A lot of you have been asking “ How do I do SEO on a low budget “. There are a lot of expensive SEO tools out there and a lot of people who are getting started doing SEO can’t really afford an $89 subscription to something like Ahrefs or maybe buying ScreamingFrog for $200 for the pro license.

So there are all these different tools you can buy online and today we’re going to show you how it is possible to start out doing SEO for free and how you can do SEO without any tools. We’re going to explain to you why you don’t necessarily have to use tools in order to be successful in doing SEO. And why tools can be a helpful thing for you and having a budget for SEO can be helpful but not completely necessary in order to do well.

Figuring Out Your Goals

With everything that we do here, we always start with our notepad or if you can have a whiteboard in the background or somewhere that’s close to your workstation so you can look at it all day. It helps to stay organized when planning low budget SEO.

We actually have a whiteboard in our office and we look at it every day and put what we have to accomplish. The first thing that you want to do is to figure out how you can draw and something that you could write your ideas out of since it actually feels better to write your ideas out to a whiteboard than to type in on your notepad.

What we always do is put out our monthly goals and we start with how much money we want to make every month. Now what you can do is you want to figure out your goals and we know this isn’t really SEO-related but we do want to talk about the business side of it. Because if you don’t have the vision on how much money you want to make, SEO isn’t really going to help you a lot so you want to figure out what your actual end goal is besides just ranking and you want to figure out how that ranking can actually help you.

What we do is that if we want to make 25k we want to think about what we have to do to get to that point and we make this reasonable and we try to stretch this a little bit so if we only making like 1k a month then our goal would probably to make 2k because the idea is you want to take what you are doing that’s making you money and you want to add more time into that and tweak or adjust it.

One of the big things you want to learn about when starting out doing low budget SEO, doing marketing, or doing whatever you’re doing online is you want to figure out what other people are doing well and try to use that as an outline for what something that you can do but in your own unique way.

If you don’t have any rankings or if you’re brand-new and not making any money, the first thing you want to do is to build a case study, no matter what. If you could do anything right and you don’t have any money you want to get a website up that you can rank locally because it’s usually easier to rank for because of lower keyword difficulty and use it as a way to get into lead generation for whatever is the industry that you are targeting.

Let’s say you want to have iPhone repair clients or acupuncturists as your client so basically, you don’t want random clients and you want to have clients that you already know their niche or industry and you want to know how their marketing works and how they make money because then you’re going to be able to scale what you’re doing faster. The less you know about a certain niche or the industry the harder it is to scale whatever that thing is because you know less about it.

2 Ways to Gauge the Keyword Difficulty

What we do is we search. So if you don’t have money don’t use this method because what we’ll do is go to Ahrefs and actually type in the keywords that we’re going to rank for locally. This is technically part of low budget SEO, but you need to decide how much you’re willing to spend

So if you don’t have any money you can actually go to Google Keyword Planner, now you’re not actually going to see the Keywords difficulty so we might have to show you how we can gauge this. So you need to sign in to whatever your google account is once you’re signed in you need to go to tools and go to Keyword Planner and type in whatever the keyword you want to rank.

This is the first way to gauge it unfortunately when it says low competition on keyword planner that just means people competing on AdWords so it’s not really a great way to gauge it but it’s a kind of a good way to gauge it might not as accurate as Keyword difficulty but it is somewhat accurate. The better way to do it is called “eyeballing” and this is what you’re going to do with a lot of your SEO and with your rankings.

This actually works really well. We still do eyeballing even with these tools because we want to see that the tool isn’t lying to us. The tool is just kind of way for you to kind of get in a faster and more accurate approach when you’re scaling meaning that when you’re going bulk tasks like finding a huge list of keywords it’s supposed to give you a better idea by looking at a bulk list however if you’re only looking at 5 – 10 keywords then it’s not always the best thing.

Tools are really meant to streamline what you’re doing, they’re meant to help you scale, they are meant to help you automate, but they’re not meant to help you rank they might help you rank to a certain extent but what we’re saying is that the real way to rank is to be able to understand what people are actually searching for, look at that result and then be able to go after that based on what you’re actually seeing.

So if we go to Google we’re going to do a ” ctrl + shift + N ”and see an unbiased search result as long as you’re in Google Chrome, first thing that we’re going to see is that keyword is completely taken over the maps you’ll see nobody else is ranking for that keyword because the way we set up this website is to completely dominate the search results by branding the keyword as the actual business name and that’s how you can actually take over like that.

For a long time, we had a map of three people with ads showing up in search results but now because of so much authority to this business because it’s doing so well. This is actually a very hard thing to rank for because it’s dominating the search results so competition-wise it’s actually harder because we’re eyeballing.

This is another thing that you need to know about whether it’s Ahrefs whether it’s Google Keywords Planner whatever you’re using just because it says low difficulty doesn’t mean that it is true it might mean that nobody is competing for it because it’s already completely dominated by whoever is SEO-ing for it.

The Indication That A Local Search Is Easy To Rank For

Another thing you want to watch out for when planning for a low budget SEO strategy is how easy it will be to rank. One indication that a local search can be easy to rank for is if you see yelp or other aggregate sites ranking really high. Aggregate means where they have a bunch of these combined listings listed on their website like Yelp or Thumbtack or whatever these different websites are.

