestyle Blogger at hashtagpaid.com / @linerglttrgloss

  Given that both have their fair share of advantages and disadvantages, you shouldn’t’ opt for a one-only tactic, but take them both and use them in your content marketing strategy. One tip: always create contextual links from your evergreen content pieces to your topical content so to help search engines like Google better index them.

  We tend to always divide content up into two kinds of groupings: seasonal versus evergreen. But you always want those, those are very important. And then, for the obvious fact that you need things to go out and get visibility to get Google-even. So you need stuff to always have out there to be alive and current and vibrant. David Harry Search Engine Algorithm Analyst  @SEOdojo / seotrainingdojo.com

  In Conclusion, Is It “Vs” or “And”?

  When comparing topical content vs evergreen content it’s like you’re putting a sprint and a marathon face to face. It’s not about which types of evergreen content or topical info is good  and which is bad, but it’s a matter of merging.

  Give yourself the treat of short-term buzz and long-term outcome, both promising to provide conversions and hype. Experiment with both, check out the ideas and examples tackled above, and see how each one works for you in terms of results (which one drives traffic for you).

  And don’t forget: if you’re after more consistent posting and bringing in followers back to your site, use topical content, and if you seek to build up the pillars that give you better SEO results and a chance to reach out to new readers, also use evergreen blog posts.

  Opt for a hybrid model: get the best of both worlds and include evergreen and seasonal content in your digital marketing strategy.

  Also, never forget that content, be it evergreen, topical or seasonal, must be promoted properly! Share your content on social media and even promote it with ads. Most of the times, it’s not enough to just write content and publish it.

  What strategy do you use on your website? Do you use seasonal content marketing a lot? If yes, do you also try to include evergreen content? Which one do you think is better? Let us know in the comments section!

  The post Seasonal or Evergreen Content | Does Topical Content Bring More Traffic Than Evergreen Content? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

[krisggordon]

Seasonal or Evergreen Content | Does Topical Content Bring More Traffic Than Evergreen Content?

Content is the weapon of SEO. And SEOs like to use a twofold weapon, one that would win them the fight both on short-term and long-term. They call it seasonal (or topical) content and evergreen content. And, as always, there’s a debate between them: evergreen content vs topical content. Which one is better?

  The thing is, is it a matter of “and” or “or”? Do topical content and evergreen content go hand in hand, or go separate ways?  This debate is not only applicable to content marketing but to social media marketing as well, as both share the same types of content.

  Nearly everybody tilts the scale in favor of evergreen content arguing this is the bee’s knees. But where does seasonal content stand in this? To what extent can holiday articles, Google updates, or top lists for a particular year really help and trigger ROI?

    Seasonal or Topical Content

The Long Seasonal Content Story Short

Seasonal Content Benefits

Seasonal Content Downsides

How to Craft Seasonal Content

Evergreen or Timeless Content

The Long Evergreen Content Story Short

Evergreen Content Benefits

Evergreen Content Pitfalls

How to Craft Evergreen Content

What’s the Ideal Mix?

In Conclusion, Is It “Vs.” or “And”?

  Each has their fair share of advantages and disadvantages. That’s where managing the right content strategy is an act of balance, like gymnastics, ballet, or figure skating. David Harry from SEO Training Dojo said in a cognitiveSEO talk that “Content strategies everything” and that is why you should know how to wield it in order to gain and not lose from it.

    Although everybody tries to solve the crossword puzzle and find out which one has a stronger impact in the SEO blogosphere and on which one they should focus their efforts on, we’re all somehow chasing our own tails.

We shouldn’t be picking a single content type. Topical content and evergreen content actually intertwine. They need each other (more on this later). 

This evergreen content vs topical content debate is similar to the one regarding passion vs love. The latter is everlasting and stronger, while the other is quite ephemeral, although fiery. Often times, you don’t even need to choose: you can have the best of both worlds.

  However, you have to always think in the long run –what’s in it for you, is it worth deploying to earn money from this, is it relevant over a long period of time? But let’s discuss this over a cup of evidence and pros and cons listing. Then, you should be able to take a decision. 

    Seasonal or Topical Content

  The Long Seasonal Content Story Short

  Seasonal content also goes under the name of topical content.

A usual seasonal content definition would say it refers to content that is related to what’s trending, catering to the industry dynamics.

It usually delivers updated, relevant, and targeted information to an audience that is already well versed and familiar with the topic you’re writing on. Topical content is relevant during certain times of the year only and is usually pretty hip and niche disruptive.

    Topical content posts are very common in industries that are constantly changing, such as tech and fashion, or to brands that usually have this kind of activity – news outlets, bet houses, and finance. Topical content titles go like this: The best country to spend your summer holiday in 2016, Winners and Losers of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Robinhood App is Available in Another Two US States, so on and so forth.

  Seasonal content is divided into 2 categories:

time-based (certain seasons such as winter and summer, but also years as the cycle repeats every year) 

event-based (Christmas, Easter, Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, Concerts and even Movies, although they end up becoming evergreen but lose traffic over time).

  Some would add a third category, known as “true” topical content which, theoretically, is visited each recurring season or event relevant for that particular content (holidays, events, sales etc). However, seasonal content marketing is said to also include another category known as holiday-based seasonal content. But I personally think this is redundant, as this is already covered by event-based topical content.

  A more reasonable use of the term topical content can also exclude seasonality. For example, a single time event such as an important politician making an outrageous statement can still be topical content, but isn’t necessarily seasonal. Same goes with shows such as “Got Talent” or “The Voice”. They are seasonal, but each have their own particular topic (artists names or different jury members).

  Seasonal Content Benefits

  Everybody says evergreen content weighs heavier from an SEO point of view. Yet, why does seasonal content still matter so much?

  Should we analyze each blog, we’ll most likely discover both topical and evergreen content. And often times, seasonal content has a fair share in the blog post ratio. For example, here on our search engine optimization blog we write both evergreen content (general SEO questions) and seasonal / topical content (questions about SEO Google Trends, Google Updates, Tweets of  Google officials, etc.).

  Trendy, fresh, breaking new content is way catchier than general truths or case studies are.

News and fads get more attention.

When you’re publishing a piece of news, you will generally trigger an audience’s interest more than when you’re publishing on a topic they’ve seen countless times already.

  One plus topical content has is that it can be transformed into evergreen content at almost any time. For instance, a How Did the SEO Landscape Influence Your Rankings in 2017 article could easily be updated to fit the year 2018. 

  Here are some top benefits you can get out of your seasonal content: 

  Seasonal Content Benefit #1 Writing seasonal content can greatly benefit your brand image. It sends the message that you care about the latest trends in the industry and like to be up-to-date. It shows interest in novelty and advanced information. This is how your audience starts trusting you and also becomes a client. Topical content shows that you want to stay relevant in your niche and you put your audience first. You care about what’s needed right at that moment. Topical content can easily satisfy readers’ needs and interests. By constantly providing fresh and up-to-date content, you are pushing forward the image of a trendy funky brand.

  Seasonal content means that you care about the needs of the consumer in regard to various occasions and times of the year.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #2 What’s more, it can be relevant more than once, if the subject is trendy again. As previously mentioned, there’s a content subcategory which goes under the name of “true seasonal” and refers to content which can get back under the public eye. These posts can be revived on various holidays or sales occasions.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #3 Another strong advantage is that topical content is good for selling things. People look for seasonal content to purchase stuff. This kind of content serves the user intent better and provides instant gratification.  Whenever you craft and post a topical content piece, you help your well-versed audience make a better decision from a marketing and purchasing point of view.

  People look for seasonal content with the intent to buy.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #4 Moreover, topical content is very important when it comes to growing an audience. It helps you when building brand reputation and brand recognition. It creates buzz around your brand, although followers might lose interest at some point in time. Instagram is a great place to do that and get instant gratification, as well as Twitter. Topical content is top notch for instant success, word-of-mouth, gratification, and conversion. The down part is that followers can eventually bounce off once they stuffed their bellies with the info they were interested in, and never visit you again. 

  Seasonal content allows you to put your brand in the race.

  Seasonal Content Benefit #5 Seasonal content usually triggers mobile-optimized strategies to help audiences land on and stay on your page longer. Seasonal content seeks to be concise yet comprehensive, all of that to satisfy their audiences with info delivered on the spot. This kind of straightforwardness needs the right user experience and interface. And that’s where mobile-friendly versions became the cool kids on the block.

  In the seasonal content marketing realm, competition is far less to worry about. And this is because almost every business opts for evergreen-only content strategies. 

  Seasonal topics allow for fresh content creation with limited competition but a long enough lifespan to make a rate of return on the content creation cost.  Lukasz zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

  Fireproof your content by creating topical content and FOMO, which is fear of missing out. Dictionaries say that it talks about FOMO as being an “anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media”. 

  Seasonal Content Benefit #6 Last but not least, seasonal content usually gets a great deal of traffic. But who doesn’t know that? Most probably, that’s the only reason people would rather deploy such content piece out on the blog. Sure the burst lasts only a while, but it’s big.

  If you time it right you can also get a lot of backlinks to these types of posts. For example, we all hate spoilers but they sure do get shared a lot on the web. Movie fan theories, news about actors or future plans for series always get a great deal of attention on the web. You can then use an internal linking strategy to boost your other articles which get less links and you won’t have to rely on link building techniques to get your off page SEO done.

    Seasonal Content Downsides

  Although topical content has a great wealth of advantages to be deployed as a content technique, it also comes with a good share of disadvantages. And the sooner we accept and own it, the sooner we would spare ourselves of disappointment.

  Seasonal Content Downside #1 Unfortunately, unlike evergreen content, topical content has an expiry date. It doesn’t sustain the same stream of traffic and social applause like on its first day after being published, and this goes over a long period of time. It creates short-term engagement, however grand and satisfying the engagement was first. And this is because topical content isn’t relevant all the time. It is a quick-decay content and has a limited lifespan of usefulness and relevancy. 

  In the end, topical content doesn’t deliver sustainable results.

  Seasonal Content Downside #2 What’s more, topical content kind of splits audiences and targets only those with advanced knowledge on the topic. It can register a massive hype, yet this is coming only from the well-versed ones, bearing no meaning to the rest of the readers.

  Seasonal Content Downside #3 Moreover, to new the users who want to enter the group, seasonal content can seem a little complicated and hard to digest, given the great amount of novelty and jargon. 

  Seasonal Content Downside #4 People can lose their interest little by little, either because of the aforementioned reason or because something else has already caught their attention. You just need to remember the news featuring who won the US presidency which was met with massive engagement, but shortly after they lost popularity as something of greater freshness and relevancy caught their attention, such as new laws proposed and adopted by those in power. 

  Focusing on topical content means you have to work your fingers to the bone to stay continually relevant and updated. You have to do your research day by day and never lose sight of what’s important in the industry, and hopefully be the first to release the news. Take the example of crypto news, where there’s so much fluctuation, speculation and breaking news relating either the rise of a particular coin or people who nailed it at mining, owning, or stealing digital coins. Such was the case, for example, for the massive news regarding the hugest bitcoin heist that took place lately. Other news on different topics took its thunder shortly after.

    Another, say, disadvantage seasonal content bears is that although it brings something unique, the event happens just once in a while and has relatively too less of an authority over its audience. Furthermore, it needs a certain kind of audience for its content, and some might very well bounce off the page or spend very little time on the page due to their lack of advanced knowledge of the topic. Sometimes, readers are just curious people who drop out reading sooner than you realize.

  How to Craft Seasonal Content

  There are some common sense rules when it comes to crafting seasonal content. Make sure you follow them if you don’t want to waste time!

  Firstly, to create successful seasonal content, focus on always making it useful and relevant – don’t write something if you only want to enlist in the seasonal post bandwagon. In addition, do keyword research very carefully. In order to nail a seasonable content piece, you need seasonable keywords. These keywords can be regular keywords + the current year but they can also be keywords related to recent events, such as concerts or movies. These only will bring you the targeted seasonable traffic. This is what you need and you win should it rank well in SERPs.

  Secondly, be prepared beforehand and do an editorial calendar with events and seasons you want to cover and get your content ready. Seasonal and even topical content can be prepared ahead of time, if you have some details about the event that’s going to happen.

  If you know a movie is going live in a couple of weeks, you can prepare your topics, but you can also write about it upfront as people will be searching for it. Is it a series? Then you can also mention past events.

  Thirdly, let your team know the impact indexation has on your content marketing strategy when setting up the topical content calendar. One of the main reasons would be that most people do their research on seasonal content (be it time-based or event-based) months before the actual time. What’s more, you need time for your article to be indexed in between the time you make it live on your platform and the time of user search.

  So make sure that you start creating your seasonal content a little early, before users start searching for it and also leave a buffer period for it to properly get indexed.

  source: seosmarty.com

  As you can see above in Google Trends, interest for Christmas related queries begins somewhere in October, around two months before the actual event. You could be driving a lot of organic traffic all this time and you can also benefit from some social media marketing. But for that, you’ll need the content upfront.

  That’s why having an editorial calendar will be very useful. You’ll know exactly when the content should be written, published and promoted.

    Evergreen or Timeless Content

  The Long Evergreen Content Story Short

  Evergreen content is content that passes the test of time and remains relevant at all times. It usually develops a greater audience and traffic along time, but its growth is secure, constant, and sustainable. Evergreen rarely to never has traffic spikes, and although you don’t necessarily see results overnight, in the long run, you’ll benefit from constantly getting visits and backlinks.

