The Oddest Story About Overcoming Obscurity You’ll Ever Hear

It’s a monumental moment in the history of Rough Draft because we are going to break — for the first time ever — the monologue mold of Rough Draft.

In fact, we’re going to do it all week.

See, Demian Farnworth has four short interviews for you from four superb web writers. People who will teach you fabulous lessons on overcoming obscurity, finding your voice, choosing the right words, and rapidly expanding your audience.

Right now, you’ll hear from the lovely James Chartrand, a single mom with two kids who built a world-class design and copywriting boutique called Men with Pens.

But her ride wasn’t pretty. Her story is one of intrigue and forced anonymity. And downright sexism.

It’s one of unfair competition and writing $2 articles. But there are also inside jokes about dressing drag and being Canadian, and ultimately, a happy ending that culminated in a blog post on Copyblogger that blew all of our collective minds.

Demian speaks in superlatives because this story demands superlatives. And it demands your attention. Particularly if you feel alone and forgotten and like no one will ever notice you. Because the lesson is if this single mom can win the attention battle with these odds, so can you.

So pay attention …

Because in this roughly 20-minute episode of Rough Draft with Demian Farnworth and James Chartrand, you’ll discover:

• Fab advice about getting noticed from a woman who chose to remain obscure
• The icky environment James found herself in when she got started
• Demian’s favorite blog post on Copyblogger (and why James had to write it)
• What she thinks of the current state of affairs for women web writers
• The ugly results behind a pricing test she ran as a woman, then as a man
• What you have to do when you must control a public conversation
• Learn James’s real first name (she won’t reveal the last — Demian begged)

Click Here to Listen to
Rough Draft on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Oddest Story About Overcoming Obscurity You’ll Ever Hear appeared first on Copyblogger.

California Set To Give Solar Panels To Low-Income Families For Free

California is the best state in the country if you want to go solar – but only if you are rich enough. Due to the steep initial cost of $ 15,000, only the middle to high-income families can afford to install solar panels. An original initiative is, however, seeks to change that. This new project aims to help disadvantaged communities see the sun in a different light.

Using the money collected by the government to help combat global warming, GRID Alternatives project aims polluting companies to pay to put solar panels on the roofs of those who can not afford them. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the plan is to use the money from cap and trade proposed by the state of the companies that have to pay per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. The cost for disadvantaged families: nothing.

GRID Alternatives Project Manager was $ 162 million solar homes affordable individual (SASH), the first solar system in the country dedicated discounts for low-income families the project. They want to install solar panels to more than 1,600 homes by the end of next year. The use of professional programs and donations of solar companies, their goal is to keep costs as low as possible. While it is free for families to settle in their homes, it is not required that families are the supply to feed the crew or help to install the panels.

The California state government will use $ 14.7 million raised by the system of cap and trade designed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, to be used to install solar panels. In general, the system of cap and trade has totted up to an impressive $ 1.6 billion.

Plowing at least 10% of this money on solar energy, the project aims to kill two birds with one stone – low-income families to save money, while large polluters of fossil fuels contribute to the reduction of emissions for the state power even more.

Anyone who is currently living in an area in California which is classified as disadvantaged qualified to apply for the cards installed. Grid Alternatives predicts that individual households could save up to $ 1,000 a year, waiting time could be spent on other essentials such as food. The sun sets on the initiative in 2021, so if you live in the state, you may want to jump on board soon.

The World's Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs Of 2015

All 100 Powerful Women have the power to shape our world, but 18 stand out in 2015 as entrepreneurs -- the women who built their status from scratch.

Why Link Building Is NOT the Future of SEO

Over the years, SEOs focused all their attention on link building. Why? Because it impacted rankings more than anything else.

Although links still help with rankings, the big misconception in the search world is that the majority of your time and effort should be placed on building links.

So, if building links is not what you should be spending your time on, what is? It’s user experience—because it will impact rankings more than anything else.

Here’s why user experience will impact your rankings more than links will: 

What’s best for users is best for Google

As you already know, Google makes a large portion of its revenue from ads. If users started to see search results that weren’t relevant, what would they stop doing?

Using Google, right?

If Google wants to continually ensure that it stays the leader in the search game, it has to provide users with the best results. This doesn’t come down to links or on-page code. It comes down to user experience.

Sure, having links and an optimized site ensures that search engines can crawl your site, but Google would rather rank a relevant to a search query webpage with no links than one that contains hundreds of links but is only somewhat relevant.

