Tag: grow your audience

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Marketing Sense

How to Grow Your Audience Using Online Workshops: Part Three

Marketing sense

We’re exploring workshop titles in this third part of our ongoing series. In our first month we chose our topic (ice-fishing if you can believe it!) and our marketing promise which, after further development, won’t work. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last month in part two, we identified and researched various title resources. This month we’ll choose our title which may / may not also incorporate our marketing promise. Let’s see.

Why Do We Need Our Content Idea Before We Write Our Title?

We won’t discuss our webinar’s content point-by-point in this article series, because we’re here to learn the process of using online workshops to grow our audience.

Still, we must have some idea of this fictitious workshop’s content, or we can’t title it.

Checking books and magazine articles about ice-fishing, I wasn’t inspired. So I researched online news stories and found a content idea that meets my criteria: both new or established ice-fishermen will want this information. Bingo!

My pretend workshop will be how to eliminate or survive ice-fishing dangers. That’s not my title. It’s the focus of my content. The two are similar but distinctly different.

We want our title to attract the audience we want to serve. If you remember from part one in this series, we want the title to do 5 things:

-identify our audience directly or indirectly;

-address a problem, a challenge, or a goal;

-begin with an action verb;

-include a number (maybe), and;

-is utterly clear…like glass.

Let’s get to work. Our audience is new or experienced ice-fishermen. The problem is danger or death. (They want to avoid both.) 🙂

Potential Workshop Titles and Why They’re Strong or Weak Options

Ice-Fishermen: Don’t Let This Happen to You! Spot on audience identification but way too vague on the remainder. Plus, the phrase, “…don’t let this happen to you!” is often used by sensationalists whose titles attract attention but whose content offers no value. We’ll pass.

3 Dangers of Ice-Fishing and How to Avoid Them Meh. Accurate but boring. Moving on.

How to Survive Your 2022 Ice-Fishing Trips We’re getting closer but we’re not there yet. Some might think adding the year makes their workshop timely, but not so. Instead, it ages it after December 31, 2022. It also suggests that your information is somehow related to that specific year in some special, not-yet-identified way, or perhaps that it’s only applicable for that specific year. Both are unintentionally misleading. We want to steer clear of even the appearance of trickery. Utter clarity is our goal.

Survive Ice-Fishing Dangers Looking at our list of 5 goals, the first word is a compelling action verb. Whatever is it, we want to survive it, right? 🙂 Can we improve this title?

 Survive Treacherous Ice-Fishing Dangers Ooh, treacherous dangers. Much more dramatic (read intriguing) than regular ol’ dangers and still applicable to our content. Hmmm…

 Survive These 3 Treacherous Ice-Fishing Dangers This is the strongest contender of those shown. Do you agree? It indirectly identifies our audience as those who ice-fish. Check. Does it address a problem, challenge, or goal? Yes.

It begins with an action verb as mentioned earlier. An attention getting action verb. It also includes a specific yet reasonable number. I don’t have time to read how to avoid 73 dangers. Do you? 🙂 It’s clear…like glass.

Anyone reading this title version will be very interested (in part because we’re using strong words like “survive” and “treacherous”) or not interested at all. Have you ever met anyone who was “so-so” about surviving anything treacherous? Me, neither.

So we’re set. Survive These 3 Treacherous Ice-Fishing Dangers it is. We don’t need to add “How to…” It’s implied. But we could.

By the way, I could have removed “How to…” from this article series without losing any impact.

Onward we go! See you next month when we’ll move to the next step.

Patricia Durgin

Patricia Durgin is an Online Marketing Coach and Facebook Live Expert. She trains Christian writers and speakers exclusively, helping them develop their messaging, marketing funnels, conversational emails, and Facebook Live programs. Patricia hosted 505 (60-minute) Facebook Live programs from 2018-2020. That program is on indefinite hiatus. She’s also a regular faculty member at Christian writers and speakers conferences around the country.

