• Innovative Strategies That Create More Profits

Month: December 2019

7 Ways To Sell Subscriptions

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

This information is from John  Warrillow’s, book: The automatic customer: Create subscriptions in any industry and from Zuora’s blog,

1 Think 10x vs. 10%

Customers are aware that a subscription is more valuable to you than a one-time purchase. So, to get hem to commit, you need to give then a significant return for their investment., They are unlikely to subscribe to a “Save 10%” but might if they could enjoy 10x the value of the alternative.

Net; “provide a ridiculous amount of value.”

2 Appeal to their Rational Side

The subscription model has gone mainstream, and people are demanding a better value than the alternative. Subscriptions are sold by appealing to convenience — especially B2B.

3 Give Customers an Ultimatum

Most customers would prefer to keep their freedom and buy your product a la carte, on an as-needed basis. YOu might consider making a subscription the ONLY alternative (they have) you sell, You can’t buy one movie from Netflix.

4 Give Them a Freemium Option

Give them a free taste of what they will get from a full-blown subscription. Magazine publishers found it virtually impossible to sell first-time visitors a subscription to an information product (e.g., magazine or membership website) until they have first opted into a free email newsletter to sample the value of the content,

Once they opt into the free newsletter, they convert to paid at a rate of 3% to 30% per year depending on the number of offers are presented and how carefully the publisher manages the list (weeds out undeliverable addresses and those who have opted out.)

In this freemium, you want to leave plenty of value off the tale to instill a sense of intrigue about what the customer will get from subscribing. A good taster gives just enough to access the product but leaven plenty of temptations behind the curtain

5 Offer a Trial

If your product or service is hard to describe or has to be used to be understood, it (the benefits) consider offering a trial subscription. Unlike freemium, usually available forever, a trial has a start and end date.

6 Offer Your Subscription as a Gift

The problem with a gift is that it is forgotten in a few days, but if you give a subscription, it expresses that appreciation over time, Standard Coca offers 1, 3, and 6-month subscriptions. They get a 75% increase in sales for Christmas and Valentine’s day. BUT, gift subscriptions are difficult to renew, but you can use them to top off your regular subscribers,

7 Set Fire To The Platform

One of the best things about a subscription company is it is always on, always available. Customers love it, but it is challenging to sell a subscription if it doesn’t change from day to day, why buy today?

One thing to do is artificially simulate a burning platform that causes the customer to act to avoid losing something (they keep thinking about it but never do it). You could put a compelling offer out there (e.g., buy the first year for half price) through the end of the month (BUT only for those interested but not signed, don’t advertise it, use it discreetly.

 

How To Write Headlines

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

What makes a headline go viral?

Following are some suggestions from Optinmonster.com

People want to share, want to increase the quality of their relationships with others, and want to increase their self-esteem and standing with their peers.

There is a magic 3-word phrase “will make you ____” This states that the topic will have an impact on you and often an emotional one.

There are five basic types of headlines that go viral

 

1 List posts — 50 Smart Ways To Segment Your Market

2 How to posts — How to optimize your site for the holidays

3 Resource posts — the ultimate guide to a simple option vs a double option — which is better?

4, Question post — How long should it take to earn revenues?

5. Heart-to–heart posts — An open letter to writers struggling with their first book

 

Now, if you add an infectious agent to those headlines your chances of going viral are much greater because they trigger emotion.  For example awe, anger, anxiety, fear, joy, lust, surprise, shock.

Examples

“40 belief-shaking remarks from a ruthless nonconformist”

Type: list post

Infectious agents: awe, anger, surprise, shock, anxiety

Belief-shaking — challenges you by stating its content will shake your beliefs

Ruthless — image of someone who doesn’t care

Nonconformist — someone unafraid and nonconventional

 

“How to hit 1,000,000 visitors in a year by blogging”

Type: How to

Infectious agents: awe, surprise, shock

“1,000,000” who wouldn’t want that. Even if you are skeptical, you will want to check

“In a year” desirable deadline

“Blogging” pinpoints its target audience and their biggest desire

Net: promise the desired result and a timescale for achieving it,

 

“Where to find free images”

Type: Resource post

Infectious agents: Awe, joy

Net: look for common questions or problems that people have, and write a headline that directly answers their question or solves a problem.