If you want to see what these different people are doing, what you can do is type in something called “The Exact Match Keyword”. So if you look at the image it’s 14 times this exact match is showing up on search results. And it looks like people are SEO-ing for it also because you’ll see the main keywords are pulled to the left and there’s some sort of call to action pulled to the right and you’ll see a lot of people are following this outline.

If you’re trying to rank for something very general, let’s say you’re trying to rank for the keyword “Cats” you can assume that that keyword is going to be competitive because a lot of people are looking to rank for that.

Now if you’re going for something local like let’s say “iPhone repair Sta Barbara” and based on your google keyword planner search result there’s a hundred to a thousand monthly search rate chances there’s not a ton of people competing for it. This way you can kind of gauge that your competition is not insane compared to something that would be more general.

The Point of Optimizing

The whole point of optimizing something is to find what’s already working out working well and make it better or that’s already working not so well and make it better. Either way, you’re trying to make what you’re seeing show up better than what is already out there.

You want to make it more relevant to the user, you want to make it more authoritative to the user and to the platform that you’re on so all these things are kind of hard to fake.

So if you’re using what google actually tells you and what we’re actually telling which is creating value and not worrying about how many links you have or how many keywords do you have ranking all these things are ways to measure big exports of content that you can scale.

If you have no rankings, you have no clients, no income, you can’t afford tools and you have no strategy whatsoever on what you’re going to do to generate leads or be able to market to them or be able to sell them packages because you don’t know your pricing.

All these things are very important to think about and that’s why our first tip to you early on was not necessarily thinking about just the SEO but it was actually thinking about what is your actual goal.

So you want to think about who you want to work with, why you want to work with them, do you know a lot in that industry, how you can scale that, who you are going to outsource, what are we going to do in order to maintain these contracts. All these things once you think about these and start to figure out what are the things that we can give to our audience as a value, what are the ways that we can build authority with these sites, that’s when you start winning.

SEO Success

Every single SEO success (low budget or not) that we have had has been related to finding the perfect keyword. What has happened is we will actually go and find what people are interested in.

One thing that you guys would probably see with some places that we do our marketing you’ll see that we do a lot of polls meaning that questionnaires on our group. We’ll actually ask things like “What’s the best SEO website you have ever seen”, “what is your favorite SEO course” we ask all these questions all the time not because we’re trying to engage some groups you’ll see they are just trying to create engagement so they can get more people into their groups so they can sell stuff.

The reason why we’re doing this is we’re trying to get as much information about our audience as possible because the people in marketing too are people who are trying to learn SEO that is why we sell programs, that is why we sell consultancy packages, and because we’re spending our time here trying to market the SEOs our biggest goal is to understand they want what they want.

Value Ladder Principle

A lot of people already know about this since we talk about it all the time. But ideally what you want to have is you want to have about 4 different steps and these 4 levels of value. Basically the higher the value meaning the higher the money that people have to pay the more resourceful it is the better the deal is. So if someone is paying more money the better the results.

Whether it’s Web design, whether it’s SEO, whether you’re selling clothing online doesn’t matter what you’re selling, you want to figure out the thing that you can bring people in with and what is the thing that you can capture them with.

A lot of people who are watching these videos, a lot of people are getting our checklist, a lot of people who are talking to us started out most likely with some sort of free type of information, some type of free checklist.

What we’re trying to say here is that if you want to sell to people, let’s say you want to make a bunch of money let’s say you want to start selling $2,000 to $3,000 SEO packages like we sell them then what you want to do is you want to figure out why these people are interested in a $2,000 to $3,000 SEO package.

And the first thing to do is to figure out what they want for free, what is the thing that’s going to blow them away for free because people feel embedded in you when you give them things for free.

When you think about that from a marketing standpoint the more value you can give upfront the more you get back and it’s usually 10 fold you usually get way more back than you actually end up giving.

The reason why we spend so much time trying to give out free stuff all the time is that we’re getting it back a lot more.

How we turn this into rankings though is because when you have things that are really valuable that are free you spend most of your time front-loading the free things, for instance, a free SEO audit template ended ranking very well because all the people who actually wanted it they type the keywords in, they leave reviews on it, they leave comments they’re linking to it and that’s how we get a ton of authority for certain things like the checklist through SEO audits.

Whatever we’re trying to do and get more traffic to our site which makes it a lot easier to end up selling and bring more rankings in, keep building an audience, and then that’s when you start to get a snowball. One other thing that you need to think about is people are not going to buy from you unless you tell them to.

Building Relationships

All of these building relationships you want to figure out SEO is a big thing that has something to with content and links and all these things but what it really has to do is it has to do building relationships.

The more relationships online you have the more people respect you and the more people want to talk to you and you want to associate themselves with you the more authority you get which is basically links or social signals or all the things that matter about SEO.

So all the things that used to be fake back in the day that were very easy to fake like links, reviews, and all these things are now getting harder to do because you want to have a real consistent value. What we mean by this is Google just doesn’t care about you getting a hundred reviews or hundred links. Google cares about you getting those consistently so consistent signals are way better than one-time signals that you can obviously fake.

Now if you really want consistent signals the way you do that is to build your audience whether it’s through MailChimp, whether it’s through ManyChat, whatever it is.

Obviously, we don’t really know a lot of low budget ways to build an SEO strategy unless you’re just getting somebody’s email directly through a form and then just feeding it into Gmail blaster so you might spend a little bit of money on generating on MailChimp or ManyChat.