  Evergreen content is a love story shared by two: the content provider and the reader. They will always need and stick to each other.

  Evergreen content is essentially made to educate audiences. It never gets out of style because people will always need this kind of content. Case studies, statistics, walkthroughs, product reviews, how-to guides, beginner’s guides, lists, top industry tips, best practices, checklists, tutorials, podcasts, common problem solutions, failure and success story, pros and cons article, all these are instances of evergreen content. 

  You can easily spot evergreen content ideas when bumping into titles like How to Tie a Bow, Cookies and Cream Fudge Brownies Recipe, 8 Steps to Kick Off an Ultra-Powerful Link Building Campaign, How to Book and Pay for a Room With Bitcoin.

  Whenever crafting evergreen content, pay attention to providing unique and relevant informational data. Make your content engaging, as readers could easily lose patience given that most evergreen content posts are quite long. Make clarity one of your guiding lights, as you wouldn’t want your audience to bounce off your page for finding your text exhaustive. In addition, always seek to write on topics of interest. Try to bring something new and authentic in your piece of evergreen content, as nobody likes to bump into the same thing everywhere. Although they might need the same thing over and over again, they’re expecting different or at least new results and insights.

  If you can provide a quality answer to a timeless question, there will always be value in that answer. Lukasz Zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

    Evergreen Content Benefits

  Evergreen Content Benefit #1 The number one plus evergreen content has is that it is timeless. Evergreen is a wealth of constant leads, traffic, shares, and social sentiment. Traffic to evergreen content will stay the same, meaning it will increase slowly but steadily, with slight differences, with the chance of rising even more and improving in accordance with the course of the website authority. 

    Even though evergreen content asks for more time and effort, given the nature of the posts (how-tos, case studies etc, all requiring strong research), they ensure continuous traffic on your content. At the same time, evergreen content is less demanding to produce, than seasonal is (and we’re not talking data and stats here). There’s no rush to find the news, no secondary resource problems.

  Evergreen Content Benefit #2 Another pro would be that timeless content builds brand trust in the long run, especially when researched properly. Readers will bookmark you as a source for quality, in-depth info when writing evergreen content, knowing that they will always find their answers on your website. Moreover, evergreen is proved to cater to the needs and interests of both new and old readers. 

  Social media profiles and blogs will carry on growing thanks to evergreen content. steve Conway Inbound Marketing Expert at ConvergeHub

  Evergreen Content Benefit #3 Evergreen content stays relevant all year round, and it doesn’t matter the time you post it. This means it can be shared any time of the year. It is everlasting, should the website stay fresh and never get closed by the admin. In other words, evergreen content is timeless, anti-aging. It is content that creates long-term engagement. This type is content that doesn’t depend on the whims of seasonal events and topic, hence how to do a braid will always be in vogue. Evergreen content never expires.

  Worthy to mention is that evergreen content also makes great use of topical content, by literally being relevant regardless of the season. It can be updated: lists, tops, case studies, or how-tos like the one available in the below screenshot. However, evergreen content rarely needs minor periodic updates to keep its usefulness. Evergreen content is not time-sensitive, and can easily be refreshed so as to keep its relevance over time, if needed. And search engines encourage webmasters to update old articles with fresh content as this would help in boosting your overall rankings. Quick tip: use the “compare and contrast” update technique, which means when you refresh some old seasonal content, make the update seem legit and relevant. Make it bring something new to the ideas expressed in the article.

    Evergreen Content Benefit #4 What other pro arguments in favor of evergreen content might be, you might wonder? Well, evergreen provides your website with greater authority thanks to the continuous diverse traffic flow. And this is because evergreen content is always trendy. It can gather backlinks much easier over time, while topical content is facing a rather difficult time at this. Evergreen content isn’t serving just the page well, but also the entire website.

  Evergreen Content Benefit #5 Last but not least, it is said that in terms of per-piece value, evergreen content is superior, empirically speaking. It ranks every week and every day compared to seasonal. Evergreen content is always trendy and in season, but the vice-versa is not (seasonal being evergreen). We can even say that whenever an evergreen piece of content is published, it officially starts its open season of continuous traffic and engagement.

  If wondering how to make and repurpose evergreen content to get as many results as possible, check CoSchedule’s case with evergreen content.

  source: www.coschedule.com

  Evergreen Content Pitfalls

  Compared to seasonal content, evergreen posts have way fewer disadvantages. And this is because evergreen content is more stable, and it pays off eventually along the time.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #1 One con argument is that evergreen content can somehow tell the obvious and basic stuff. The information can reach a point where it becomes somehow worthless because there are too many sites that already provide that specific information.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #2 Another pitfall is that there’s too big of a competition on evergreen content, therefore you’ll face harder times at getting noticed and ranked high in Google SERPS.

  Evergreen Content Pitfall #3 Not to forget that evergreen content also requires a great deal of research, when done well and quality is a rule of thumb. It is indeed more comfortable to write a timeless piece of content than a topical one, as you don’t have to rush to the first news provider, but it needs valuable resources such as time, in-depth research, and the spark of originality in order to bring something new to an already crowded and saturated content industry.

  How to Craft Evergreen Content

  Evergreen content might be a little bit harder to create. Compared to seasonal content, where time and sync are of the essence, with evergreen content quality is of the essence.

  The first step in creating successful evergreen content is to choose the topic and keywords well. Some pieces of content are more evergreen than others. For example, an article optimized for the keyword “SEO Guide” will last as long as search engine optimization itself exists. However, an article an a particular ranking factor might not last as much, as we all know that in our industry, things change very often. Articles on “meta keywords”, for example, are not so popular anymore, as this isn’t considered a ranking factor anymore.

  Perform keyword research and select queries that have a decent search volume. Those are the best evergreen content ideas You can always try to optimize a piece of content for multiple keywords. You can also use the topic clusters & hubs strategy, where you have big general topics surrounded and supported by other relevant topics.

    The second step is to make sure you answer every question about that topic. Don’t be fooled about competition. Sure, competition can sometimes be though, but there’s always a gap, be it in information, design, trust or tone of voice. A surefire way to make your digital content last is to try and answer all the frequently asked questions about your topic. If you don’t answer the users’ questions, they will leave and look for it somewhere else.

  Structure in this case is very important. Users don’t really read an article from top to bottom, but rather skim through it. In order to keep them reading, you need to let them know upfront that their question will be answered.

  For example, this article is optimized for both “evergreen content” and “seasonal content”. However, we’re answering multiple questions:

  What is seasonal content? What is evergreen content? How to create seasonal content? How to create evergreen content? We also added the benefits and downfalls of each, so that users know what lies ahead.

  Structuring it properly allows us to have the article navigation menu at the top. This means that the users will know if the answer to their question is there or not.

    The third step is to update your evergreen content regularly, to keep it relevant. You might notice that the image above differs from the current article navigation menu at the top of the article. That’s because this article was updated with some fresh information, to keep it relevant.

  Unlike seasonal content, where each update is a separate event that must be published under its own entity, evergreen content stays relevant by getting updated. For example, if you write an article on “how to get your car registered”, you might have to regularly update it depending on how the laws change, in order to keep it relevant. There’s no point in writing new articles for each change in the law, as users will have a hard time following that on your website.

  So make sure you regularly update your content if you want it to last.

  What’s the Ideal Mix?

  And now we remain with the ultimate question: what type of content is more relevant to your business? Or, if willing to use both, what mix is more suitable for you?

  Web content can be compared to perishing flowers, seasonal plants, and evergreen trees. lukasz zelezny Author and Keynote Speaker @LukaszZelezny / zelezny.uk

  So which content flora will populate your website the most? Many content marketers rush into dismissing topical content for all the abovementioned disadvantages.

However, if we are to look at the pros and cons ratio only, although topical content has more cons than evergreen does, it is still richer in benefits (we’re talking numbers here).

Maybe it’s because evergreen content is too mainstream already.

  Both content types can trigger organic activity to your website, that’s sure thing.

They both join powers to bring the best results to your content marketing strategy: evergreen content can suit all kinds of readers, at all times, while seasonal content suits only those well versed in that specific topic or industry, the ones who want to be kept up-to-date with advanced, upgraded news.

The smartest thing would be to make great use of both types.

  Both types of content are equally important and necessary. So my answer to the question “Which one is better?” is: both are equally important as each contributes to the well-being of your blog in ways neither of them can cover for the other.

  The path most webmasters take is that of writing a piece of content that is nearly topical to evergreen, one where they talk about something already established but with the twist of something that they’re selling or believing in at that point in time, hence making it rather trendy and relevant to the moment of speaking.

  Others tilt the scale to evergreen content. Atomic Reach suggests a ratio of 1:4 – one seasonal piece of content to every four evergreens. It’s crucial that you strike the right balance. The ideal mix depends a lot on what you are looking for for your business – your objectives, your target audience, what they need and appreciate the most. It depends on your marketing goals: educate or convert into clients, fast or slow, now or everytime they land on your website.

  source: semrush.com

  Take this cognitiveSEO example: Unmasking The Hidden Digital Marketing Strategies of 9 Successful Startups is an article that brings us continuous traffic over time and it doesn’t show to stop anytime soon. It is a hit among our followers and a constant go-to source for information, data, and inspiration.

    On the other side, there is this Google Penguin 4.0 Goes Real-Time! Massive Google Fluctuations article which we intended to be a seasonal article. And this is what it was: a smashing piece of content on a topic that was quite hot at the moment. We registered massive hype and engagement at the time of publishing and also a couple of days after, but metrics never displayed the same amount of visits and traffic as in those days. And this is because topical content gets you traffic spikes but rarely promises a neverending love story between the article and its readers. 

    By deploying both tactics, your message to the readers will be that you have a well-rounded perspective of your market needs and interests. Topical plus evergreen content equals the win of all kind of readers, bringing a diverse range of clients to your business.

  Finding the balance between evergreen and seasonal content can set the tone of your feed. danielle thomson Lifestyle Blogger at hashtagpaid.com / @linerglttrgloss

  Given that both have their fair share of advantages and disadvantages, you shouldn’t’ opt for a one-only tactic, but take them both and use them in your content marketing strategy. One tip: always create contextual links from your evergreen content pieces to your topical content so to help search engines like Google better index them.

  We tend to always divide content up into two kinds of groupings: seasonal versus evergreen. But you always want those, those are very important. And then, for the obvious fact that you need things to go out and get visibility to get Google-even. So you need stuff to always have out there to be alive and current and vibrant. David Harry Search Engine Algorithm Analyst  @SEOdojo / seotrainingdojo.com

  In Conclusion, Is It “Vs” or “And”?

  When comparing topical content vs evergreen content it’s like you’re putting a sprint and a marathon face to face. It’s not about which types of evergreen content or topical info is good  and which is bad, but it’s a matter of merging.

  Give yourself the treat of short-term buzz and long-term outcome, both promising to provide conversions and hype. Experiment with both, check out the ideas and examples tackled above, and see how each one works for you in terms of results (which one drives traffic for you).

  And don’t forget: if you’re after more consistent posting and bringing in followers back to your site, use topical content, and if you seek to build up the pillars that give you better SEO results and a chance to reach out to new readers, also use evergreen blog posts.

  Opt for a hybrid model: get the best of both worlds and include evergreen and seasonal content in your digital marketing strategy.

  Also, never forget that content, be it evergreen, topical or seasonal, must be promoted properly! Share your content on social media and even promote it with ads. Most of the times, it’s not enough to just write content and publish it.

  What strategy do you use on your website? Do you use seasonal content marketing a lot? If yes, do you also try to include evergreen content? Which one do you think is better? Let us know in the comments section!

  The post Seasonal or Evergreen Content | Does Topical Content Bring More Traffic Than Evergreen Content? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/18774/seasonal-evergreen-content/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmontiveros]

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends

Lead generation is the number one challenge for marketers today. And it’s only going to get harder now that most Google search results pages have become saturated with promotional lead magnets masquerading as “great” content.

There are millions of free resources out there already competing for attention. And customers are quickly catching on to the fact that most of these “Ultimate Guides to Dog Grooming” aren’t really worth giving up their personal information for.

Jessica Meher, VP of Marketing at Notarize, put it really well on Twitter:

So many #SaaS companies today produce the same content mktg formulas as they did 10 years ago.

E.g. ebooks on "the complete guide to X" or blog posts on "5 reasons why." etc.

This shit works, until it doesn't. Now's a good time to invent the new ebook. Get creative.

— Jessica Meher (@jessicameher) February 6, 2018

To stand out, you need more than quality content. You need to think outside the box. Try something a little bit different. Maybe even a little bit experimental.

For inspiration, we talked to some of the most legendary marketers working today and asked them to share their most creative lead gen examples. And believe me—some of these folks needed QUITE a bit of convincing to spill their most useful and interesting ideas.

But we got ‘em here for you: 10 unique examples lifted straight from the private swipe files and secret marketing playbooks of the pros. Use these ideas as inspiration for your next lead gen campaign. Or, just keep them handy for the next time you want to try something more interesting than creating another ebook or webinar.

Ready? Let’s get cooking.

Jump to a Creative Lead Gen Example

Create an Interactive Tool

Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

Interview a Third-Party Expert

Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Connect via Communities

Promote a Personalized Template

Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Start an Interesting Side Project

Publish a Surprising Quiz

If you’re creating a lead gen campaign, make sure you check out our professional landing page and popup templates. You’ll be able to optimize your page design to earn more conversions and qualified leads.

