Mike Allton

Mike has been blogging for over a decade, and won Top Social Media Blog from Social Media Examiner twice. He is considered one of the foremost experts on blogging and content marketing, has served as Chief Marketing Officer for SiteSell, and has recently joined the Agorapulse team as Brand Evangelist.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Mike’s success

 Using a data-driven lead magnet design that boosts conversion

Result if you follow the steps in Mike’s session

Lead magnets that are created based on a data-driven approach that will increase the size of your email list

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

What happens with most businesses is that you begin to create content and you might tell your website visitors, “Hey, I’ve got an email list, you can subscribe and you can get into my newsletter”, or something along those lines, maybe not those words.

But that’s the initial intent and that’s okay. And you’ll get us all tricolor people signing up for your email list, using that kind of an approach. But what we want to do is be a little more proactive and offer them something of value, like I said, something that answers a question or solves an issue. And we do that a couple different ways.

You can have what we call landing page that simply says, “Hey, I’ve got an Ebook on this particular topic. And you just put in your name and your email address, and we’ll send it to you”.

Or you can have pop ups or some other kind of notification throughout your site that simply lets the reader know, “Hey, I’ve also got this other piece of content”, even though they might be reading something else. And you can use both.

I personally have had the most success with pop ups because I’m already getting a good amount of organic traffic to my site. I’m getting paid traffic through other means, and when they come into my site.

So to look at an existing article, they’re also made aware of something else that I have to offer them. And that’s something else is very carefully chosen. And this, this is where I think a lot of you might benefit, those of you who are listening.

You don’t want to just try to come up with something on your own out of your own mind, “Hey, I think this might be a good topic or a good question to answer in an ebook”.

What you’re going to want to do is take a look at what people are already coming to your sites for. So for this, you’re gonna want to open Google Analytics and take a look at what are your most popular articles over the past 12 months, for the past 24 months.

Now, if you’re just getting started in creating content, and you really don’t have a lot of history yet, look at your competitors. You can use tools like SEMrush, or BuzzSumo to see what are the most traffic, what are the most popular pieces of content, what are people wanting to know about.

But the most effective are going to be, once you’ve been blogging for a while, creating content for a while, and you can see, out of all the different articles that you’ve created. These five, for instance, are the most popular. They’re getting the most organic traffic or the most social shares.

So you know that your audience is really interested in these topics. Okay, then you can think, alright, well, if they’re really interested in this, whatever this is, what else can I say that’s related to that topic?

So my case, for instance, I noticed that over the years that I’ve been creating content on the social media, my Facebook related articles were the most popular. They continue to get traffic day after day after day.

And the really basic stuff, “How do I find a specific URL for a Facebook post”, right? Or “How do I mention somebody on Facebook”. Very tactical, technical kinds of pieces, and those are great kinds of questions to answer for any kind of business.

So when I noticed that, I said to myself, alright, I need to create a Facebook related resource that’s targeting these people. So now if you come to my site, the very first thing you see is what’s called a welcome mat. The whole site is replaced by a full screen pop up, basically, that says, “Hey, I’ve got this resource I happened to create”.

It was, I used Google Slides to put together this list of Facebook tips and tools and hacks and everything. And today, here it is. And that generates dozens and dozens of new leads every single day.