Here’s how I believe it measures the relevance of a search result:

• Click-through rate – as you know, this metric is about the number of people who see a listing and actually click through to the site. For example, if most of the searchers inputting a specific query are clicking on the second listing and not the first, it should tell Google that the second listing is more relevant.
• Bounce rate – if users are hitting the back button within their browsers and going back to the search listings page, chances are they didn’t find what they were looking for, especially if they click on another listing after they hit the back button. In an ideal world, Google wants to give you the best result first so you don’t have to keep going through listings to find the answer you are looking for.
• Time on-site – after users perform a search, they tend to click on a listing. Assuming a portion of those people will hit the back button, Google will eventually (if it already isn’t) analyze the time it took the user to hit the back button. If users do this within three seconds, it will tell Google that the result is less relevant than the result that kept users on-site for five minutes before they clicked back.

In essence, the sites with the best user experience are going to win in the long run. That means sites with good quality content, media, etc. will tend to rank better in the long run.

Plus, the sites that put their users first tend to generate the highest number of social shares and backlinks organically. They don’t focus on manual link building; instead, they focus on providing the best user experience.

What’s an example of a great user experience?

Google the phrase “online marketing.” You’ll see Quick Sprout towards the top.

As you can see below, my site has the least number of backlinks compared to a lot of the webpages that rank beneath me. Just look at Wikipedia and Forbes who rank below me. Both of those sites have many more backlinks than I do.

So, what’s the main difference? The page I send users to provides a much better user experience. I spent over $40,000 creating that guide. I know it sounds crazy, but I am now finally seeing the fruits of my labor.

Another great example of how Google values user experience is when it penalizes a site. For example, if BMW gets penalized for unethical link building, Google still has no choice but to rank BMW for the term “BMW.”

Why?

It’s such a popular query that users would be really upset with Google if it stopped ranking BMW. Users wouldn’t care if BMW did unethical link building—they just want to get to BMW’s site.

Granted, Google can ding BMW’s ranking for generic keywords, but if it dings them for brand keywords, it will hurt Google’s reputation with users more than it would hurt BMW.

What does this mean for you?

By no means am I saying that you should ignore SEO. Optimizing your code for search engines, building links when you have spare time, and growing your social media channels are all activities you should continually do.

But they shouldn’t be your main focus.

You should be shifting the majority of your focus to building a great product or service as that is what users want. And when you aren’t building, you should be creating great content.

You need to provide content so great that people will want to not only read it but also bookmark it, share it, and tell their friends about it. Your content should be so detailed and helpful that no competitor would dare to copy you as it would take too much time and energy.

In addition, you should be signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and continually analyzing your click-through rates. You can get this data by clicking on “search traffic” in the navigation bar and then clicking on “search analysis.”

Your goal should be to get more clicks out of every impression. You can do this by following the tips in this article.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t rocket science. Sure, Google has a ton of PhDs working for it, but its goal is aligned with yours: Google just wants to provide users with the best possible experience.

So, if you can create the best product/service and write the best content out there, you will be helping users. Eventually, Google will see this, and your rankings will climb. You may not see the best results in the short run, but over time things will get better.

What do you see as the future of SEO?

5 Reasons Why It’s Practical and Profitable to Share Your Expertise Online

We were silent as the car left the coziness of our home to the bright lights of the train station. I’d never been so anxious.

At the drop-off bay, I opened the door to leave and gave a barely noticeable lurch … barely noticeable. My husband looked at me with wide eyes.

“Did you just throw up in your mouth?!”

“No …” (I lied.)

And so I went, to run the copywriting workshop that made me (almost) decide to give up live workshops altogether and only teach online.

And I want to share what happened because it’s cheaper than therapy even though not all live workshops are nightmares, I realized a valuable lesson:

Teaching online isn’t just easier on your nerves; it makes great, profitable sense.

Let me give you five reasons why …

Reason #1: You don’t have to be an ex-marine to win over your students (they already love you)

LouAnne Johnson in Dangerous Minds. Detective John Kimble in Kindergarten Cop.

Both teachers equipped with the necessary skills to thwart unruly classroom action and turn hard-to-please students into enthusiastic scholars.

But while I had no hand-to-hand combat skills to demonstrate and couldn’t shout like an Austrian bodybuilder, I was in the same predicament as them. I was about to teach students who didn’t really want to be there.

I’d already taught one workshop for this particular company and it had just about turned me to drink. Contractually obliged to deliver another one, I felt ill at the thought of facing it all again.