1. Create an Interactive Tool

There’s a good reason why so many brands—including HubSpot, Moz, and, yes, even Unbounce—have invested time and effort to create free tools. Tool-based marketing is popular because even simple interactive ideas can generate boatloads of qualified leads.

For example, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, says they developed a Free Keyword Tool for the Wordstream website. Marketers could use it to research and prioritize new keywords in just a few minutes.

And while developing an interactive tool might seem like a lot more work (you might need someone who knows how to code), Larry says they were able to generate a huge number of leads as a result.

Here’s how the tool works: you start out by entering a keyword or website URL that you’re interested in analyzing. To hone the results, you can also choose the industry and country you want to focus on.

What makes this tool particularly clever is the way it displays the results. Hit the “Search” button, and you’ll instantly be able to see some of the related keywords. But all the other information? It’s hidden, blurred out, or obscured in some way.

This smartly creates a curiosity gap for visitors, who feel like they’ve already started the process of doing research on their keyword. All they need to do is take one teeny-tiny extra step to get their results.

That final step? You gotta give up your email address.

Boom, lead generated.

This simple tool took just 3 months to build, yet has generated over a million email signups.

PRO TIP: Even a simple tool can be expensive to create. When considering your tool-based marketing idea, speak with a sample of your target audience first to see if they’d be interested.

2. Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

I believe it was old Billy Shakespeare who once wrote: “To gate or not to gate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous website traffic, or ask for an email address against a sea of troubles…”

At some point, every marketer faces this dilemma. You have an amazing piece of content—now are you going to give it away for free as a way to attract organic traffic? Or do you gate the content and use it as a lead gen magnet?

Cara Hogan, Content Strategist for Zaius, considered these options and asked—why not both?

For their Marketing Unboxed series, Cara says they took a hybrid approach to gating each video. Rather than lock up their content entirely behind a lead gen form, they actually embedded forms into each video so they showed up as you watch.

We created the Marketing Unboxed video series as a top-of-funnel piece of content designed to engage our target audience of B2C and commerce marketers. By including a lead gen form within the video itself, we encourage people to subscribe, but we don’t require it.

The forms draw just the right amount of your attention, without being too distracting. It slides off the video if you move your mouse off the screen, but then pops back on whenever you come back. All in all, a very classy approach that Cara says has driven some serious results.

We’ve generated hundreds of net new leads from this video series so far. We’ve only published 10 total episodes, and older episodes continue to earn subscribers over time. Some of these subscribers have since been nurtured to become new Zaius customers.

3. Interview a Third-Party Expert

For many brands, consistent blogging is one of their main sources of lead generation. Every time you put out an article, it’s an opportunity for someone new to visit your site, discover your brand, and opt in for more communications.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking outside of your own organization and team for content, either. Stepping outside of your comfort zone and providing a fresh perspective can actually be a fantastic way to bring in new audiences.

Take, for example, this lead gen example brought to us by Aaron Orendorff, Content Strategist for iconiContent. To help Shopify Plus rank for some valuable keywords, such as “ecommerce replatforming,” Aaron interviewed a high-profile expert in the industry.

Aaron says it’s the quality of the interview that makes this lead gen example work.

Rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch, the piece is an interview with Paul Rogers—one of the brightest and most respected leaders in ecommerce … That objectivity—and framing the article as an honest conversation about a ‘dirty word’—is highlighted throughout.

But wait, how do you actually generate leads with an interview or blog post? Well, Aaron explained that they peppered the article with three separate lead gen CTAs (including an Unbounce popup) to present visitors with downloadable content upgrades, related to the topic of the interview.

Popups and sticky bars can turn any high-traffic page into a lead generator. Find out how you can use these targeted offers to drive more conversions.

4. Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Direct mail might seem like an old school marketing tactic, but that’s exactly what makes it so darned interesting for lead generation. Why not focus your efforts on a smaller customer segment, and put together packages that really get them to sit up and take notice?

Take, for example, these direct mailers that Hero Conf sent out to promote their PPC marketing conference. The event organizers took a pretty interesting approach to get the attention of marketers like Casie Gillette, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing:

Oh man. @heroconf this is one of the coolest pieces of direct mail I've ever received! Who knew video could be so amazing in such a small package? pic.twitter.com/aQnlV2y71G

— Casie Gillette (@Casieg) January 31, 2019

Each piece of mail embedded a small video screen to show clips of the presenters who would be speaking at Hero Conf. And while these must have cost a fair bit more than a typical event brochure, Casie says the unique packaging really helped to win her over.

What got me was if you played the video to the end, they had a free ticket offer—you just had to respond to the email they had sent earlier … By placing the offer at the end, only those who watched the video all the way through would learn about the offer. A really cool way to grab attention.

5. Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Andrew Davis, best-selling author and keynote speaker, recently pointed out that most video testimonials are pretty dry. They’re usually just a lot of talking heads, with nervous customers babbling on about all the reasons why they like some marketing brand.

But there’s also a different type of video testimonial—one that actually tells the complete customer story. And although these can be harder to produce, they can also serve up a different type of indirect lead generation for your business.

As an example, Andrew suggests watching this video on YouTube that recently went viral: Vance’s Incredible 365-day Transformation. The video currently has over 31 million views and 50,000 comments on YouTube.

Unlike other video testimonials, this customer story is shot in real time. It’s compelling, it’s emotional—and it doesn’t have a single call to action.

Instead, Vance mentions throughout the video the diet and exercise program he is using to lose weight. The references start out subtle, but eventually become a main focus of the video. Andrew calls this an “implied CTA” that generates leads by inspiring viewers to take the next step.

A great testimonial video needs no call to action. It actually should create a moment that inspires people to do the next search … It doesn’t need a button, it just invites people who are so inspired to actually check out the next step of the product.

If you want to try this for yourself, all you need to do is start thinking about how you can frame your customer stories more like, well, stories. Connect with viewers on a personal or emotional level, and tease out the results so they get curious to learn more.

6. Connect via Communities

For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly different approach to lead generation. While you can still build lists using your website and landing pages, a lot of your success will also come from word of mouth and social interactions.

For example, Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant, says their go-to lead generation strategy has been to build sincere connections with other people, in both online and offline marketing communities.

Being an active member of my favorite communities has lead to me receive leads from other members, because I’m demonstrating expertise in that domain.

Nichole says that being an active community member on websites like Growth Hackers has often lead to them becoming a part of the team, responsible for either community management or growth.

As you build relationships and demonstrate expertise, people will naturally start to think of you or your company for future opportunities. The key is to be genuinely helpful and selfless in your interactions, and to try to build actual friendships with other members of the community.

The thing is, ‘getting leads’ was never my end goal for any of these communities. I was just actively building relationships by bringing value to others.

7. Promote a Personalized Template

The right template on the right page can be a powerful tool for generating leads. That’s because visitors are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for something practical they can actually use.

But while traditional templates are usually just generic PDF downloads, Ross Simmonds, digital marketing strategist, says you can get better results by making a downloadable template that’s more personalized and interactive.

Almost every audience loves a template. If you can think about a simple template that arms your audience with the steps they need to take to solve a problem – it can be a great win. Even better; make it an interactive template that gives the user the ability to download it at the end.

As an example, Ross points towards this Free Privacy Policy Generator created by Shopify.

Privacy policies are one of those things that ecommerce business owners know they need, but probably don’t have time to create. And while Shopify could have given their visitors a sample policy or instructions on how to create their own, instead they decided to go above and beyond by building a personalized template generator.

The form you fill out to generate your privacy policy serves two purposes. Not only does it help personalize the template with your company info, but it also lets Shopify follow up meaningfully with every lead that uses the tool. How cool is that?

The template approach is interesting because there’s a true value exchange. If you’re offering a template that is closely aligned with your product or service it can be both a rewarding user experience and a rewarding lead generation tactic.

8. Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Cross-promotion isn’t a new idea, but it’s not something too many marketers think about strategically when it comes to lead generation.

The hard part, of course, is finding the right brand to partner with. If the other company is too similar, then your audiences might already be overlapped. If the other company isn’t similar enough, then you run the risk of promoting to people who just don’t care about your brand or products.

This is where a bit of outside-the-box thinking can come in handy. Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, points to this particularly clever example of cross-promotion between Hydrate IV Bar and Live Love Lash:

Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the marketers at Hydrate IV Bar decided to try a different strategy. They thought about different places where their target customers might be available to try an IV bar, and struck up a smart partnership based on that:

The Hydrate IV Bar team was brilliant in thinking outside the box for local lead gen! In what instances are people in a position of stillness/rest where they could also benefit from IV therapy? Lash extensions! This cross-marketing has done very well for both businesses and feels like an efficient use of time for their customers.

And the thing is, there are all sorts of unique cross-promotion opportunities available that marketers might miss. Let’s say you’re a running shoe company, for example. The obvious cross-promotion opportunity would be a sports store, right? But you could also partner with a gym or training facility, and target athletes in the places where they spend the most time.

9. Create an Interesting Side Project

Sometimes, the best leads can come from the projects that have very little to do with your actual business. If you dig into related topics, you can discover whole segments of customers who otherwise might not have been exposed to your brand or marketing.

And when it comes to side projects, Ryan Robinson is a self-described aficionado. Once, he launched a public challenge on his blog to validate a random business idea in under 30 days with only $500.

The project took up a lot of Ryan’s time for that month, even though it was something he was doing on the side. He figured it would just be an interesting way to educate readers on how to validate their business ideas, and perhaps bring in some new audiences to his blog. But he was surprised by the number of leads he was able to generate as a result.

I saw a sizable surge in traffic during my first week of the challenge. Throughout the course of the full month as I updated the challenge post, I picked up almost 3,000 new subscribers on my blog.

To take advantage of all these new leads, Ryan even built a new course based around his learning.

A couple months after the challenge wrapped up, I launched a course about validating ideas to that new audience … This new group of subscribers that tuned in and kept a close eye on my challenge were very qualified leads, and that course ended up generating over $15,000 in revenue during just the first week of open enrollment.

10. Publish a Surprising Quiz

Online quizzes have been around for years, but many marketers still haven’t discovered their potential for lead generation. They’re powerful because they’re so compelling—visitors actually have fun filling them out, and then get super curious about the results. (“Why yes, I do want to know which piece of IKEA furniture best represents my personality.”)

To find a creative quiz example, we went to the quizmaster herself, Chanti Zak. Chanti is a quiz funnel strategist and copywriter who specializes in creating quizzes for lead gen, and really brings a special flair to the quiz creation process.

As an example, she shared this saucy quiz she created to target entrepreneurs for Jenna Kutcher’s website.

The key to a great quiz? You’ve got to surprise and delight visitors with every click, so they stay engaged throughout the process. Throw them a couple curveballs along the way, and then hit ‘em with results that speak to their unique situation.

The results go deep into what uniquely positions you to create a successful business. The custom results meet people where they’re at and are intentionally designed to empower them to take action.

To attract the most leads, you’ll want to create a quiz that speaks directly to your brand and target market. For this example, Chanti created playful questions and answers that really get in the headspace of a budding entrepreneur.

And the strategy seems to have worked too, with this quiz alone generating over 100,000 leads.

When this interactive and personalized approach is the first impression someone has of your brand, your chances of converting them from onlooker to customer are exponentially higher than with a generic lead magnet.

Are You Ready to Take the Lead?

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface with these 10 ideas. There are all sorts of different ways to generate leads, including more tried and true methods. You could always host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, run a contest, or buy ads on social media.

Whatever you try, the most important thing to remember is that in order to generate qualified leads, you need to offer up quality content. Give those top-of-funnel leads something that’ll educate, entertain, inform, or inspire and soon you’ll be overwhelmed with too many leads. (#firstworldmarketingproblems)

Share in the comments below if you have another method of lead gen that works well for your business, or if you think there’s something we missed. The more ideas we can round up, the better!

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

[roypstickney]

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends

Lead generation is the number one challenge for marketers today. And it’s only going to get harder now that most Google search results pages have become saturated with promotional lead magnets masquerading as “great” content.

There are millions of free resources out there already competing for attention. And customers are quickly catching on to the fact that most of these “Ultimate Guides to Dog Grooming” aren’t really worth giving up their personal information for.

Jessica Meher, VP of Marketing at Notarize, put it really well on Twitter:

So many #SaaS companies today produce the same content mktg formulas as they did 10 years ago.

E.g. ebooks on "the complete guide to X" or blog posts on "5 reasons why." etc.

This shit works, until it doesn't. Now's a good time to invent the new ebook. Get creative.

— Jessica Meher (@jessicameher) February 6, 2018

To stand out, you need more than quality content. You need to think outside the box. Try something a little bit different. Maybe even a little bit experimental.

For inspiration, we talked to some of the most legendary marketers working today and asked them to share their most creative lead gen examples. And believe me—some of these folks needed QUITE a bit of convincing to spill their most useful and interesting ideas.

But we got ‘em here for you: 10 unique examples lifted straight from the private swipe files and secret marketing playbooks of the pros. Use these ideas as inspiration for your next lead gen campaign. Or, just keep them handy for the next time you want to try something more interesting than creating another ebook or webinar.

Ready? Let’s get cooking.

