Summary:
1 – Need to send a collection of contents via follow-up
2 – How to create an initial list
3 – Sending an e-book with a single message
4 – How to gradually gain trust and credibility
5 – How to create a collection of content to send with a follow-up
6 – How to create the content of your content library via follow-up
7 – Summary, introduction and preface to the next article
8 – Create new content
1 – Need to send a collection of contents via follow-up
You would also like to have a completely independent job with the internet, but you have not yet achieved financial independence, and you are still forced to work on a monthly salary.
However, you still have many doubts because you believe you are not yet able to make yourself known to your audience, despite the nights and weekends spent in front of your computer.
But you will see how the solution to your problem is not that difficult to find.
If you are not yet known in your targeted market, I want to present you with the opportunity to make yourself known, create a good list of subscribers, gain trust, build your credibility and present offers and commercial promotions, with the certainty of starting to sell.
Online follow-up marketing uses strategies that aim to help you achieve these goals.
Among the strategies, which can be considered among the most effective for achieving all these objectives, two are known, which I will now illustrate in detail.
The first of the two strategies is to distribute your own e-book, dividing it into lessons, and then inserting its contents into each message of a follow-up sequence.
The second, very similar to the first, is based on the collection of articles from your blog, the contents of which are consistent with the topic you will choose to create the name of the list and autoresponder.
In practice, it involves identifying each article, making a summary of it or simply examining its introduction, alternatively using the summary or introduction as the contents of each e-mail message, together with a link that leads to the article on your blog.
In this way, in addition to taking advantage of the advantages of online follow-up marketing, you will be able to acquire greater traffic visits from search engines, and consequently you will have more subscribers to your list.
So a system that guarantees you don't waste time creating new content, because you will eventually find everything in your e-book or blog.
In practice, more than an article, this is a definitive guide to sending a course or a collection of blog articles, with a follow-up of email messages.
For brevity, I will summarize the two strategies in order to identify only one, calling it the strategy of collecting content to be sent via follow-up, only to then highlight some important differences between them in the continuation of this article.
Creating the collection of content, to be sent with a follow-up sequence, is the perfect tool to increase the growth of your list, which represents the most efficient way to obtain economic income.
In fact, users and visitors, once they have entered the blog and found your content interesting, will certainly want to contact you to receive more articles and courses.
Furthermore, this collection of contents also constitutes the main basis for gaining an avalanche of visits to your blog, since thanks to them you will also be able to be positioned at the top of search engines.
But it also gives you the chance to get the highest conversion rate into customers, even higher than what you could get from a social media campaign.
2 – How to create an initial list
The first problem you will have to face is being able to identify already published content that is consistent with the topic you would like to choose for your follow-up messages, in order to obtain excellent support in building a large list of loyal and active members.
But while waiting to create your first collection of content, how can you actually proceed to obtain a starting list, with a minimum of names and email addresses?
The reality is precisely this, that is, you realize that you have a rather meager list or that you don't yet have a large starting list.
At the dawn of the internet and e-mail, just under 25 years ago, in the simplest of hypotheses, visitors were asked to sign up for a newsletter.
This was done with two lines of text, plus the clickable email address, in order to automatically open the visitor's email client, placed in the most visible part of a homepage, without adding anything else, without giving anything or promise nothing in return, except the newsletter itself.
At that time it was mistakenly believed that the mere fact of sending a newsletter was sufficient to establish a relationship in which the mutual exchange of a newsletter and an e-mail address was established.
But this almost never led to anything, precisely because the principle of reciprocity could not find any application, given that the two counter-performances could not be on the same level, as the e-mail address was considered an asset of greater value, an instrument belonging to one's private, almost intimate sphere.
It was not understood that the principle of reciprocity was fundamental to building an initial relationship with one's targeted users.
Or in the best case scenario, while trying to respect this principle, you were asked to subscribe to the newsletter, promising to send a certain number of messages every certain time, with news in that sector, etc., but always without offering any reasons. valid.
That is, the fact of receiving something in exchange for something indefinite and unknown could not be counterbalanced by a clear and clear fact, such as being in possession of an e-mail address, to be given in exchange, but for what?
And here the offer of a newsletter inexorably fell into naught precisely due to the lack of a valid reason for subscribing, and, nevertheless, it represented a better hypothesis than the previous hypothesis because, peradventure, you could also find someone who signed up, but it would still be a small thing.
