Category: Content Marketing

Converting visitors into prospective sales is where the success of a company lies. Visitors come and go without leaving a lead – quite literally. That is why the marketing departments have come up with the “magnets” to rope in visitors, offer incentives, and convert them into buyers. 

However, is that as easy as it is said? 

Not essentially. 

Strategizing with lead magnet ideas to optimize your visiting traffic into returning ones, and potentially into customers, is not an easy game. This is mainly because lead magnets are popular bait, and you need to come up with relevant and value-adding stuff to gain the favor of your target audience. 

Buyer’s Journey Stages 

The buyer’s journey stages, as it clearly indicates, are three progressive steps that every prospective lead follows to become a buyer.  

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Awareness Stage:

The prospect is completely unaware of your brand, or of the solution, it offers to a problem. A visitor might have stumbled upon your website via organic search, so at this stage, you have to focus on making the prospects become “aware”.

Consideration Stage:

As the prospect makes it to the middle of your customer journey funnel, it “considers” and weighs the options against the problem. Countless businesses are offering similar solutions, if not completely the same. In that case, what makes your brand credible?

Decision Stage:

If a lead has made it to the decision stage, all it needs is a slight push to be converted into a consumer. Just a click away, the right or wrong move can influence their buying decision. 

There’s a different mind map of the prospect at every stage of the funnel. Lead magnets, therefore, vary for each segment of the buyer’s journey. 

The Awareness Stage 

Educate with eBooks 

In-depth, detailed, and comprehensive eBooks are a powerful way to attract qualified sales leads by giving them a free download to an inclusive guide. They act as a strong lure because eBooks are a reserved property and require extensive time and knowledge to compile.

Make sure your eBook is thoroughly researched, is relevant to the brand’s core values, and has visual appeal. Using original infographics, charts, and images is an effective way to get your message across. 

Increase Productivity with Checklists

You can use checklists as a lead magnet considering the target audience of your company. 

Visitors find these quick lists helpful in optimizing their productivity – for instance, an ultimate to-do-list for backpackers so they do not miss out on anything. You can stash away valuable insight or tips and tricks in these “cheat sheets” in return for their email addresses.

Businesses customize the checklist lead magnet by turning it into steps of a process, top requirements, or best practices. As they are easy to consume and condenses a lot of information into an easy-to-scan list, it propels the prospect from the first stage to the next. 

Bring Interactive Quizzes 

Interactive quizzes are one way to entertain and interact with users while can be tailored to keep them invested in your preposition. Quizzes are custom-made – it is so much you can give and take from only a few interesting questions. They can be creative, whacky, and still remain relevant to the problem at hand. 

For instance, if your company sells athletic wear, you can create a quiz to get users to find out which sports movie character they would most likely play. Or, if you are an interior designing company, you can host a quiz asking people of their likes and dislikes to offer an end-result telling which design will suit their taste best. 

The Consideration Stage 

Exclusive Webinars

The king of converting leads, Neil Patel, recommends webinars as a strong magnet to attract genuinely interested sales leads. Webinars are classified under the “educational” lead magnets – schooling your visitors about something they didn’t already know. 

In return for an email address, prospects can watch live or pre-recorded presentations as many times as they want. Offer valuable insights, wisdom speech, and informative content with, perhaps, a host-interactive session or an attractive offer at the end to make it to the prospect’s shortlist. Knowledge is the key, and an exclusive webinar behind a gate is a promising way to catch potential buyers. 

Make sure you design the webinars in a way that it compels the prospect to “consider” your brand. 

Whitepapers 

Whitepapers are compelling reports or guides with exhaustive knowledge on a complex issue. They are a marketing magnet that takes on the form of an authoritative and credible problem-solving stance and has rich, in-depth methodologies presenting solutions. 

Readability is imperative, always. Keep the text boxes short, to-the-point, and backed by visuals to grab the reader’s attention. Since whitepapers are golden freebies for consumers to read, evaluate, and make a decision; you need to keep them power-packed with original facts and stats. 