Jump to a Creative Lead Gen Example

Create an Interactive Tool

Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

Interview a Third-Party Expert

Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Connect via Communities

Promote a Personalized Template

Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Start an Interesting Side Project

Publish a Surprising Quiz

If you’re creating a lead gen campaign, make sure you check out our professional landing page and popup templates. You’ll be able to optimize your page design to earn more conversions and qualified leads.

1. Create an Interactive Tool

There’s a good reason why so many brands—including HubSpot, Moz, and, yes, even Unbounce—have invested time and effort to create free tools. Tool-based marketing is popular because even simple interactive ideas can generate boatloads of qualified leads.

For example, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, says they developed a Free Keyword Tool for the Wordstream website. Marketers could use it to research and prioritize new keywords in just a few minutes.

And while developing an interactive tool might seem like a lot more work (you might need someone who knows how to code), Larry says they were able to generate a huge number of leads as a result.

Here’s how the tool works: you start out by entering a keyword or website URL that you’re interested in analyzing. To hone the results, you can also choose the industry and country you want to focus on.

What makes this tool particularly clever is the way it displays the results. Hit the “Search” button, and you’ll instantly be able to see some of the related keywords. But all the other information? It’s hidden, blurred out, or obscured in some way.

This smartly creates a curiosity gap for visitors, who feel like they’ve already started the process of doing research on their keyword. All they need to do is take one teeny-tiny extra step to get their results.

That final step? You gotta give up your email address.

Boom, lead generated.

This simple tool took just 3 months to build, yet has generated over a million email signups.

PRO TIP: Even a simple tool can be expensive to create. When considering your tool-based marketing idea, speak with a sample of your target audience first to see if they’d be interested.

2. Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

I believe it was old Billy Shakespeare who once wrote: “To gate or not to gate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous website traffic, or ask for an email address against a sea of troubles…”

At some point, every marketer faces this dilemma. You have an amazing piece of content—now are you going to give it away for free as a way to attract organic traffic? Or do you gate the content and use it as a lead gen magnet?

Cara Hogan, Content Strategist for Zaius, considered these options and asked—why not both?

For their Marketing Unboxed series, Cara says they took a hybrid approach to gating each video. Rather than lock up their content entirely behind a lead gen form, they actually embedded forms into each video so they showed up as you watch.

We created the Marketing Unboxed video series as a top-of-funnel piece of content designed to engage our target audience of B2C and commerce marketers. By including a lead gen form within the video itself, we encourage people to subscribe, but we don’t require it.

The forms draw just the right amount of your attention, without being too distracting. It slides off the video if you move your mouse off the screen, but then pops back on whenever you come back. All in all, a very classy approach that Cara says has driven some serious results.

We’ve generated hundreds of net new leads from this video series so far. We’ve only published 10 total episodes, and older episodes continue to earn subscribers over time. Some of these subscribers have since been nurtured to become new Zaius customers.

3. Interview a Third-Party Expert

For many brands, consistent blogging is one of their main sources of lead generation. Every time you put out an article, it’s an opportunity for someone new to visit your site, discover your brand, and opt in for more communications.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking outside of your own organization and team for content, either. Stepping outside of your comfort zone and providing a fresh perspective can actually be a fantastic way to bring in new audiences.

Take, for example, this lead gen example brought to us by Aaron Orendorff, Content Strategist for iconiContent. To help Shopify Plus rank for some valuable keywords, such as “ecommerce replatforming,” Aaron interviewed a high-profile expert in the industry.

Aaron says it’s the quality of the interview that makes this lead gen example work.

Rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch, the piece is an interview with Paul Rogers—one of the brightest and most respected leaders in ecommerce … That objectivity—and framing the article as an honest conversation about a ‘dirty word’—is highlighted throughout.

But wait, how do you actually generate leads with an interview or blog post? Well, Aaron explained that they peppered the article with three separate lead gen CTAs (including an Unbounce popup) to present visitors with downloadable content upgrades, related to the topic of the interview.

Popups and sticky bars can turn any high-traffic page into a lead generator. Find out how you can use these targeted offers to drive more conversions.

4. Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Direct mail might seem like an old school marketing tactic, but that’s exactly what makes it so darned interesting for lead generation. Why not focus your efforts on a smaller customer segment, and put together packages that really get them to sit up and take notice?

Take, for example, these direct mailers that Hero Conf sent out to promote their PPC marketing conference. The event organizers took a pretty interesting approach to get the attention of marketers like Casie Gillette, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing:

Oh man. @heroconf this is one of the coolest pieces of direct mail I've ever received! Who knew video could be so amazing in such a small package? pic.twitter.com/aQnlV2y71G

— Casie Gillette (@Casieg) January 31, 2019

Each piece of mail embedded a small video screen to show clips of the presenters who would be speaking at Hero Conf. And while these must have cost a fair bit more than a typical event brochure, Casie says the unique packaging really helped to win her over.

What got me was if you played the video to the end, they had a free ticket offer—you just had to respond to the email they had sent earlier … By placing the offer at the end, only those who watched the video all the way through would learn about the offer. A really cool way to grab attention.

5. Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Andrew Davis, best-selling author and keynote speaker, recently pointed out that most video testimonials are pretty dry. They’re usually just a lot of talking heads, with nervous customers babbling on about all the reasons why they like some marketing brand.

But there’s also a different type of video testimonial—one that actually tells the complete customer story. And although these can be harder to produce, they can also serve up a different type of indirect lead generation for your business.

As an example, Andrew suggests watching this video on YouTube that recently went viral: Vance’s Incredible 365-day Transformation. The video currently has over 31 million views and 50,000 comments on YouTube.

Unlike other video testimonials, this customer story is shot in real time. It’s compelling, it’s emotional—and it doesn’t have a single call to action.

Instead, Vance mentions throughout the video the diet and exercise program he is using to lose weight. The references start out subtle, but eventually become a main focus of the video. Andrew calls this an “implied CTA” that generates leads by inspiring viewers to take the next step.

A great testimonial video needs no call to action. It actually should create a moment that inspires people to do the next search … It doesn’t need a button, it just invites people who are so inspired to actually check out the next step of the product.

If you want to try this for yourself, all you need to do is start thinking about how you can frame your customer stories more like, well, stories. Connect with viewers on a personal or emotional level, and tease out the results so they get curious to learn more.

6. Connect via Communities

For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly different approach to lead generation. While you can still build lists using your website and landing pages, a lot of your success will also come from word of mouth and social interactions.

For example, Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant, says their go-to lead generation strategy has been to build sincere connections with other people, in both online and offline marketing communities.

Being an active member of my favorite communities has lead to me receive leads from other members, because I’m demonstrating expertise in that domain.

Nichole says that being an active community member on websites like Growth Hackers has often lead to them becoming a part of the team, responsible for either community management or growth.

As you build relationships and demonstrate expertise, people will naturally start to think of you or your company for future opportunities. The key is to be genuinely helpful and selfless in your interactions, and to try to build actual friendships with other members of the community.

The thing is, ‘getting leads’ was never my end goal for any of these communities. I was just actively building relationships by bringing value to others.

7. Promote a Personalized Template

The right template on the right page can be a powerful tool for generating leads. That’s because visitors are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for something practical they can actually use.

But while traditional templates are usually just generic PDF downloads, Ross Simmonds, digital marketing strategist, says you can get better results by making a downloadable template that’s more personalized and interactive.

Almost every audience loves a template. If you can think about a simple template that arms your audience with the steps they need to take to solve a problem – it can be a great win. Even better; make it an interactive template that gives the user the ability to download it at the end.

As an example, Ross points towards this Free Privacy Policy Generator created by Shopify.

Privacy policies are one of those things that ecommerce business owners know they need, but probably don’t have time to create. And while Shopify could have given their visitors a sample policy or instructions on how to create their own, instead they decided to go above and beyond by building a personalized template generator.

The form you fill out to generate your privacy policy serves two purposes. Not only does it help personalize the template with your company info, but it also lets Shopify follow up meaningfully with every lead that uses the tool. How cool is that?

The template approach is interesting because there’s a true value exchange. If you’re offering a template that is closely aligned with your product or service it can be both a rewarding user experience and a rewarding lead generation tactic.

8. Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Cross-promotion isn’t a new idea, but it’s not something too many marketers think about strategically when it comes to lead generation.

The hard part, of course, is finding the right brand to partner with. If the other company is too similar, then your audiences might already be overlapped. If the other company isn’t similar enough, then you run the risk of promoting to people who just don’t care about your brand or products.

This is where a bit of outside-the-box thinking can come in handy. Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, points to this particularly clever example of cross-promotion between Hydrate IV Bar and Live Love Lash:

Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the marketers at Hydrate IV Bar decided to try a different strategy. They thought about different places where their target customers might be available to try an IV bar, and struck up a smart partnership based on that:

The Hydrate IV Bar team was brilliant in thinking outside the box for local lead gen! In what instances are people in a position of stillness/rest where they could also benefit from IV therapy? Lash extensions! This cross-marketing has done very well for both businesses and feels like an efficient use of time for their customers.

And the thing is, there are all sorts of unique cross-promotion opportunities available that marketers might miss. Let’s say you’re a running shoe company, for example. The obvious cross-promotion opportunity would be a sports store, right? But you could also partner with a gym or training facility, and target athletes in the places where they spend the most time.

9. Create an Interesting Side Project

Sometimes, the best leads can come from the projects that have very little to do with your actual business. If you dig into related topics, you can discover whole segments of customers who otherwise might not have been exposed to your brand or marketing.

And when it comes to side projects, Ryan Robinson is a self-described aficionado. Once, he launched a public challenge on his blog to validate a random business idea in under 30 days with only $500.

The project took up a lot of Ryan’s time for that month, even though it was something he was doing on the side. He figured it would just be an interesting way to educate readers on how to validate their business ideas, and perhaps bring in some new audiences to his blog. But he was surprised by the number of leads he was able to generate as a result.

I saw a sizable surge in traffic during my first week of the challenge. Throughout the course of the full month as I updated the challenge post, I picked up almost 3,000 new subscribers on my blog.

To take advantage of all these new leads, Ryan even built a new course based around his learning.

A couple months after the challenge wrapped up, I launched a course about validating ideas to that new audience … This new group of subscribers that tuned in and kept a close eye on my challenge were very qualified leads, and that course ended up generating over $15,000 in revenue during just the first week of open enrollment.

10. Publish a Surprising Quiz

Online quizzes have been around for years, but many marketers still haven’t discovered their potential for lead generation. They’re powerful because they’re so compelling—visitors actually have fun filling them out, and then get super curious about the results. (“Why yes, I do want to know which piece of IKEA furniture best represents my personality.”)

To find a creative quiz example, we went to the quizmaster herself, Chanti Zak. Chanti is a quiz funnel strategist and copywriter who specializes in creating quizzes for lead gen, and really brings a special flair to the quiz creation process.

As an example, she shared this saucy quiz she created to target entrepreneurs for Jenna Kutcher’s website.

The key to a great quiz? You’ve got to surprise and delight visitors with every click, so they stay engaged throughout the process. Throw them a couple curveballs along the way, and then hit ‘em with results that speak to their unique situation.

The results go deep into what uniquely positions you to create a successful business. The custom results meet people where they’re at and are intentionally designed to empower them to take action.

To attract the most leads, you’ll want to create a quiz that speaks directly to your brand and target market. For this example, Chanti created playful questions and answers that really get in the headspace of a budding entrepreneur.

And the strategy seems to have worked too, with this quiz alone generating over 100,000 leads.

When this interactive and personalized approach is the first impression someone has of your brand, your chances of converting them from onlooker to customer are exponentially higher than with a generic lead magnet.

Are You Ready to Take the Lead?

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface with these 10 ideas. There are all sorts of different ways to generate leads, including more tried and true methods. You could always host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, run a contest, or buy ads on social media.

Whatever you try, the most important thing to remember is that in order to generate qualified leads, you need to offer up quality content. Give those top-of-funnel leads something that’ll educate, entertain, inform, or inspire and soon you’ll be overwhelmed with too many leads. (#firstworldmarketingproblems)

Share in the comments below if you have another method of lead gen that works well for your business, or if you think there’s something we missed. The more ideas we can round up, the better!

[itsjessicaisreal]

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends

Lead generation is the number one challenge for marketers today. And it’s only going to get harder now that most Google search results pages have become saturated with promotional lead magnets masquerading as “great” content.

There are millions of free resources out there already competing for attention. And customers are quickly catching on to the fact that most of these “Ultimate Guides to Dog Grooming” aren’t really worth giving up their personal information for.

Jessica Meher, VP of Marketing at Notarize, put it really well on Twitter:

So many #SaaS companies today produce the same content mktg formulas as they did 10 years ago.

E.g. ebooks on "the complete guide to X" or blog posts on "5 reasons why." etc.

This shit works, until it doesn't. Now's a good time to invent the new ebook. Get creative.

— Jessica Meher (@jessicameher) February 6, 2018

To stand out, you need more than quality content. You need to think outside the box. Try something a little bit different. Maybe even a little bit experimental.

For inspiration, we talked to some of the most legendary marketers working today and asked them to share their most creative lead gen examples. And believe me—some of these folks needed QUITE a bit of convincing to spill their most useful and interesting ideas.

But we got ‘em here for you: 10 unique examples lifted straight from the private swipe files and secret marketing playbooks of the pros. Use these ideas as inspiration for your next lead gen campaign. Or, just keep them handy for the next time you want to try something more interesting than creating another ebook or webinar.

