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Hey, business besties if you follow me on Twitter, then you already knew I was going to share a special podcast and blog post about marketing hacks. In this special podcast, I'm going to go over marketing hacks more specifically seven things that I did in 2021 that changed the marketing game for me. If this is something of interest to you, and you want to learn about the different software's techniques and strategies that I try, stay tuned.
Now, I decided to do this tonight, because I've been getting a lot of DMs recently about different business owners feeling overwhelmed, a little bit confused and a bit discouraged about what to do with marketing. They have wonderful ideas, but they're not necessarily sure where to start and different things that they can try on a small scale that make a big impact. So if that describes you in any way, or you just want to learn some different marketing strategies to try and stay tuned, because I have a lot that I want to go over with you.
And if you do find value in this, I do want to ask that you just consider donating $5 to Touched By Ty’s creator fund. If you don't know, I am a full time content creator running 2 businesses while also caring for my disabled parent. Running Touched By Ty without offering services actually cost me about $4,000 a month. And if you want this content to stay free forever, please take one minute to click the donate button in this podcast description to send $5 via cash app and to say thanks.
You know, it really means a lot to me when you guys go out of your way to support me because I want to keep this content free forever for you. If you can't do that, right now, that's perfectly fine. I still hope you enjoy this content & find real value in it.
Before we get started, I just want to let you guys know that ya girl is officially a Certified HoneyBook Expert. HoneyBook is a customer management software that can help you automate invoices, contracts, create contract templates, and create full workflows and help you manage your projects more easily and give you a full panel view of where each year clients are.
It will also tell you when clients open your emails when they ignore your emails and give you you know, just a full depth analysis of how your clients behaviors are affecting your brand. So if this is something that's of interest to you, since I am an affiliate of honey books and a certified expert, I can get you 50% off of the software for you to try. Now, all you got to do is just click the link and it'll take you right to it and you can sign up.
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Now that we got all those good things out of the way, I want to go ahead and go over the seven things that I'm going to cover with you guys tonight.
So, here's 7 marketing hacks & strategies that actually work in 2021:
- Creating content pillars and cluster topics
- Email lists segmenting s
- Creating full email series with four to seven emails
- Creating a killer follow up strategy
- Learning to recycle and reuse my content
- Starting to show up every single day
- Using Zapier to automate social proof
Now if those things are of interest to you, stay tuned, get a pen and a piece of paper or your favorite notebook. And let's go ahead and start taking some notes. Be prepared to try some different software's that I'm going to mention. And if you have any of these tips that you want me to expand on just let me know one of the tips which is automating social proof, I am going to expand on and my Zapier workshop in February 2022.
Once I go over this tip, and you decide that you actually do want to sign up for the workshop, go ahead and checkout the Zapier Workshop. And it'll take you right to the forum to be notified, the tickets are going to go on sale at the end of this week.
I'm only going to make it available so probably 20 to 30 students because as you know, I like to keep my workshops small and intimate so that you feel comfortable asking questions. So if this is something of interest to you, and you really want to have a hands on experience learning about this software, then go ahead and sign up for the workshop.
Tip 1: Creating Content Pillars & Cluster Topics
So, what is a content pillar? A content pillar is a vague topic that you want to go over with your audience to express your expertise. You might have anywhere from 5 to 10 content pillars for your brand, but they should all be interrelated to the services and products that you offer. I personally recommend creating two content pillars for the different types of products or services that you do have then within those content pillars you have what we call cluster topics.
Cluster topics are the bite-sized types of content that you're going to create to help build a well-rounded understanding of your pillar content. So the content pillar may have its own landing page that links back to all of your cluster topics. Cluster topics will be things like your Twitter spaces, going live on Instagram, doing Instagram Story series, Instagram carousel posts, Twitter threads, blog posts, YouTube videos, YouTube series, videos, Episode, a type podcasts, things of that nature.
