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BLOG SMARTER DASHBOARD :: COMMUNITY

Note: You have three weeks to complete the lessons inside this module. For a suggested pace for each week, visit the Your Assignments forum in the VCC.

You’re now halfway through the Blog Smarter program. Congratulations!

Before You Start…

Before we jump into this next module, let’s review how far you’ve come and how you’ll get to the finish line.

Now that you’re at the halfway point, you’ve done the target market research. You’ve developed your core brand elements. You’ve put on your Target Market Goggles and looked at your whole site with your readers’ perspective. You did all that and more.

You’ve worked hard to develop a powerful strategy that will help your business grow—now and into the future. But in order for that strategy to work, you’ll need CEO muscles so that when the program is over, you can make CEO-level decisions without needing to rely on anyone else. That’s why this program is designed to empower you, not to make you dependent on someone else.

In the first half of the program, you were kind of like Spider-Man right after he got bit by the spider. You didn’t yet trust your own CEO spidey-sense, so the lessons encouraged you to wait on program leader feedback before proceeding. That made sense because the work you do in the first half is mission-critical to the work you’ll do later in the program. For example, it’s important to get feedback on your Problem Statement before moving forward because the rest of the program builds on that.

And now at this point in the program, your CEO muscles are strong enough so that you can make the decisions you need to make for your business. You’re officially in tune with your own spidey-sense!

In other words, at this stage, you don’t need to wait for “approval” from a program leader before you move forward on a lesson or a step. Because now that you have a solid foundation in the Blog Smarter strategy, you can make decisions for your business knowing that even if it isn’t “perfect”, you can try it and learn from it.

To continue developing your own CEO muscles, here are a couple techniques that many students find helpful from here forward in the program:

• When you post a question in your learning log, go ahead and also post the answer your CEO spidey-sense is telling you. For example, you might say something like, “Is it better to xyz or zyx? My CEO spidey-sense is telling me xyz because of…” Getting into this habit is like P90X for your CEO muscles!
• Before you post something for the program leaders and your teammates to review, first get it as far as you can get it on your own so that what you’re posting is the best possible version you’re currently capable of. Because when you post your best work, the leaders and your teammates can help you stretch to the next level from there. In practical terms, this might mean reading back through a piece of copy a couple times and revising it before you post it, or it might mean walking away from a piece of copy for a couple hours or overnight and coming back with fresh eyes to revise it and get it as far as you can possibly get it.

The Best Place to Send Superfans

In this module, you’ll focus on converting your readers into subscribers. But before we jump into the meaty lessons in this module, let’s review why your email list is so important to your business success.

We covered this in the pre-work lesson titled Where to Send Superfans, so now do some retrieval practice and see if you can answer these questions:

• Why is your email list the best place to send your superfans?
• Which visitors are most likely to purchase…or take any other action?
• How valuable is an email subscriber, compared to social media followers?

If you can’t remember, no worries! Just take a few minutes to pop back over to that lesson right here and either review the transcript or watch the videos as a refresher (try 1.5x speed!). Because before you move forward, it’s important to be clear on exactly why email is so crucial to your business.

What Conversion Rate Means

Your conversion rate is like a thermometer that can show you how healthy your overall brand is on your site – it tells you out of all the people coming to your site, how many are taking the action you want them to take?

In the case of a blog, the one action you want people to take – because it enables the rest of your business success – is to join your email list.

Because if you’re not converting as many readers as possible to subscribers, you’re leaving money on the table.

Think about it like this: Right now, the visitors coming to your site are kind of like flour – the kind you bake with – and your email list is a colander with holes the size of pencil erasers. Every time visitors come to your site, that’s like pouring flour into your colander. Sure, some clumps may get stuck and stay in the colander, but most of the flour will flow right through to the other side.

Your job is to swap out your colander for a fine-mesh strainer. The kind with tiny holes that won’t let as much pass through. Why? Because you want to capture as many readers as possible and turn them into subscribers who will keep coming back.