The Decision Stage 

Prospects at this stage are waiting for the final push to help them make their decision. Consider the lead magnets under this section as the final straw to your conversion. You need to come up with personalized content that would interact with your final prospects and creatively address their pain points. 

Provide Discounts 

Discount coupons are the prime lead magnets to convert visitors into buyers. This magnet came into existence when the internet wasn’t ever found. So, you cannot undermine the effectiveness of discount coupons acting as the most successful incentives. 

Offer whooping discounts to first-time users, free shipping perks, giveaways, and free gifts on first deliveries. 

Seal the Deal with free demo/trials/consultation

Did you know that ASOS introduced a “try before you buy” model to gain the blind trust of their customers? And it worked – it worked better than anything else. Using this tactic, they not only conquered the hearts of their loyal customers, but it was another powerful generation of leads and referrals. 

Seal the deal for your customers at the last stage of the funnel by offering them free trials/demos or consultations of your services. 

Final Thoughts about Lead Magnet Ideas

Backed up marketing metrics and data, you can easily monitor the performance of your lead magnets and devise improvisations accordingly. There is nothing more challenging than converting visitors into buyers – and once they have converted, there’s nothing worthier.

Are you thinking of paying royalties to ghostwriters?

If they accept royalties as a payment option, then go ahead. If you’re being fair or not, offering them royalties for ghostwriting services is another story.

So let’s discuss what you need to know. By the end of this post, you’ll find out the answer to the question “do ghostwriters get royalties” and what the best course of action is. This way, you’ll get to the bottom of things if you’re considering using royalty payments.

This also targets beginner ghostwriters trying to break into the publishing industry but don’t know where to begin regarding payment schedules, upfront costs, and others.

Do ghostwriters get paid in royalties or not?

Ghostwriters don’t get paid royalties for their services. That’s how the general traditional publishing process goes, anyway. 

And paying a ghostwriter for their services is both simple and practical. So why would you want to complicate matters and propose to pay royalties?

To elaborate on this concern, let’s check out what dictionaries say about royalty. Encyclopedia Britannica, for one, explains that royalty is a payment option in law. 

Wondering how royalty payments work, though? Then here are some points to ponder:

• The basis of product performance – How is the product doing? Royalty payments will depend on how much the book sells over time.
• The basis on royalty percentage agreement – For example, the average starting royalty percentage is 5% 
• The need for a royalty contract – A detailed description of the ghostwriting arrangement prevents feud. This includes the coverage and limitations involved in the work.

However, this was back in the day. Nowadays, if you insist on paying royalties for the services of a professional writer, you’re somewhat asking that person to work for free. And don’t you think it’s unreasonable?

Remember, a ghostwriter can’t pay their urgent bills with the promise of royalty payments. That, and they wouldn’t be able to support their daily lifestyle.

If you want to offer royalties to a ghostwriter, here is some practical advice:

• Supplementary royalty payments – Offer royalty only after providing monetary rewards. Let royalty payments serve as extra compensation or bonuses.
• Guarantee of success – Is the success of your publishing content set in stone? Then there’s a guarantee of recurring income, which you can give to a ghostwriter.
• Passion project – Does a ghostwriter love working on a project? Are they 100% willing to accept royalty as a payment option?

Related post: Do Ghostwriters Get Credit or Not? The Real Answer

And do ghostwriters get credit too?

In most cases, no. Ghostwriters don’t get to claim a published work is theirs without their client’s consent. Even if every word is theirs, they can’t “own” it.

Most ghostwriters are aware of this. So if you’re working with a professional ghostwriter, there’s nothing to worry about. 

Besides, regardless of getting credit for their work, other rewards await them. Here’s a look at some of these:

Freedom to work

Ghost writers, like most freelance writers, can work anytime and anywhere they want — if their client is good with the setup. They’re free to hustle however they wish as long as they meet their client’s expectations about a project. 