Ready? Let’s get cooking.

Jump to a Creative Lead Gen Example

Create an Interactive Tool

Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

Interview a Third-Party Expert

Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Connect via Communities

Promote a Personalized Template

Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Start an Interesting Side Project

Publish a Surprising Quiz

If you’re creating a lead gen campaign, make sure you check out our professional landing page and popup templates. You’ll be able to optimize your page design to earn more conversions and qualified leads.

1. Create an Interactive Tool

There’s a good reason why so many brands—including HubSpot, Moz, and, yes, even Unbounce—have invested time and effort to create free tools. Tool-based marketing is popular because even simple interactive ideas can generate boatloads of qualified leads.

For example, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, says they developed a Free Keyword Tool for the Wordstream website. Marketers could use it to research and prioritize new keywords in just a few minutes.

And while developing an interactive tool might seem like a lot more work (you might need someone who knows how to code), Larry says they were able to generate a huge number of leads as a result.

Here’s how the tool works: you start out by entering a keyword or website URL that you’re interested in analyzing. To hone the results, you can also choose the industry and country you want to focus on.

What makes this tool particularly clever is the way it displays the results. Hit the “Search” button, and you’ll instantly be able to see some of the related keywords. But all the other information? It’s hidden, blurred out, or obscured in some way.

This smartly creates a curiosity gap for visitors, who feel like they’ve already started the process of doing research on their keyword. All they need to do is take one teeny-tiny extra step to get their results.

That final step? You gotta give up your email address.

Boom, lead generated.

This simple tool took just 3 months to build, yet has generated over a million email signups.

PRO TIP: Even a simple tool can be expensive to create. When considering your tool-based marketing idea, speak with a sample of your target audience first to see if they’d be interested.

2. Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

I believe it was old Billy Shakespeare who once wrote: “To gate or not to gate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous website traffic, or ask for an email address against a sea of troubles…”

At some point, every marketer faces this dilemma. You have an amazing piece of content—now are you going to give it away for free as a way to attract organic traffic? Or do you gate the content and use it as a lead gen magnet?

Cara Hogan, Content Strategist for Zaius, considered these options and asked—why not both?

For their Marketing Unboxed series, Cara says they took a hybrid approach to gating each video. Rather than lock up their content entirely behind a lead gen form, they actually embedded forms into each video so they showed up as you watch.

We created the Marketing Unboxed video series as a top-of-funnel piece of content designed to engage our target audience of B2C and commerce marketers. By including a lead gen form within the video itself, we encourage people to subscribe, but we don’t require it.

The forms draw just the right amount of your attention, without being too distracting. It slides off the video if you move your mouse off the screen, but then pops back on whenever you come back. All in all, a very classy approach that Cara says has driven some serious results.

We’ve generated hundreds of net new leads from this video series so far. We’ve only published 10 total episodes, and older episodes continue to earn subscribers over time. Some of these subscribers have since been nurtured to become new Zaius customers.

3. Interview a Third-Party Expert

For many brands, consistent blogging is one of their main sources of lead generation. Every time you put out an article, it’s an opportunity for someone new to visit your site, discover your brand, and opt in for more communications.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking outside of your own organization and team for content, either. Stepping outside of your comfort zone and providing a fresh perspective can actually be a fantastic way to bring in new audiences.

Take, for example, this lead gen example brought to us by Aaron Orendorff, Content Strategist for iconiContent. To help Shopify Plus rank for some valuable keywords, such as “ecommerce replatforming,” Aaron interviewed a high-profile expert in the industry.

Aaron says it’s the quality of the interview that makes this lead gen example work.

Rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch, the piece is an interview with Paul Rogers—one of the brightest and most respected leaders in ecommerce … That objectivity—and framing the article as an honest conversation about a ‘dirty word’—is highlighted throughout.

But wait, how do you actually generate leads with an interview or blog post? Well, Aaron explained that they peppered the article with three separate lead gen CTAs (including an Unbounce popup) to present visitors with downloadable content upgrades, related to the topic of the interview.

Popups and sticky bars can turn any high-traffic page into a lead generator. Find out how you can use these targeted offers to drive more conversions.

4. Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Direct mail might seem like an old school marketing tactic, but that’s exactly what makes it so darned interesting for lead generation. Why not focus your efforts on a smaller customer segment, and put together packages that really get them to sit up and take notice?

Take, for example, these direct mailers that Hero Conf sent out to promote their PPC marketing conference. The event organizers took a pretty interesting approach to get the attention of marketers like Casie Gillette, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing:

Oh man. @heroconf this is one of the coolest pieces of direct mail I've ever received! Who knew video could be so amazing in such a small package? pic.twitter.com/aQnlV2y71G

— Casie Gillette (@Casieg) January 31, 2019

Each piece of mail embedded a small video screen to show clips of the presenters who would be speaking at Hero Conf. And while these must have cost a fair bit more than a typical event brochure, Casie says the unique packaging really helped to win her over.

What got me was if you played the video to the end, they had a free ticket offer—you just had to respond to the email they had sent earlier … By placing the offer at the end, only those who watched the video all the way through would learn about the offer. A really cool way to grab attention.

5. Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Andrew Davis, best-selling author and keynote speaker, recently pointed out that most video testimonials are pretty dry. They’re usually just a lot of talking heads, with nervous customers babbling on about all the reasons why they like some marketing brand.

But there’s also a different type of video testimonial—one that actually tells the complete customer story. And although these can be harder to produce, they can also serve up a different type of indirect lead generation for your business.

As an example, Andrew suggests watching this video on YouTube that recently went viral: Vance’s Incredible 365-day Transformation. The video currently has over 31 million views and 50,000 comments on YouTube.

Unlike other video testimonials, this customer story is shot in real time. It’s compelling, it’s emotional—and it doesn’t have a single call to action.

Instead, Vance mentions throughout the video the diet and exercise program he is using to lose weight. The references start out subtle, but eventually become a main focus of the video. Andrew calls this an “implied CTA” that generates leads by inspiring viewers to take the next step.

A great testimonial video needs no call to action. It actually should create a moment that inspires people to do the next search … It doesn’t need a button, it just invites people who are so inspired to actually check out the next step of the product.

If you want to try this for yourself, all you need to do is start thinking about how you can frame your customer stories more like, well, stories. Connect with viewers on a personal or emotional level, and tease out the results so they get curious to learn more.

6. Connect via Communities

For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly different approach to lead generation. While you can still build lists using your website and landing pages, a lot of your success will also come from word of mouth and social interactions.

For example, Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant, says their go-to lead generation strategy has been to build sincere connections with other people, in both online and offline marketing communities.

Being an active member of my favorite communities has lead to me receive leads from other members, because I’m demonstrating expertise in that domain.

Nichole says that being an active community member on websites like Growth Hackers has often lead to them becoming a part of the team, responsible for either community management or growth.

As you build relationships and demonstrate expertise, people will naturally start to think of you or your company for future opportunities. The key is to be genuinely helpful and selfless in your interactions, and to try to build actual friendships with other members of the community.

The thing is, ‘getting leads’ was never my end goal for any of these communities. I was just actively building relationships by bringing value to others.

7. Promote a Personalized Template

The right template on the right page can be a powerful tool for generating leads. That’s because visitors are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for something practical they can actually use.

But while traditional templates are usually just generic PDF downloads, Ross Simmonds, digital marketing strategist, says you can get better results by making a downloadable template that’s more personalized and interactive.

Almost every audience loves a template. If you can think about a simple template that arms your audience with the steps they need to take to solve a problem – it can be a great win. Even better; make it an interactive template that gives the user the ability to download it at the end.

As an example, Ross points towards this Free Privacy Policy Generator created by Shopify.

Privacy policies are one of those things that ecommerce business owners know they need, but probably don’t have time to create. And while Shopify could have given their visitors a sample policy or instructions on how to create their own, instead they decided to go above and beyond by building a personalized template generator.

The form you fill out to generate your privacy policy serves two purposes. Not only does it help personalize the template with your company info, but it also lets Shopify follow up meaningfully with every lead that uses the tool. How cool is that?

The template approach is interesting because there’s a true value exchange. If you’re offering a template that is closely aligned with your product or service it can be both a rewarding user experience and a rewarding lead generation tactic.

8. Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Cross-promotion isn’t a new idea, but it’s not something too many marketers think about strategically when it comes to lead generation.

The hard part, of course, is finding the right brand to partner with. If the other company is too similar, then your audiences might already be overlapped. If the other company isn’t similar enough, then you run the risk of promoting to people who just don’t care about your brand or products.

This is where a bit of outside-the-box thinking can come in handy. Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, points to this particularly clever example of cross-promotion between Hydrate IV Bar and Live Love Lash:

Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the marketers at Hydrate IV Bar decided to try a different strategy. They thought about different places where their target customers might be available to try an IV bar, and struck up a smart partnership based on that:

The Hydrate IV Bar team was brilliant in thinking outside the box for local lead gen! In what instances are people in a position of stillness/rest where they could also benefit from IV therapy? Lash extensions! This cross-marketing has done very well for both businesses and feels like an efficient use of time for their customers.

And the thing is, there are all sorts of unique cross-promotion opportunities available that marketers might miss. Let’s say you’re a running shoe company, for example. The obvious cross-promotion opportunity would be a sports store, right? But you could also partner with a gym or training facility, and target athletes in the places where they spend the most time.

9. Create an Interesting Side Project

Sometimes, the best leads can come from the projects that have very little to do with your actual business. If you dig into related topics, you can discover whole segments of customers who otherwise might not have been exposed to your brand or marketing.

And when it comes to side projects, Ryan Robinson is a self-described aficionado. Once, he launched a public challenge on his blog to validate a random business idea in under 30 days with only $500.

The project took up a lot of Ryan’s time for that month, even though it was something he was doing on the side. He figured it would just be an interesting way to educate readers on how to validate their business ideas, and perhaps bring in some new audiences to his blog. But he was surprised by the number of leads he was able to generate as a result.

I saw a sizable surge in traffic during my first week of the challenge. Throughout the course of the full month as I updated the challenge post, I picked up almost 3,000 new subscribers on my blog.

To take advantage of all these new leads, Ryan even built a new course based around his learning.

A couple months after the challenge wrapped up, I launched a course about validating ideas to that new audience … This new group of subscribers that tuned in and kept a close eye on my challenge were very qualified leads, and that course ended up generating over $15,000 in revenue during just the first week of open enrollment.

10. Publish a Surprising Quiz

Online quizzes have been around for years, but many marketers still haven’t discovered their potential for lead generation. They’re powerful because they’re so compelling—visitors actually have fun filling them out, and then get super curious about the results. (“Why yes, I do want to know which piece of IKEA furniture best represents my personality.”)

To find a creative quiz example, we went to the quizmaster herself, Chanti Zak. Chanti is a quiz funnel strategist and copywriter who specializes in creating quizzes for lead gen, and really brings a special flair to the quiz creation process.

As an example, she shared this saucy quiz she created to target entrepreneurs for Jenna Kutcher’s website.

The key to a great quiz? You’ve got to surprise and delight visitors with every click, so they stay engaged throughout the process. Throw them a couple curveballs along the way, and then hit ‘em with results that speak to their unique situation.

The results go deep into what uniquely positions you to create a successful business. The custom results meet people where they’re at and are intentionally designed to empower them to take action.

To attract the most leads, you’ll want to create a quiz that speaks directly to your brand and target market. For this example, Chanti created playful questions and answers that really get in the headspace of a budding entrepreneur.

And the strategy seems to have worked too, with this quiz alone generating over 100,000 leads.

When this interactive and personalized approach is the first impression someone has of your brand, your chances of converting them from onlooker to customer are exponentially higher than with a generic lead magnet.

Are You Ready to Take the Lead?

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface with these 10 ideas. There are all sorts of different ways to generate leads, including more tried and true methods. You could always host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, run a contest, or buy ads on social media.

Whatever you try, the most important thing to remember is that in order to generate qualified leads, you need to offer up quality content. Give those top-of-funnel leads something that’ll educate, entertain, inform, or inspire and soon you’ll be overwhelmed with too many leads. (#firstworldmarketingproblems)

Share in the comments below if you have another method of lead gen that works well for your business, or if you think there’s something we missed. The more ideas we can round up, the better!

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/lead-generation/10-creative-lead-gen-examples-sourced-from-marketing-legends/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[annaxkeating]

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends

Lead generation is the number one challenge for marketers today. And it’s only going to get harder now that most Google search results pages have become saturated with promotional lead magnets masquerading as “great” content.

There are millions of free resources out there already competing for attention. And customers are quickly catching on to the fact that most of these “Ultimate Guides to Dog Grooming” aren’t really worth giving up their personal information for.

Jessica Meher, VP of Marketing at Notarize, put it really well on Twitter:

So many #SaaS companies today produce the same content mktg formulas as they did 10 years ago.

E.g. ebooks on "the complete guide to X" or blog posts on "5 reasons why." etc.

This shit works, until it doesn't. Now's a good time to invent the new ebook. Get creative.

— Jessica Meher (@jessicameher) February 6, 2018

To stand out, you need more than quality content. You need to think outside the box. Try something a little bit different. Maybe even a little bit experimental.

For inspiration, we talked to some of the most legendary marketers working today and asked them to share their most creative lead gen examples. And believe me—some of these folks needed QUITE a bit of convincing to spill their most useful and interesting ideas.