A Warning About Your Conversion Rate

Before you make any changes to your subscriber strategy, it’s a good idea to get a snapshot of your own conversion rate so you can track your progress. For example, if you tweak some messaging hoping it will convert more readers into subscribers but it actually decreases your conversion rate, that’s important to know so you can revisit that messaging again.

Next, we’ll step through how to calculate your own conversion rate. But keep in mind that conversion rate depends on countless variables, from your niche to which problems you’re helping your audience with – and much more. And so no matter what your conversion rate turns out to be, it’s not about comparing your number to another blogger’s number to see whose is “better.”

Instead, your goal should be to outdo yourself. For example, if your current conversion rate is 0.5%, try to get it to 1%. Or if your current rate is 5%, try to get it to 6%.

Because we’re talking percentages here, any tiny improvement can actually lead to big results. For example, if you get 200,000 visitors a month and you increase your conversion rate from 0.5% to 1%, that means you just got yourself another 1,000 new subscribers a month.

How to Figure Out Your Conversion Rate

Figuring out your conversion rate involves a little math, but don’t worry! You can copy this Google Sheets template to do the math for you.

Note: This is a view-only link, so after you open it, you’ll need to select File»Make a copy to make your own copy.

After you make a copy of the spreadsheet, follow these steps:

1. Go to Google Analytics and set the date range to the last full month. For example, if it’s February 5 today, set the date range to January 1 to January 31.
2. On the Audience»Overview page, find the total listed under Users and add that to the spreadsheet. That’s the total number of users who visited your site in that month.
3. In your email marketing tool, find the analytics or reports section where it shows you how many new subscribers you gained over a certain time period. Look for the total new subscribers in that same time period you selected in Google Analytics, and add that to the spreadsheet.
4. Now the spreadsheet will take the total new subscribers (step 3) and divide it by the total users (step 2) and multiply that by 100 to get the percentage. Here’s a formula if that’s easier for you:
   (total new subscribers / total users) x 100

That’s your conversion rate! For example, if you had 200,000 users in January and you got 4709 new subscribers, that would look like this:

(4709 new subscribers / 200,000 total users) x 100 = 2.35%

After you calculate your rate for the last full month, then go through those same steps on the Annual tab of the spreadsheet to calculate it for the last 12 months to get a bigger picture view of how your business has performed over the last year.

If your conversion rate is lower than you’d like, take heart because this module is all about getting your conversion rate as high as possible. You can use everything we cover in this module to troubleshoot where you’re losing people and how to start converting more readers into subscribers.

Which Email Tool Should You Use?

Here’s a common question you may have before we get started: Which email marketing tool is best for your business long-term?

Ultimately, as long as your email tool is delivering your messages to your subscribers so you can serve your target market, that’s what matters most. No “perfect” email tool exists because they all have their pros and cons, so you’ll need to make a CEO decision on what’s best for you.

With that said, I personally have used and can recommend both ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit. I personally prefer ActiveCampaign because it gives you more power over analyzing your subscribers and segmenting your audience based on their actions. Neither tool is perfect, but both get the job done well.

You can find more cost-effective tools out there, but as your business grows you will likely find that you want to move to a professional-level email marketing tool.

For example, I started out with one of those email tools that’s free until a certain number of subscribers, but as my list grew, my needs outgrew what that lower-cost tool could provide. I wasted a lot of time and energy trying to work around that tool’s limitations when I should have just bit the bullet and upgraded to a professional-level tool instead!

One Last Thing for You to Consider

If you’re not yet comfortable with using your email marketing tool – or if you haven’t set up your email list yet – you might want to consider hiring a tech person who can help you with implementing the techniques we cover in this module. There is no shame in asking for help because that frees you up to focus on the strategy instead of on the nitty gritty details of implementing the tactics of that strategy.

Steps to success…