And beyond the benefits of a highly autonomous work setup, here’s how awesome their freedom to work extends:

• Unlimited earning potential – No fixed income. Ghostwriters can earn more if they take on more work.
• Stable work – Written content isn’t losing value, and so the work for ghostwriters is always going to be present. 
• Ability to choose projects – Don’t like a project? Without a boss to force them to work on it, they can choose to decline an offer.

Ability to network

With every client ghostwriters work with, they meet people. And to those acquaintances, they can shake hands with potential clients. The more clients they score, the bigger their network becomes.

Here are some tips on how to help them get more out of networking:

• Commit to leveling up – Adopt the right mindset, be sociable, and be engaging. You can also devote an hour per day to growing your network.
• Attend events – For example, your town is hosting a small party for businesses relevant to your niche. So be there!
• Seek exemplars – Connect with successful individuals and praise-worthy

Opportunity for advancement

Ghostwriters can apply their experience in working on writing projects to real-life situations. And in turn, these newfound skills can help further their career and improve their lives.

Let’s shed light on the matter above – the ability to network – to cite an example. Building a network of social connections is a lot like writing content that you want audiences to vibe with. And that isn’t easy. 

For one, it takes having a pleasant attitude to give other people reasons to associate with another. 

Beyond that, here are some valuable non-writing skills that they can learn with every work opportunity:

• Time management – They learn to manage their time better and set priorities. For example, they understand it’s best to allow 3 hours per day for a project.
• Organizational skills – Dumping loads of work and expecting them to attend to everything isn’t an effortless task. Experienced ghostwriters can handle it, though 
• Listening and comprehension skills – Over time, ghostwriters better understand clients.

Ghostwriter prices

One of the main reasons ghostwriters get into ghostwriting is high monetary compensation. However, they can live comfortably if they can write and use it to embody another person’s writing style.

However, while ghostwriters are tied to good pay, it doesn’t mean there’s a cookie-cutter approach to this. Remember, each ghostwriter sets prices differently. This can depend on the category of ghostwriters they belong to. 

Some ghostwriters charge a flat fee. This benefits you if you have a lengthy project for a professional ghostwriter like 20,000-word e-books. This way, you can just give them a project, expect them to deliver high-quality output, and pay them a set price.

They might not charge much if they’re novice ghostwriters who could still use writing advice. However, if they’re high-end ghostwriters with years of experience up their sleeves, they can charge high ghostwriting fees. 

Here’s a lowdown on the average annual salary of ghostwriters based on experience:

• $5,000 to $9,000 range – This is the average rate of ghostwriters with about 3-5 years of experience
• $9,000 to $20,000 range – If they have about five years up to a decade of experience in ghostwriting, expect to pay this
• At least $20,000 – If you’re looking for professionalism and experience, go for ghostwriters with over ten years of experience. Then expect to pay them compensation in this range.

However, ghostwriters can base their fees on a per-word or per-page rate, especially if they prefer to work as freelancers, they’ll charge you differently. 

What makes this pricing system a suitable fit for you? Well, if you have a quick project that can be completed in less than a week, this ghostwriting work is what you should aim for. Examples are a 1,000-word blog post and a brief two-page case study.

In this case, here are the factors that also come into play:

• Level of difficulty – If your project requires the need to delve into complex subjects, be ready to pay a ghostwriter high for it
• Word count – You’ll have to pay based on the length of your project
• Urgency – Want ghostwriters to work on a time-sensitive project? Then expect to be charged a higher amount.

Summing it up

What matters the most is that you and the ghostwriter you’re looking to hire come to an understanding with your publishing house. In the ghostwriting business, paying royalties isn’t standard practice in the publishing industry.

However, it’s not wrong to consider proposing it during your talks with publishers. If they refuse to accept it as a primary payment option, the discussions above should help you see their point. Now, if you want to know how to proceed with offering royalties, the discussions above also have your back.

Still have questions about royalty payments? Then you’re welcome to contact me!

Content is a pillar of digital marketing.