A few years ago, immediately after the creation of email, the need arose to create automatic responses to certain types of messages.
Here came the autoresponder, which then only meant that by sending a message to an email account, the client would automatically respond with a message.
From this perspective, the practice of subscribing to or unsubscribing from a list by means of an empty message with the subject "Subscribe me" or "Cancel me" became established.
Furthermore, the number of operators also grew who, not wanting to create a website at all costs, promoted their services by inserting the address of their autoresponder in paper or electronic magazines.
In this case, subscribing to their list could have been accomplished by sending an empty message to their autoresponder published in a paper or electronic magazine.
This practice has obviously become obsolete, but it is still used by the most recent autoresponders, to give users an extra chance to subscribe or unsubscribe, given that sometimes it seems like the only system available when you have to communicate with a smartphone.
Therefore, to start creating a list, you could ask people you meet for work or other reasons to sign up directly, and who have at least a minimum of targeted interest in the sector you deal with, inviting them to send you an email message. blank email, with subject“Iscrivimi”.
Otherwise you could get their business card, complete with email address, and their consent to receive messages, inviting them to confirm in the same way you asked in the previous case, or with the system I will describe to you now. .
Currently the most used system to create a list is the following: once a visitor has arrived on your landing page, equipped with a registration form, you can ask him to enter his data in the form itself to register.
To encourage registration, you could offer to download a software product for free, in the trial version, perhaps to create funnels or webinars, or an e-book, and a further promise to send news, useful content and interesting commercial promotions.
3 – Sending an e-book with a single message
Except for the addition of the promise to send news, content of interest and commercial promotions, the practice of offering the download of an e-book, via a link, to encourage registration does not seem very convenient, both from the point of view of sender, and from the recipient's point of view.
A) The recipient's point of view
The sender guarantees the download of an entire e-book, and this happens with a single e-mail, in one go, and therefore will never be able to know, unless he sends further messages, whether the recipient is available to receive them or whether was satisfied with the sending of the e-book.
Therefore this practice does not generate any follow-up messages and ends with a single message, in which the user finds the link to download an e-book and then that's it.
Furthermore, if you eventually wanted to obtain purchases, you would not get any results, because you would have exhausted your topics, unless you decide to fill your ebook with links that refer to products and/or services for which you will have become an affiliate.
However, this is a practice that equally cannot bring you any results, in the event that you have just entered the market and no one knows you, and consequently you are not yet credible.
Therefore, if you think you can gain trust and credibility on the internet by sending a single message offering a free e-book, even if it has excellent content, you are completely off track.
After all, convincing someone on the internet to buy something means that you must have educated them, with free valuable content, offered not in the blink of an eye, but gradually, with a follow-up of messages.
And doing a follow-up means either creating new content, or having it already available, such as those included in a course divided into lessons, or in a collection of articles on your blog, in short my "collection of content", in way to gain your credibility and gain the trust of your subscribers, with the aim of converting them into customers.
It works a bit like the off-line sales of a sales representative.
In fact, by offering an e-book it is as if you are trying to win over the customer with a single, miserable visit, while to win over a customer you need to visit them several times.
And in any case, if you are still little known by your market, sending an e-book, full of links for the sale of products, for which you will be affiliated, with a single e-mail, is a bit like expecting someone you purchase without problems directly from a website, when you know perfectly well that 99.9% of people go online to obtain free information rather than to purchase anything.
Assuming that your e-book is read, and this is also a rather rare hypothesis, unless you are already quite well known in your market.
But then, in any case, what would be the point of doing a mailing campaign on your blog to get the address of your visitors, offering the e-book with a single message, containing the link to your e-book, and then that's it, just to get the name and address of the visitors?
Do you think they will remember you if after a few months you send another message with another free e-book?
Unfortunately, by behaving like this you will inevitably end up causing cancellations and spam complaints, even if your behavior is completely legal.
So with just one automatic response message, containing the link to your e-book, you will never be able to convince your target regarding the value of your content and the level of experience you will have acquired.
B) The users' point of view
In general I can say that your users are certainly not naive, they know perfectly well that you are looking for their name and your e-mail address for your specific purposes.
Their data is your reward.
