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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Blog

How We Used Content and Email to Increase Sales by 100%

Posted: 07 Nov 2012 08:30 AM PST

Anyone that has been observing CopyPress over the last few months can tell that we have put an expanded effort into our blog as a marketing tool. Some basic numbers from this 3 month duration are pretty telling about the power of the product we sell to customers:

  1. 140% increase in organic search traffic
  2. 382% increase in overall traffic
  3. Over 400% increase in referring domains linking to our website

  1. An increase of 1,000 email subscribers to our newsletter
  2. 100% increase in closed sales
  3. Increased our Facebook traffic by over 300%

These last two numbers feed off of each other.

Since our building out of the Content Lifecycle, we have looked for strong partners for the conversion portion of the cycle. The timing was perfect because a good friend of mine,Jeremy "Shoemoney" Schoemaker was creating a product called the PAR Program.  PAR enables you to build acquisition and retention sequences from your user list, and based on amazing demographic information the product has, cut your list into very targeted micro-lists for laser precise acquisition funnels.

As soon as we relaunched our blog in August we began using PAR. From the outset of the new blog, the concept has been to use our own services to scale revenue, essentially putting our money where our mouth is.

Until October we simply used PAR to harvest emails and collect demographic data. During this time period our VP of Operations, Stefan Winkler, started to get a bit nervous because he didn't see the value in the service. I let him know that it would all be worth it come October.

In October, we built and launched our first acquisition sequence. The sales letters for the sequence were written by me using what I had recently learned from Dan Kennedy's book,The Ultimate Sales Letter.

The sales letters revolved around our new and growing digital media offerings, especially infographics. I actually used a very honest approach to these letters and expressed my general distaste for infographics as a content type (which is true), but based on how awesome our illustration staff is, and our copy-backed process for data and information creation, I wanted people to try the offering at a 25% discount.

The first email went well, and was followed by a series of emails introducing a new package product involving our sharebait product.

We saw our inbound lead rate for that week soar off the charts, leading to our strongest web lead-to-sale month ever at CopyPress. People responded in different ways to the letters, but money talks. We closed 100% more sales in October than we did in August, and increased monthly revenue by over 5%.

This case study is a great example of how the entire Content Lifecycle works.

  1. We created awesome copy and content for a 90-day span of time that led to large increases in traffic.
  2. We connected this content with other websites which led to even more traffic.
  3. We curated the content and grew our Facebook audience allowing for …. you get it.
  4. Then we used PAR and our webinar series to capture passive traffic and turn it into customers.

The core was understanding the value our content had, and how to mold it into a conversion. Based on this write-up you can see we spent between 60 to 90 days to yield the benefit of the sales increase, but now it should grow incrementally month over month.

Reflection

For me, this is what we are trying to build at CopyPress. A high quality crowd-sourcing solution that allows every single business online to achieve these kinds of results. That is why our core value of Quality over Profits is so important to us, because it would be easy to outsource content for pennies, and phone in the rest, however that isn't going to get the job done. We look for the best writers, and now through the opening of CopyPress Community we train them on how to increase their skills. Crowd-sourcing doesn't have to be synonymous with, "cheap", it should mean, "scalable quality."

Challenge

I would offer a challenge to anyone that wants to test this concept. We have a special package we are soon to launch that you can email us about today for more information. If you sign up for this monthly package and you don't see results in 90 days, we will refund your money.  Just contact us and ask about the ContentSphere.

Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?

Shareaholic Shares Traffic Sources Data - DailyBlogTips

Shareaholic Shares Traffic Sources Data - DailyBlogTips


Shareaholic Shares Traffic Sources Data

Posted: 07 Nov 2012 03:41 AM PST


Shareaholic is the creator of a widget that site owners can put on their websites to allow visitors to share their content on various social bookmarking sites and social networks. Every month they release a report with the main traffic sources and trends they publishers are seeing (combined they receive over 300 million visitors per month).

The October 2012 report is out, and the data is quite interesting. First and foremost because it’s pretty much putting another nail on the StumbleUpon coffin. Here’s a quote:

Pinterest aside, as far as growth and decline goes this year, the trend that stands out the most this month is around StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon's share of traffic sent to publisher sites has steadily declined by 53% since July. Additionally, Twitter now outpaces Stumbleupon's share of traffic by .22%. StumbleUpon recently unveiled a new site design and Pinterest-like "lists" feature which enables content consumers to curate collections of articles they enjoy – but publishers will still have to see if this results in click-throughs and traffic directly to their sites.

A traffic decrease of 50% in three months is quite drastic. I used to like StumbleUpon a lot, but haven’t used it in years. What about you?

Anyway make sure to check the full report as it has a bunch of other data and insights. If you are in a hurry, here are the key points:

  • Google obviously leads the referrals list
  • Facebook is the third, after direct traffic
  • Pinterest is fourth
  • Visitors coming from Pinterest are 10x more likely to buy
  • Despite being first the number of visitors coming from Google declined a bit

Wanna make money with your website?


Original Post: Shareaholic Shares Traffic Sources Data