You know what’s even better than hustle?
Getting results without breaking your back. That’s why these are some of my favorite content marketing techniques ever.
None requires hours of additional effort. And you don’t need an advanced degree to understand them. In fact, you can put these easy content marketing hacks to work today.
Get 30% more people to view your emails with this ridiculously simple trick
W hen it comes to ROI, email is right at the top of the marketing list. According to a survey conducted by the Direct Marketing Association and Demand Metric, ROI is more than four times higher for email than social media, direct mail and paid search.
That’s despite the fact that most of your email list never even sees the content of those emails. According to GetResponse’s 2017 Global Benchmark Report, the average open rate is just 23%.
You work hard making your emails persuasive. I’ll bet you sweat over all the details, no matter how minor. And all that hard work is wasted on over three quarters of your email list. But it doesn’t have to be.
The solution is so simple you’ll wonder why you never thought of it before.
Change the subject line and resend your email to all the people who didn’t open the first time.
Think about it. There are many reasons those people might not have opened your email. It could just be that they were busy that day and didn’t get around to it.
Email marketing guru Noah Kagan got 30% more opens by using this technique. Imagine how much more you can make when you increase your open rate by 30%.
Not bad for a few minutes work.
Get 4 times more page views with a couple of extra minutes work
Twitter feeds move incredibly fast. In just a second or two your tweet could be buried under dozens of new tweets from other users.
If you want your tweet to be seen, you need to hit people’s feeds multiple times. That’s why Guy Kawasaki sends each of his tweets 4 times a day.
“The reason for repeated tweets is to maximize traffic and therefore advertising sales. I’ve found that each tweet gets approximately the same amount of clickthroughs. Why get 600 page views when you can get 2,400?”
-Guy Kawasaki
It makes sense. But there’s a catch.
If you just tweet the same thing every time, you’ll end up with a profile page that reads like a broken record (for everyone old enough to remember those).
The solution is simple.
Tweet your links with different variations in the text. For instance, you could schedule tweets like this:
Tweet 1: Announce your article
Example: Check out my new article on underused marketing hacks Share on X
Tweet 2: Article Headline
Example: Easy marketing tactics you’re probably not using Share on X
Tweet 3: Include a teaser about the article
Example: Learn the technique @noahkagan uses to get 30% more email opens. Share on X
Tweet 4: Pull out a quote or excerpt from the article
Example: “Get 30% more people to view your emails with this ridiculously simple trick” and other marketing hacks Share on X
Tweet 5: Ask a question related to article
Example: Which of these hacks are missing from your marketing efforts? Share on X
Start back at square 2
You probably already know you should be creating evergreen content. But are your treating it like evergreen content? Or do you forget about it almost as soon as you hit the publish button?
Sure, people may find this content on their own through a search engine. But they may not. And what’s the point of having content that stays relevant for years if it just sits there?
There’s no reason you can’t promote your older content on a regular basis. Here are a few ways to do it.
- Set a reminder or schedule re-promotions at set timeframes. For instance, you could promote your content every four months. So an article originally published and promoted on January 9 would be repromoted on May 9 and September 9.
- Promote related content around themes on your editorial calendar. If you are focusing on say, affiliate marketing, one week, then you could pull out all your content on that subject and promote that throughout the week.
- Take advantage of trending topics. If you notice a topic generating a lot of interest in the news or on social media, that’s a perfect time to promote content your related content.
The Samuel L Jackson marketing hack
People share content pretty regularly on social media. Email is a different story. Why?
(In your best Samuel Jackson voice)
Clicking a button to share content on Twitter or Facebook is easy. Sharing through email is more work. You have to open your email client, write a subject line, write a note and include a link. Ugh.
Enter this smart technique developed by Noah Kagan that does all that by clicking a single link.
Here’s what you need to do.
- Write the email you want people to send to their contacts. Don’t forget about the subject line, too.
- Convert that text into code using this tool or something similar. Convert the subject line and email body separately.
- Now it’s time to construct your link. Simply copy this and replace the red portions with the codes you generated in step 2: mailto:?subject=SUBJECT CODE&body=BODY CODE
- Now create a hyperlink using the code in step 3 as the address.
When someone clicks on this link, it will launch a pre-written email. All they have to do is fill out the “to” field and click send. Easy, peasy.
Here’s the example Kagan used in his original blog post introducing the concept:
This code:
<br /><br /><br /><br />
mailto:?subject=Check%20out%20this%20free%20Summer%20of%20Marketing%20course&body=Check%20out%20the%20new%2C%20free%20course%20Noah%20Kagan%20is%20offering%20this%20week%20about%20marketing%20called%20%22Summer%20of%20Marketing.%22%20%0A%0AHelps%20you%20put%20marketing%20tactics%20and%20lessons%20into%20action.%20More%20info%20at%20summerofmarketing.com
Generates this email:
Write one extra line to boost your success metrics
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
-David Ogilvy
I’m sure you’ve read that quote before. It’s cited in almost every article and blog post on headline writing. Yet most never bother testing and optimizing their headlines.
The folks over at Thrive Themes have come up with a great solution that makes testing blog headlines easy: Thrive Headline Optimizer
(Full disclosure: The link above is an affiliate link. That means that if you end up purchasing the plug-in, I get a commission.)
Here’s how it works:
- Choose something from your list of posts, pages, or other content types.
- Enter your headline variation(s).
- Select your engagement and automatic winner settings.
The plugin tracks engagements through metrics such as click throughs, time on content and how far reader’s scroll. The engagement settings let you determine when these activities are counted as an engagement.
In this example, an engagement is triggered only when a visitor is on the page for 78 seconds or longer.
All of these criteria can also be turned off, so you determine winners on the metrics that are important to you.
The automatic winner settings will end the test and declare a winner when the set criteria is met.
- Click start test.
That’s all there is to it.
Over to you
Which of these marketing hacks are you going to try first? Are there any easy underused or little known tactics you would add to the list?
Let me know in the comments.
Feature image by Jeremy Mikkola