When you ask readers for their email to sign up for an autoresponder, in exchange for a follow-up course or an e-book, the reason is that you need their email to deliver information, and this can represent a very trivial transaction.
And it is a transaction that must not give rise to doubts, because you declare that you will never spam the data of your potential subscribers.
In fact, in the registration form you will enter the classic phrase "Your data will never be given or shared with anyone, I hate spam too".
And this after also inserting a link to your free services, terms and conditions page, where you will have placed a link to the privacy policy of your blog.
But you can also insert a direct link to the privacy policy page.
In any case, in this relationship of user data in exchange for free information, there is also an exchange of email addresses, even if the recipient is of little or no interest in the sender's email address.
C) Exchange between e-book and e-mail
We need to reflect on a fact, and that is that users, in the event that you are still little known by your target, are always wary of those who offer a lot of content for free, even useful and interesting, in an e-book of 250, 500 pages, because they might think there's something behind it.
The following consequences arise from this assumption.
People usually don't like giving out an email address to get benefits they shouldn't ask for anything in return, or for something they feel is of no use, or for something they're wary of.
So your readers might even want to download the e-book, but only if you provide them with a direct link.
In this case their e-mail is considered as a valuable asset to be defended at all costs, while it seems that the e-book, however valuable, is not considered in the same way.
In general, webmarketing experts agree that even the download of a free e-book, in exchange for an email, still represents a sale, even a front-end one, and those that could potentially be contained on the thank you page for signing up.
Some believe that downloading an e-book or report should not require an email in exchange, but this is the exchange that must be made to obtain information, as the email address is the instrument essential to send the link to download the e-book.
Of course, your readers might also think that you could give them the opportunity to download the e-book by providing the link to download it directly on your blog, instead of giving you their email address.
And then your target may still want your e-book, but at the same time they may never want to be subscribed to your list, still believing that it is not worth giving their address in exchange for your e-book.
And they wouldn't be entirely wrong, because asking for registration and giving an e-book in exchange for the e-mail address is not a great commercial strategy, and at most you could do some branding, as a branding operation it would be the inclusion in your blog of a link to download the e-book.
And then I assure you that bookshops, including mine, are full of e-books, which have never been opened or read.
D) How to make money with an e-book
However, a solution for spreading your e-book exists, and it is also a source of income.
First of all, if you used a famous brand as a distributor, you would acquire an excellent reference which would guarantee you a sure way to establish your brand, but also to earn money.
For example, if you closed a deal with Amazon, you would have everything to gain, rather than giving away your e-book for free with an email message.
In fact, Amazon has a precise strategy, that is, the launch of your e-book as a free offer for a period of approximately ten days/two weeks, after which the launch of your paid e-book would begin, and Amazon will certainly leave you a good percentage on takings, and this is better than nothing.
Otherwise you could start selling resale rights, i.e. PLRs.
E) Exchange between content collection via follow-up and email
When we move on to the analysis of the exchange relationship of a collection of contents in exchange for an email address, things change completely, it almost seems like they are reversed.
In fact, users are much more willing to gradually read a sequence of e-mail messages, where they could possibly also view and appreciate your commercial offers and promotions, rather than an e-book.
And therefore users seem to attribute greater value to a follow-up course compared to an e-book, even if you are not well known, because you have recently entered your market.
This is especially because after 4 or 5 messages they have evaluated your content collection and if you have involved them you can be sure that they will not unsubscribe and will remain subscribed until they receive the last follow-up message.
On the contrary, they could attribute a high value to an e-book that was offered for free, by a famous web marketing agency, in exchange for an e-mail address.
Probably the prospect of continuous contact, which is created through a follow-up, is more intriguing than the single message with the link to download the promised e-book.
With a follow-up course, your subscribers will gradually understand that it is only you behind that email address and little by little you will begin to gain their trust and credibility and you can be sure that they will always remember you.
Their email address is their price to pay in exchange for the free information you will send with your course via follow-up.
However, your potential subscribers are not fully aware that signing up to your autoresponder means making a commercial exchange, for them it is still a free follow-up course in exchange for their data.
They think the only way to get the course is to give you their address.
Therefore, for the registered user, the application of the principle of reciprocity is not a conscious aspect of the process of exchanging e-mail against course via follow-up.
In fact, as long as you provide content of a certain level, your readers will consider that you have been quite generous in giving them high quality material without asking for anything else in return, other than their email address. email!