 

“On dying, mothers, and fighting for your ideas”

Type: Heart-to-heart

Infectious agents: awe, anger, surprise, shock, fear

“Dying” — strong emotive word, it congers up images in people’s minds

“Mothers” — emotive whatever your relationship with mother 

“Fighting” — emotive, congers up images in people’s minds of struggle, aggression

Net: fighting for your idea suggests motivation and inspiration 

 

“Are you good enough?”

Type: Question

Infectious agents: anger, anxiety, fear, surprise, shock

Net: are you good enough to challenges people. It asks a question everyone asks themselves, Ask a big question that drums up deep, human desires.

 

How to start writing viral headlines

1 Get to really know your audience

2 Know where your audience hangs out (media,etc.)

3 Discover your audiences’ infectious agents (follow them on social media, what are they sharing, any patterns in words and phrases? (topics, headlines, links)

4 Lay in those infectious agents.

Are Search Engines Missing Your Website?

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

 Some people have been saying that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is dead or at least no longer relevant to the current World Wide Web landscape. Believe it or not, the idea of the ineffectiveness of SEO has been going on all across the web for many years now, and it still creates quite an intense debate among website builders and business owners alike.

Major search engines such as Google and Bing are continually updating their search algorithms, so to say that SEO has changed quite a bit over the years is an obvious understatement. Despite the doubts, many websites or businesses continue to practice various methods of optimizations to increase online visibility and thrive. On the other hand, some who have tried implementing well-known tricks and techniques to acquire top spots in search engine results gain no benefit at all. Now, this begs the question about the specific practices those naysayers did.

 SEO is not math; while it does involve a lot of calculations, the practices do not follow the same formula all the time. When search engines change their algorithms, websites must also implement different optimization methods to stay relevant. Failure to keep up with the changes will render your website invisible.

SEO is not dead. It just evolves and gets better.

When it comes to digital marketing, especially increasing website traffic, you cannot afford to rely merely on links and keywords. While they are still essential parts of today’s SEO practices, there are just many more methods (and therefore works) required to obtain results within reasonable measure. Instead of just focusing on keywords and link-building efforts, today’s version of SEO demands constant attempts on your part of providing real values for visitors, such as user-friendly interface, relevancy to search queries, and useful, informative contents. A strong online presence is also the result of seamless integration with social media (and sometimes) advertising strategies. Having only one or two of those elements will not yield the results you need.

Every algorithm update aims to make the Internet better, more useful, and more effective for those searchers. When people say that SEO is no longer relevant, useful, or even dead, they most likely refer to specific optimization techniques that are now considered obsolete. SEO failed them because they used outdated methods.

Dead SEO Techniques

Older websites probably used the following methods to gain popularity. Still, you cannot merely follow their footsteps because some of those methods are now ineffective (or even bad) for website development. A few examples of dead SEO techniques:

All-out link building

Link building is an important part of SEO, both in the past and present. The most significant difference is that the old method did not care about the sources of the links. You could build or create as many links as you can, and almost certainly, your website would start to rank much higher. In many cases, people made dozens of sites and linked the contents heavily.

In today’s SEO, link quantity is no longer a reliable indicator of a good website. Other authoritative domains will link to an accurate, informative website. If your contents are fresh, well-written, and useful, it is not impossible to get linked by more popular sites.

Aiming for a high number of keywords

Targeting specific keywords remains an effective method to increase page rank, although, in the old days, there was an entirely different approach to that. It used to be that having more content target the same keyword was enough to gain more online exposure, but then search engines knew that it was a bad idea to rank websites based on the number of content they have. Some search engines do not rank an entire website, only individual pages. The new approach is to write a longer post and target multiple keywords instead.

Keywords Overuse

When you have tons of keywords within a single post used to be a great idea, all you needed to do was cramp as many keywords as possible in a relatively short post to reach sufficient keyword density. Search engines now despise the practice.

Appropriately implemented, SEO can do wonders for your website. Some of the most effective methods right now are as follows.

Page readability: not only does the interface need to be user-friendly and easy to navigate, but the contents have to be human-readable. People demand informative content relevant to their search queries, delivered on a website that is pleasing to the eyes in an instant. User experience and value of materials play crucial roles in today’s SEO landscape.

Topic and keywords: a combination of text- and keywords-focused content is preferable. You can use Google Trends to look for recent popular search queries and related keywords. Focus on trending search with low-competition keywords if possible.