You see, after we’d signed agreements, worrying details began to drip into my email inbox:

• “We desperately need to improve everyone’s copywriting skills.”
• “Attendees don’t want to be there.”
• “We’re forcing them to take this training.”

And one more the day before, just to ramp up my nausea:

“I know this is a bit last minute, and we’d agreed you’d teach on an intermediate level, but tomorrow you’ll be in front of a group with a huge range in ability and experience: from complete beginners to senior management … Please bear this in mind.”

Perhaps this time it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe this was a more willing group? I gauged people’s attitudes as they filed into the room.

“At least it gets us out of work for the day …”

I shuffled my notes by the projector.

“Are you taking the course, too?”

“Oh no.” I smiled in a way I hoped would communicate confidence. “I’ll be running the session today.”

“Really? Who are you?”

When you create your own online education offer, you attract an audience that wants to learn from you.

If you’ve built an online audience through content marketing, you sell to people who already know, like, and trust you.

The result?

You attract and teach a crowd that is enthusiastic and can’t wait to learn from you. No hand-to-hand combat skills needed.

Reason #2: You have more control over your teaching environment

The next challenge I had that day: the projector didn’t work. So, no slides to share.

I quickly shuffled the schedule so we didn’t lose any teaching time and then spent the morning tip-toeing around electrical cables and technicians working in the room.

Attendees focused on writing exercises, and they seemed to be engaged. I congratulated myself for hitting the curve ball.

Until I got the feedback forms.

“Didn’t have the projector working straight away” was one of the biggest complaints.

*Sigh.*

Online, it’s easier to teach materials with confidence.

Of course you can still experience technical hiccups online, but since you control the teaching environment, you can take steps to help prevent them.

For example:

• Take time to research the best online teaching platforms.
• Use free software trials to see which product is the best fit for you.
• Practice your session from start to finish.

So when you’re ready to teach, you’re confident, calm, and ready to give your students your best.

Reason #3: Teach once, sell many times over (the definition of a smart investment of time)

“Excuse me, I have a question …”

“Yes?!” I answered keenly, looking up from my notes. A man faced me with mild despair. In his hand was one of the free pencils from the venue.

“Do you have a sharpener? I’ve blunted my pencil.”

Did I forget to mention that very few people had brought their own pens or paper to the workshop?

To a copywriting workshop.

“Ah … no. You could just get another free pencil. I can see about 20 over there.”

My internal monologue shifted from enthusiasm to despair: “Are you frikken kidding me?! A pencil? Are you six? How do you get anything done day-to-day?! A pencil!”

I looked at the clock — seven hours to go.

In seven hours, I could have created some new marketing materials to generate sales, drafted a couple of new lessons for a membership course, or written an educational webinar to promote an online course.

Instead, I was stuck in a room handing out pencils.

Until they master cloning, you can’t scale your live workshops and profit.

I’ve had the pleasure of running many workshops that I absolutely loved. Even so, I was capped at the number of training days I could physically do each month.

Anyone who trades time for money has this limit, and in addition to limiting your revenue, it can also make you susceptible to the small business “feast or famine” cycle:

1. Do a ton of marketing.
2. Attract a ton of clients.
3. Spend all your time on client work and forget about marketing.
4. Wonder why the work dries up.
5. Panic.
6. Repeat cycle, starting from step one.

Now imagine this cycle if you teach online:

1. Create a useful online course that addresses your audience’s needs.
2. Develop an ongoing marketing system to feed new people into your sales funnel.
3. Watch sales come in.
4. Repeat cycle, starting from step two.

With online education, you can deliver the content to many people without it taking up all of your time. Teaching 1,000 people can be as easy as teaching 100, leaving you more time to focus on marketing and generating sales.

Scalability. It’s what makes online education so darn sexy.

Reason #4: You build a community of (profitable) evangelists

At 5:30 p.m., the most-senior attendee got up and walked out without saying goodbye.

It was too bad, because we’d spent so many happy minutes discussing his valuable contributions:

• “I wouldn’t put that word in that place.”
• “That’s the wrong length for a subject line. It should only ever be eight words.”
• “You should never use that word. It doesn’t work.”
• “I hate this magazine. You can’t learn about content from newspapers and magazines.”

It was a joy to see his wisdom actively adopted by the other students.

I’m kidding. I wanted to strangle him with his lanyard.

Which I have never wanted to do with any of my online students, but online education isn’t just valuable because the people you attract are awesome.