Users will think, rather than of an exchange, of a gift received of great value, and with an actual profit only for them.
Your course instead represents the price you have to pay to obtain their email address, in this business relationship of which only you are aware.
They will understand that your follow-up course is a great resource to receive in exchange for their email address.
And you need their email address to send them your content and make yourself known to your audience, gaining trust and credibility, without asking for anything else in exchange other than their email address.
The relationship that is generated when you send a course via follow-up in exchange for an email address is considered a fair exchange, since only their address is needed to deliver the course itself.
F) Users sometimes sign up and don't understand the subscription mechanism
It often happens that some users give you their email to get that report, or an e-book, or a follow-up course, or useful information written according to the canons of infographics, but they don't understand that their address email will be added to your list, to your subscriber list.
It may be that you have not made the purpose of data collection clear enough, or they are completely unaware of how these exchanges work, because they are new to this type of approach.
after all, they just wanted free information, they didn't believe in being added to a bare list of email addresses.
Therefore it may also be that some of those subscribers unsubscribe from the list, or that they report you as a spammer.
Furthermore, this reaction does not happen very often, if it is a collection of content, sent with a follow-up.
In the vast majority of cases, what happens is that, even if they know very well that they have been added to your email list, they nevertheless still expect to receive email messages from you and are happy to receive all emails from you. email you will send him.
And this is because they have become fond of your image, your way of writing, and therefore they have become so accustomed to the idea of receiving your emails, which have as their object your collection of contents, that if you send them others and -mails, which have a different subject as their subject, you can be sure that they are absolutely not a problem for them.
Furthermore, readers who have signed up for a course sent via follow-up will never have to complain.
They have asked you to send them the content via email and they don't care when you do it, although it would normally be better to specify the days for sending and/or the intervals between one sending and another, and how many messages you will send.
G) If readers will gradually get to know you, you can be sure that they will not forget you easily
Who knows how many times you will have signed up to download mountains of e-books, which you will never read again?
I've said before that I also have an impressive library of free e-books that I've downloaded and never read.
A course sent with a series of follow-up messages, on the other hand, represents a very different and more affordable way to spread information.
It's not a hefty 219-page PDF.
It is your best information, fed constantly and in small doses, so as not to tire the reader.
It arrives in their email inbox, the world where they spend most of their day.
An autoresponder keeps their attention towards you.
An e-book is downloaded once and presented in a single message.
A collection of content sent with a series of follow-up messages via email is repetitive and your content may become a habit, which readers will no longer be able to give up.
Your email messages constantly remind your readers that you are there and they feel comfortable hearing your voice.
If you really want to do a favor to your readers, in the last message of the follow-up you can always insert the link to download your collection of contents, in the format of an e-book, and in this mode you can give a vision of together with this collection, which by now your readers will certainly have assimilated, having read one piece at a time in their email inbox.
Indeed, this is a strategy that I will also adopt, anticipating on the free services page that at the end of the sequence of messages I will give subscribers the opportunity to download the entire collection, made up of lessons or blog articles, and rearranged into an e-book.
4 – How to gradually gain trust and credibility
In general, to gain the trust of your targeted audience, you must send a sequence of messages, organized in follow-ups, which could also be short or long, following the canons of Email Marketing, and in particular Follow-up up Online Marketing, in order to gradually convert your subscribers into loyal customers.
From this perspective, even better, to create a real sequence of email messages, you could set up an autoresponder to send a course, made up of several lessons or a collection of articles from your blog, divided into many email messages, and then people will gladly give you their details and eagerly await the arrival of your emails.
But you need to offer content that is useful, interesting and engaging, and perhaps you can later gain their trust and credibility in order to promote your products and/or services.
A collection of contents, sent via email, can give a lot of satisfaction, and not only for you, but also for your reader, because he will be able to receive the information he was looking for in his email inbox, after having immediately verified it , something he can't do with an entire e-book, and he will be able to read what he never had time to look for, because he didn't know where to put his hands.
In any case, you will realize that your collection of contents, organized in a follow-up of email messages, works great because over time, it is able to make you acquire the credibility and trust of your target, and you will also be sure that your subscribers will look forward to receiving your follow-ups in their email inbox.