 Let’s not forget about the marketing efforts. You must be willing to (slowly) promote your websites to gain popularity. Part of modern SEO is to integrate sites or your profile with social media, online communities, and relevant Internet forums. Be active and promote your ideas throughout the web; now and then, you can create a thread or give answers to others’ questions and link them to one of your pages.

What you need to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Posted on by harborcapitalgroupinc

We are now live in a world where people Google before they shop, visit Yelp before hiring services and use social media to get informed about the latest discounts from local retailers. Some even rely on YouTube or Instagram to get a glimpse of the products they consider buying.

Regardless of the business niche, you need a website to establish a presence in the virtual world and therefore stay ahead of the increasingly competitive market. Whether you are a retailer, contractor, consultant, or offering services of any sort, having no website is just as bad as giving away customers to your competitors. It doesn’t even matter if you run a small startup or a bigger sized company.

But having-a-website-alone is enough to attract visitors and customers; bear in mind that your competitors also have websites of their own. Your website must be optimized in terms of security, layout, performance, keywords, links (both inbound and outbound), and of course contents. You need to implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which refers to the practice of increasing traffic to your website. There is a large variety of SEO software you can use to generate a website analysis report you can use to plan and execute your optimization strategy.

Why SEO?

By now, every business owner knows that a website is like an online representative of the company, ready to welcome customers any day anytime. It is the place where customers and partners can learn more about the company as well as its products in a convenient manner. People can even place an order via the Internet on the website from the comfort of home.

One thing to remember is that having a website does not guarantee you will gain more customers. Just because your company has a website, it does not necessarily mean you will generate more sales in an instant. You can only make money if customers are at your storefront, or visit your website to buy what you’re selling. The following are some of the things you can do to improve your chances of attracting visitors and converting them into loyal customers.

SEO Basics

Creating a website is the first step to establish an online presence, and thankfully it is quite easy. You don’t have to be a computer or software engineer to get the job done. There are free domains, free hosting services, and free templates you can use to see if the website can run as intended; if not, you can always try again without spending a dime. While free options are available, the premium ones are almost always miles better for business purposes. A website is a powerful marketing tool, and that is why you want to have it built and optimized by professionals. In addition to using a useful (and relevant) domain and reputable hosting service, you also need thorough and complete website optimization practices, including but not limited to the following.

On-page SEO: there is nothing complicated about this step. All you need to do is to make sure that you use the right title for every page, the right keywords relevant to the title, human-readable contents, useful Meta descriptions, quick loading time, and the likes. On-page SEO is about making the website function as it should.

Off-page SEO: the more challenging part is the off-page optimization. It involves more sophisticated techniques to acquire quality backlinks (links directed to your website/content) from the more authoritative sites, social media integration, guest blogging, and brand popularity, among others. The purpose of off-page optimization is to build a better reputation and make the website more authoritative.

Internal linking: make it a priority to link a post to another on your website. The goal is to tell search engines that all your contents are relevant to each other. It also promotes the idea that visitors will remain engaged with the website because it provides detailed information about a particular topic. Visitors will stay longer on the site, improving your chances of converting them into customers.

Key-phrase instead of keywords: while keywords are most likely inevitable, you may also want to target key-phrases. You use more words to target a specific idea and insert the same phrase several times in a longer post. Longtail key-phrases (consisting of at least three words) are traditionally seldom-used, which means you don’t have to compete with more websites. Search engines prefer key-phrases to keywords because key-phrases give more specific information.

Reinforced website security: search engines are more eager to index secure websites with “https” as opposed to “Http” in their addresses. HTTPS features an SSL certificate to indicate an encrypted connection to the site. Your information is secured as well as the visitors’. If your website is also an online shop, secure online transaction processing is a must.

Fast loading speed: minimize the use of large-sized multimedia files such as videos and images on every page, or at least compress them to the smallest size possible without adversely affect view quality. Another excellent method is to use a dedicated server rather than a “shared” one. Switching to a “lighter” theme and enabling browser caching also help. Mobile-friendly: search engines have now moved to prioritize mobile-friendly websites in their indexing processes. Every day, more people are using smartphones to access the web, so it makes no sense to skip this step. Being mobile-friendly means your website will work the same way across devices of multiple platforms.

Last but not least, you need good SEO software to perform detailed analytics of website performance. Based on the analysis, the software may offer suggestions on how to fix errors and increase online visibility.