Website: marketersonamission.com
Facebook: MarketersOnAMission

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Marketing Sense

How to Grow Your Audience Using Online Workshops: Part Two

Marketing sense

Last month we began this series by choosing the marketing message for a workshop on  ice fishing. Ice fishing?!? Yep. I chose an out-of-the-ordinary subject to focus on the workshop process from start to finish. Nail the process, and you’ll be able to present an effective workshop that will grow your audience anytime, anywhere, on any topic.

I know zero about ice fishing, so you and I are starting from the same place: ignorance 🙂 Let’s learn together, shall we?

This month we begin working on our title.

Creating a Results-Oriented Workshop Title

Weak, vague titles run rampant throughout the world like vermin.

We want a title that will do 5 things:

-identify our audience directly or indirectly;

-address a problem, a challenge, or a goal;

-begin with an action verb;

-include a number (maybe), and;

-is utterly clear…like glass.

So clear that it’s understood by those inside and outside our audience. Why? We only want people interested in ice fishing to attend our ice fishing workshop. So obvious! Yet many don’t “get” this basic truth: it serves no purpose to attract people not interested in our offer.

Where to Find Title Inspiration

We can find scads of fill-in-the-blank title templates online. But you and I are intelligent. We can be more unique than some ol’ cookie-cutter formula, right?  

That goal leads us to online research. Let’s see what others are saying about ice fishing.

Inspiration can be found in book titles. How about Drill It Till It Squirts? Uh, noooo. Incredibly, there’s both a book title and a popular clothing line with that phrase.

Here’s another: You Had Me At Ice Fishing. That’s a fun twist on the famous movie line. Let’s keep looking.

Don’t limit your research to Amazon. There’s a wide range of books on this subject beyond what Amazon offers. Google it.

On-topic magazines can be a gold mine for titles. I’ve found their covers and the stories highlighted on them super helpful. They either confirm my direction or change it, which is what happened in this case.

Scanning different ice fishing magazines, I realize my workshop’s original promised result–catch more fish–is both waaay too basic and too vague compared to what else is in the marketplace.

Others are offering sophisticated information, and not just about the best gear or locales.

For example, many such magazines regularly publish deep dive articles on a single fish species. There seem to be hundreds: panfish and walleyes, giant perch, trout, pike, catfish, and more, each with their own likes, dislikes, homes, favorite bait, and on and on the details go. Yikes!

We can’t possibly contain that in a 60-minute workshop. Instead of too basic, this topic’s waaay too broad.

It looks like we’re back at zero, but we’re not. We’ve eliminated our original direction and its extreme on the other end of the spectrum. Good work!

We must dig deeper. Be more specific. Back to the magazines we go.

We find the following article titles:

-The Search for Perch

-Strategies for Northern Pike

-How to Read Fish and Respond

-Pike Lairs, from Big Lakes to Secluded Backwaters, Find Where Monsters Lurk

-Tracking Pike

-Ice Fishing Game Plan

-The Hunt for Gillzilla

I did not make these titles up. Some of them are real possibilities because their only purpose is to spur our creative thoughts. You and I could ponder the same article titles and come up with vastly different workshop titles. That’s a good thing.

Why Are We Spending So Much Time on Our Workshop Title?

Because potential attendees will decide whether to sign up or not based upon it.

This 3-7 word phrase will determine the success of our workshop. That’s a huge load to carry.

Important as our content is, some will never see it because our title either turned them off or didn’t interest them enough to find out more. So, they won’t sign up.

Let’s keep working to find / create a great title so our workshop is full. That will make our title struggle worth it.

See you next month.  

Patricia Durgin

Patricia Durgin is an Online Marketing Coach and Facebook Live Expert. She trains Christian writers and speakers exclusively, helping them develop their messaging, marketing funnels, conversational emails, and Facebook Live programs. Patricia hosted 505 (60-minute) Facebook Live programs from 2018-2020. That program is on indefinite hiatus. She’s also a regular faculty member at Christian writers and speakers conferences around the country.