5 – How to create a collection of content to send with a follow-up
Your collection of contents sent with a follow-up of messages represents a valid support for your blog, because it helps you to make your level of experience and expertise known, and then constitutes a very effective remedy to establish that reciprocal relationship ', which I was talking about before, the exchange between you and your users, their name and address, or even just the address, as is most commonly used currently, in exchange for your course or collection of articles via follow-up .
Both you and your list will get what you are looking for, and this represents the classic win-win business relationship hypothesis, where there is not just one party that gets the biggest profit, but both parties get the same level of satisfaction, due to the mutual exchange of goods.
A) You have already created your contents and these just need to be divided into messages
The biggest concern for most bloggers, when it comes to finding something to write, to compose and to give in exchange for an e-mail address, is that of not having enough topics to compose a course, an e-mail. book, a report or simply a collection of articles from their blog, identified by topic, either due to lack of time or because they don't have the know-how to create an e-book or a complete report.
They have the feeling, or even the fear of no longer being able to compose something new or unprecedented, and they strive at all costs to be able to create brand new content, never seen before.
But it is a concern that absolutely should not bother you, because you could very well, as all bloggers do, especially the successful ones, use the contents that you have already published on your blog, in order to create your course, to send via follow up, with your autoresponder.
In fact, the majority of your users may never have read many articles contained in your blog, and, on the other hand, they may have read them in a sequential order, which would not guide them in the effective solution of their problems or in the clarification of their doubts.
Instead, with the order that you give to the sequence of your messages, within the follow-up, readers will have a greater chance of understanding what you have already written on the blog, giving further support and help that will allow you to gain greater credibility and trust.
So the topics of your content collection will be connected in an order that will allow your subscribers to assimilate them more easily, with greater depth and a better overall vision, and the beauty of all this is that you will be able to do it directly to their inbox.
So feel free to use the blog content you've already created, because you absolutely won't need to create new content.
Finally, with a follow-up you can easily email all your available content.
B) Maybe you are short of content, but don't take advantage of the relationship established to introduce other topics
You are creating your follow-up content, but after a few messages, perhaps a few, you realize that you no longer have anything to say about that topic, on which you had aimed to send a substantial follow-up .
Perhaps you would have something else to promote, very different from what you have proposed, to convince your users to remain subscribed to the list.
For example, an online learning course or a webinar.
And perhaps you think you can take advantage of the relationship established by signing up to that initial list, to introduce in your follow-ups a completely different topic than the one your users signed up for.
But you understand that this would be a big mistake, and so you think you want to speed things up, believing that for a new topic it is better to immediately create a landing page for a site consisting of a single page.
When it comes to sales or promotion, single pages structured as landing pages can be very effective, if you are an excellent webmaster and therefore if you perfectly know the art of writing sales pages in an excellent copywrite, and perhaps also equipped with pretty graphics attractive, which induces readers to do what you want them to do on the landing pages, the so-called call to action.
But if you are not yet ready to build attractive and intriguing landing pages, and if you have new things to promote that are off topic compared to your initial content collection, how will you do your future promotions?
Simple, choose a much simpler path, use a new collection of content, divide it into a large series of messages, and insert them into your autoresponder, then insert a new subscription form into your blog.
So start setting up your new follow-ups and don't complicate your life with landing pages, which require much more work, especially if you're a beginner.
By collecting content via follow-up you will have given your readers great content and earned their attention.
They chose to sign up because they were interested, as they found that what they were looking for coincides with what you offered for free and gradually.
So they don't want to know about something else that has a different subject to what they signed up for, and so if they want they will subscribe to another of your content collections.
So don't suddenly insert another topic just because you think it might be of interest to them.
It is you who must understand their current needs.
It is you who has to understand what they are actually interested in, and then create another follow-up, another subscription list, another autoresponder.
Recipients appreciate that you only provide information about products and/or services they may be interested in!
And in fact with their registration they have notified you what they are interested in.
Forget everything else.
C) How to choose a topic for your content collection
You may not have an ebook to break down into posts, or even many articles on your blog.
How will you choose the topic of the content collection you will send with a follow-up?
How will you know if this topic is of interest to your subscribers?
If you are now convinced that you will have to send your collection of contents, or rather a new collection, where will you draw the topics from which to develop your contents?
What should your course lessons or blog articles be about, to be sent via follow-up?
To find the topic of your content collection you will first have to find out who your target audience is.