All of your efforts at low budget SEO should be around this whole deal that we’re talking about like increasing your authority, building relationships, building the things that you are giving away for free, all of these things are easy to do if you spend some time thinking about them like thinking about what is already out there that is awesome but what is something that could be even better.

Content marketing and SEO belong together. Both disciplines need the other to achieve their goals. For SEO to be really effective, you need good content – and those who produce content need SEO knowledge in order to plan the content and to ensure that the lavishly created content is then also found by the target group.

Here we show how SEO tactics can help improve content marketing and make it more effective.

Content Marketing and SEO: Appealing page title

The so-called title tags define the title of a document. In the search engines, page titles are usually displayed on the search results pages (SERPs), above a short excerpt of the page content (snippet). Good page titles are important to SEO, and they affect whether something gets redistributed on social media.

The title tag has long been considered one of the most important SEO factors – the most important criterion is of course the entire page content. Title tags appear in three places: in the browser, on search results pages, and when sharing on external websites such as social media pages.

The title tag of a website should contain a precise and concise description of the page content. Therefore, it is essential for both user experience and search engine optimization. A good page title is useful in three areas: relevance, when browsing, and on the search results pages.

If you use keywords in the title tag, the search engines will highlight them in the search results when the user uses these keywords in their search. This makes it easier for the user to find and usually means higher click-through rates.

Tips for good page titles:

• Use times to pick up users who are looking for the latest content, e.g. “The 5 best newsletter tools of 2021”
• Write naturally and avoid repetition: The page titles should both do search engines justice and be easy to read and appealing for users
• Using the brand name on important pages like the home page – it’s not that important on blog and post pages.

Content Marketing and SEO: Content must be meaningful, visual and unmistakable

The old SEO technique, in which content was only created to cram a page full of keywords, is dead. The changes to the Google algorithm have forced search engine optimizers to focus more on quality than quantity. Another reason for the increased importance of content marketing.

High quality content should have value for the visitor – informative, useful and / or entertaining. The search engines decide whether content meets these criteria by evaluating user behavior with regard to this content – e.g. how long the visit times are on the page, what the next activity is after viewing the content, and whether the content actually answers the question that was entered in the search – all of these will help your content rank higher in organic search results.

Tips for good content:

• Create so-called evergreen content: content that is also relevant to the search in the long term and thus generates traffic.
• Create content that answers the most common questions about your topic / area of ​​expertise. To do this, you can research what is currently being asked on sites such as Quora.
• Remember, the more your content is shared and linked, the higher it will appear in search results, which in turn leads to more clicks and visits.

Content Marketing and SEO: Integrate SEO and PR

In the past, the two disciplines have often clashed when it comes to how to improve search engine results and which approach works best. PR managers were of the opinion that deserved mentions initiated by PR should be preferred in other media. SEO professionals, on the other hand, held that their own content would achieve the best search results. In reality, both disciplines have to work together in the digital world.

Interlinking PR and SEO can significantly increase marketing effectiveness. The two so different disciplines work better when they work in harmony with one another. And both sides can learn from each other. PR professionals can learn more about keywords, link building, and other SEO tactics. SEO executives can learn from PR strategists when it comes to building and maintaining relationships and creating high-quality content.

Tips for SEO and PR:

• Coordinate goals and share (market) research results
• Follow a common keyword strategy
• Training PR staff in SEO & Analytics and SEO staff in PR issues

Content Marketing and SEO: Make your website fast and secure

A website’s loading speed is the time it takes for the page to load in the browser. According to research by Yahoo, up to 35 factors can affect a website’s loading speed. Many of these depend on the programming of the website – this requires a web developer.

You can test how fast your site loads with services such as GTmetrics or other tools .

No matter how you measure – when it comes to charging speed, the following applies: faster is better. Experience shows that faster pages often rank better and users convert better.

Tips for fast websites:

• Avoid too many redirects.
• Possibly use performance tools like Cloudflare.
• Optimize and compress images so that the quality is maintained, but the file size decreases.

Adapting to new technologies & tactics can make lead generation hard for B2B startup companies as they basically lack the budget. The companies have to come up with new ideas to grow their leads and this can be a complex process as quality leads are the soul of any B2B company. The limits on resources to splurge on marketing functions demands you be sharp about your lead generation strategies. To help you generate new lead generation ideas we have 10 best lead generation practices for your B2B startup.

By consistently analyzing the lead generation practices you can easily stay at the top of the competition. With ever-changing technology, it is quite challenging for startups to acquire leads. But with regular hard work and efforts, you can shoot up conversions and captivate more leads for your B2B startup.

B2B Lead Generation Practices #1 – Build a Successful Sales Team

In B2B startups the CEO is also the head marketer and the sales department to enterprise sales teams that demand multiple tiers of account planners and customer service reps. Prosperous B2B sales teams come in all shapes and sizes. Sales teams can play a crucial and active role in the lead generation task by using the brand new cold sales development approaches, known as the Lead Relationship Management methodology or Outbound Sales.

Working closely with the sales team can bring users to both the sales and marketing team, far beyond making a civil workplace. The sales team speaks with prospects and customers on a daily basis. They obtain a vast wealth of knowledge about the problems customers have now, and in the future. By meeting frequently in a collaborative and innovative atmosphere both teams can help each other reach their objectives.