Website: marketersonamission.com
Facebook: MarketersOnAMission

Categories
The Intentional Writer

Lead Magnets 101:A Useful Tool for Growing Your Audience

The intentional writer

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a marketing term for a free item or service that is given away to potential customers for the purpose of gathering contact details, such as their email address. Examples of lead magnets include free ebooks, webinars, and printable checklists.

How do lead magnets help you?

The purpose of lead magnets is to attract potential customers, who hopefully will become actual customers after interacting with your lead magnet. Even those of us who don’t yet have a book to sell benefit from lead magnets, because lead magnets build your email list, which enlarges your platform.

Here are some ways they can attract customers.

  1. People like free stuff. Marketers have been exploiting this fact for years.
  2. If your freebie is on-brand, it will attract the kind of readers who are most likely to be interested in your writing, and thus and purchase your products in the future.
  3. They give potential customers something helpful, which A) builds trust in your brand and B) makes them more likely to return and purchase something from you.
  4. They help you acquire potential customers for future sales by growing your email list, which is still the most effective way to convert book sales.

Before you create a lead magnet, you must consider three parts of the definition:

  • the What (the free item or service)
  • the Who (potential customers)
  • the Why (your purpose for gathering contact details)

Don’t put the cart before the horse

To create the best possible lead magnet, you need to consider the Why and Who before worrying about the What.

1. The Why: Consider your specific purpose

What do you want the lead magnet to accomplish? What is your end goal? Possibilities include:

  • Gain author newsletter subscribers
  • Gain blog followers
  • Get people to try your product/service in the hopes they’ll want more
  • Get people to read your free ebook, so they’ll want to read more of your books

2. The Who: Define your target audience (and their felt needs)

The more specifically you can define your target audience, the easier it will be to create a valuable lead magnet that meets one of their felt needs.

  • What are the target audience(s) of your author brand?
  • What subset of that target audience you are targeting with your lead magnet? You will need different lead magnets for different goals and audience subsets.
  • What are their felt needs or pain points? The more specific you are at identifying these pain points, the better your chance of creating a lead magnet they will love.
  • What social media platforms do they spend time on? Optimize your lead magnet for that kind of media.

3. The What: Create a freebie your target audience will love

The ideal lead magnet will:

  1. Meet a felt need or pain point the user has
  2. Be something the user can use immediately and easily
  3. Be something the user can use repeatedly
  4. Make the user feel like they’re “stealing” from you—i.e. getting a lot of value for free
  5. Reinforce your brand.
  6. Deliver what is promised. Don’t disappoint the user with content that doesn’t live up to the hype.

With those goals in mind, begin to brainstorm:

  •  What helpful service or information can you offer that meets a felt need of your target audience? .
  • How might you package that information into a downloadable form? (Printable pdf, How-To video, ebook, free link to a training webinar, etc.)
  • Which kinds of media and content do you feel most comfortable creating? A quality lead magnet combines a useful idea with good design. If you’ve never created a video before, it’s probably not the best format for your lead magnet.

There are tons of websites that offer lists of ideas. Here are three to try:

Three fiction lead magnet ideas

Lead magnet examples from successful authors.

A comprehensive list of 101 ideas with a handy table of contents.

Finally, don’t stress out! (And stop trying to create the perfect lead magnet.)

There’s no such thing as the perfect lead magnet, so stop stressing over whether your idea is “right”. Your goal is not to spend the next six months analyzing your target audience, coming up with eight dozen possible lead magnets ideas and then rejecting all of them.

Your goal is to make your best effort, put it out there, and see what happens. So have fun.

Award-winning writer Lisa E. Betz believes that everyone has a unique story to tell the world. She loves inspiring fellow writers to be more intentional about developing their craft and courageous in sharing their words. Lisa shares her words through speaking, leading Bible studies, writing historical mysteries, and blogging about living intentionally.

You can find her on Facebook LisaEBetzWriter Twitter @LisaEBetz and Pinterest Lisa E Betz Intentional Living.

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Blogging Basics

Make Your Blog Mighty: Attention To The Details

Do details matter? In the world of blogging, I would say, “Yes.” You labor over a beautifully crafted blog spending time, effort and energy to share your heart with your audience only to hear crickets. Has this happened to you? The following two tips could help make your blog hum with activity by paying attention to the details.

SEO Your Headings

I recently saw a lengthy news article online. After the title and under the featured image, the writer listed bullet points sharing the most important topics shared in the article. This helped me to decide if I wanted to read the article in its entirety.

Headings in a blog are similar to the points noted in the article. Using the Headings Feature in WordPress will help your blog to be easily read. This allows the reader to scan the blog and know, at a glance, if they would like to read it.

Another reason to craft Headings is for SEO. As stated in a Yoast article,

“Although not a major ranking factor, headings do affect SEO. That’s because headings are important to help users understand the subject of an article. And if readers use headings to figure out what an article is about, Google will too.”

Crafting headings helps visually set a block of text apart and aids with the readability score in WordPress.  Yoast SEO recommends you offer a heading for every 300 words. To add headings, you type the heading, highlight it, and then select the dropdown box that says Paragraph.

Heading 1 – 6 are available options to select from. I usually use Heading 2 throughout my blog. You can choose Heading 1 as your first heading and use Heading 2 in the remainder of your blog.  For this blog post, I used Heading 2 only.

The Mighty Meta-Description

The purpose of creating a meta description is to have a reader choose your blog to read. Similar to the description on a book jacket, the meta description helps draw them in. State why they should read your blog. Using 150 characters, craft enticing phrases like, Learn More, Get It Now and Try It For Free. This needs to mirror/match your content or Google may penalize your site.  The meta-description should have your selected keyword shared at least once for SEO purposes.

For my blog titled, Why Being A Mother Has Great Value, I wrote the following meta description:

Is there value in the mundane daily chores of being a mother? This article says, “Yes.” Read why being a mother has great value.

My selected focus keyword is: a mother has great value. These words are also contained in my title. Using the focus keywords in my meta description, and title helped to give my Yoast SEO score a green light.

Another example of a meta description used by Barnes & Noble for the memoir, I Can Only Imagine By Bart Millard is the following:

I Can Only Imagine is an amazing book. I was humbled just reading it, Mr. Millard’s story is fantastic to read. To know all that he is gone through in his life and how GOD fit exclusively into it.

In this meta description, Barnes & Noble chose to use a book review to entice the reader. However you choose to craft your meta description, remember to make it do the heavy lifting to gain attention. In other words, make it mighty.

Why do these details matter? Meta descriptions help to entice your reader. Headers help your readers decide if they want to continue to read. There are many aspects to writing, designing and marketing your blog. These two details are two of the ingredients to make your blog mighty. For more tips, read Sure Fire Ways To Gain An Audience .

Evelyn Mann is a mother of a miracle and her story has been featured on WFLA Channel 8, Fox35 Orlando, Inspirational Radio and the Catholic News Agency. A special interview with her son on the Facebook Page, Special Books by Special Kids, has received 1.4M views. Along with giving Samuel lots of hugs and kisses, Evelyn enjoys hot tea, sushi and writing. Visit her at miraclemann.com.

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Uncategorized

3 Sure Fire Ways To Find Your Audience

When I started blogging, I researched examples online. I came across a blogger who posted one paragraph a day. I wondered if this was the norm. I thought there had to be more to blogging than writing a single paragraph. Is this how I find an audience for my blog?

Posting

After a few minutes, I discarded the idea of writing so few words. Instead, I chose to create blogs ranging from 400 – 700 words, depending on the topic. But what I failed to realize from the blogger I discovered was the concept of consistency. Posting daily created a body of work which helped him be found by search engines. 365 paragraphs to be exact. At 120 words on average, the total equals 43,800 words. His body of work all posted on the internet. A library of sorts, if you will. Each post with its own topic.

My sister-in-law had started a blog before me. She had consistently posted over the years creating her own body of work. When she shared my website with her followers, several of them started following me. Her consistency and sheer volume of work helped me to start finding my audience.