You will be able to find out very easily who your audience is with the analyzes that Google makes available to you, using its tools.
This is a topic that is preferable to deal with in another context because it is quite complex, and cannot be summarized in 4 pages.
D) High traffic articles
High traffic articles are such because they are read by a very large audience who deems them quite interesting.
You can take inspiration from the topics in these articles to create your own collection of content to send via follow-up.
And besides, you absolutely must neither copy nor fear being reported for copying, and then if you did it would be Google itself that would block you, because everyone writes on the internet, but above all you need to be able to find the right topics where there is a lot literature, but there is still no one who has been able to make it accessible in a synthetic way.
You can always use these topics and articles as an excellent basis to create a guide to learn more about what people want to read and know.
Furthermore, once you know which articles get the most traffic, you can start creating your articles based on those topics and you can promote the subject of your follow-up right in your new articles.
Furthermore, you will be able to further target or segment your specific audience, compared to the more generic target of the original author.
For example, having the advantage of knowing English, I do my research by topic, drawing on everything that comes from the Anglo-Saxon world, because its literature, on any topic, is practically endless.
E) The name of the autoresponder or list name
Choose a topic for your autoresponder name that your readers already like, not one that only you like.
Examine whether there is a topic that is common to certain articles by a known author, so that you can derive your own topic from which to develop new articles.
Even seemingly unrelated blog posts may still have a connection in common.
For example, two high-traffic articles about the customer service shortcomings of two large companies, and which have no relation to each other, except that they indicate that people are looking for help with handle the problems created by such large companies, they may suggest new ideas for finding new topics.
This search for help could make a strong case for creating a basic theme, which not only suggests the name of your autoresponder, but also the contents of your collection to send via follow-up.
What are the topics and articles that people would prefer to find on your blog and read?
Ask him!
F) Examine your social media
Social media isn't just a tool for sharing and talking.
They are also a strategy to know if your visitors read your content.
It is a kind of "unofficial" source of analysis, to which a lot of attention must be paid.
Which of your blog posts gets shared the most on social media?
This is a great indicator, not only of what your followers are interested in, but also of what they are willing to share with their followers.
Statistics are also useful, such as those provided by bit.ly, which however are currently paid.
Just like a tool for web analysis, Bitly provides various statistics, such as clicks on links, referrer of origin, data on browser and operating system and breakdown by geographical area.
It's a great tool for monitoring the effectiveness of a link, especially if you don't yet have access to Google Analytics.
Bit.ly, Buffer and other apps, which you can use with your social media, give you high-performance statistics that show which of your articles get the most clicks and shares.
Pay attention to the most popular hashtags that are used by your followers on social media.
They can provide you with guidance on the topics that are most important to your readers.
Plus, you can take advantage of these hashtags when it comes time to post your content collection via follow-up.
Have you had conversations with people on social media?
What have you talked about?
What do they ask you most often?
Wouldn't you like to have a ready-made collection of content at hand to send via follow-up, so that if someone was interested, you could tell them that you are able to send it to them immediately, at their request?
On social media you will be able to examine their conversations, take part and answer their questions, and at some point you will also be able to mention your collection of content to send with a sequence of messages.
Of course, social media is not as precise as analytics tools, but it provides excellent support for understanding what people are interested in.
G) Review the comments on your blog
Which articles sparked the most discussion?
What questions were asked?
The comments section is a great tool for finding out which article topic sparked the most interest among your users.
If you're lucky, readers might even be kind enough to ask you questions in their comments, which you can answer directly with what you've put in your content library to send as a follow-up or which you can use as an opportunity to find new topics for your articles, inserting them into your new content collection via follow-up, to be sent at a later time.
I've had blog users write to me directly and ask if I could write articles to answer specific questions they'd like to ask.
As you can imagine, I was very happy to do so.
But I would have been just as happy, or maybe more, if I had told him: “I just created a collection of follow-up content that will guide you to the solution to your problem!”
H) Ask your users what they would prefer to read on your blog
Try asking your readers directly if there is a topic they would like to know more about.
To do this, use a survey or write an article that asks them directly what they are interested in.
Bloggers spend a lot of time researching topics for their articles, but then forget that they can simply ask users directly what they want to read.
Never be afraid to ask your audience what they want to know and how or where they want you to write about it, whether just in an article or even in a follow-up content collection.