#2 – Depict your Target Audience

Marketing and selling effectively in the B2B domain requires some of the same skills and words that help promote B2C success. You need a bond with your customer, a product that fits coherently within the customer’s own process and a message that answers the “why” of your suitability as a trading partner. Among the many methods, you can divide up a B2B target audience, look to a collection of business demographics as a mode of parting the population.

You can segment your B2B customers using one of the following methods-

• Segmentation based on tiering
• Segmentation based on needs
• Segmenting customers based on firmographics
• Segmentation based on behavior

Depending on the products and brand your startup markets, one technique of customer segmentation might turn out to be more valid than another.

B2B Lead Generation Practices #3 – Display a toll-free phone number strikingly

Customers are more likely to contact you by phone if they know they can talk to someone either now or down the road if they need assistance with your product. Since more people are using their phones to search for things online and the explosion of call analytics companies, it’s now easier than ever to track and learn from your phone calls.

After you get a person to convert to your form, you can expand your likelihood of getting them on the phone by offering an extra incentive or an even superior offer if they call in.

You can also choose a lead generation company to automatically track, qualify, route, and record phone leads.

#4 – Boost your Customer Referral

Create an engaging B2B referral program regularly to captivate your customers.

Trust building is essential before customers share contact info with you. That means you need to be very clear with all the aspects of your referral campaign.

You should clearly explain to customers about how the information they presented will be used, and when, and how the referral process will function.

Once a customer gives you a referral, make sure the sales rep involves in person with them in the process. On your primary email outreach, refer the referrer’s name and copy them.

Try to highlight some of the success they’ve had with your product. Your customer’s statement will be better than any marketing security you could send the lead.

Give them rewards for participating in your B2B referral program, they’re more likely to keep coming back. Request your customers to join a VIP program, and give them public identification by sharing their content on social media, this can turn them into lifelong brand promoters.

B2B Lead Generation Practices #5 – Build an Ultimate B2B Lead generating Landing page

Lead generating landing pages are perfect to capture personal information about a prospect such as an email address, phone number, company size, etc. And to support that prospect down your marketing funnel.

The content on the landing page is the key source which gives an asset to the reader. A swift, digestible summary of what they’ll learn if they download it is crucial. Your asset should be worth their time and contact information. Highlight all your key features and benefits in the landing page copy.

Consider the following tips to build the perfect lead generating landing page-

• Use Security badges below the lead gen landing page form to let people know their personal information is secure.
• Keep your message under the CTA button clear-cut and let your audience know that your business values the privacy of its leads. This will make it all the more likely for them to feel comfortable handing over their information.
• Do not add images when it is of no value. Use images only if it boosts your conversions and enhances the page.
• Display testimonials only from reliable sources to build trust.
• Add video on the bottom of the page to demonstrate how the product will help your clients in an entertaining way.
• Instead of just promoting your content, design your landing page to streamline the lead-capturing process. Apply the same logic for your copy of form fills and keep them simple and polished.

#6 – Optimize your Search Engine

Search Engine Optimization is very crucial because most of your website’s traffic starts with a search query. Writing an SEO optimized content is a bit complex process as it consists of numerous moves, it covers keyword research, writing content for your target supported keywords, and then promoting the content to make it search engine beneficial.

Links that make to the peak and to the right of organic search upshots in Google and other search engines. This is also known as CPC advertising. Here are a few ways to improve your website’s SEO immediately-

• Develop few audience characters to create finer content for your audience.
• Research well to know the keywords. It is better to concentrate more on the number of keywords than search volume. A number of keywords with low search volume have all the abilities to generate leads more successfully than one keyword with a high search volume.
• Create quality content and strategically use your links. Always link beneficial websites that are useful to your customers and complement your business.

It is better to post new content frequently. Your content should be of good quality and it should also be unique. Add new content to your website on a regular basis.

A search engine consists of billions of websites. With your hard work, you will see your results in months. It takes time, but it will help you stay on top of the competition.

B2B Lead Generation Practices #7 – Use LinkedIn Lead Gen Form

Lead Gen Form is a type of ad specifically outlined to accumulate leads, using pre-populated opt-in forms. By using LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms you can capture quality leads, by applying forms that are advanced filled with LinkedIn profile data. You can use Advanced People Search feature which filters people’s profiles by using particular keywords, job title, contact information, department, and so on. For this reason, as a B2B marketer Linkedin Lead Gen Forms are effective for your startup.

You can drive people to your Lead Gen Form on Linkedin by promoting a sponsored content with a useful link, an attractive image and an update of your page.

#8 – Use offers as lead magnets

You can use attractive offers as a free resource to collect your lead’s data. This serves as a smart and inexpensive strategy. A free lead magnet could be anything from a small e-book to a small educational PDF. Always be alert to collect not only leads, but generate market price from the exchange with the customer.

Providing a free product or service is a powerful marketing tool and it is also more reasonable than traditional sales teams or ad campaigns. As a B2B startup using a free trial or freemium offering will construct a massive user group, and allows you to drive more traffic and virality.

Example- Groove offers its benefits for free with a time limit. The advantage of this time limit would be to weed out prospects who aren’t serious about taking the software for a test-drive.

B2B Lead Generation Practices #9 – Use Facebook Ads

As a B2B startup, it is very crucial to proving that you know what you’re talking about before people might take a shot on your product. Get people to sign up, whether for a newsletter or email list, to show how well you know your capacity and assure people to try your product.

