6 Best SEO Content Writing Tips for SaaS Companies

One of the main reasons SaaS blogs fail to gain bigger audiences is their lack of correct SEO optimization and buyer targeting.

When you take the time to optimize your content for SEO, you help guarantee that it will reach a wider, more targeted audience.

And an industry-specific audience will be far more likely to engage with both your content and your business, ensuring your long-term success.

There are several different methods, tips, and tricks you can follow to implement best SEO practices in your SaaS writing, but let’s take a close look at the top six you can start doing today: researching well, writing for a specific target audience, using clear language, being direct, highlighting your benefits, and implementing keyword strategies.

Research, research, research

Perhaps the most important step in generating SEO-optimized SaaS content is performing the right market and keyword research.

By gathering the data and knowledge you need to draft successful content, you set your entire campaign up for success.

There are several different kinds of research you can perform to ensure you’re starting off on the right foot, so let’s briefly look at each of them:

Target audience research

To market anything to your audience, you have to know who they are and tailor your content to their problems and pain points.

For example, if your goal is to sell a chatbot, your target customer audience may be websites with an outdated chatbot or none at all.

You might target your campaign towards law firms one month and home services the next. Picking an industry also helps refine your SaaS content marketing and makes it more effective.

Also, think about where your market is at in the buyer journey.

At the top-of-the-funnel, you will want to publish more informational and brand awareness-type pieces.

You’ll want to educate the audience about how your SaaS product solves pain points and make them aware of their problems again to remind them of the need to fix them.

Middle-of-the-funnel content can include case studies, testimonials, demos, feature explanations, infographics with case study results, or statistics that showcase your product’s effectiveness.

Bottom-of-the-funnel topics can include comparisons to other solutions, independent reviews, testimonials or case studies with multiple calls to action, or sales brochures.

By researching your ideal customer, you can better understand what problems they face that you can help solve, the tone and style you need to communicate with them in, and what purchase barriers may be preventing them from doing business with you.

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Competition research

Once you know the audience you’re marketing to, you need to understand who else is competing for their attention. Who are your competitors? What is their core message? How are they appealing to your shared audience?

Once you have answers to these questions, you’ll be better equipped to differentiate your company from theirs and market yourself to your communal audience with greater success.

And without badmouthing them, you can start publishing content that does a fair comparison of their pros and cons compared to yours to help buyers decide.

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Product research

To market any product well, your writers have to understand it thoroughly. You need to make sure your writers know how it works, what its benefits are, and how it has the potential to make your customers’ lives easier.

The best way to do this is to provide your writers with unrestricted access to the product or at least a detailed demo. Access is best.

That way, they can learn its features hands-on and draft content for you that highlights all the best things your product has to offer from a knowledgeable, authoritative perspective.

Keyword research

After you have your ideal customer, competitors, and products nailed down, you can go ahead and draft whatever copy you are planning to release.

But before it’s written, take a minute to evaluate it through the final bit of research you’ll need to do: keyword research.

By researching appropriate short and long-tail SEO keywords along with those that rank well for your competitors, you can start to narrow down a target list.

Then, you can incorporate those desired keywords throughout your content in key places to ensure the highest possible Google ranking for your content is achieved.

There is much more that goes into SEO keyword optimization for SaaS content, but at minimum, you should target long tail keywords and questions at the beginning and work your way towards more competitive keywords across a period of 6-12 months.

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Write for your customer, not your company

A common mistake made by copywriters and content creators is drafting the content they want to feature rather than the content their audiences want to read.

SaaS companies all around the world produce content that shows off how fantastic their product is, and how much good it will do the customer upon purchase.

But the point of high engagement SEO-optimized copy isn’t to highlight how great your product or company is.

Rather, it’s to effectively show customers how they can solve their own problems by using the product you’re marketing. This is a small, but key difference that can separate good copy from great copy.

Individuals want to be the heroes of their own lives and take charge of situations. If you claim your product is the hero, that leaves no room for the individual in the driver’s seat, and they’ll be less likely to do business with your company.

Keep your language simple

If your target audience can’t understand what you’re saying, what’s the point of writing it?

Top SaaS companies are able to communicate clearly, consistently, and effectively with their audiences, carefully considering customer research they’ve already done and applying it to their writing style.

This means that when they’re trying to market to modern, younger generations, they may use language that reflects their customer base by incorporating slang, popular phrases, and relevant tones.

And when they’re marketing to industry professionals, they use appropriate jargon and technical language designed to accommodate those fields.

Be direct

People have incredibly short attention spans, so it’s important to grab onto them quickly with clear branding, slogans, and CTAs.

These easily identify your brand identity to audiences and help them better understand who you are and what your mission is, even if they’re only on your page for a few minutes.

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Benefits beat features

When you’re selling a SaaS product, focus on how it benefits your customers rather than all the amazing features you’ve jam-packed it with.

Remember, your competitors will often market products with similar features to your shared target audience, so relying on specific features to draw customers in may not work well.

Instead, focus on how your product benefits customers and makes their lives easier. Remember, all the features your product offers are likely present to help satisfy one or a few key pain points for your audience. Identify what those pain points are and what your broader benefits are, and then market that.

Make your pages readable

Webpage layouts and aesthetics are key focus points when you’re trying to draw in your SaaS audience.