Ask your blog users directly what they want to know!
6 – How to create the content of your content library via follow-up
A) Introduction
Your collection of content to send via follow-up can be made up of content you have already published on your blog or new articles you have written specifically for the course, or a mix of both.
B) Use the articles you have already published on your blog
Using your own blog posts is quite common and is a great way to get started and build your first collection of content to send via follow-ups.
What you will have to do is quite easy because you will have already done most of the work.
C) Always current posts
Select articles with always current content or articles whose content never goes out of fashion.
For example, articles dedicated to solving problems or containing detailed instructions on how to use social networks.
But this last point might have been fine a few years ago, because currently, to increase their diffusion, the most important social media now create updates from month to month and it is easy to fall behind.
Since when you send follow-up messages you must always give the impression of having just drafted the messages sent, whose contents may still represent an ever-current topic, you will never be able to send messages that have outdated contents.
However, you will have to undertake not to send content that is already out of date within a month or less.
Therefore, if you don't want to give the idea of writing something that already belongs to the past, avoid using such an obsolete topic, or if you intend to use already published articles, search among those whose contents will remain valid for a long period of time. time, otherwise you risk losing blog users and subscribers to your list.
So make sure that your content collection does not need to be continuously updated and is therefore usable for a long period of time.
D) Be present on the web with multiple lists, and therefore multiple collections of content to send via follow-up
Be careful not to fall into the mistake that is frequently made, of creating a collection of contents to send via follow-up, and then waiting for the sequence to finish being sent to the last subscriber, and then believing that you have failed, because you won't have sold anything yet.
In this way it is very easy for the contents of your follow-up content collection to be forgotten and fall into oblivion along with you.
Instead you have to insist, make yourself heard more often, even with different follow-ups, corresponding to different lists.
If you want your business to be profitable, you must first of all be constantly present in the email inboxes of your subscribers, and then you must plan to create and send multiple content collections via follow-up.
E) Your most read articles
I mentioned using analytics, social shares, comments on your most read posts and high-traffic articles, to determine what the overall topic of your blog and articles might be.
Now you can start using your most read articles to determine the contents of the messages in your collection to send via follow-up.
Of course, don't forget your archives.
You have probably written some interesting posts, which perhaps reached the top ten positions on Google and which perhaps would no longer be considered now because you published them many months ago.
However, they may still have some good content.
Include them!
You will always be able to judge the validity of the contents of your articles.
If you are aware of how well you write and of the fact that you have written excellent articles in the past, you will know a priori which ones you will have to reuse, and which ones instead inspire little confidence in you, and therefore to be completely redone if and when you have time, or to be permanently thrown away.
For your content library, select those excellent articles that your users may not have read yet.
The central idea of this article, which will give you satisfaction in terms of registrations and traffic from search engines, is to use the contents that are already present in your blog, so you can include part of the article, your introduction or summary, with a link to the blog, in the body of your follow-up posts or you can give readers the original article.
According to most bloggers, as we will see, it is better to insert the summaries or a part of the article, with the link to your blog, rather than insert the entire article, because they are the summaries or parts of the article, thanks at that link, the tools that will give you excellent traffic visits to the blog.
F) Creation of new content
Sometimes you would like to include new material, especially for your follow-up course.
There are more reasons that justify this intention and you would also have your good reasons, which are many, for wanting to do it, and it is an excellent idea.
But is it really necessary to try to write articles starting from scratch?
To create new content you could very well rework old articles.
You may have created excellent articles in the past, but you can only reuse them after updating the contents.
However, it could also happen that you come across an excellent article, but one that is so obsolete that it requires many corrections and updates.
You will just have to understand if it is worth spending precious time to correct and update it, or if it will be better to resume another article.
Very often in the past I tried to compose new courses to send via follow-up to stimulate me to write new articles for the blog, but then I gave up and drew from old articles, reworked them and reused them, inserting them into my new ones. courses via follow-up, as they needed a simple tweak, as they were well set up, especially from the point of view of the topics covered.
The topics and general ideas of those rather dated articles could also have some connection with the main topic of the current blog, but they still had to be reworked to show greater coherence with this theme, in order to be the subject of a collection of contents to be sent for follow-up.