No matter what you want to achieve, you need some kind of content in order to attract and engage your audience – be in a newsletter that will inform them about your latest features, or a how-to video that solves a particular issue, or an educational blog post. Even a product description on an e-commerce web page also qualifies as a piece of content.

In other words, content is a building block of your overall marketing strategy.

But the problem is you need a lot of it. And what’s even more important, it has to be superb. Long story short, it takes a great deal of time, effort, and resources to come up with all the content you need.

Technology has been tackling this challenge for quite some time, and natural language generation (NLG) seems to be a solution for scaling your content marketing.

Natural language generation is a branch of artificial intelligence whose primary purpose is to produce verbal or written content consisting of meaningful words and phrases in a human-like manner. In other words, this advanced technology uses vast amounts of data and translates them into stories with the help of powerful algorithms.

It’s worth mentioning that NLG can write, but it can’t read – that’s the role of another similar branch of AI called natural language processing (NLP). Its role is to analyze unstructured data and turn it into numbers that will be fed to NLG and out of which human-readable text will be produced.

In a nutshell, what we have here is artificial intelligence, which is an umbrella technology encompassing a wide variety of different subset technologies such as NLP, NLG, neural networks, and others.

The main use case of AI is processing and analyzing massive sets of both structured and unstructured data, and interpreting their meaning at an immense speed. So, it’s clear that such data-driven machines can analyze and produce content for different purposes in no time.

This brings us to our first question – how to produce a lot of relevant, personalized, and engaging content relatively quickly?

Natural language generation has been commercially implemented, meaning that there are tools capable of generating content for various digital marketing purposes.

Some of them include:

A predictive typing feature that offers smart suggestions and corrects typos and grammatical errors is an example of partial automation. It eliminates repetitive writing and helps users draft their copy faster. This AI-powered functionality has been available in Gmail through its Smart Compose, and it learns from your preferences when picking from one of its available suggestions. The synergy of NLP and NLG technology is capable of reading your emails while you’re writing and predicting what you want to say next, based on the context in real-time.

Some major publications, including The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg, have been using NLG for some of their reports and short articles. For example, Bloomberg News leverages Cyborg, an AI-powered system, to produce thousands of company earnings reports. Similarly, the Washington Post has its own proprietary robot writer, Heliograf, to churn out high school football league reports. Such intelligent machines allow writers to focus on more important stories that require critical thinking, creativity, and literary craftsmanship.

Conversational AI or chatbots automate customer interactions and provide 24/7 customer support by answering questions and helping website visitors find what they’re looking for. These smart algorithms are capable of mimicking human communication, thus engaging customers. In other words, conversational chatbots can be configured more intelligently so that they don’t only generate already predefined and canned phrases, but converse on an almost human level. However, for an effective enterprise chatbot implementation, a detailed strategy has to be put in place.

E-commerce stores need well-optimized product pages in order to attract the right audience. This means coming up with unique product descriptions, which can be a repetitive, tiring, and time-consuming task. NLG can harvest all the relevant product information and generate different description versions for products that are almost identical. Besides, big stores can have catalogs containing tens of thousands of items that need descriptions – and NLP can produce this gargantuan amount of content very quickly.

While this technology is revolutionary and game-changing, it still has some limitations. This means that it’s essential to do your research and consider whether NLG is the right thing for scaling your content marketing.

Here are some factors to take into account before you embrace this sophisticated tech:

• Do you have a use case? As helpful as this technology is, at the moment, it can be used only for data-driven content. You can’t expect it to produce a regular blog post, which is the result of a creative process based on critical reasoning. NLG works only if you provide it with cold, hard data that it can make use of and transform into a narrative. So, if you’re publishing reports, summaries, or fact-sheets, then this technology can be beneficial for your business. If your content doesn’t heavily rely on facts, figures, numbers, and repetitive structures, then NLG isn’t the right fit.
• Is your data structured? NLG needs structured data in order to be able to produce content. This means having well-organized CSV files, with impeccably structured columns and rows. For this technology to deliver value, you should clean up your data before feeding it to the NLG system.
• Calculate your ROI. NLG is a sophisticated technology that takes time to set up and configure. If we bear in mind that you have to pay for it, it’s logical that you should assess the value you’ll get by implementing it. Analyze how long it takes you to produce your reports and articles at the moment, and establish how much time an NLG system would trim and whether you would benefit from this acceleration.