Great customers don’t just fill your heart with happiness; they fill up the bottom line.

Each customer can potentially contribute more value than even the cost of admission because of:

• Raving testimonials. The next time you launch to new members, you’ll have a ton of social proof that shows you kick ass.
• People talking. Reviews and endorsements from fans can increase your exposure to new audiences.
• Repeat purchases. If customers love one class you teach, they might love your next one or jump at the chance to train with you one-on-one.

Making the sale shouldn’t be the end of the process — it just might be the beginning of a long-term, profitable relationship.

Something I was never going to have with Mr. Lanyard.

Reason #5: You build authority

Now that ebooks are so common, how do you stand out as an authority in your industry?

Don’t just write about your knowledge. Be the expert who teaches the hot topic in your industry.

There’s nothing like having a signature program that makes people say: ‘Oh her? She’s the person who does [course name].’

And in addition to attracting people who want to take your course, you’ll probably attract people who want to hire the expert who delivers the course.

You might be approached about a lucrative contract, a speaking gig, or consultancy. Whichever it is, it’s definitely true that opportunities appear when you are an authority in your niche.

Now, that company’s training session hasn’t stopped me from running live workshops. I’ve enjoyed too many to know that it was (thankfully) a rare nightmare.

But I can’t ignore the profitable possibilities that come from expanding my reach with online teaching.

Over to you…

So, how can you teach your skills online?

Can you take content from an ebook and teach it in a paid webinar? Create a membership site? Organize an online bootcamp?

If so, I think you should do it. I’m pretty sure you won’t look back.

Join the discussion on LinkedIn to let us know about your experience with online teaching or how you plan to develop a new online course …

Additional reading: If you found this post useful, make sure to also read Pamela Wilson’s article, How to Structure and Sell Your Natural Expertise.

Editor’s Note on Teaching as a Business:

If teaching online sounds like a business model you want to learn more about, we’re going to be launching a brand-new version of our flagship Teaching Sells course, in a new “Quick Start” edition. Watch the blog for more information — we’ll be providing lots more details in the coming weeks.

About the Author: Amy Harrison is a copywriter, content trainer, and owner of Write With Influence: a comprehensive copywriting training system. To access your free five-day video course with techniques for writing irresistible marketing content, click here.

The post 5 Reasons Why It’s Practical and Profitable to Share Your Expertise Online appeared first on Copyblogger.

Showrunner ‘Short': The 4 Essential Elements of a Remarkable Podcast

Do you want to create a podcast for listeners?

Or do you want to deliver a remarkable audio experience to your audience?

In this reprisal of his presentation at Authority Rainmaker, Jerod Morris dives deep into the four essential elements of a remarkable audience experience.

You’ll learn:

• Why the general perception of the term “showrunner” is too limiting
• How Jerod’s method of proposing to his now-fiancée was a quintessential example of responsibility for an audience experience
• The step you should take right now if you’re considering launching a podcast
• What authenticity really is (and isn’t), and how to create an authentic connection with your audience
• How to ensure that every single episode you publish is useful to your audience
• Why sustainability is so simple to explain but so difficult to do
• What the elements of podcast profitability are — and which one is most important

Plus a lot more — including an impassioned call to action at the end that you won’t want to miss. It might just change how you view your relationship to your topic, your audience, and your show.

Click Here to Listen to
The Showrunner on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Showrunner ‘Short': The 4 Essential Elements of a Remarkable Podcast appeared first on Copyblogger.

Behind the Scenes: Authority Rainmaker, the Next Wave of Rainmaker.FM Shows, and the Departure of Robert Bruce

Here’s the “too long, didn’t listen version” … Authority Rainmaker was awesome (if we do say so ourselves). Especially Henry Rollins.

We’re launching a whole bunch of new shows on Rainmaker.FM. This is exciting.

Robert Bruce is leaving the show. He makes Benedict Arnold look like Arnold from Happy Days.

In this 34-minute episode of New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, Brian and Robert discuss:

• A look back at Authority Rainmaker 2015
• The amazing Henry Rollins experience
• A quick rundown of what’s coming on Rainmaker.FM
• Brian’s new, new podcast (yes, he’s starting something else)
• Why Robert is betraying Brian and what Brian’s doing about it

Click Here to Listen to
New Rainmaker with Brian Clark on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Behind the Scenes: Authority Rainmaker, the Next Wave of Rainmaker.FM Shows, and the Departure of Robert Bruce appeared first on Copyblogger.