Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

A recent Google update has a lot of sites looking to improve their About pages.

About pages are pretty simple — but that doesn’t mean people don’t sometimes screw them up. In this episode, Sonia Simone talks about seven common mistakes she sees on About pages, and how to spruce them up again.

In this 16-minute episode, Sonia discusses:

• Why a recent Google update has a lot of folks scrambling to improve their About pages
• When to get creative with your About page (and when not to)
• The elements that really, truly have to be there
• Why a good About page can improve your links and shares
• How to focus your About page on your audience, not yourself

Listen and subscribe to Copyblogger FM:

• Click to listen to this episode
• Click to subscribe to Copyblogger FM on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Copyblogger FM” and you should find the show.

Here are this week’s three resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

Create

Staring at a blank page?

Use these lessons to create your own short list of writing advice for yourself to post over your desk.

3 Famous Writers on Process and Productivity

Sell

Enhance your email marketing approach.

From send time personalization to writing great subject lines (and everything in between), learn how these email marketers achieve above average email open rates.

34 Email Pros on How They Achieve Above Average Email Open Rates

Grow

Cultivate a healthy business model that is sustainable.

Here are some helpful tips, advice, and resources on how to successfully start and grow your marketing agency.

How to start a marketing agency and grow it successfully

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend! 🙂

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

Whether you’re a blogger, podcaster, or a creator of some other form of digital content, you may feel yourself losing that “creative spark” at times. If this sounds like you, fear not, as this week’s podcast recommendation will help you get out of that creative rut.

In this 16-minute episode, Sonia talks about some of the techniques and approaches we use at Copyblogger to keep the creative flame burning. Specifically:

1. Tell quick stories
2. Find striking metaphors or analogies
3. Mix the senses
4. Maybe you’re funny?
5. Practice your voice (social media works!)
6. Escape your echo chamber
7. Fire off The Godin Hack

Listen and subscribe to Copyblogger FM:

• Click to listen to this episode
• Click to subscribe to Copyblogger FM on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Copyblogger FM” and you should find the show.

Here are this week’s three resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

Create

Creating a personalized customer experience strategy will pay off.

Companies can’t afford to take a vacation when it comes to delivering great customer experiences. Avoid these things in order to drive growth.

Want to deliver great customer experiences? Here’s what not to do

Sell

Business goals matter when it comes to content.

Without business goals connected to content, you’re likely wasting both time and money. Discover how to connect your content with business goals that help marketers build effective campaigns.

How Successful Marketing Writers Plan Their Content

Grow

Become a worldwide presence.

If you have a saturated local/national market, then it might be the right time to expand internationally. If you’re not sure where to begin, this resource may help you grow your ecommerce business successfully on an international scale.

How to Grow Your eCommerce Business Internationally

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend! 🙂

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

Whether you’re starting a brand-new content site or have one that just needs a spruce-up, great sites tend to share similar habits and structures.

In today’s podcast recommendation, Sonia Simone talks about 10 things to keep in mind, so you’re building your content on a rock-solid foundation.

By the way — if you like text content, this podcast episode is an audio version of a Copyblogger post: The 10-Step Content Marketing Checklist.

In this 19-minute episode, Sonia discusses:

• Key elements to have in place for your site, including your own domain, solid security, and great-looking design
• The keys to creating content that’s worth reading, viewing, or listening to. (Our upcoming publication checklist can help you with that as well!)
• Crafting the “cornerstone” content that supports the authority of your site
• When to add an email list to your publication tasks
• Taking your content to a larger audience

Listen and subscribe to Copyblogger FM:

• Click to listen to this episode
• Click to subscribe to Copyblogger FM on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Copyblogger FM” and you should find the show.

Here are this week’s three resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

Create

Set the table for inspiration.

Everyone has habits that help them work. Some are learned, others are innate, but the outcome is the same: You’re in the zone, feeling good about yourself.

How to Architect Your Day to Be More Productive

Sell

Follow this landing page process.

A landing page will help you understand your customers better and validate your value proposition and pricing. How do you build the perfect landing page? Simple. By asking the right questions.