Use Facebook ads to offer up something valuable, for free, to showcase your unique insights and then the rest of the competition. B2B ads can generate awareness about your startup and attract people to try your product for the first time. You can aim for different audiences and objectives, from creating Awareness to Sales and Promotion, to Free Trials.

Example-Market researchers, news outlet, government agencies and other organizations would quickly click on this. SurveyMonkey has let the image do the talking. The post lets you create a survey by creating an account for free.

#10 – Content marketing

It is eminent for both B2B and B2C startups to create original, generous and keyword optimized content. The true best content for a startup is to write what you know and target vertical audiences who will most probably use your product. Focus on one audience, it helps your product and builds your user base much faster. Later turn these articles into eBooks with an option, to run your Facebook Ads and Google AdWords to generate leads.

Here are a few key tips-

Tip #1-Differentiate yourself.

The content game is overpopulated, but there’s always more demand. Always provide worthy points to the user. Share your own experiences – hacks you’ve found, tricks that have worked for you and even failures you’ve had. If you don’t have sufficient knowledge yet, you can utilize the experience of the industry influencers. Pick the most engaging topics and successful content, and make it even more valuable.

Tip #2-Apply elegant images and videos in your content.

Visual content must play an important role in all of your efforts. When you split up a text body with some fascinating images, people are more ready to finish reading what you’ve written. Prefer using original images or ones taken by you, to add much-desired personal touch to your content. Also, a good video serves as an excellent platform for your content. It reveals that you’re prepared to go the extra mile for quality.

Tip #3-Use Right Tools.

Emerging content marketing efforts can be complex if you don’t have the right tools in place to reach out. You can use the following tools to jumpstart your content marketing attempts-
Yoast
Bundlr
Wunderlist
Buffer
Pocket
Feedly

Top-achieving lead generation practices are strong to come by unless you’re endlessly researching and testing new methods to pull prospective customers. By implementing these strategies with time and work, you can eventually stick to the process. Also, you can see more leads tick up and higher conversion rates, which will significantly boost your profit.

We hope this post gets your head buzzing with ideas for things to generate more leads on your own to your startup. Let us know in the comments if you have any ideas that we overlooked!

Intro To SEO Takeaway: SEO is just a list of little things that you can do to improve your website’s search rank.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become an essential part of running a website, but all the information and discussion about it often make it out to be much more complicated than it really is. In reality, although SEO is quite simple, it can have a powerful effect on a website’s traffic. In this article, we’ll take a look at SEO and break it down to its simplest concepts.

Reasons for SEO

Search engines provide an important service on the Web. They allow us to quickly find relevant information in response to our queries, and they do it fast. This convenience means that fewer people are going to sites they trust or like to find the content they want. Instead, users search for content across the entire Web, and land wherever the search engines take them.

This means that site traffic is increasingly coming through search engines compared to direct means like bookmarking or clicking around from a home page. If you have a website, you need SEO to ensure that you are getting the search engine traffic you should be. Fortunately, SEO is relatively simple.

Intro To SEO: SEO Ying and Yang

There are two basic types of SEO: black hat and white hat. Black hat is the dark side of SEO, where a webmaster uses link farming, hidden text and other controversial methods. White hat SEO, by contrast, just involves strengthening key areas of a website to help search engines determine the type and quality of the content on the page.

The Anatomy of White Hat SEO

How search engines work is a bit of an open question. There are some factors we know are important – and then there a number of factors we think are important, but aren’t quite sure. There are very likely some factors that we have no idea about. Search engines keep this level of secrecy to prevent people from gaming them with black hat SEO.

Here are some of the basic factors we know/think make an important difference in a Web page’s search engine ranking:

Intro To SEO: Content

Good content is at the heart of what search engines look for. They want to deliver the best content for a particular query, so if you have informative and useful content, a lot other aspects of SEO fall into place.

Intro To SEO: Inbound Links

When another website chooses to link to some of your content, it is seen by search engines as a positive thing. Essentially, that website is telling its users that something on your site is worth checking out. This link matters even more if the linked text is accurate. For example, getting a link for “great article” is not as significant as a link for “article explaining SEO.”

Trustworthy Inbound Links

Not all inbound links are created equal. Every website creates a profile of itself that is an aggregation of its content. A site like www.nytimes.com has a high trustworthiness factor, so a link from The New York Times to your site is a huge boost. The New York Times got to where it is by producing high-quality content and earning those inbound links, social media “likes,” and so on.

Intro To SEO: Site Links

Although probably not as significant as inbound links, links within your site help define your content rather than waiting for inbound links to do so. For example, this article will appear as a related link on the SEO terms on Techopedia. This signifies that a) the article is related to SEO and b) the terms that feature it as a link are related to SEO.

External Links

Providing external links from your content to related content on other sites also provides relational data that can help search engines figure out what your content is about. For example, if a piece of content has three outbound links that all go to sites that publish DIY home repair content, that article is probably about DIY home repair.

Intro To SEO: Social Media

When search engines see that your content is being tweeted, liked or otherwise shared, this works in a similar way to inbound links – it represents a testimonial to the quality of your content.

Intro To SEO: Keywords

Traditional keywords – the ones that could be stuffed into the background of a page – are virtually dead. What seems to work now is incorporating keywords naturally into content and then highlighting their importance. So, instead of bolding subtitles, you can change them into secondary headers (h2 and h3 tags in HTML.). But this also means that you may sacrifice cleverness in favor of being clear – in this article, SEO Ying and Yang would work better as SEO Types: White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO. That said, part of using SEO properly is not overdoing it.