Those bite-sized pieces of content that go more in-depth and explain the vague topic for the services that you offer or the product that you're trying to sell is what a content cluster topic is. An example that you can actually see right now, we'll be our Seven Days of Marketing campaign that we did as a play of the 21 days a Christmas theme.
When you click on this on our website, a landing page is going to open and it's going to have seven different things listed that we did every single day for the second week of December. And in the process, you will see blog posts, expert interviews, podcast episodes, freebie downloads, a company newsletter, and a few other things as well. In this process, I also gained over 300+ new email subscribers, sold products and I also created a full strategy going on for what I'm going to do with this email list in January.
These types of landing pages can stay on your site forever, or you can take them down and reuse them when the seasons come back around again. I personally am going to leave them up and allow them to get the proper SEO and search traffic. And hopefully, it'll start generating and ranking in Google next year when Christmas comes around again.
Now, this is something that you can do in every single industry. Yours does not have to be as in-depth as my seven days of marketing, you can keep it very simple, as simple as your audience wants it to be. Just make sure it's something that's not overwhelming and time consuming for you. Since I am a full time content creator, I have significantly more time to actually create content. And since I don't typically make my own products, I don't necessarily have to focus on shipping out things that need to be made.
Which means that I can put a lot more time into it than many business owners, so try to avoid committing to do things that are going to leave you overwhelming once you start making sales for them. To start, think about how much time you have to commit every week to make content before you actually decide what those types of cluster topics are going to look like. Also, keep in mind that all of your content does not need to be the same, you want to mix it up. You also want to give people a good type of variety so that you can understand what type of content is going to convert the best for your audience.
So even if you're not into video content, maybe you can start a podcast. If you don't like writing them, maybe you do a Twitter thread. If you don't like taking pictures of yourself, maybe you can use Canva to create some interactive graphics or suggestions or short videos, whatever it is, you just need to make sure that you have the multimedia type of content that's well rounded.
Also, you want to make sure that it can keep your audience engaged so that your content does become addictive, shareable, and something that people would consider to be binge-worthy. Making sure you incorporate these things is what's going to be the difference and making sure that your content is relevant & connected, but not all over the place. You want your content to actually make sense and work towards your goal of selling a specific product or service.
Without doing this, it remains one of the leading reasons why you feel like your content doesn't really flow together, or why you feel like your audience isn't really engaged, your content has to evolve with your audience's needs. If you're only ever sharing things that are just directly trying to book your services, or just directly trying to sell your products, you're not really building trust with your audience. You're not really building rapport with them. You're really just a sales man. And honestly, nobody on social media wants to be sold to 24/7 Nobody on the internet wants to be sold to 24/7 You have to find that balance between selling and creating content that indirectly sells for you.
And if you haven't taken the time to learn about direct and direct marketing, pause this podcast and look it up and look up the differences get on YouTube and look at the differences as well, because you'll see that all of these large brands and corporations that are super successful, they have mastered the art of indirect marketing. Now understanding content pillars and closer topics is just the beginning of the different things that you're going I have to do to actually capitalize on creating content. For Tip number two, this is actually the second skill that you need to learn how to do in order to really make money from your new followers. And that is going to be segmenting your email list.
Tip 2: Segmenting Your Email List
Now I've talked about this before, I've even shared a couple of tutorial videos, and I shared examples of different email campaigns that I've done that have been quite successful for me. I'm going to link to a couple of Tik Tok videos that I made about this just to give you guys some examples. So feel free to take a break from reading so that you can go and look over those examples and come back.
TikTok email tutorial:
Essentially, segmenting your email list means that you separate people into lists based on their interests and also where they signed up for your email list.
Now, an example that I gave someone on Tik Tok when they were asking me to explain, I reviewed how you'd do it selling hair. In the example, let's say you're a hairstylist, and you sell wigs, and you sell bundles. Ideally, you should have a different pop up on your services page, a different pop up on your bundles page, and a different pop up on your wigs page.