How to Validate Your Product Idea With Landing Page

Grow

How does your product grow?

What is a framework that represents how the fastest companies grow? One that combines product, channels, and monetization into one system? One that looks for compounding growth vs linear growth? Growth Loops.

Growth Loops are the New Funnels

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend! 🙂

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

This week’s podcast recommendation aims to answer the question:

How can we find the confidence to publish regularly — when we’re not completely confident in our writing ability yet?

“Publish regularly!” is one of the frequent commandments of content success.

“Only publish high-quality content” is another frequent commandment of content success.

How do we reconcile them? How can we work up the confidence to click Publish when we aren’t “great writers” yet?

In this 20-minute episode, Sonia discusses:

• Being kinder to ourselves when we’re beating ourselves up with creative perfectionism
• The three elements that will let you create worthwhile content, even if you aren’t “great” (yet)
• The kind of practice that leads to superior craftsmanship
• Deciding what you will … and won’t … sweat the details on

Listen and subscribe to Copyblogger FM:

• Click to listen to this episode
• Click to subscribe to Copyblogger FM on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Copyblogger FM” and you should find the show.

Here are this week’s three resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

Create

Finding new customers is tough …

Supercharge growth by making one tiny tweak to your strategy: start focusing on customer loyalty, and take a look at the opportunities right under your nose. Focusing on customer loyalty is a fantastic way to reduce your cost per customer acquisition.

How to Create the Best Customer Loyalty Program for Your Ecommerce Business

Sell

What is “neuromarketing?”

Neuromarketing is the application of neuroimaging methods to product marketing. Learn more about this evolving field.

Neuromarketing: all you need to know

Grow

Conversations are the perfect model for good copywriting.

If and when you’re fortunate enough to have a really good conversation, you can learn a lot from it … about copywriting.

7 Lessons Copywriters Can Learn from Simply Listening to a Really Good Conversation

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend! 🙂

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

This week’s podcast recommendation is a quick, three-step check to make any piece of content more interesting and more effective.

While doing critiques for our private community of content marketers, Sonia Simone noticed a pattern emerging. That pattern turned into three quick checks you can do for any piece of content. Try looking over your last few podcast episodes or blog posts to see how they measure up. Then, keep these three points in mind as you create new work.

In this 16-minute episode, Sonia discusses:

• How to figure out “the point” for your audience — and how to get there quickly
• Two resources to help you understand your content strategy — and how every piece fits together
• Sales funnels and content paths — how to make content “pave the way” toward your business goals

Listen and subscribe to Copyblogger FM:

• Click to listen to this episode.
• Click to subscribe to Copyblogger FM on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Copyblogger FM” and you should find the show.

Here are this week’s three resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

Create

Take these steps to become a more productive writer.

Whether you’re a pro content writer, fictionist, or poet, you’ve likely experienced anxiety or elation about any number of the habits we all have in common.

5 Things Only Serious Writers Do

Sell

Ready to up your product marketing game?

No one is immune from product failure. Products come and go. Product marketers live in the intersection of product, sales, and marketing. Here are some tips to help you create the most effective strategy at every stage.

5 Tips to Being a Successful Product Marketer in 2018

Grow

Aim for long-term success by maintaining a sustainable growth rate.

Growth is oxygen to companies, especially those backed by investors. Learn some valuable lessons from this giant’s rise to dominate its market.

How Skyscanner Grew So Fast: 3 Killer Takeaways from a Radical Brand

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend! 🙂

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

This week’s podcast recommendation is a one-on-one discussion between Sonia Simone and the founder of ConvertKit, Nathan Barry, about the company’s recent transformation.

At Copyblogger, we really like the ConvertKit email solution. In fact, we’re marketing partners for them, and recommend them to anyone looking for a tool that allows powerful segmentation and automation without a ton of resources to implement.

Nathan Barry founded his company to help founders and creators serve their audiences better with email. Along the way, they realized that the name “ConvertKit” was putting the focus on the wrong place. So they decided to change it.

That took two years … and Nathan joined us to talk about some of the lessons learned along the way.