The Takeaway

We have focused on the SEO of a particular piece of content, but SEO also takes place at the domain level. Plus, there is much more to the social media side of SEO that we haven’t covered here. There are also more technical areas we haven’t covered here. However, the key thing to remember is that SEO is not that complicated. It is basically a list of little things that you can control and improve with some effort. The bottom line in SEO is that when you have good content that a search engine can recognize as such, everything else will click into place.

Different lead magnet types can help to address a dire need across the online space: getting more qualified leads for your business.

A lead magnet is an irresistible bribe that offers a very specific value in exchange for a reader’s email address. Lead magnets turn website traffic into new subscribers.

An effective lead magnet is the foundation of a solid email marketing strategy: the first step to converting website traffic into live leads that have the potential to become paying customers or clients some time down the road.

Best of all, creating an effective lead magnet doesn’t have to consume a lot of time. After you’ve finished reading this post, you should already have a couple of ideas for lead magnets that you could probably create in just a single afternoon.

Let’s get started.

Lead Magnet Types #1 – Checklist

Checklists show the reader step-by-step what they need to be doing to accomplish a certain task. It’s all too easy for crucial things to slip through the cracks. They help to simplify a task that would otherwise seem too complex.

For instance, a checklist that shows you how to maximize your onsite SEO would be very helpful, since there are so many tiny pieces you need to get right.

Think about how a checklist could be useful in your industry—is there some complex process that you know like the back of your hand, but your readers might find baffling? If so, then to create this lead magnet all you have to do is write down a step-by-step guide to completing that process.

As an added benefit, checklists can commonly be printed out so you can advertise this lead magnet as a printable PDF that users could pin up and regularly refer to.

#2 Cheat Sheet

Cheat sheets are quick reference guides that illuminate quick, obscure shortcuts that you wouldn’t normally know yourself. Put simply, a cheat sheet usually shows how to do one of the following: cut time spent on a repetitive task; exploit an unknown loophole.

To create a cheat sheet, just think of a few neat hacks you use in your industry, outline them in a PDF, spice it up a bit with some good copywriting, and you suddenly have a very enticing offer for your readers.

Take the “Headline Hacks” example. Writing good headlines can be difficult, especially when you don’t have a lot of experience. This cheat sheet has over 100 different headline formulas subscribers can use to complete the repetitive task of crafting compelling headlines with much less effort.

Lead Magnet Types #3 – Report

A report lead magnet can take a few different directions. One type of report combs through a large batch of data to make it digestible and actionable for the average reader.

Another type you could use takes a set of data that you’ve personally collected, and shares the results with your readers.

HubSpot compiles a yearly report called the State of Inbound. This report includes data and information they’ve collected from over 3,500 different marketing and sales professionals.
One side effect of reports is that they also help you stand out as an authority in your space. If your industry is a data-intensive one, then a report might just be the way to go.

#4 Video Course

Video courses make for very effective lead magnets for a simple reason: people perceive them as more valuable than a bunch of written words. They seem more substantial, even if they contain the same content as a written report.

Visual content can also be more powerful because people are more likely to remember a video they’ve watched as opposed to a long-form piece of content they just skimmed over.

The video course highlighted above shows aspiring authors how to successfully build an audience for their book. The free video training does upsell a more in-depth course, but the free series does provide a ton of value by itself.

Be aware, creating a professional video course does take a lot of work, and sometimes a lot of money as well. If you don’t have the budget to plan, record, and edit high quality video, then you might want to put this one on the back burner.

Lead Magnet Types #5 – Worksheet

Worksheets function as tools that help your readers to become better a certain job, or accomplish a specific task. Worksheets act more like a skeleton or an outline that readers can use to fill in the blanks.

Remember those old fill-in-the-blank tests you used to take back in high school? These will often have a similar format, but they’ll be geared towards solving a more pressing problem rather than getting an A+ on an exam.

Strategyzer has a great worksheet lead magnet that’s perfect for people looking to show readers how their business provides value. It’s easy for subscribers to use, and does a great job instructing readers.

#6 Top Tools/Resource List

There are probably hundreds of different tools or resources you could use to complete any Internet-related task. But that significant volume of resources begs the question: how do you know which ones are actually worth using?

That’s where toolboxes/resource lists come in.

This type of lead magnet is incredibly easy to create. All you have to do is organize a list of tools that will help your readers accomplish a specific goal. You can use a catchy heading like, “27 Tools I Use to Run My Six-Figure Copywriting Business”.

Besides a toolbox, you can also curate a list of resources that help readers to accomplish a certain task. These resources can include things like the blogs you follow, publications you read, or books you consistently use for reference material.

Take some inspiration from Location Rebel, who uses a well-designed resource “arsenal” that promises everything you need to live a location-independent lifestyle. Sounds enticing!

Lead Magnet Types #7 – Case Study

Case studies are like an in depth how-to guide. However, rather than being simply theoretical, they illuminate a real-life example that shows how that guide has been put into action. Case studies can be seen as an extensive testimonial of how a certain strategy actually works.
If you have a few customers already whose success stories you can showcase, then a case study might be the way to go. All you have to do is flesh out the details of the strategy your customers used and make it an actionable read.

Case studies can act as great pre-sales material, as they allow readers to put themselves in the shoes of one of your customers.