The reason being everybody who wears bundles does not wear wigs. Everybody who wears wigs does not want to have bottles in their head because they want to be able to take it off. And the same thing for people who are bundles, they don't always want to wear wigs because they want to be able to keep it in, they don't want to have to take it off. They may also not want to deal with lifting lace. But people who book services aren't necessarily interested in buying these different products separately, they might just want to book the service and buy the product at the same time for you.
So all of these different types of people needs need to be put into three different categories. And they honestly need three different types of marketing geared towards them. The reason being is because they have different problems that they're trying to solve. They also have different interests, different budgets, and they're prepared to invest different types of money.
Sending them the same types of offers is not going to work because they are not at the same level of preparedness to do business with you. And this is true whether you do nails and you sell a nail service or you sell press on nails, whether you sell clothes, or whether you sell shoes or if you're a digital marketer like myself. Whatever the case is, you need to segment your email list based on where people encounter and engage with their brand.
I also recommend experimenting with pop-up timers and exit intent pop-ups, I always had the best results when I did exit intent pop ups. This is when a pop-up opens when people are trying to exit the page. And Neil Patel talks about this too. If you guys don't know who that is, I definitely recommend looking into him. He is one of the top digital marketers in the world. And when you google digital marketing, he's actually the person that comes up on the homepage of Google for four of the top 10 listings. He also has a pretty fast-grossing YouTube channel and he drops new tips every single day. So if you have not checked out Neil Patel, I definitely recommend doing so because he can give you a lot more advice about email marketing segments in your email list experimenting with pop-up timers and things of that nature.
Now once you segment your email list, you need to go ahead and have different email series created for each email list. This is where Tip 3 comes in.
Tip 3: Creating Email Series With 4-6 Emails
Now, what I like to do is create automated series so that each email list type receives a series of four to seven emails. In those emails, I cover a variety of things including a welcome email, a brand introduction, explaining the process of what it's like to work with me and supplying testimonials, also send an email just kind of reviewing what people would need if they actually did want to work with me. Recently, I started sending out a survey email asking them what they actually need assistance with and the type of email content they want to see and how frequently they want to hear from me. That last email I just mentioned, is actually called an "email preference center". If you haven't created one of those, I definitely recommend looking into that. The last three emails that I send are actually when I start asking to close the sale and trying to sell and pitch products once I nurture them and warm them up. If they don't buy, then I tend to kind of back off and go back into nurturing them and then start the process all over again.
Not everybody is going to be ready to buy from you just because you send them an email. Some people sign up to your email list and they might not buy anything from you for a month or two months or even three months. Some people might even take a year, but you won't know until you start nurturing people and actually tracking the data.
Once you start, you can start saying things like this person signed up for my email list six months ago and it took them six months to decide to spend $1,000 with me, does most of my email lists look like this? And most of them have behaviors like this. What do I need to do actually to them faster is there even anything that I can do to nurture them faster? Or do I just need to keep going at the rate that I'm going. Those things are going to come from you actually learning how to track data, analyze your data, organize your data, and start applying your findings to your actual business model and strategies.
Now, I do want to take a step back here and just say that it took me years to fully understand these things. So don't feel like you just have to take everything in this article and apply it right now, because it's going to be very unrealistic on your part. Instead, you should want to take your time to create content that matters, take your time to create processes that work and be willing to dedicate the next year to it.
Personally, I cannot throw marketing things together and expect them to work, they actually do take time and creating content takes time. And doing all of these things comes from the heart. It comes from months of planning and weeks of mapping out and editing. And even though sometimes you could just throw content together and it works out - the content that is the most success successful and converts the best likely won't be able to just be thrown together.
So just keep that in mind, you don't have to rush through these things in order for them to produce the results that you want. You don't have to just throw content out there to get the results that you want, you can take your time to create content that's actually going to nurture your audience so that you can enjoy the process without feeling overwhelmed to the next thing I want to go over.
I believe that this is tip number four is that you need to understand what it takes to create a killer follow up strategy.
