Shobha Ponnappa, Author at SOLOHACKS® ACADEMY

How To Write A Newsletter That Will Be Opened, Clicked, Read, Loved!

Let’s start at the beginning because we need some frank talk.

Are you a solopreneur who has some email subscribers?
If yes, do you send them regular newsletters?
Do you know if your newsletters fall into junk folders of subscribers?
Do you know if people care to open your un-junked newsletters?
If people do open your newsletters, do they bother to click through (or do they “mark as read” and trash)?
If people click on your newsletters, are they read with interest or eyeballed at speed?
If people read your newsletters, do they love them? Want to keep getting them? Look forward to them?
Or do you live in eternal fear that subscribers are itching to hit the “unsubscribe” link?

Phew! Look at all the loving care you put into a newsletter (after your blog, it’s your most written content). And yet, every newsletter of yours doesn’t know how long it will stay alive!

Ask yourself: Is this the fate of only your newsletters – or every marketer’s newsletters? Newsletter marketing statistics show another rosy side:

Active email accounts have hit 5.6 billion by 2019.
73 percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.
Newsletters are by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.
99% of consumers check their email every day.
59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.
Newsletter readers spend 80% more time on the website that sends them these messages.
Email generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 3,800% ROI.
72% of people cited email as their preferred source for promotional content.

Are your newsletters not enjoying the benefits of these kinds of Email Marketing Content statistics? Buddy, you’ve got a big strategy revamp coming!

[Read more…]

Search Intent: How These Two Words Can Increase Your Traffic by 677%!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

Are you a solopreneur content-marketer struggling to increase organic traffic to your site? This number of 677 percent traffic growth should be making your eyes goggle!

I’m not making up this number. Joshua Hardwick, Head of Content at Ahrefs has shown a graph that’s soaring heaven-wards … and written:

“That’s a 677 percent increase in organic traffic to one of our core landing pages in just six months! How did we do this? We made a small change to the page to bring it in line with search intent.”

Search intent is one of those words a lot of SEO experts in Content & Traffic Generation talk about. You may even have understood its meaning somewhat. But after you know what it is, how do you use it to get 677 percent more traffic – or even more?

Wouldn’t you like to know? I did.

That’s why I researched and wrote this article, because I too am a solopreneur like you. I too want more traffic (it’s never enough!). And I too wanted to be able to achieve this without hiring expensive SEO help.

I haven’t yet hit the 677 percent growth goal, but I sure am speeding towards it everyday. Search intent seems like a small thing. But it does delivers some unbelievable results.

Read on if you want to see what the search intent hoo-ha is about. See how you too can use it like I am doing. Create some new tall spikes if your site’s traffic graph is too flat-looking.

[Read more…]

Ecommerce Product Images: Never Underestimate Their Selling Power!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

You’re a solopreneur in Content Marketing & Ecommerce. You are all eager to launch your online store and you have loads of product ideas to sell. But you’re not sure how good your product images need to be, right?

You’d like to do the photography yourself, or it would cost lots of money to hire a professional. You also don’t have any other photography equipment than your mobile phone.

So how do you get sensational ecommerce product images with what you have? Fear not, it’s all simpler than you think.

Concern about ecommerce product images quality is a marker that you are on the right track. Nothing is more important than images in ecommerce.

In the offline world, the whole satisfaction and guarantee of product quality is touch and feel. You can’t offer that via an online store. But you have to allow an experience as close to the real thing as possible.

Without great images YOU CAN’T SELL products online. Read that again. If you need more stats to confirm this. Here they are:

DigitalCommerce360 research says 51% of users prefer shopping online through ecommerce shops. 63% of consumers say good product images are more important than product descriptions.
People form their first impression of an ecommerce product within 50 milliseconds. That’s less than half a glance! Making that impression count rests on the quality of your images.
The IRCE 2012 Report says 75% of online buyers listed product images quality as key to buying. 66% of people wanted alternative views of the product. 61% of people wanted product zoom images.
An A/B test run by Visual Website Optimizer shows that larger product images increase sales by 9%.

Read on to see how you can improve the quality of your ecommerce product images – and do it all yourself!

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Blogging Goals: One Goal You Must Set, And Four Goals You Must Avoid!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

Blogging started out as a way for people to self-express. They aired their opinions, feelings and thoughts. That was when blogging was a hobby, a form of journaling.

Marketers soon realized that blogging could become a powerful marketing tool. Brands could use blogs to drive powerful, achievable goals like these:

Air their brand values.
Showcase their uniqueness.
Show their difference from competition.
Display their niche authority.
Attract new customers.
Keep customer loyalty.
Attract influencer networks.
Increase reach and visibility.