Natural language generation has immense potential to disrupt content marketing, although it’s still in its infancy. If you identified one of the use cases discussed in this text as being important in your business, it’s a good idea to give this technology a thought as its benefits can be immense.

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Promoting your blog post is never a one-and-done deal.

That’s why you need to find places to syndicate your content!

Here’s the thing about content:

As long as their information remains relevant, you can promote them to different online channels to drive more blog traffic.

Marketing your blog content on social media and online communities are good places to start. However, where else can you push your content on channels where your readers are?

Here’s the thing about syndicating content

Content republishing has been around for quite some time now.

In fact, it was once considered an illegal tactic due to the reproduction of duplicate content.

By publishing the same blog post on different sites, you risk your site from getting penalized on search results. If not get outranked, sites like Google and Bing will only index content and deindex pages with the same content.

As a result, there is a chance that your blog post might get deindexed even if you wrote and published the post.

However, content republishing has been used to great effect by bloggers. Both have addressed that republishing your blog content on different platforms will not hurt your blog’s search rankings, but only if this is done to reach out to your audience and not spam-related.

The pros and cons of republishing blog posts

As mentioned, republishing your original content on Web 2.0 platforms is a great way to drive more traffic. If people like your content, they can visit your blog to read related posts.

Also, this tactic is a great method to increase awareness about your blog by tapping into existing readers from these platforms. But we will discuss this in depth later.

Lastly, you can link back to the original post to inform search engines that the content has indeed been republished. Consider this as a way of building backlinks to your blog, which is a valuable factor in determining your search rankings. However, keep in mind not to abuse this feature to prevent Google and Bing from penalizing your blog.

On the downside, content republishing can drown out your blog, especially if you are just starting out. By republishing your blog content on established sites, search engines may disregard your post and rank sites where you syndicated your post instead.

Jumping headfirst into content republishing can be a perilous thing. Before, before we begin, make sure that:

• Your blog has enough authority to proceed with content republishing – While there is no way to measure this, just make sure that your blog has some Domain Authority of at least 20 to prevent other sites from outranking yours. DA is indicative of your blog’s performance over time, which is a big factor in determining your search rankings.
• You have promoted your blog content on social media and online communities – The idea behind content repurposing is to get more audience to your blog. Therefore, you want to inform your existing readers from the aforementioned channels that your post is available for viewing.
• You published the post at least seven days ago – Again, no data supports this claim. But a one-week window is enough for search engines to collect information about your blog content to index it for search. This way, the content you’ll publish on your site won’t be picked up by tools like PlagiarismCheck.org as plagiarized content.

That said, these drawbacks shouldn’t prevent you from building a content syndication strategy aimed at increasing the visibility of your posts!

Below are content syndication networks where you can republish your blog content.

1. Medium

Why? Medium is a unique blogging platform because it does not focus on statistics and data. Instead, it encourages users to tell stories that people will read. If your post communicates something useful and different to Medium readers, then consider republishing your content on the site.

Sign up for an account and click on New Story.

You will be brought to the text editor of the site. Just copy and paste the text from your blog onto the editor. Medium will apply the same formatting to your blog’s, but you will have to run through the content just to be sure.

Before you publish, make sure that you link back to the link where the blog content was first published to ensure proper attribution.

Once the content is ready, click on Publish and share the post on Twitter and Facebook.

You can track who read your story and the site that referred them to the story.

2. LinkedIn

Why: LinkedIn allows users to create content that will appear on the notification of your connections.  The more connections you have on LinkedIn, the more chances they will read your post and become more aware of your blog.