Tip 4: Creating a Follow Up Strategy
To get started, I highly recommend looking up templates for following-up and trying to close sales deals, and templates that do more than just reminding people, "oh, you have an abandoned cart" or "you have an abandoned cart, here's 10% off". Seriously, you can do better than that. Something that actually worked for me is I will reach out to people who had abandoned carts, and I'll be like, "Hey, I saw you visited my website a week ago and that this is what you abandoned, so I looked over your brand and these are some recommendations that I have for you just based on which you abandoned in your cart. If you have any questions or if you want to proceed with booking the service, here's the link to do so or feel free to respond to this email, I'm happy to help if you want to jump on a 15-minute call as well".
You'd be surprised just how much more that works in terms of that little extra effort than just telling people that they have an abandoned cart. Now yours might not necessarily look like that if you're not in marketing or if you're not selling the service. But you can still do something similar if you are just selling a product.
So with this, I want to challenge you to think deeper about how to personalize your follow up strategy. And those follow up emails and texts and calls that you're going to be selling and sending out. Because when you follow-up with somebody they might not necessarily be ready to buy and only talking about money or only trying to take their money in the process can make them anxious and make them not want to talk to you. So instead, try to be friendly and courteous and the process where you can also ask for the sale in a very relaxed way that doesn't make people tense up at the idea of grabbing their wallet to give it to you.
Tip 5: Reuse, Recycle & Re-purpose your content
I believe this is the most impactful for me, which is learning to reuse, recycle and re-purpose my old content. In the process of doing this, I've learned that I created so much valuable content over the years. For example, I have over 100,000 tweets, I've created over 200 different blog posts, all of them are not visible on my website, I've taken a lot of them down.
But in the process, I've learned that there is a real value in taking a step back and learning how to recreate that content and make it better. Also, learning how to make it more clear, informing, resourceful, & spicing it up with new graphics while creating a new offer and new backlinks goes a long way. It's still the same content, except now I'm just taking the time to nurture my audience with it.
Something that I've also started doing Twitter threads off of Twitter and turning them into actual blog posts to go on my blog and help me get better at SEO. Especially if it's a Twitter thread that went viral or got a little bit of traction. If you've been following me since I started this Twitter page in 2017 then you know I've gone viral multiple times for my educational Twitter threads. And I think that not turning those threads into blog posts sooner was actually a mistake on my part.
So, I'm going to be spending 2022 turning those popular Twitter threads into actual blog posts that nurture my audience further, and this is something that you can do as well. If you have a popular post on Instagram or popular post on Twitter, or a popular YouTube video, turn those things into blog posts and expand on them because nine times out of 10 If people on those platforms found it useful people on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and all these other search engines will find them useful as well.
And as a content creator, it makes your job significantly easier when you do not have to create new types of content every single time you want to post something. This also takes the stress out of content planning. And this is one of the reasons why you need content pillars and content clusters topics because if you do this, right, you can reuse and recycle content without worrying about if it fits where your brand is going right now. Because all of your content fits where your brand is going. All of your content works towards selling a product or a service that you offer indirectly and it also helps you paint expertise.
So if you haven't been doing that thus far, and you're just sharing random content that does not help you, now's the time to really change how you're doing that so that you can recycle, reuse and re-purpose your content. Now Tip number six is learning how to show up every single day, no matter what.
Tip 6: Showing up every single day
For the last seven years, I've pretty much done a really good job of showing up every day for myself as far as personal and professional development. And since 2017 of starting Touched By Ty I feel like I've done a good job of showing up. But I also feel like in the summer of 2020, or 2019, I kind of started to slack off. And this year, I picked my momentum back up.