In this 20-minute episode, Nathan and Sonia talk about the road from “ConvertKit” to “Seva,” the “paradox of automation” and how smart automation can help you deliver more value to your audience, and much more including how to find a balance between “craft” and “commerce.”

Listen and subscribe to Copyblogger FM:

• Click to listen to this episode.
• Click to subscribe to Copyblogger FM on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Copyblogger FM” and you should find the show.

Now here are this week’s five resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

1. Be discoverable.

As consumers search from more places than ever before, it’s vital that marketers deliver experiences that perform. Check out these tips on how to deliver a great experience at every search touch point.

Improving the customer experience means getting search right

2. Capitalize on peer-to-peer marketing.

Customers are the heart of your business. Peer-to-peer marketing is not only a viable channel you should be exploring, it’s also one that has seen great success in both B2B and B2C marketing. It’s all about fully partnering with your network of happy customers to assist with social selling, referrals, and thought leadership.

6 Ways to Include Customers in Your Content

3. Give your customers exactly what they are looking for.

Today people can – and do – prepare for every aspect of any experience, big or small. Google recently analyzed search trends and spoke to consumers, identifying three motives that drive them to know before they go. But what does it mean for marketers?

Why people need to “know before they go”

4. Tell your story.

By figuring out the correct message and distributing it to the right people, you can reach (and connect with) your target market. Utilize these tactics to correctly manage your media relations strategy.

Media Relations Strategy: 11 Winning Tactics to Market Your Product

5. Rething competition.

If you’ve ever thought, “It will be extremely difficult for my content to stand out,” this post will help you rethink that self-limiting notion.

Get More Subscribers by Provoking People to Ask This Question

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend!

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

This week’s podcast recommendation is one of my personal favorite episodes of Copyblogger.FM.

In it, Sonia Simone has a quick (and highly informational) discussion on how to become a badass marketer.

Most of us won’t make a living making “pure art” that only serves our creative expression. But you won’t make a reasonable living writing cynical garbage, either.

Listen as Sonia talks about why it’s a silly (and expensive) mistake to try to promote a business with crummy content, the key element to content strategy today, how (and why) to get over your fear of the “A-word,” and much more including why a technology-first approach can actually kill your content strategy.

Listen and subscribe to Copyblogger.FM:

• Click to listen to this episode.
• Click to subscribe to Copyblogger.FM on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Copyblogger.FM” and you should find the show.

Now here are this week’s five resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

1. When it comes to influencers think quality over quantity.

The numbers don’t lie: micro-influencers can be a vital asset when it comes to growing your ecommerce store’s customer base. Here’s how you can build these vital relationships.

How Micro-Influencers Can Help Ecommerce Brands Grow Their Audience

2. What are they up to?

Facebook recently launched a new feature that allows anyone to see the ads any business is running on the platform. This has unleashed tons of valuable data that you can use to learn from competition.

5 Ways Lead Gen Marketers Can Use Facebook’s New Feature to Spy on Competition

3. Strengthen your first impression.

Welcome emails are important, but few brands try to actually accomplish anything with them. Here’s how to build your welcome email with a specific path of action in mind.

7 brands that mastered the welcome email

4. Positioning and marketing are not the same, but they do go hand-in-hand.

If your positioning is wrong, your marketing will fail. And if your marketing fails, it’s likely you will too. Here’s how you can avoid this common pitfall.

Positioning is the Part of “Product Market Fit” You’re Likely Ignoring

5. Strengthen your social presence by maintaining balance.

If social media is so important, how come so many small digital businesses are doing it so wrong?

5 Bad Habits that Will Tank Your Social Media Marketing

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend!

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

Before I dive into the details of this week’s podcast, I want to provide you with something I know you will find extremely useful.

We recently held a free workshop on how to sell with webinars with expert host Tim Paige. Learning about his enthusiastic and ethical approach to online selling is something I highly recommend.

And the best news? You can access this free workshop inside of DCI at this link: https://digitalcommerce.com/tim-replay

Don’t miss Tim’s easy-to-implement tips on how to increase your selling skills. Plus, in addition to the workshop, Tim provides a free webinar creation checklist that walks you through the elements needed for an effective session.

