20 Marketing Tools for a Small Business & Their Best Feature

Published

1 month ago

May 27, 2022

20 Marketing Tools for a Small Business & Their Best Feature

There are thousands of marketing tools, but only a few fit the bill for small businesses. Some you may already know; others you should consider using.

We’ll outline how to use the best feature of each tool so that you can get started on delivering some real marketing success today.

Sounds good? Let’s get into it.

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides a 360-degree view of the performance of your website.

It is suitable for tracking sales, conversions, the best source of visitor traffic, how people interact with your website, and insights into your audience.

The mobile app provides these reports instantly in the palm of your hand.

With Google sunsetting the old version of Google Analytics, here’s a beginner’s guide to setting up GA4.

Pricing

How to view monthly comparison reports with Google Analytics

Follow these steps:

Download the app on App Store or Google Play
Log in and select your property
Select the date range in the upper left
Select month > Last 30 days > Compare > Preceding period > Save

This view ensures you compare all metrics with the previous time period.

ConvertFlow workspace and sidebar on right

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How We Used a Video Course to Promote Ahrefs (And Got 500K+ Views)

Published

3 hours ago

July 6, 2022

Entireweb News Bot

How We Used a Video Course to Promote Ahrefs (And Got 500K+ Views)

Creating and selling educational courses can be a lucrative business. But if you already have a product to sell, you can actually use courses as a marketing tool.

Back in 2017, about two years after joining Ahrefs, I decided to create a course on content marketing.

I had a very clear understanding of how an educational course would help me promote Ahrefs.

People like courses – Folks like Brian Dean and Glen Allsopp were selling theirs for $500 to $2,000 a pop (and rather successfully). So a free course of comparable quality was sure to get attention.
Courses allow for a deeper connection – You would basically be spending a few hours one on one with your students. And if you managed to win their trust, you’d get an opportunity to promote your product to them.

That was my raw thought process going into this venture.

And I absolutely didn’t expect that the lifespan of my course would be as interesting and nuanced as it turned out to be.

The lessons of my course have generated over 500K+ in total views, brought in mid-five-figures in revenue (without even trying), and turned out to be a very helpful resource for our various marketing purposes.

So here goes the story of my “Blogging for Business” course.

1. The creation

I won’t give you any tips on how to create a successful course (well, maybe just one). There are plenty of resources (courses?) on that topic already.

All I want to say is that my own experience was quite grueling.

The 10 lessons of my course span some 40K words. I have never attempted the feat of writing a book, but I imagine creating such a lengthy course is as close as it gets.

I spent a tremendous amount of time polishing each lesson. The course was going to be free, so it was critical that my content was riveting. If not, people would just bounce from it.

Paid courses are quite different in that sense. You pay money to watch them. So even if the content is boring at times, you’ll persevere anyway to ensure a return on your investment.

When I showed the draft version of the course to my friend, Ali Mese, he gave me a simple yet invaluable tip: “Break your lessons into smaller ones. Make each just three to four minutes long.”

How did I not think of this myself?

Short, “snackable” lessons provide a better sense of completion and progress. You’re also more likely to finish a short lesson without getting distracted by something.

I’m pretty sure that it is because of this simple tip that my course landed this Netflix comparison (i.e., best compliment ever):

You know you’re a digital marketing geek when you’re binge watching @ahrefs training videos instead of Netflix. (Can we get an auto-play feature built in after each lesson, so I can watch it all without moving? 😜) https://t.co/hMJAl3OaNp #AhrefsAndChill
— Monique Muro (@MoniqueMuro) May 8, 2018
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2. The strategy

With the prices of similar courses ranging from $500 to $2,000, it was really tempting to make some profit with ours.

I think we had around 15,000 paying customers at Ahrefs at that time (and many more on the free plan). So if just 1% of them bought that course for $1K, that would be an easy $150K to pocket. And then we could keep upselling it to our future customers.

Alternatively, we thought about giving access to the course to our paying customers only.

This might have boosted our sales, since the course was a cool addition to the Ahrefs subscription.

And it could also improve user retention. The course was a great training resource for new employees, which our customers would lose access to if they canceled their Ahrefs subscription.

And yet, releasing it for free as a lead acquisition and lead nurturing play seemed to make a lot more sense than the other two options. So we stuck to that.

3. The waitlist

Teasing something to people before you let them get it seems like one of the fundamental rules of marketing.

Apple announces new products way before they’re available in stores.
Movie studios publish trailers of upcoming movies months (sometimes years) before they hit the theaters.
When you have a surprise for your significant other (or your kids), you can’t help but give them some hints before the reveal.

There’s something about “the wait” and the anticipation that we humans just love to experience.

So while I was toiling away and putting lessons of my course together, we launched a landing page to announce it and collect people’s emails.

In case someone hesitated to leave their email, we had two cool bonuses to nudge them:

Access to the private Slack community
Free two-week trial of Ahrefs

The latter appealed to freebie lovers so much that it soon “leaked” to Reddit and BlackHatWorld. In hindsight, this leak was actually a nice (unplanned) promo for the course.

4. The promotion

I don’t remember our exact promotion strategy. But I’m pretty sure it went something like this:

I also added a little “sharing loop” to the welcome email. I asked people to tell their friends about the course, justifying it with the fact that taking the course with others was more fun than doing it alone.

I have no idea how effective that “growth hack” was, but there was no reason not to encourage sharing.

In total, we managed to get some 16,000 people on our waitlist by the day of the course launch.

5. The launch

On a set date, the following email went out to our waitlist:

Did you notice the “note” saying that the videos were only available for free for 30 days? We did that to nudge people to watch them as soon as possible and not save them to the “Watch later” folder.

In retrospect, I wish we had used this angle from the very beginning: “FREE for 30 days. Then $799.”

This would’ve killed two birds with one stone:

Added an urgency to complete the course as soon as possible
Made the course more desirable by assigning a specific (and rather high) monetary value to it

(If only we could be as smart about predicting the future as we are about reflecting on the past.)

Once it was live, the course started to promote itself. I was seeing many super flattering tweets: