Blog coaching clients often come to me for three things:
- They want to start or launch a new blog.
- They want to grow their audience or email list.
- They want to create and sell a product or sell more.
What fascinates me is how many of my clients have already been through courses and have watched hours of YouTube before they decide to work with me.
I have several theories around why that might be, but I think a key part is the advice out there tends to be aimed at particular tactics.
Even when individual tactics work very well for a particular blog, you still need to connect that tactic to the business as a whole.
For one example that springs to mind, a client had huge success in getting Pinterest users to view her recipes. Her challenge was getting those people to return because they very rarely signed up for her email list or followed her on social media.
Attraction, Retention, and Conversion – The Virtuous Cycle of Blogging
Attraction, Retention, and Conversion are something I have spoken about and written about for around 25 years now. I wish I still had my PowerPoint deck from when I used to pitch to agency clients.
Just like back then, people over-focus on a particular part of the overall picture.
Can you launch a product with advertising and go from attraction to conversion? Yes, absolutely.
Will you make more long-term ROI by adding a retention element? You bet!
End the struggle, frustration, and overwhelm.
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Attract Attention
The cycle begins, at least in diagram form, with attracting an audience.
How do you attract an audience? First, you need to decide who you want to attract. I encourage you to really figure that out with customer profiles and marketing pen portraits.
When you have nailed who you want to attract, finding how to attract them becomes much easier.
You can figure out what they are looking for, provide answers in the form of content, and promote it where those people hang out.
Doing this correctly means not just clumsily chasing traffic, but intentionally developing the correct audience of people you can most help and who are most motivated to find solutions. This is a big part of why my SEO approach works and has weathered the various, ever-changing Google storms.
Retain Interest
It’s not news to say we live in an attention economy. Once you stand out and get attention, you need to retain that attention and hold onto it.
I say retain, but another word might be nurture because at a minimum you want folks to stick around, but really the goal is for your new prospect to grow to know, like, and trust you.
This is the power of authority through content marketing over individual tactics.
Rather than craft a massive sales page or video that tries to get all the information required in one place, while avoiding the prospect clicking away, you can deliver a useful and fascinating narrative over time.
With today’s email and CRM tools, we can tailor that experience more and more to the individual, holding their interest and learning more about their needs.
Conversions
Your first conversion is from attraction to retention. Although a return visitor is of course important, it is much more valuable to you for the visitor to become a subscriber.
Unless you earn from ads and sponsorships, however, you really want visitors and email subscribers to become customers.
As part of your audience research, you will come up with a list of wants and needs for your prospects, which will inform both your free content and what they might be willing to invest money into, aka your premium solutions.
Getting people from being readers to being buyers requires:
- They have all the information and motivation needed so that they are ready to take action.
- They believe you and your solution are the best, least risky option.
Again, content comes to our aid here.
While informing and inspiring your audience, you also grow your trust level with them.
It is great to have “impulse purchase” products, things that people are willing to take more of a risk with that have immediate appeal.
Successful impulse purchases that massively over-deliver value and results, increase the trust level of customers and their motivation to continue with you.
Beyond those, very, very few people are ready to purchase at first sight of an offer. Consider the fact that most online businesses would be delighted to have a 2% conversion rate, which means 98% of people who see the sales page say ‘no’.
So, again, retention comes into play. You want to keep making the offer, keep educating, and keep inspiring, so more of the 98% build up enough trust and motivation to take action.
Work Here is Done?
Remember at this point one vital thing. It is a cycle.
The people who bought from you need onboarding and nurturing as customers, with the goal that they see success and positive results.
You also want the majority of your customers to at least stick around, but preferably get interested in pursuing the next step of their journey with you.
The other day someone purchased from me after being with me in my community for 12 years. That’s not unusual, though that it took so long it might speak more to my lack of hypnotically persuasive sales skills!
Back in the day, internet marketers gained a bad reputation for churning and burning huge audiences through massive hype. They would have amazing million-dollar launches, and the headlines from those would feed their next launch, and the next, without mentioning the equally huge credit card complaints and chargebacks.
There’s no better marketing than a happy customer, so as much of your energy or more needs to go into fulfilling your promises as getting the sale in the first place.
Conclusion
For years I have had conversations with clients and prospects who have been burned on silver bullet solutions.
There are always going to be new and shiny tactics, and some of them will actually work, but unless you want to lurch from launch to launch, or from tactic to tactic, you are better at figuring out your whole.
Who do you want to attract, what do they need from you to stick around long term, and how will you help them?
If you can keep growing an audience of people who become happy customers who continue to buy from you then you have a real business that you can thrive in and be proud of.
Would you like me to go into more detail about any of these phases and how they connect to product creation? I want you to succeed so let me know.