Now onto this week’s podcast!

One person, armed with the internet, affordable technology, and a network of fellow unemployable people can do big things, and the number of one-person businesses earning a million dollars or more a year continues to rise.

This type of high-powered business is more achievable now than ever with the right level of commitment.

In this episode of Unemployable, journalist Elaine Pofeldt joins Brian Clark to share what her intensive research into the growing phenomenon means. The data and her interviews with solo entrepreneurs reveal some interesting things these lucrative lean businesses have in common.

Listen and subscribe to Unemployable:

• Click to listen to this episode.
• Click to subscribe to Unemployable on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Unemployable” and you should find the show.

Now here are this week’s five resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

1. How well do you really know your users?

Not only do you need to understand what triggers them, but you also need to figure out how to design for persuasion to ensure they engage in behaviors with you and not a competitor.

How To Get To Know Your Users

2. Houston, we have liftoff.

Building a brand for your company is one of the most important things you can do as a marketer. Whatever you do, don’t rush through the process. Instead, adopt a forward-thinking mindset, establish a strategy, and fully prep your rollout. Doing so will help take your launch into the success stratosphere.

How to Launch a New Brand: Five Tips for an Unforgettable Debut

3. We’re currently in an interesting time for social media marketing.

Seemingly by the day, it’s becoming more difficult to stand out from the digital noise on social media, unless you allocate a large budget into advertising. What does the future have in store for the industry?

After Facebook and Snapchat, What’s Next for Social Media Marketing?

4. Eureka!

The best product leaders think about value from the user’s perspective. They know that value isn’t always obvious, and that you should always be working with the user to help them see it.

The Ultimate Guide to Getting Your Users to Their Aha Moment

5. Process is about preparation as much as it’s about execution.

Your muse is a flaky friend, who promises to hang out but never calls. Your muse is a boss who promises a raise but never gives you a review.

Forget Your Muse

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend!

Hey there,

Welcome to another edition of The Digital Entrepreneur Newsletter.

This week’s podcast recommendation walks you through three questions that will help you plan your online course.

Once you have your website up and running, and you’re consistently publishing good content and connecting with your audience, it’s time to ponder whether creating an online course would be a smart next move.

There are many different ways — both big and small — to incorporate an online course into your content and product mix.

Keep these questions in mind from the very beginning to avoid major missteps later on.

Listen and subscribe to Site Success:

• Click to listen to this episode.
• Click to subscribe to Site Success on Apple Podcasts

If you use another podcast app, just search for “Site Success” and you should find the show.

Now here are this week’s five resources to help you create, sell, and grow.

1. Prod your customers (gently). ?

One of the best ways to boost your conversion rate is to insert a sense of urgency into the shopping process. But don’t make the mistake of pushing too hard. Instead, develop and implement a subtle collection of gentle nudges to increase your conversions significantly.

Six Nudges: Creating A Sense Of Urgency For Higher Conversion Rates

2. Timing is everything. ?

If you want to successfully engage today’s impatient consumers, you have to be ready to meet them on their time, with the perfect message for each of their changing needs and interests.

Finding the right time: How leading marketers redefine moments of assistance

3. Make people laugh. ?

Humor in advertising enhances memory and increases the impact of your message. If done correctly, having humorous, emotional marketing will allow your business to be remembered in the mind of consumers and recalled subconsciously at the right time and place.

Do emotions affect buying behavior?

4. Commit to a process. ?

The path to self-improvement starts by setting a specific and actionable goal. However, when it comes to actually getting things done and making progress, there is a much better way to do things.

Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.

5. Repeat after me: “I am creative.” ?

Creativity and logic have attained a mythical status as two oppositional forces. Not only is this myth wrong and unnecessary, it’s damaging.

Why You’re Missing Crucial Opportunities if You Think You’re ‘Not Creative’

I hope you find these resources to be useful, and that at least one of them helps you take a meaningful step forward during the course of the next week.

Thank you for your attention and have a great weekend!