The trouble started when Google began indexing and ranking individual blog posts. So it paid marketers to create a flurry of blog posts daily to keep themselves atop of the Google pile. They could stay fresh, visible and try to rank high to attract masses of traffic.

Today, Content Marketing & Blogging has become a mad rush to publish without application of thought. Bloggers are giving the original goals of blogging short shrift. Valueless blog posts are being churned out in thousands and poured into Google.

It’s time to stop and ask. Does your business show any results from all that effort? If not, it could that your blogging goals are the real problem. Set different blogging goals. Set the right goals this time. Trash the wrong goals. And get yourself those promised benefits of blogging!

[Read more…]

How Evergreen Webinars Could Be A Solopreneur’s Smartest Selling Tool!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

You are an already overburdened solopreneur. Your content creation workload is enormous. You have no bandwidth to be conducting live events like webinars to push your selling a notch higher. Right?

You know that among all Content Types & Formats, webinars are powerful. A Content Marketing Institute study found this … webinars are in the top five effective content marketing tactics. But you don’t have the time to conduct live webinar events every now and again. Right again?

Well, there’s a smart solution you can use to propel your customer-prospects over the edge. Convert them from dithering to buying by creating “evergreen webinars”.

What’s that you ask? This blog post will show exactly what evergreen webinars are. See how you can use them as potent selling tools. You don’t need to run regular live events, but you can achieve the same results as if you did.

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How To Get Out Of A Creative Rut … Solohacks Roundup #5!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

How to get out of a creative rut? If you are a creative person of any kind, you are sure to have come across the dreaded “creative rut”. Your mind goes blank, your workload looks onerous, there is nothing called “mojo” to be found anywhere nearby, and life looks like an endless downward spiral. How do you get out of this morose state of affairs, when you’re additionally racked by guilt that you are doing nothing towards your goals? I thought it would be good to go outside the community of content marketers to see how people in other fields of creativity deal with the creative rut! Sometimes, the answers are not the usual ones if you check in with people not of your field.

Our Content Marketing Roundups usually pick topics that most people would consider a question without easy answers. We think it’s important to see how different people have worked their way around the many challenges of this issue. That’s why we have chosen this topic of Getting Out Of The Creative Rut – for you to get suggestions from those who’ve found ways to come out of it.

Our picks for this Content Marketing RoundUp include some great quotes from the blog posts of Chuck Sambuchino, Margarita Tartakovsky, Lisa Evans, Mattias Westlund, Randle Browning, V Renée, Sam Matla and Cosette Jarrett. I hope their opinions open your mind to the ways to get your creative juices flowing again, if they get jammed. How to use these points of view is then up to you.

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Content Creation Outsourcing Success … Solohacks Roundup #4!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

Content Creation Outsourcing is something that sounds attractive to a lot of solopreneur content marketers – especially those unable to bear the burdens of the workload any longer. But the question isn’t as simple as: “Should you or shouldn’t you outsource?” Once you decide to outsource, that’s when the questions really begin. Are you ready to place your brand at someone else’s mercy? Even after you manage to hire and train people, will you still be left shepherding your freelancer writers or agency? How do you get them to understand exactly what you want, and don’t want?

Our Content Marketing Roundups usually pick topics that most people would consider a perplexing dilemma, but we think it’s important to see how different content marketers have worked their way around the many challenges of this issue. That’s why we have chosen this topic of Content Creation Outsourcing for you to get a flavor of what those who’ve experimented think about it.

Our picks for this Content Marketing RoundUp include some great quotes from the blog posts of Paul Zalewski, Mitchell Hall, Isaac Justesen, Steve Lazuka, Carolyn Cohn, Jodi Harris, Sunil Rajaraman and Eric Siu. I hope their opinions open your mind to the possiblities of outsourcing and its implications. How to use these points of view is then up to you.

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How Solopreneurs Can Be Micro-Influencers Earning Macro Dollars!

By Shobha Ponnappa Leave a Comment

Solopreneurs in online content marketing may have noticed. Influencer Marketing & Content have become inseparable. More and more content-marketers are now referring to themselves as “influencers”.

There are agencies mushrooming everywhere that match “influencer-bloggers” with big brands. Brands large and small are now looking to use such influencers to talk about their products.

Mid-tier influencer content-marketers are already earning in six figures. Top-tier influencer content-marketers are creaming it. More interesting: the class of micro-influencers are finding a lucrative market too!

If you have both authority and influence with a targeted community of followers, you are king! Can your content sway a small but loyal group of your followers? You’re in the game.

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