How A Content Upgrade Will Build Your List On Autopilot

Every online entrepreneur understands the importance of building their list of prospects and customers. Whether offering a free opt-in incentive, or selling a product or service, your customers should feel like they receive many times more value than they are expecting. This is true with list building content upgrades, just as it is with everything else you do.

What Is A Content Upgrade?

The name implies, a content upgrade is extra information that upgrades the content that someone has just read. For example, let's say your reader has just read your blog post about 'Cooking The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie'. If that web surfer has read your entire post, that means they are very inclined to receiving more information on that same topic.

Offering a checklist or report with '10 Quick and Tasty Cookie Recipes' would make sense as a content upgrade in this scenario. Improve on the information you offered in your blog post, 'upgrading' the knowledge, information and/or resources on that topic in exchange for that reader joining your email list.

More Value, Quickly Delivered

Checklists and other lists make great content upgrades. Your reader can digest the information quickly. Web surfers these days are highly distracted, and have short attention spans. They don't want to commit a lot of time towards consuming content, even if that content provides value. So make your content upgrade short and sweet.

You should also make your content actionable. Describe a 'simple win' scenario where your reader can notice some real improvement in his or her life because of the information contained in your upgrade. In the above example, a short checklist that offers 10 quick recipes is a high value resource by anyone who was reading your cookie blog post.

Build Your Email List

The quicker someone can experience and benefit from your content the better. That is why content upgrades for building email lists seem to work the best when they are short pieces of easily digested content. On your side of the equation, this means you can make multiple content upgrades quickly and easily.

Your reader gets a quick win. They don't have to spend all day reading a lengthy piece of content. They can realize value very quickly. You don't have to spend as much time in the production process as creating traditional opt-in bribes, your conversion rates soar, and you add one more happy follower to your email list.

Writing a content upgrade for an online audience is very different from writing for an offline audience. It's hard for some people to master because it means giving up old ways of thinking and embracing a new style. Throw out your traditional old-school writing rules and discover the easier and faster way to connect with your audience with this free download: 

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Getting Traffic to your Website (3)

3.1 - Off site optimization - Off site optimization really comes down to links pointing to your website. The more links you get, from related sites that also have some power of their own with the search engines, the better your site is going to rank (and the more traffic you'll get as a result).

This is where the short- and long-term strategies start to overlap a bit. If you're using any of the short-term traffic strategies we just discussed to get quick traffic to your sites, they will also help you with SEO in the long term.

The links in your forum signatures, guest blog posts and submitted articles will all help push your site up the search engine rankings so while you might get a short-term jump in traffic when they first go live, they will keep working for you for a long time.

This is why it's a good idea to keep doing those things, even when your site starts to get traction in the search engines. It will continue to drive both instant and longer-term traffic.

3.2 - Social Media - Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are a relatively new way to get traffic, and as a result they tend to be misunderstood. A lot of marketers use them as a kind of "announcement" service, posting links to new offers, affiliate promotions, new blog posts and anything else they want people to visit.

But that's all they ever post, and then they think social media doesn't work because nobody ever clicks through on their links.

The fact is, social media is a longer-term traffic strategy. You need to build relationships with the people you follow before you can expect them to click on any of the links you post.

Example: Think of it in "real world" terms. If you went to a party or some kind of meeting, would you just make a sales pitch to everyone you talk to? Or would you have a conversation first, so you could get to know one another and what you could offer?

Treat social media like you would a "real life" meeting - offer value first and build up some trust with your followers before you start hitting them with a bunch of offers.

3.3 - Relationship Building - Building relationships isn't really a traffic generation method in and of itself, but it applies to virtually every other strategy to some degree. If you build relationships with the visitors to your website, or to the other places you post your content, you're going to be a lot more successful in the long run. 

When you have strong relationships with your visitors, they're a lot more likely to return. And return traffic is one of the keys to a really successful website.

Look at it this way. If you get 100 visitors per day and you have no way of getting them to come back to your site after they click an ad or an affiliate link, you have to find 100 new visitors every day to maintain your results.

But if you get 100 visitors every day and get 10 of them into your "relationship funnel" so they return to the site, you've increased your future traffic without having to find "new" visitors. It's over-simplified, but let's assume that they come back the next day. Now you've got 110 visitors, of which 10 will again become return traffic.

Every day that goes by, you're getting more traffic while you're still only having to generate 100 new visitors. Over time, your traffic will continue to grow even if you don't do any more work to find new people than you already are.

One of the best ways to build these relationships and generate return visitors is with our next traffic strategy - list building.

3.4 - Generating Traffic Through An Email List - One of the biggest advantages of building an email list is that it lets you control your own traffic. If you have a list of people interested in your market, it doesn't matter if Google, Facebook and every other traffic source shuts off tomorrow - you can still generate traffic just by sending out an email to your list. And if you have a brand new page or website that you want to direct traffic to, you can do that as well. You could set up a website in the next half hour, send an email 

to your list and see traffic to your site within a few minutes.

Even when you're paying for traffic, it's pretty tough to get visitors within minutes of finishing a new site.

List building as a traffic strategy is a bit of a Catch-22, however. You won't be able to generate that "on demand" traffic until you've built a list, and to build a list you need to get some traffic from other sources first.

That's why it's important to use all the strategies we're discussing, but get those visitors to subscribe to your email list so you can contact them over and over again in the future. 



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How To Build A Better Email List

How are you getting prospects and customers to buy from you? Building your email list is crucial to the survival of your business. It doesn't matter if you have an online business or a bricks and mortar business, email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing that has ever existed.

Building an email list means that you spend time getting email addresses for marketing from leads, prospects and customers. You can then send them information related to their problems and offer them products or services that provide solutions.

So how can you build a better email list?

1. Produce Valuable Content

While your audience won't see the content until they sign up to your email list and open your email, the content needs to be well written, interesting, and relevant to your audience. You want them to love it so much that they keep opening and that they share your emails with their friends.

2. Segment Your Email Lists

The more targeted each email list is, the more relevant the messages can be for your readers. By segmenting your lists when people make a purchase or click through on a link, you can make each email much more personalized.

3. Produce A Lead Magnet

You'll need an incentive to get people to give you their email address. Having said that, make sure the incentive is specific to your target market, to avoid visitors who just want the freebie and have no plan of ever buying anything.

4. Add Social Icons

It's easy to add social icons to your email messages. Include them on your email at the bottom, but also add a call to action asking your readers to share the email.

5. Use Creative Twitter Welcomes

You can get software to send automatic welcome messages to people who follow you on Twitter, like SocialOomph. While some people don't like them, they're still effective.

6. Get Yourself Interviewed

Find people who are looking to interview experts in your niche and pitch yourself as a guest. Most of the time when you are a guest you're expected to bring with you an offer to their audience. This offer can require an email address to receive it.

7. Host a Webinar

Webinars are a great way for building your email list. Everyone who wants to attend the webinar has to sign up for your email list. People see personal webinars as valuable and are more willing to give up their email address for them.

8. Speak Offline

You can collect email addresses at events as a host or speaker. If you give a good, value-packed talk and presentation, people will want to sign up to your list.

You're not going to build your email list very fast with a bland opt in offer. If you're offering a boring, "seen it all before" report that doesn't address your visitor's problems with any urgency, they won't be enticed to give you their email details.To learn how you can build your email subscriber base with an opt in offer that your audience can't resist go to: http://jonallo.com/build-your-email-list-fast/

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