Take the example above from James T Noble. If you’re in the online business space, then surely you’re heard of Salesforce. Any chance to get an inside look at such a massively successful company is not one that can be passed up.

#8 Free Short Consultation

If you’re a consultant, then what’s a better way to get new clients on board than to have them get the actual experience of one of your consultations?

The only downside to free consultations is that they do have a time expense, but when you compare that time expense to the total revenue a new lead could bring, then free consultations could be a very worthwhile investment.

To weed out those who won’t actually convert into paying customers, it can be helpful to use a complex form that takes a little bit of time to fill out. The more info you have about the lead, the better you can judge whether they are a good fit for your business.

The free consult offer from Boostability requires a bit more info than your standard name-and-email opt-in form. If you visit their site you’ll also notice this page has a breakdown of what the free consultation includes. Both of these elements together help to ensure higher quality leads.

Lead Magnet Types #9 – Webinar

Webinars are basically virtual powerpoint presentations with an audio walkthrough. They do take a lot of effort to execute (particularly if you bring on special guests). However, webinars can be quite effective, since the amount of effort required to create them communicates their value to readers.

Lewis Howes has been very successful in growing his company through the use of webinars as a lead generation tool (he even wrote the book on it).

Best of all, webinars can be also be recorded once and then used as a video lead magnet to passively generate leads.

#10 eBook

eBooks are one of the first lead magnet types that Internet companies have used to get people to join their list. A lot of e-business owners today opt for “fancier” types of lead magnets, but eBooks continue to thrive for one simple reason—they work.

When creating an eBook it’s important to ensure it doesn’t get too long. I get it–it can be tempting to go explain your topic in excruciating detail, but readers are often put off by too much length.

Michael Hyatt has created a simple eBook that helps readers to become more productive. The book helps readers solve a big problem (managing their time) with the promise of a simple, 4-strategy solution.

Lead Magnet Types #11 – Free Trial

If you’re in the SaaS space, free trials are one of the best ways to drive customers towards an eventual purchase. Be enabling readers to sign up for a free trial, you reduce buyer inhibitions by allowing them to test out your product to see if it’s something that could be valuable for them.

A large percentage of SaaS business are already using free trials to entice new leads: if you aren’t, then you could be missing out.

The only caution is to be wary of the length of your free trial. Free trials that last forever (i.e. “freemium” plans) can result in you having to invest resources to maintain software for users who are never going to pay you money for an upgraded version.

Look how Shopify does their free trial. Land on their home-page and what’s the first thing you see? An offer to start your free trial. The only info you have to give is your email address.

#12 Online Course

Online courses come in a variety of formats. Usually, these courses are pretty in-depth and expand upon material that has been touched upon in your blog posts.

These lead magnets are commonly delivered through an autoresponder course via email, wherein one lesson is sent to the subscriber every day/week. Additionally , sending regular emails to your subscribers gets them in the habit of opening your emails, which is a beneficial side effect once the course is over.

This publishing course offered by Tom Morkes teachers readers how to launch a bestseller. Tom includes real-life examples from his own experience of launching bestsellers, as well as information from other popular writers like Dan Norris and Jeff Goins who have done the same.

Lead Magnet Types #13 – Customizable Templates

Customizable templates are similar to the worksheets mentioned above, but these are less spreadsheet/text-focused and more design-based. A few examples of things that could use templates are book covers, powerpoint presentations, invoices, or business cards.

As a lead magnet, templates can especially work well when released along with a specific blog post that walks readers through the process of creating the object you’re offering a template for. That’s not to say they can’t also work as a standalone offer–you need to figure out which is the best fit for your business.

If you’re in a design-related industry, you might even already have a few of these templates lying around that you often work with. All you have to do is package them up and set them behind an opt-in form.

This lead magnet from DIY Book Covers provides subscribers with a set of templates along with a set of videos on how to use them. If you’re looking to quickly design your own book cover, this is a great place to start.

#14 Free Chapter of a Published Book

If you’re a published author, then you might want to consider giving away a portion of your book for free. It’s hard for readers to pass up on free. Plus, you have the added benefit of possible getting readers so interested in your work that they go on to buy the entire book.
Giving people a small taste of something larger is a great way to get the hooked.

Once subscribers get a free taste to judge the quality of your book, if they find it satisfactory then they’ll often purchase the entire book in order to go ahead and complete their learning.
Think of this lead magnet as similar to those free samples you see at lots of supermarkets. Not everyone ends up purchasing the product after sampling it, but obviously enough do to justify the free samples as a valid marketing strategy.

Best of all, if you already have a published book, then it won’t take any additional time to create a free chapter. You just need to select which chapter to give away (probably the first 1-2), package it separately, and set up the lead magnet on your website.

Tim Ferris has built up quite a reputation for himself in the productivity and self-help niches, and Tim’s success establishes him as a master marketer. Tim gives away a free portion of his 4-Hour Workweek book to entice visitors.

Lead Magnet Types #15 – The “30-Day Challenge”

Challenges are a great way to build a relationship with your followers and readers. Not only do they entice subscriptions, but they also hold your readers accountable to you, which is a great way to ensure that they regularly open your emails and keep coming back to your website.
Naturally, the challenge doesn’t have to be 30 days. Choose a duration that seems like the right fit for whatever topic the challenge is on.