But we got ‘em here for you: 10 unique examples lifted straight from the private swipe files and secret marketing playbooks of the pros. Use these ideas as inspiration for your next lead gen campaign. Or, just keep them handy for the next time you want to try something more interesting than creating another ebook or webinar.

Ready? Let’s get cooking.

Jump to a Creative Lead Gen Example

Create an Interactive Tool

Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

Interview a Third-Party Expert

Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Connect via Communities

Promote a Personalized Template

Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Start an Interesting Side Project

Publish a Surprising Quiz

If you’re creating a lead gen campaign, make sure you check out our professional landing page and popup templates. You’ll be able to optimize your page design to earn more conversions and qualified leads.

1. Create an Interactive Tool

There’s a good reason why so many brands—including HubSpot, Moz, and, yes, even Unbounce—have invested time and effort to create free tools. Tool-based marketing is popular because even simple interactive ideas can generate boatloads of qualified leads.

For example, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, says they developed a Free Keyword Tool for the Wordstream website. Marketers could use it to research and prioritize new keywords in just a few minutes.

And while developing an interactive tool might seem like a lot more work (you might need someone who knows how to code), Larry says they were able to generate a huge number of leads as a result.

Here’s how the tool works: you start out by entering a keyword or website URL that you’re interested in analyzing. To hone the results, you can also choose the industry and country you want to focus on.

What makes this tool particularly clever is the way it displays the results. Hit the “Search” button, and you’ll instantly be able to see some of the related keywords. But all the other information? It’s hidden, blurred out, or obscured in some way.

This smartly creates a curiosity gap for visitors, who feel like they’ve already started the process of doing research on their keyword. All they need to do is take one teeny-tiny extra step to get their results.

That final step? You gotta give up your email address.

Boom, lead generated.

This simple tool took just 3 months to build, yet has generated over a million email signups.

PRO TIP: Even a simple tool can be expensive to create. When considering your tool-based marketing idea, speak with a sample of your target audience first to see if they’d be interested.

2. Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

I believe it was old Billy Shakespeare who once wrote: “To gate or not to gate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous website traffic, or ask for an email address against a sea of troubles…”

At some point, every marketer faces this dilemma. You have an amazing piece of content—now are you going to give it away for free as a way to attract organic traffic? Or do you gate the content and use it as a lead gen magnet?

Cara Hogan, Content Strategist for Zaius, considered these options and asked—why not both?

For their Marketing Unboxed series, Cara says they took a hybrid approach to gating each video. Rather than lock up their content entirely behind a lead gen form, they actually embedded forms into each video so they showed up as you watch.

We created the Marketing Unboxed video series as a top-of-funnel piece of content designed to engage our target audience of B2C and commerce marketers. By including a lead gen form within the video itself, we encourage people to subscribe, but we don’t require it.

The forms draw just the right amount of your attention, without being too distracting. It slides off the video if you move your mouse off the screen, but then pops back on whenever you come back. All in all, a very classy approach that Cara says has driven some serious results.

We’ve generated hundreds of net new leads from this video series so far. We’ve only published 10 total episodes, and older episodes continue to earn subscribers over time. Some of these subscribers have since been nurtured to become new Zaius customers.

3. Interview a Third-Party Expert

For many brands, consistent blogging is one of their main sources of lead generation. Every time you put out an article, it’s an opportunity for someone new to visit your site, discover your brand, and opt in for more communications.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking outside of your own organization and team for content, either. Stepping outside of your comfort zone and providing a fresh perspective can actually be a fantastic way to bring in new audiences.

Take, for example, this lead gen example brought to us by Aaron Orendorff, Content Strategist for iconiContent. To help Shopify Plus rank for some valuable keywords, such as “ecommerce replatforming,” Aaron interviewed a high-profile expert in the industry.

Aaron says it’s the quality of the interview that makes this lead gen example work.

Rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch, the piece is an interview with Paul Rogers—one of the brightest and most respected leaders in ecommerce … That objectivity—and framing the article as an honest conversation about a ‘dirty word’—is highlighted throughout.

But wait, how do you actually generate leads with an interview or blog post? Well, Aaron explained that they peppered the article with three separate lead gen CTAs (including an Unbounce popup) to present visitors with downloadable content upgrades, related to the topic of the interview.

Popups and sticky bars can turn any high-traffic page into a lead generator. Find out how you can use these targeted offers to drive more conversions.

4. Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Direct mail might seem like an old school marketing tactic, but that’s exactly what makes it so darned interesting for lead generation. Why not focus your efforts on a smaller customer segment, and put together packages that really get them to sit up and take notice?

Take, for example, these direct mailers that Hero Conf sent out to promote their PPC marketing conference. The event organizers took a pretty interesting approach to get the attention of marketers like Casie Gillette, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing:

Oh man. @heroconf this is one of the coolest pieces of direct mail I've ever received! Who knew video could be so amazing in such a small package? pic.twitter.com/aQnlV2y71G

— Casie Gillette (@Casieg) January 31, 2019

Each piece of mail embedded a small video screen to show clips of the presenters who would be speaking at Hero Conf. And while these must have cost a fair bit more than a typical event brochure, Casie says the unique packaging really helped to win her over.

What got me was if you played the video to the end, they had a free ticket offer—you just had to respond to the email they had sent earlier … By placing the offer at the end, only those who watched the video all the way through would learn about the offer. A really cool way to grab attention.

5. Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Andrew Davis, best-selling author and keynote speaker, recently pointed out that most video testimonials are pretty dry. They’re usually just a lot of talking heads, with nervous customers babbling on about all the reasons why they like some marketing brand.

But there’s also a different type of video testimonial—one that actually tells the complete customer story. And although these can be harder to produce, they can also serve up a different type of indirect lead generation for your business.

As an example, Andrew suggests watching this video on YouTube that recently went viral: Vance’s Incredible 365-day Transformation. The video currently has over 31 million views and 50,000 comments on YouTube.

Unlike other video testimonials, this customer story is shot in real time. It’s compelling, it’s emotional—and it doesn’t have a single call to action.

Instead, Vance mentions throughout the video the diet and exercise program he is using to lose weight. The references start out subtle, but eventually become a main focus of the video. Andrew calls this an “implied CTA” that generates leads by inspiring viewers to take the next step.

A great testimonial video needs no call to action. It actually should create a moment that inspires people to do the next search … It doesn’t need a button, it just invites people who are so inspired to actually check out the next step of the product.

If you want to try this for yourself, all you need to do is start thinking about how you can frame your customer stories more like, well, stories. Connect with viewers on a personal or emotional level, and tease out the results so they get curious to learn more.

6. Connect via Communities

For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly different approach to lead generation. While you can still build lists using your website and landing pages, a lot of your success will also come from word of mouth and social interactions.

For example, Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant, says their go-to lead generation strategy has been to build sincere connections with other people, in both online and offline marketing communities.

Being an active member of my favorite communities has lead to me receive leads from other members, because I’m demonstrating expertise in that domain.

Nichole says that being an active community member on websites like Growth Hackers has often lead to them becoming a part of the team, responsible for either community management or growth.

As you build relationships and demonstrate expertise, people will naturally start to think of you or your company for future opportunities. The key is to be genuinely helpful and selfless in your interactions, and to try to build actual friendships with other members of the community.

The thing is, ‘getting leads’ was never my end goal for any of these communities. I was just actively building relationships by bringing value to others.

7. Promote a Personalized Template

The right template on the right page can be a powerful tool for generating leads. That’s because visitors are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for something practical they can actually use.

But while traditional templates are usually just generic PDF downloads, Ross Simmonds, digital marketing strategist, says you can get better results by making a downloadable template that’s more personalized and interactive.

Almost every audience loves a template. If you can think about a simple template that arms your audience with the steps they need to take to solve a problem – it can be a great win. Even better; make it an interactive template that gives the user the ability to download it at the end.

As an example, Ross points towards this Free Privacy Policy Generator created by Shopify.

Privacy policies are one of those things that ecommerce business owners know they need, but probably don’t have time to create. And while Shopify could have given their visitors a sample policy or instructions on how to create their own, instead they decided to go above and beyond by building a personalized template generator.

The form you fill out to generate your privacy policy serves two purposes. Not only does it help personalize the template with your company info, but it also lets Shopify follow up meaningfully with every lead that uses the tool. How cool is that?

The template approach is interesting because there’s a true value exchange. If you’re offering a template that is closely aligned with your product or service it can be both a rewarding user experience and a rewarding lead generation tactic.

8. Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Cross-promotion isn’t a new idea, but it’s not something too many marketers think about strategically when it comes to lead generation.

The hard part, of course, is finding the right brand to partner with. If the other company is too similar, then your audiences might already be overlapped. If the other company isn’t similar enough, then you run the risk of promoting to people who just don’t care about your brand or products.

This is where a bit of outside-the-box thinking can come in handy. Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, points to this particularly clever example of cross-promotion between Hydrate IV Bar and Live Love Lash:

Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the marketers at Hydrate IV Bar decided to try a different strategy. They thought about different places where their target customers might be available to try an IV bar, and struck up a smart partnership based on that:

The Hydrate IV Bar team was brilliant in thinking outside the box for local lead gen! In what instances are people in a position of stillness/rest where they could also benefit from IV therapy? Lash extensions! This cross-marketing has done very well for both businesses and feels like an efficient use of time for their customers.

And the thing is, there are all sorts of unique cross-promotion opportunities available that marketers might miss. Let’s say you’re a running shoe company, for example. The obvious cross-promotion opportunity would be a sports store, right? But you could also partner with a gym or training facility, and target athletes in the places where they spend the most time.

9. Create an Interesting Side Project

Sometimes, the best leads can come from the projects that have very little to do with your actual business. If you dig into related topics, you can discover whole segments of customers who otherwise might not have been exposed to your brand or marketing.

And when it comes to side projects, Ryan Robinson is a self-described aficionado. Once, he launched a public challenge on his blog to validate a random business idea in under 30 days with only $500.

The project took up a lot of Ryan’s time for that month, even though it was something he was doing on the side. He figured it would just be an interesting way to educate readers on how to validate their business ideas, and perhaps bring in some new audiences to his blog. But he was surprised by the number of leads he was able to generate as a result.

I saw a sizable surge in traffic during my first week of the challenge. Throughout the course of the full month as I updated the challenge post, I picked up almost 3,000 new subscribers on my blog.

To take advantage of all these new leads, Ryan even built a new course based around his learning.

A couple months after the challenge wrapped up, I launched a course about validating ideas to that new audience … This new group of subscribers that tuned in and kept a close eye on my challenge were very qualified leads, and that course ended up generating over $15,000 in revenue during just the first week of open enrollment.

10. Publish a Surprising Quiz

Online quizzes have been around for years, but many marketers still haven’t discovered their potential for lead generation. They’re powerful because they’re so compelling—visitors actually have fun filling them out, and then get super curious about the results. (“Why yes, I do want to know which piece of IKEA furniture best represents my personality.”)

To find a creative quiz example, we went to the quizmaster herself, Chanti Zak. Chanti is a quiz funnel strategist and copywriter who specializes in creating quizzes for lead gen, and really brings a special flair to the quiz creation process.

As an example, she shared this saucy quiz she created to target entrepreneurs for Jenna Kutcher’s website.

The key to a great quiz? You’ve got to surprise and delight visitors with every click, so they stay engaged throughout the process. Throw them a couple curveballs along the way, and then hit ‘em with results that speak to their unique situation.

The results go deep into what uniquely positions you to create a successful business. The custom results meet people where they’re at and are intentionally designed to empower them to take action.

To attract the most leads, you’ll want to create a quiz that speaks directly to your brand and target market. For this example, Chanti created playful questions and answers that really get in the headspace of a budding entrepreneur.

And the strategy seems to have worked too, with this quiz alone generating over 100,000 leads.

When this interactive and personalized approach is the first impression someone has of your brand, your chances of converting them from onlooker to customer are exponentially higher than with a generic lead magnet.

Are You Ready to Take the Lead?

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface with these 10 ideas. There are all sorts of different ways to generate leads, including more tried and true methods. You could always host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, run a contest, or buy ads on social media.

Whatever you try, the most important thing to remember is that in order to generate qualified leads, you need to offer up quality content. Give those top-of-funnel leads something that’ll educate, entertain, inform, or inspire and soon you’ll be overwhelmed with too many leads. (#firstworldmarketingproblems)

Share in the comments below if you have another method of lead gen that works well for your business, or if you think there’s something we missed. The more ideas we can round up, the better!

from Digital https://unbounce.com/lead-generation/10-creative-lead-gen-examples-sourced-from-marketing-legends/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[jjonassevilla]

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends

Lead generation is the number one challenge for marketers today. And it’s only going to get harder now that most Google search results pages have become saturated with promotional lead magnets masquerading as “great” content.

There are millions of free resources out there already competing for attention. And customers are quickly catching on to the fact that most of these “Ultimate Guides to Dog Grooming” aren’t really worth giving up their personal information for.

Jessica Meher, VP of Marketing at Notarize, put it really well on Twitter:

So many #SaaS companies today produce the same content mktg formulas as they did 10 years ago.

E.g. ebooks on "the complete guide to X" or blog posts on "5 reasons why." etc.

This shit works, until it doesn't. Now's a good time to invent the new ebook. Get creative.

— Jessica Meher (@jessicameher) February 6, 2018

To stand out, you need more than quality content. You need to think outside the box. Try something a little bit different. Maybe even a little bit experimental.

For inspiration, we talked to some of the most legendary marketers working today and asked them to share their most creative lead gen examples. And believe me—some of these folks needed QUITE a bit of convincing to spill their most useful and interesting ideas.

But we got ‘em here for you: 10 unique examples lifted straight from the private swipe files and secret marketing playbooks of the pros. Use these ideas as inspiration for your next lead gen campaign. Or, just keep them handy for the next time you want to try something more interesting than creating another ebook or webinar.

Ready? Let’s get cooking.

Jump to a Creative Lead Gen Example

Create an Interactive Tool

Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

Interview a Third-Party Expert

Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Connect via Communities

Promote a Personalized Template

Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Start an Interesting Side Project

Publish a Surprising Quiz

If you’re creating a lead gen campaign, make sure you check out our professional landing page and popup templates. You’ll be able to optimize your page design to earn more conversions and qualified leads.

1. Create an Interactive Tool

There’s a good reason why so many brands—including HubSpot, Moz, and, yes, even Unbounce—have invested time and effort to create free tools. Tool-based marketing is popular because even simple interactive ideas can generate boatloads of qualified leads.

For example, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, says they developed a Free Keyword Tool for the Wordstream website. Marketers could use it to research and prioritize new keywords in just a few minutes.

And while developing an interactive tool might seem like a lot more work (you might need someone who knows how to code), Larry says they were able to generate a huge number of leads as a result.

Here’s how the tool works: you start out by entering a keyword or website URL that you’re interested in analyzing. To hone the results, you can also choose the industry and country you want to focus on.

What makes this tool particularly clever is the way it displays the results. Hit the “Search” button, and you’ll instantly be able to see some of the related keywords. But all the other information? It’s hidden, blurred out, or obscured in some way.

This smartly creates a curiosity gap for visitors, who feel like they’ve already started the process of doing research on their keyword. All they need to do is take one teeny-tiny extra step to get their results.

That final step? You gotta give up your email address.

Boom, lead generated.

This simple tool took just 3 months to build, yet has generated over a million email signups.

PRO TIP: Even a simple tool can be expensive to create. When considering your tool-based marketing idea, speak with a sample of your target audience first to see if they’d be interested.

2. Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

I believe it was old Billy Shakespeare who once wrote: “To gate or not to gate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous website traffic, or ask for an email address against a sea of troubles…”

At some point, every marketer faces this dilemma. You have an amazing piece of content—now are you going to give it away for free as a way to attract organic traffic? Or do you gate the content and use it as a lead gen magnet?

Cara Hogan, Content Strategist for Zaius, considered these options and asked—why not both?

For their Marketing Unboxed series, Cara says they took a hybrid approach to gating each video. Rather than lock up their content entirely behind a lead gen form, they actually embedded forms into each video so they showed up as you watch.

We created the Marketing Unboxed video series as a top-of-funnel piece of content designed to engage our target audience of B2C and commerce marketers. By including a lead gen form within the video itself, we encourage people to subscribe, but we don’t require it.

The forms draw just the right amount of your attention, without being too distracting. It slides off the video if you move your mouse off the screen, but then pops back on whenever you come back. All in all, a very classy approach that Cara says has driven some serious results.

We’ve generated hundreds of net new leads from this video series so far. We’ve only published 10 total episodes, and older episodes continue to earn subscribers over time. Some of these subscribers have since been nurtured to become new Zaius customers.

3. Interview a Third-Party Expert

For many brands, consistent blogging is one of their main sources of lead generation. Every time you put out an article, it’s an opportunity for someone new to visit your site, discover your brand, and opt in for more communications.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking outside of your own organization and team for content, either. Stepping outside of your comfort zone and providing a fresh perspective can actually be a fantastic way to bring in new audiences.

Take, for example, this lead gen example brought to us by Aaron Orendorff, Content Strategist for iconiContent. To help Shopify Plus rank for some valuable keywords, such as “ecommerce replatforming,” Aaron interviewed a high-profile expert in the industry.

Aaron says it’s the quality of the interview that makes this lead gen example work.

Rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch, the piece is an interview with Paul Rogers—one of the brightest and most respected leaders in ecommerce … That objectivity—and framing the article as an honest conversation about a ‘dirty word’—is highlighted throughout.

But wait, how do you actually generate leads with an interview or blog post? Well, Aaron explained that they peppered the article with three separate lead gen CTAs (including an Unbounce popup) to present visitors with downloadable content upgrades, related to the topic of the interview.

Popups and sticky bars can turn any high-traffic page into a lead generator. Find out how you can use these targeted offers to drive more conversions.

4. Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Direct mail might seem like an old school marketing tactic, but that’s exactly what makes it so darned interesting for lead generation. Why not focus your efforts on a smaller customer segment, and put together packages that really get them to sit up and take notice?

Take, for example, these direct mailers that Hero Conf sent out to promote their PPC marketing conference. The event organizers took a pretty interesting approach to get the attention of marketers like Casie Gillette, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing:

Oh man. @heroconf this is one of the coolest pieces of direct mail I've ever received! Who knew video could be so amazing in such a small package? pic.twitter.com/aQnlV2y71G

— Casie Gillette (@Casieg) January 31, 2019

Each piece of mail embedded a small video screen to show clips of the presenters who would be speaking at Hero Conf. And while these must have cost a fair bit more than a typical event brochure, Casie says the unique packaging really helped to win her over.

What got me was if you played the video to the end, they had a free ticket offer—you just had to respond to the email they had sent earlier … By placing the offer at the end, only those who watched the video all the way through would learn about the offer. A really cool way to grab attention.

5. Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Andrew Davis, best-selling author and keynote speaker, recently pointed out that most video testimonials are pretty dry. They’re usually just a lot of talking heads, with nervous customers babbling on about all the reasons why they like some marketing brand.

But there’s also a different type of video testimonial—one that actually tells the complete customer story. And although these can be harder to produce, they can also serve up a different type of indirect lead generation for your business.

As an example, Andrew suggests watching this video on YouTube that recently went viral: Vance’s Incredible 365-day Transformation. The video currently has over 31 million views and 50,000 comments on YouTube.

Unlike other video testimonials, this customer story is shot in real time. It’s compelling, it’s emotional—and it doesn’t have a single call to action.

Instead, Vance mentions throughout the video the diet and exercise program he is using to lose weight. The references start out subtle, but eventually become a main focus of the video. Andrew calls this an “implied CTA” that generates leads by inspiring viewers to take the next step.

A great testimonial video needs no call to action. It actually should create a moment that inspires people to do the next search … It doesn’t need a button, it just invites people who are so inspired to actually check out the next step of the product.

If you want to try this for yourself, all you need to do is start thinking about how you can frame your customer stories more like, well, stories. Connect with viewers on a personal or emotional level, and tease out the results so they get curious to learn more.

6. Connect via Communities

For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly different approach to lead generation. While you can still build lists using your website and landing pages, a lot of your success will also come from word of mouth and social interactions.

For example, Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant, says their go-to lead generation strategy has been to build sincere connections with other people, in both online and offline marketing communities.

Being an active member of my favorite communities has lead to me receive leads from other members, because I’m demonstrating expertise in that domain.

Nichole says that being an active community member on websites like Growth Hackers has often lead to them becoming a part of the team, responsible for either community management or growth.

As you build relationships and demonstrate expertise, people will naturally start to think of you or your company for future opportunities. The key is to be genuinely helpful and selfless in your interactions, and to try to build actual friendships with other members of the community.

The thing is, ‘getting leads’ was never my end goal for any of these communities. I was just actively building relationships by bringing value to others.

7. Promote a Personalized Template

The right template on the right page can be a powerful tool for generating leads. That’s because visitors are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for something practical they can actually use.

But while traditional templates are usually just generic PDF downloads, Ross Simmonds, digital marketing strategist, says you can get better results by making a downloadable template that’s more personalized and interactive.

Almost every audience loves a template. If you can think about a simple template that arms your audience with the steps they need to take to solve a problem – it can be a great win. Even better; make it an interactive template that gives the user the ability to download it at the end.

As an example, Ross points towards this Free Privacy Policy Generator created by Shopify.

Privacy policies are one of those things that ecommerce business owners know they need, but probably don’t have time to create. And while Shopify could have given their visitors a sample policy or instructions on how to create their own, instead they decided to go above and beyond by building a personalized template generator.

The form you fill out to generate your privacy policy serves two purposes. Not only does it help personalize the template with your company info, but it also lets Shopify follow up meaningfully with every lead that uses the tool. How cool is that?

The template approach is interesting because there’s a true value exchange. If you’re offering a template that is closely aligned with your product or service it can be both a rewarding user experience and a rewarding lead generation tactic.

8. Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Cross-promotion isn’t a new idea, but it’s not something too many marketers think about strategically when it comes to lead generation.

The hard part, of course, is finding the right brand to partner with. If the other company is too similar, then your audiences might already be overlapped. If the other company isn’t similar enough, then you run the risk of promoting to people who just don’t care about your brand or products.

This is where a bit of outside-the-box thinking can come in handy. Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, points to this particularly clever example of cross-promotion between Hydrate IV Bar and Live Love Lash:

Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the marketers at Hydrate IV Bar decided to try a different strategy. They thought about different places where their target customers might be available to try an IV bar, and struck up a smart partnership based on that:

The Hydrate IV Bar team was brilliant in thinking outside the box for local lead gen! In what instances are people in a position of stillness/rest where they could also benefit from IV therapy? Lash extensions! This cross-marketing has done very well for both businesses and feels like an efficient use of time for their customers.

And the thing is, there are all sorts of unique cross-promotion opportunities available that marketers might miss. Let’s say you’re a running shoe company, for example. The obvious cross-promotion opportunity would be a sports store, right? But you could also partner with a gym or training facility, and target athletes in the places where they spend the most time.

9. Create an Interesting Side Project

Sometimes, the best leads can come from the projects that have very little to do with your actual business. If you dig into related topics, you can discover whole segments of customers who otherwise might not have been exposed to your brand or marketing.

And when it comes to side projects, Ryan Robinson is a self-described aficionado. Once, he launched a public challenge on his blog to validate a random business idea in under 30 days with only $500.

The project took up a lot of Ryan’s time for that month, even though it was something he was doing on the side. He figured it would just be an interesting way to educate readers on how to validate their business ideas, and perhaps bring in some new audiences to his blog. But he was surprised by the number of leads he was able to generate as a result.

I saw a sizable surge in traffic during my first week of the challenge. Throughout the course of the full month as I updated the challenge post, I picked up almost 3,000 new subscribers on my blog.

To take advantage of all these new leads, Ryan even built a new course based around his learning.

A couple months after the challenge wrapped up, I launched a course about validating ideas to that new audience … This new group of subscribers that tuned in and kept a close eye on my challenge were very qualified leads, and that course ended up generating over $15,000 in revenue during just the first week of open enrollment.

10. Publish a Surprising Quiz

Online quizzes have been around for years, but many marketers still haven’t discovered their potential for lead generation. They’re powerful because they’re so compelling—visitors actually have fun filling them out, and then get super curious about the results. (“Why yes, I do want to know which piece of IKEA furniture best represents my personality.”)

To find a creative quiz example, we went to the quizmaster herself, Chanti Zak. Chanti is a quiz funnel strategist and copywriter who specializes in creating quizzes for lead gen, and really brings a special flair to the quiz creation process.

As an example, she shared this saucy quiz she created to target entrepreneurs for Jenna Kutcher’s website.

The key to a great quiz? You’ve got to surprise and delight visitors with every click, so they stay engaged throughout the process. Throw them a couple curveballs along the way, and then hit ‘em with results that speak to their unique situation.

The results go deep into what uniquely positions you to create a successful business. The custom results meet people where they’re at and are intentionally designed to empower them to take action.

To attract the most leads, you’ll want to create a quiz that speaks directly to your brand and target market. For this example, Chanti created playful questions and answers that really get in the headspace of a budding entrepreneur.

And the strategy seems to have worked too, with this quiz alone generating over 100,000 leads.

When this interactive and personalized approach is the first impression someone has of your brand, your chances of converting them from onlooker to customer are exponentially higher than with a generic lead magnet.

Are You Ready to Take the Lead?

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface with these 10 ideas. There are all sorts of different ways to generate leads, including more tried and true methods. You could always host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, run a contest, or buy ads on social media.

Whatever you try, the most important thing to remember is that in order to generate qualified leads, you need to offer up quality content. Give those top-of-funnel leads something that’ll educate, entertain, inform, or inspire and soon you’ll be overwhelmed with too many leads. (#firstworldmarketingproblems)

Share in the comments below if you have another method of lead gen that works well for your business, or if you think there’s something we missed. The more ideas we can round up, the better!

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/lead-generation/10-creative-lead-gen-examples-sourced-from-marketing-legends/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[josephkchoi]

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends

Lead generation is the number one challenge for marketers today. And it’s only going to get harder now that most Google search results pages have become saturated with promotional lead magnets masquerading as “great” content.

There are millions of free resources out there already competing for attention. And customers are quickly catching on to the fact that most of these “Ultimate Guides to Dog Grooming” aren’t really worth giving up their personal information for.

Jessica Meher, VP of Marketing at Notarize, put it really well on Twitter:

So many #SaaS companies today produce the same content mktg formulas as they did 10 years ago.