I started focusing on creating different types of content, expanding my content mediums, finding different ways to show up, and also understanding that what works for other people will not necessarily work for me. In the process, I began learning how to show up creatively, which is what I struggled with before. Some different ways that I show up now are by creating these types of special podcast episodes, going live weekly with my Twitter spaces at 7pm every Wednesday, creating new blog posts three to six times a month, going back and turn on my old Twitter threads into blog posts, resharing my old content, dropping new tips and gems every single day. I also take the time now to batch create content twice a week on Canva, especially engaging infographics with fun facts, tips, and statistics.
Doing these things also encourages other people to engage and interact with me more often. And my following count is actually now growing a lot more quickly than it was before to now I'm gaining anywhere from 300 to 500 followers a month.
I also started showing up every single day for my email list because before I would only send them maybe like one or two emails a month. Now they hear from me multiple times a week, and they actually love talking to me and people reach out to me and they tell me like I actually look forward to your emails. Something that I had to understand too, is that if I showed up every day, it will be impossible for people to forget about me, it will be impossible for people to forget that I wrote a book, it will be impossible for people to forget that I host workshops and that I have freebies and all these resources and that I make mugs and journals and that I own a print company and all of these different things that I do.
It is impossible for people to forget me if I show up every day and they see my face in my name and my links on my website every single day. And that's something that has really taken my business to the next level. Last year I had about 12,000 website visitors. But this year I've had almost 41,000 website visitors just from showing up every day sharing my link multiple times a day and automating that process.
That is where tip #7 comes in and becomes super resourceful.
Tip 7: Automating Social Proof
If you follow me on Twitter that you know that I love Zapier because Zapier has allowed me to automate my campaigns by letting people know when other people are signing up for my email list and for different freebies and workshops, blog post drops, release dates for different things and more. Doing this also encourages other people sign up to because when they know that somebody else is interested enough to sign up and give their email to me, they're more likely to be interested to sign up and give me their emails too.
Learning this really took my promotional skills to the next level because it made it to where I don't have to be on social media every day, I don't have to market my stuff personally every day to make sure that my stuff is being marketed. And that's the point that you want to get to as well.
So if you're not using Zapier, and you don't have it integrated into your marketing strategy to passively promote and market your products, your services, the music, you drop, your music videos, YouTube channel, and all the dope things that you're doing, now's the time for you to get started. Unlike platforms where you can schedule & automate content, you can set up campaigns to just tweet the same thing twice a week with Zapier. You will be so surprised at how big of a difference it'll make for you to tweet the same thing every Tuesday and Thursday.
Now instead of talking about it once or twice a month, you're talking about it six to 10 times a month, consistently which is going to make a big difference in the number of email subscribers, YouTube subscribers, video views, & podcast listeners just automating those things. Learning to also incorporate customer reviews and client testimonials, rather than only promoting products is also an awesome way to implement social proof.
Now I'm going to keep my promise and keep it short, sweet, simple and straight to the point and end it right here. That might be a little abrupt to some people. But like I said, if I shared a topic that you want me to elaborate on more, just comment down and let me know, share this post on Twitter and tag me to @Touchedbyty.
Special Offer: Content Marketing Guide
Now keep in mind also that I do have a book that you can buy that has 15 additional tips in it, that goes over content marketing, content, strategy, planning, how to create a content calendar, how to come up with different types of mediums and topics for your content, how to identify your audience, and so many more things.
So if you haven't invested in my content marketing guide yet, I highly recommend it, you will not regret it. You can get it today for $20 using Sezzle and shop pay as well. So that means that you could get it for $5.
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If you're not ready to make that investment. That's perfectly fine. However I do x and if you enjoyed this special blog post & podcast episode, please consider donating $5 to Touched By Ty's creator fund so that I can keep this content free forever.
With almost 15,000 followers on Twitter over 2000 email subscribers and almost 3000 followers on Tik Tok I'm 100% certain that we can come up with the $4,000 together just to make this content channel free forever for you guys.
In closing, I just want to thank you for listening to this podcast and reading this blog. Thank you for sharing my content and engaging with me. Thank you supporting me and surrounding me with love.
Happy new year and a belated Merry Christmas.
Tyllah <3
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