Welcome to another edition of Sites Weekly.
A quick heads up to start:
Next week, the doors to Digital Commerce Academy will be reopening. They will stay open for a week, and the price will go up the next time we reopen to a new group of students.
So there is good reason to consider if now would be a good time for you to supercharge your training and education when it comes to building a thriving online business around digital products.
The best action to take right now is to join the waitlist.
Then next week you can see all the details of the offer and make a decision.
Now on to this week’s links …
Content: Are you customer-centric enough?
If your content marketing strategy is going to succeed over the long term, one of its core principles must be customer centricity.
And it’s important to note that even if you’re not selling products yet, and thus don’t view your readers as “customers,” that’s still what they are. No money may be exchanging hands, but these people are still paying you with their time and attention in exchange for value and insight.
The post linked below goes through several examples of big brands who have succeeded and struggled with customer centricity. Each of the stories delivers a valuable lesson.
Here’s the big idea:
“No matter what the future holds, for your brand or for the market, if you deeply understand who your customers are and what those core customers need, your brand will always be valued and relevant.
“Marketers must let these core customers be their guiding principles and funnel all decisions through this core customer centricity.”
There is no better way to future-proof your success than by being as customer-centric as possible.
The Road to Marketing Success Is Paved With Customer Centricity
Design: How to optimize images for maximum impact
Images can fulfill several roles on your website:
- They make your pages more visually appealing.
- They can communicate certain messages and emotions in ways words cannot.
- They can even drive traffic via search engines.
But to gain all of these benefits (and others) from using images in your blog posts, you need to optimize those images.
Here are some useful tips to keep in mind that will help you do so:
14 Image Optimization Tips You Need to Know
Two of the most important decisions you will make about your WordPress website are your theme and your hosting. Wouldn’t it be great if they worked together to make your website more powerful?
Now they can.
Discover why over 213,675 website owners trust StudioPress.
Technology: AI applications to keep an eye on
This is another future-looking link, as most of what is discussed in this article about AI applications probably won’t impact your content marketing right now …
But it’s always important to keep an eye toward the future so you know what is coming and can have time to prepare how to either leverage it or respond to it.
AI Applications That Are Changing the Face of Content Marketing
Strategy: How to get traffic when you’re just starting out
It’s not difficult for us to drive big-time traffic to a new blog post. We have hundreds of thousands of people on our email lists, and hundreds of thousands more who visit our websites each month.
But this has taken time to build. And a lot of resources. Which is why you better believe we’re going to maximize every inch of this advantage. 🙂
However …
This also means that the strategies we use at Rainmaker Digital to promote new content may not necessarily be the same ones you will want to use, especially if you’re just starting out.
There is a big difference between promoting an article on an established website like Copyblogger, and the scratching and clawing any website owner has to do when launching a new site and trying to build a fresh audience.
I found this blog post by Jacob McMillen at Conversion Sciences to be very insightful. He ran tests on 20 different promotion strategies. Some of the results will likely surprise you (others won’t). And there are a few tools he mentions I’d never heard about, but have since bookmarked.
Give it a read:
I Tested 20 Content Promotion Strategies And Found 3 Big Winners
So …
Which of the ideas in these posts will you put to good use immediately?
I’ll be back with a new edition next week.
Keep building.