E.g. ebooks on "the complete guide to X" or blog posts on "5 reasons why." etc.

This shit works, until it doesn't. Now's a good time to invent the new ebook. Get creative.

— Jessica Meher (@jessicameher) February 6, 2018

To stand out, you need more than quality content. You need to think outside the box. Try something a little bit different. Maybe even a little bit experimental.

For inspiration, we talked to some of the most legendary marketers working today and asked them to share their most creative lead gen examples. And believe me—some of these folks needed QUITE a bit of convincing to spill their most useful and interesting ideas.

But we got ‘em here for you: 10 unique examples lifted straight from the private swipe files and secret marketing playbooks of the pros. Use these ideas as inspiration for your next lead gen campaign. Or, just keep them handy for the next time you want to try something more interesting than creating another ebook or webinar.

Ready? Let’s get cooking.

Jump to a Creative Lead Gen Example

Create an Interactive Tool

Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

Interview a Third-Party Expert

Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Connect via Communities

Promote a Personalized Template

Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Start an Interesting Side Project

Publish a Surprising Quiz

If you’re creating a lead gen campaign, make sure you check out our professional landing page and popup templates. You’ll be able to optimize your page design to earn more conversions and qualified leads.

1. Create an Interactive Tool

There’s a good reason why so many brands—including HubSpot, Moz, and, yes, even Unbounce—have invested time and effort to create free tools. Tool-based marketing is popular because even simple interactive ideas can generate boatloads of qualified leads.

For example, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, says they developed a Free Keyword Tool for the Wordstream website. Marketers could use it to research and prioritize new keywords in just a few minutes.

And while developing an interactive tool might seem like a lot more work (you might need someone who knows how to code), Larry says they were able to generate a huge number of leads as a result.

Here’s how the tool works: you start out by entering a keyword or website URL that you’re interested in analyzing. To hone the results, you can also choose the industry and country you want to focus on.

What makes this tool particularly clever is the way it displays the results. Hit the “Search” button, and you’ll instantly be able to see some of the related keywords. But all the other information? It’s hidden, blurred out, or obscured in some way.

This smartly creates a curiosity gap for visitors, who feel like they’ve already started the process of doing research on their keyword. All they need to do is take one teeny-tiny extra step to get their results.

That final step? You gotta give up your email address.

Boom, lead generated.

This simple tool took just 3 months to build, yet has generated over a million email signups.

PRO TIP: Even a simple tool can be expensive to create. When considering your tool-based marketing idea, speak with a sample of your target audience first to see if they’d be interested.

2. Embed Your Lead Gen Forms in Videos

I believe it was old Billy Shakespeare who once wrote: “To gate or not to gate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous website traffic, or ask for an email address against a sea of troubles…”

At some point, every marketer faces this dilemma. You have an amazing piece of content—now are you going to give it away for free as a way to attract organic traffic? Or do you gate the content and use it as a lead gen magnet?

Cara Hogan, Content Strategist for Zaius, considered these options and asked—why not both?

For their Marketing Unboxed series, Cara says they took a hybrid approach to gating each video. Rather than lock up their content entirely behind a lead gen form, they actually embedded forms into each video so they showed up as you watch.

We created the Marketing Unboxed video series as a top-of-funnel piece of content designed to engage our target audience of B2C and commerce marketers. By including a lead gen form within the video itself, we encourage people to subscribe, but we don’t require it.

The forms draw just the right amount of your attention, without being too distracting. It slides off the video if you move your mouse off the screen, but then pops back on whenever you come back. All in all, a very classy approach that Cara says has driven some serious results.

We’ve generated hundreds of net new leads from this video series so far. We’ve only published 10 total episodes, and older episodes continue to earn subscribers over time. Some of these subscribers have since been nurtured to become new Zaius customers.

3. Interview a Third-Party Expert

For many brands, consistent blogging is one of their main sources of lead generation. Every time you put out an article, it’s an opportunity for someone new to visit your site, discover your brand, and opt in for more communications.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking outside of your own organization and team for content, either. Stepping outside of your comfort zone and providing a fresh perspective can actually be a fantastic way to bring in new audiences.

Take, for example, this lead gen example brought to us by Aaron Orendorff, Content Strategist for iconiContent. To help Shopify Plus rank for some valuable keywords, such as “ecommerce replatforming,” Aaron interviewed a high-profile expert in the industry.

Aaron says it’s the quality of the interview that makes this lead gen example work.

Rather than a heavy-handed sales pitch, the piece is an interview with Paul Rogers—one of the brightest and most respected leaders in ecommerce … That objectivity—and framing the article as an honest conversation about a ‘dirty word’—is highlighted throughout.

But wait, how do you actually generate leads with an interview or blog post? Well, Aaron explained that they peppered the article with three separate lead gen CTAs (including an Unbounce popup) to present visitors with downloadable content upgrades, related to the topic of the interview.

Popups and sticky bars can turn any high-traffic page into a lead generator. Find out how you can use these targeted offers to drive more conversions.

4. Send Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail

Direct mail might seem like an old school marketing tactic, but that’s exactly what makes it so darned interesting for lead generation. Why not focus your efforts on a smaller customer segment, and put together packages that really get them to sit up and take notice?

Take, for example, these direct mailers that Hero Conf sent out to promote their PPC marketing conference. The event organizers took a pretty interesting approach to get the attention of marketers like Casie Gillette, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at KoMarketing:

Oh man. @heroconf this is one of the coolest pieces of direct mail I've ever received! Who knew video could be so amazing in such a small package? pic.twitter.com/aQnlV2y71G

— Casie Gillette (@Casieg) January 31, 2019

Each piece of mail embedded a small video screen to show clips of the presenters who would be speaking at Hero Conf. And while these must have cost a fair bit more than a typical event brochure, Casie says the unique packaging really helped to win her over.

What got me was if you played the video to the end, they had a free ticket offer—you just had to respond to the email they had sent earlier … By placing the offer at the end, only those who watched the video all the way through would learn about the offer. A really cool way to grab attention.

5. Share a Customer Experience to Spark Brand Searches

Andrew Davis, best-selling author and keynote speaker, recently pointed out that most video testimonials are pretty dry. They’re usually just a lot of talking heads, with nervous customers babbling on about all the reasons why they like some marketing brand.

But there’s also a different type of video testimonial—one that actually tells the complete customer story. And although these can be harder to produce, they can also serve up a different type of indirect lead generation for your business.

As an example, Andrew suggests watching this video on YouTube that recently went viral: Vance’s Incredible 365-day Transformation. The video currently has over 31 million views and 50,000 comments on YouTube.

Unlike other video testimonials, this customer story is shot in real time. It’s compelling, it’s emotional—and it doesn’t have a single call to action.

Instead, Vance mentions throughout the video the diet and exercise program he is using to lose weight. The references start out subtle, but eventually become a main focus of the video. Andrew calls this an “implied CTA” that generates leads by inspiring viewers to take the next step.

A great testimonial video needs no call to action. It actually should create a moment that inspires people to do the next search … It doesn’t need a button, it just invites people who are so inspired to actually check out the next step of the product.

If you want to try this for yourself, all you need to do is start thinking about how you can frame your customer stories more like, well, stories. Connect with viewers on a personal or emotional level, and tease out the results so they get curious to learn more.

6. Connect via Communities

For freelancers, consultants, and smaller marketing agencies, you might have to take a slightly different approach to lead generation. While you can still build lists using your website and landing pages, a lot of your success will also come from word of mouth and social interactions.

For example, Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant, says their go-to lead generation strategy has been to build sincere connections with other people, in both online and offline marketing communities.

Being an active member of my favorite communities has lead to me receive leads from other members, because I’m demonstrating expertise in that domain.

Nichole says that being an active community member on websites like Growth Hackers has often lead to them becoming a part of the team, responsible for either community management or growth.

As you build relationships and demonstrate expertise, people will naturally start to think of you or your company for future opportunities. The key is to be genuinely helpful and selfless in your interactions, and to try to build actual friendships with other members of the community.

The thing is, ‘getting leads’ was never my end goal for any of these communities. I was just actively building relationships by bringing value to others.

7. Promote a Personalized Template

The right template on the right page can be a powerful tool for generating leads. That’s because visitors are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for something practical they can actually use.

But while traditional templates are usually just generic PDF downloads, Ross Simmonds, digital marketing strategist, says you can get better results by making a downloadable template that’s more personalized and interactive.

Almost every audience loves a template. If you can think about a simple template that arms your audience with the steps they need to take to solve a problem – it can be a great win. Even better; make it an interactive template that gives the user the ability to download it at the end.

As an example, Ross points towards this Free Privacy Policy Generator created by Shopify.

Privacy policies are one of those things that ecommerce business owners know they need, but probably don’t have time to create. And while Shopify could have given their visitors a sample policy or instructions on how to create their own, instead they decided to go above and beyond by building a personalized template generator.

The form you fill out to generate your privacy policy serves two purposes. Not only does it help personalize the template with your company info, but it also lets Shopify follow up meaningfully with every lead that uses the tool. How cool is that?

The template approach is interesting because there’s a true value exchange. If you’re offering a template that is closely aligned with your product or service it can be both a rewarding user experience and a rewarding lead generation tactic.

8. Look for Unique Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Cross-promotion isn’t a new idea, but it’s not something too many marketers think about strategically when it comes to lead generation.

The hard part, of course, is finding the right brand to partner with. If the other company is too similar, then your audiences might already be overlapped. If the other company isn’t similar enough, then you run the risk of promoting to people who just don’t care about your brand or products.

This is where a bit of outside-the-box thinking can come in handy. Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, points to this particularly clever example of cross-promotion between Hydrate IV Bar and Live Love Lash:

Rather than partner with another health or fitness company for their cross-promotion, the marketers at Hydrate IV Bar decided to try a different strategy. They thought about different places where their target customers might be available to try an IV bar, and struck up a smart partnership based on that:

The Hydrate IV Bar team was brilliant in thinking outside the box for local lead gen! In what instances are people in a position of stillness/rest where they could also benefit from IV therapy? Lash extensions! This cross-marketing has done very well for both businesses and feels like an efficient use of time for their customers.

And the thing is, there are all sorts of unique cross-promotion opportunities available that marketers might miss. Let’s say you’re a running shoe company, for example. The obvious cross-promotion opportunity would be a sports store, right? But you could also partner with a gym or training facility, and target athletes in the places where they spend the most time.

9. Create an Interesting Side Project

Sometimes, the best leads can come from the projects that have very little to do with your actual business. If you dig into related topics, you can discover whole segments of customers who otherwise might not have been exposed to your brand or marketing.

And when it comes to side projects, Ryan Robinson is a self-described aficionado. Once, he launched a public challenge on his blog to validate a random business idea in under 30 days with only $500.

The project took up a lot of Ryan’s time for that month, even though it was something he was doing on the side. He figured it would just be an interesting way to educate readers on how to validate their business ideas, and perhaps bring in some new audiences to his blog. But he was surprised by the number of leads he was able to generate as a result.

I saw a sizable surge in traffic during my first week of the challenge. Throughout the course of the full month as I updated the challenge post, I picked up almost 3,000 new subscribers on my blog.

To take advantage of all these new leads, Ryan even built a new course based around his learning.

A couple months after the challenge wrapped up, I launched a course about validating ideas to that new audience … This new group of subscribers that tuned in and kept a close eye on my challenge were very qualified leads, and that course ended up generating over $15,000 in revenue during just the first week of open enrollment.

10. Publish a Surprising Quiz

Online quizzes have been around for years, but many marketers still haven’t discovered their potential for lead generation. They’re powerful because they’re so compelling—visitors actually have fun filling them out, and then get super curious about the results. (“Why yes, I do want to know which piece of IKEA furniture best represents my personality.”)

To find a creative quiz example, we went to the quizmaster herself, Chanti Zak. Chanti is a quiz funnel strategist and copywriter who specializes in creating quizzes for lead gen, and really brings a special flair to the quiz creation process.

As an example, she shared this saucy quiz she created to target entrepreneurs for Jenna Kutcher’s website.

The key to a great quiz? You’ve got to surprise and delight visitors with every click, so they stay engaged throughout the process. Throw them a couple curveballs along the way, and then hit ‘em with results that speak to their unique situation.

The results go deep into what uniquely positions you to create a successful business. The custom results meet people where they’re at and are intentionally designed to empower them to take action.

To attract the most leads, you’ll want to create a quiz that speaks directly to your brand and target market. For this example, Chanti created playful questions and answers that really get in the headspace of a budding entrepreneur.

And the strategy seems to have worked too, with this quiz alone generating over 100,000 leads.

When this interactive and personalized approach is the first impression someone has of your brand, your chances of converting them from onlooker to customer are exponentially higher than with a generic lead magnet.

Are You Ready to Take the Lead?

Of course, we’re only scratching the surface with these 10 ideas. There are all sorts of different ways to generate leads, including more tried and true methods. You could always host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, run a contest, or buy ads on social media.

Whatever you try, the most important thing to remember is that in order to generate qualified leads, you need to offer up quality content. Give those top-of-funnel leads something that’ll educate, entertain, inform, or inspire and soon you’ll be overwhelmed with too many leads. (#firstworldmarketingproblems)

Share in the comments below if you have another method of lead gen that works well for your business, or if you think there’s something we missed. The more ideas we can round up, the better!

10 Creative Lead Gen Examples Sourced from Marketing Legends published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/