As a new blogger decide how often you want to post and stay consistent. At first, I posted weekly. Now, my schedule as a special needs mom, author, columnist, and social media instructor allows me to post on my own blog monthly.

How much should you post just starting out? How do you create your own body of work in a short amount of time?  One way is to join this year’s NANOWRIMO which is an acronym for National Novel Writing Month.

Sure Fire Tip: Find your audience by posting quality content, 2-3 times a week. Posting once a week or once a month can still gain you an audience but at a slower rate. You may also want to guest post to help your audience find you. Read more here.

You don’t have to be writing a novel to join this challenge in November. Another writer who joined last year used the opportunity to write a blog post each day of the challenge. This year, I plan to create a blog every day in November. Once completed, I will use the body of work created as a backlog of pre-prepared blogs. With consistent posting, this could also boost my SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helping me to grow my audience. You can sign up for NANOWRIMO here

Titles/Descriptions

As an author, I know how important it is to have an attention-grabbing, gotta read it, give it to me now title. From the title of your blog to your meta-description, creating interest for your audience is key.

Use a great title generator to help you craft the perfect title. I use coschedule.com’s headline analyzer. This title generator ranks your title on a scale up to 100. Don’t fret, I’ve never received a 100 on any of my titles, but I am happy to see my title go green (above 70.)

Sure Fire Tip: Use this headline analyzer to create your titles with a score of 70 or above.

The title I intended to use for this blog post was Blog Basics For Beginners. Kinda rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it? Though it seemed like a catchy title to me, it received a headline score of 40.

How did I get my score up? I downloaded a list of emotional words:

I added Sure Fire which is an emotional word found on the list and changed the title to 3 Sure Fire Ways To Find Your Audience.

The title of this blog received a score of 71. Your score color is green when scoring over 70.

Focus Keyword

When I want to search for topics about memoirs, I type the word memoir in my google search bar. Or, in my particular area of interest, I type, medical memoirs. The first return under this topic is Popular Medical Memoirs Books by Goodreads.

If I type in my son’s diagnosis using this string of words: Thanatophoric Dwarfism Survivors, the second result is an article I wrote for The Mighty.com. The 8th result is a blog I wrote on my website. (The Mighty.com has a much larger body of work than my blog; hence, higher on the list.)

The word or string of words searched for in the Google search bar are focus keywords your audience will use to find results for a topic. And hopefully, they will find you.

TIPS

Tip 1: When crafting your blog, think about how your audience would search for your topic/blog.

Tip 2: Before writing, search your topic in Google. What words did you use to search? Chances are, this will be your keyword or keywords. Did your search return any results? If so, peruse the results and decide if you want to narrow your topic. If no results appeared, your topic may be just what your audience wants to know.

Tip 3: Still need help finding a keyword(s)? You can find suggestions for a keyword by using Yoast suggest.

Write your article/blog with your keyword or keywords in mind. Naturally add these words in your title, article headings, picture tags, meta-description and in the body of your content. (Read Part 2 of Sure Fire Ways To Find Your Audience next month for further discussion of headings, tags, and meta-description.)

Sure Fire Tip: Use Yoast Suggest to find a fit for your keyword(s).

For this article, I searched for Grow Your Audience in Google. Potential focus keywords returned were:

  • grow your blog audience
  • how to grow your audience
  • how to find grow your audience

Based on this list and the content of my blog, I would select “grow your blog audience” as my keywords. This should help my ideal audience find this blog post when searching using these words.

Sure Fire Tip: Use Yoast suggest to find your keyword(s) for your blog.

Have you used any of the above websites when creating your blog post? Do you use other websites to craft your blog and help find your audience? Share in the comments below. Let’s help each other grow.

Evelyn Mann is a mother of a miracle and her story has been featured on WFLA Channel 8, Fox35 Orlando, Inspirational Radio and the Catholic News Agency. A special interview with her son on the Facebook Page, Special Books by Special Kids, has received 1.4M views. Along with giving Samuel lots of hugs and kisses, Evelyn enjoys hot tea, sushi and writing. Visit her at miraclemann.com.