Sign in your LinkedIn account and click “Write an Article” from your dashboard.

You need to upload a featured image that will introduce readers to the post.

Copy and paste your blog content on the text editor area. The images won’t be included once you paste the article, so you need to upload them one by one.

Again, make sure that you attribute the post to your blog.

Once you click “Publish,” it will ask you to include a maximum of three tags to your post. The tags will help make your article searchable on LinkedIn.

The benefit of republishing your blog content on LinkedIn is that your connections will receive a notification about your LinkedIn article. If they are not following your blog, this is a great way to introduce the kind of content you produce and encourage them to visit your blog.

Therefore, it would really help if you have lots of connections on LinkedIn. The more professionals you are connected with, the more they will click and read your post from their notification page.

Kingged.com

Why: Kingged.com is a social networking site for business where users can share and syndicate their posts and comment on what other people shared. The site is also a great place to interact and collaborate with influencers within your industry so you can build and leverage relationships in the future. For this to happen, you need to syndicate your best posts.

Sign in your account and click on “Syndicate Your Post.”

A text editor will show on a window where you can enter your post. Copy and paste the post on the body, select the appropriate category, and enter the most relevant tags.

Since the editor will ask for the URL of the post you want to syndicate, you do not need to attribute the post within the content of the republished on.

Make sure that the images are not more than 600px in width to maintain the layout and appearance of the post.

Over time, you can expect people to “king” your post and receive comments from them.

Update: Users can no longer syndicate their content on Kingged.com. The site is now a blog about financial tips.

3. WordPress.com

Why: Don’t confuse WordPress.com with the self-hosted WordPress. This is the online version of this blogging platform. You have access to users where you can follow, like, and reblog their posts. What we want to achieve here is to reach out to like-minded users and republish our blog content here so we can build a dedicated following of your blog.

I am referring to the WordPress.com free account. If you do not have an account yet, you can create one now.

After logging in, write a blog post.

Copy and paste the article on the text editor. Upload the image and enter the proper attribution within the content.

Before publishing, connect your social media accounts to your WordPress’ so you can automatically share the post on those channels upon publication.

You can check out the republished blog content here.

If your post is good, different users will like and/or reblog it.

If your post is really good, some will even follow your blog!

4. Tumblr

Why: While Tumblr caters to a younger audience, it is still a valuable place where you can republish your post and get found easier online, which could lead to more blog traffic.

Log into your account and create a text update.

If you have the HTML copy of the post you want to republish, you can select HTML as your text editor.

Make sure to revert back to Rich Text to edit and check if the formatting is correct.

Link back to the first article within the post and include tags to make your post searchable within Tumblr.

You can check out the republished blog content here.

5. Quora

Why: Quora is the premier online Q&A site. With its blogging function, Quora aims to help users impose their knowledge on particular topics instead of just answering questions. By creating and writing on a Quora blog, they can build a following and refer more traffic to your actual blog.

Log into your account and go to the Blogs page.

If you do not have a blog yet, you can create one from this post. Choose an available name for your Quora blog and it will used as your subdomain for creating posts using this platform.

If you have a blog already, create a post.

It is best to copy and paste the post on your text editor and make the necessary edits.

After linking to your initial article, choose the topics to categorize the post. Choose topics with thousands of followers to increase your reach.

You can check out the republished blog content here.

Final words about the places to syndicate your content

Content syndication can be a time-consuming activity. However, making it part of your digital marketing strategy will grant you rewards later. As shown in the examples above, you can build a following of your target audience, which you can later engage further with more republished posts from your blog.

This will lead them to visit your blog and read more of your great content!

Also, you do not have to republish your blog content on these syndication networks. You can focus on republishing only the best content you have so you only deliver content your followers will love on these platforms. Play around with this tactic and see the results you can get from republishing your posts.

I appreciate you reading through the entirety of the post. I hope you learned from the tactics I shared about syndication content and republishing. Also, please share this post if you find this post useful 🙂