The format you use to setup a challenge is up to you. One way you could do it is by giving subscribers access to a private Facebook group where they can join like-minded peers completing the same challenge. Or, you could deliver the challenge through a daily email via an autoresponder sequence.

The 30 day squat challenge from Uncaged Man is a great showcase of this type of lead magnet. It’s a great way for the website to both connect with their readers and introduce them to the “uncaged” lifestyle.

Summing it Up

The type of lead magnet you end up choosing will depend upon your business and the type of content your audience enjoys consuming most. You can choose to use just one, or even a combo of different lead magnets depending on your website’s niche and your audience
The key with lead magnets (just as most areas of online business) is experimentation. Don’t be afraid to test different offers to see which converts the highest. What works for one business might not work for you, so keep that in mind while you’re using one of the above lead magnets to entice new subscribers to your list.

Gamification is one of the most important elements of a successful email campaign. It can also significantly improve digital marketing.

Before talking about the advantages of gamified content, let’s first see what gamification means in terms of email marketing. To put it short, gamification is the employment of diverse game-liked design elements and solutions in email campaigns in order to reach deeper engagement, promote brand awareness and, of course, generate sales.

The concept isn’t new to marketing. Gamification has been used widely on websites and social media. However, recently it has made its way into email campaigns in an effort to breathe some fresh air in one of the oldest communication channels.

There is no single definition, rule or restrictions on how gamification can or can not be used in emails. Your imagination and technical possibilities are the only limits. Depending on your campaign type and purpose, it can take any form.

By far, the most common are:

• wheel of fortune;
• quiz;
• trivia;
• bingo;
• puzzle;
• reveal a gift;
• spot the difference;
• crossword;
• optical illusion;
• maze;

However, there are also many solutions that simply can’t be categorized due to their customized design and uniqueness. Anything that involves gaming tasks can be qualified as gamification content.

Why Use Gamification to improve digital marketing?

The main purpose of gamification is to catch the reader’s attention and prompt them to interact with the particular message as long. And its main advantage is its versatility; it can be employed equally well for B2C and B2B, and suits any industry, from travel agencies to beauty studios. Why?

Gamification increases the average reading time and, as a result, customer engagement.

Gamified content sparks interest, anticipation, and excitement, encouraging people to move on (take a quiz, answer the questions, take a test, scratch for a gift). And if you’ve implemented a really good idea, chances are good the products promoted via this idea will finally be purchased.

It improves the reading experience, making it more enjoyable. Email is a relatively stagnant channel with few changes over the last years. Of course, there have been many technical improvements, but they mostly invisible to the eye of a regular subscriber. All that people see is good old text, images, and call-to-actions, and game-like elements can spice up this classic recipe.

It has a sense of novelty. If you have a tight schedule of campaigns, sending four to five per week, it would be nice to mix regular promos with more creative messages, as people get tired of the routine.

It boosts word of mouth. When you come across something unexpectedly interesting which exceeds your expectations, you want to share it. A campaign that gave you moments of fun will be most likely directed to friends.

It helps collect customer data. This can be especially useful for subscribers who have signed up some time ago but haven’t made any purchases yet (meaning you can’t analyze their purchase history and website behavior). Ask them to choose a gift in a game and you’ll know what product categories might be of interest to them. And the more data you know, the better you can segment your contact base and send more targeted campaigns.

Gamification serves as content on its own.

Brands that don’t have blogs and don’t run sales very often can use gamified newsletters as an occasion to reach out. When you don’t have much new information, don’t have resources to prepare materials (custom photos/product lookbook/video) for a new campaign, consider using game-like elements to fill in the email template.

As you see, the benefits can be numerous, but there are also things you need to consider.

First, every gamification project is a one-time solution. The whole idea of this approach is interest and excitement, and people won’t play the game or take the same test twice. If you plan to invest effort in a complex project, make sure you use it to promote a really good offer to amplify the effect.

Second, to put a complicated project in life, you’ll most probably need a designer. Such elements as a quiz, trivia, or a crossword can be implemented even within a basic responsive template; a more advanced layout requires HTML skills.

How to Use Gamification to Improve Digital marketing

Before starting crafting any campaign, ask what task it has to complete: offer new products, collect data, redirect to a target page, collect feedback, or simply keep you top of mind. Once you’ve set it up, it will be easier to design the layout, position CTAs, and put a focus on certain elements.

Before starting designing a gamified campaign, make sure that whatever form you choose, it complies with the following characteristics.

Simple and understandable. It takes several seconds to scan the email and decide whether it’s worth the time. People won’t start doing too complex tasks with long explanations and multiple rules.

Dynamic. Each click on your quiz or gift hunt should lead somewhere (reveal new word for a promo code, reveal part of a puzzle, open a new window).

Clear goal. Explain what’s the task of whatever you’re offering: solve the puzzle, find the necessary gift, spot the difference, find out your hair type.

Reward. A game presupposes there are winners and prizes. If you ask to complete some task (especially if takes time and intellectual effort), you need to give something as a reward, let’s say, % off the next purchase, free download, +1 gift, shipping discount, for example.

Engaging process. Whatever activity you offer, it should be fun.

In Conclusion Gamification Improves Digital Marketing

To sum up, gamification can be a useful tool in your email marketing arsenal. It’s not a replacement for all other solutions but rather a supplement to the existing strategy. Use game-like elements to spruce up your campaigns, deliver content in a new way, and keep your subscribers engaged and entertained.