Therefore, to find new content you can very well rework old articles, publish them on your blog, as if they were unpublished and use them as message content for the recipients of your course via follow-up.
7 – Summary, introduction and preface to the next article
A) Summary
The summary, inserted at the beginning of each e-mail message, has the function of creating a rather concise summary of the message, in order to indicate, in summary, which are the most salient points of the message itself that are of interest to the reader, making it easier to read.
B) General introduction
The general introduction, inserted at the beginning of the first message, or even the welcome message, of the follow-up series, helps to give an overview of the follow-up of the subsequent messages, so that they seem like a single whole and homogeneous.
C) Introduction in each message following the first
The introduction inserted in each subsequent message, in addition to providing further summary information, should contain a brief reference to the contents of the previous message.
D) Preface to the next article
In the final part of each follow-up message, except for the last one, obviously, a reference to the topic of the following message must be inserted, that is, a sort of preface to the latter.
If you want to arouse the reader's curiosity, you could create a mysterious situation, forcing the reader to feel anxious while waiting for the next message.
The latter represents a classic application of the Zeigarnik effect, which is based on the expectation of an event, which is unexpectedly postponed to a later moment.
To make such a tool effective, when you think the time has come to end the message, you can give the idea of wanting to pretend nothing has happened and moving on to the topic of the next lesson without batting an eyelid, but then suddenly close the speech, adding that you will talk about it in the next lesson.
Obviously to prolong such an effect, as I said above, you will insert in the next message an introduction which will briefly recall the contents of the previous lesson, in order to give a certain continuity to your speech set up with the follow-ups, precisely to diminish the The negative influence that the intervals between one message and another can have on the user's memory of previous messages.
In this way you will also remind the recipient of that situation of pathos that he felt at the end of the previous lesson, so as to give him new enthusiasm in reading the current lesson and provoke curiosity for the next one.
Then the frequency of messages and the duration of the intervals also influence this entire process.
You will be able to meet the reader's need to know the contents of the next message by using the arpReach autoresponder software, which is equipped with the function of sending the message in question to the recipient, letting your target click on a specific link to be able to access the next message, which you will have inserted into your email messages.
8 – Create new content
A) Use of content that is not new out of laziness or to create traffic visits to the blog
Perhaps you would like to use articles that you have already published on your blog, or perhaps you would prefer to insert new content directly into the follow-up messages, but your autoresponder, for unknown reasons, may have missed a message containing a lesson or a very popular article. important and unpublished and not yet published.
In this case you would need to create new content to integrate the missed lesson or article with the message, so that the follow-up course can reach its final goal.
But it may also be that you need to write new content, adding it to your course or blog, so that your follow-up course achieves the goal of satisfying your users' needs for newness.
It could also be that you are building your course via follow-up before even inserting the articles into the blog, but already knowing where you will find the contents of the articles or lessons.
Or you may just want to write the course from scratch.
Most bloggers do not like to create a follow-up course from scratch, inserting completely new content, essentially for two reasons.
Surely, a first reason is the following: it takes a lot of work.
The second would be that by following this approach you give up the benefits that can be obtained in terms of SEO, given that those contents are not on your blog, while the links inserted in the email messages would point to the articles already existing in the blog, and therefore this it would certainly lead to a significant increase in traffic.
The possibility of acquiring traffic through links to blog articles placed in messages represents one of the main web marketing and search engine optimization strategies used by the majority of bloggers.
And the arguments put forward are justified.
B) Exclusivity and unpublished content
However, we must consider, in the opposite sense, a great opportunity: that of exclusivity, due to having created new, unique and exclusive content.
In fact, having created new, unique and exclusive content still represents a winning strategy, as it can guarantee you greater success, even in the short term, especially if you are just starting out and are not well known by your audience.
When you create new content that isn't available anywhere else, you can announce that your follow-up course will feature exclusive content that your users will never be able to find anywhere else.
Readers who want to benefit from that content will necessarily have to subscribe to the course list via follow-up.
Therefore, in summary, following the classic approach followed by the majority of bloggers, if you publish all the newly created contents on your blog, you can later create your own collection of contents via follow-up, containing the same articles, but reduced, with the link to the full blog articles, to benefit from the SEO effect.
If, however, you want to use exclusivity as the main reason that makes your collection of content sent via follow-up attractive, you will have the favor of all users who want to read truly new and unpublished content.
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