If your site looks outdated, unattractive or slow and your viewers don’t like looking at it, they’ll go find the information they need somewhere else. And the more they click in and out of your site, the worse your performance will be on Google. Update your website/blog if needed in order to improve its aesthetics and loading speed.

Making your pages more readable isn’t difficult, nor does it take up a huge amount of time. All you need to do is make sure your content is broken up into smaller, more visually manageable sections, keep your paragraphs short, and feature lists and visuals wherever you can to break up the text.

Key takeaways

Optimizing your SaaS content for SEO isn’t difficult. It just takes a little bit of time, effort, and research, and before you know it, your pages will start ranking higher on Google, more people will find and enjoy your content, and your long-term business success will grow right along with it.

Guest Author: Sully Chaudhary, MBA, is an inbound/growth and content marketing expert with two self-founded businesses under his belt: WriterArmy, an award-winning premium SaaS content writing platform (and other verticals), and GrowthArmy, a growth marketing agency.

The post 6 Best SEO Content Writing Tips for SaaS Companies appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

* This article was originally published here

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The 5 Step Process For Producing Successful Money Making Ideas

I carry my phone with me everywhere. This small device has become my augmented self, a second brain and an always-on connection with the world. 

My phone is my Metaverse. 

Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t realized that the Metaverse is already here and Apple has been working on it since 2007.  

We are already living in a virtual world and have augmented reality all around us. The Metaverse sits in your pocket without you having to wear a 3-pound headset.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not wearing big ugly expensive goggles as that would mess up my hair. But online gamers either don’t have hair or don’t care.  

I am curious to see how Zuckerberg’s folly turns out as he spends a staggering $15 billion a year building out his imagined Zucky Metaverse chasing a rainbow.   

Sorry about the rant and…back to my smartphone. 

It is not just for checking my Facebook posts, for random scrolling of Instagram or watching the latest TikTok videos.  

My phone’s vital role is as my idea capture machine. I have lost a few ideas at times because I didn’t have it handy.

As I use my iPhone, the idea capture app I use is not complicated. It’s just the minimalist “Notes” app that is ready to go, sitting on my screen. It is much better than a notepad and pencil. 

Why? 

Because I can send it straight to my email and it is searchable.

Where do our mind’s thoughts come from?

That question is confusing people much smarter than me that work in a research lab, wear white coats and have a PhD. 

I am not quite sure of my mind’s thought source but all I know is that sometimes it gets rather noisy in there. And I could often do with a mute button. Because that babble is usually not useful.

 Let me mention a few of those unhelpful thoughts. 

Worrying about the past, fearing the future or thinking about conversations that really don’t matter. None of that is useful.

My approach

I have had a lot of good ideas mixed up in a tirade of meaningless thoughts over the years and most are not worth saving. In fact, they are mostly folly. Here is my toolbox to make the good ideas rise to the top.

• Foster inspiration. Ideas don’t come out of a vacuum. You need inspiration and information. Reading, listening to podcast guests, interviewing people (I do that every week on my Podcast) and watching a good TedTalk.  
• Be curious. Curiosity can be fostered and nurtured. This can be as simple as asking an internal “Why” as a default question for almost everything. But I wouldn’t recommend doing that too much with your “significant other”!
• Observe problems and write them down and see if your mind can come up with a solution. 
• Write it out. Sit down and write about it and research the idea topic area. My blog posts over the years have been where I go to research, learn and nurture ideas. Getting an idea out of your mind and onto figurative paper allows you to make sense of the idea and see if it makes sense in the light of day. This is where it starts to take form.

The last and final test is when you make an idea useful by giving it form and sharing it and taking it for a test drive.

No guarantees of success

There are no guarantees of success and this includes ideas that turn into art, products or services. 

Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan till they get hit in the face”.

Most ideas and plans don’t work out in the reality of the market. Many ideas don’t handle the furnace of reality. 

This could be your idea for starting a business or launching a low-risk side hustle.

Starting and launching your idea could involve the painful experience of “getting hit in the face”. 

So how do you produce good ideas?

First, let me clarify what a good idea is. It has utility, is useful and it works. If you achieve that then the world claps. 

A bad idea is when you are ignored and hear nothing. 

In 1965 James Webb Young published a short 47-page book called “ A Technique for Producing Ideas”. In it, he reveals his 5 step process for producing and nurturing ideas with the intention to help others go from an idea to something that is useful. An idea acted on.    

He touches on how most good ideas are often a new combination of old ideas. 

His 5-step process at a glance:

1. The gathering of the raw materials. This includes information on an immediate problem and also just collecting general knowledge.
2. Working these materials intensely over in your mind. Ask questions and interrogate the idea consciously.
3. The incubation stage. This is where you let the idea go and let the subconscious get to work. 
4. The Eureka moment. Where the idea takes full form. This is optimized by writing it out (to get more clarity) and planning the final step.
5. Idea action: The final step. The shaping and polishing of the idea are finally achieved by acting on it. That is where an idea becomes useful. This is the Mike Tyson moment. The idea meets reality.

Ideas are plentiful and action is scarce. Don’t let fear stop you from acting.

How to move an idea to action with an online side hustle

There is a low-risk way to start. It’s called Side Hustle Strategies.

Start an “Online Side Hustle” and get the inspiration, information and resources to kickstart your idea. The best part? You can get started for free with a risk-free one-month trial.

If you sign up today, you’ll also get a bonus free e-book “The 5 Essential Steps To Start a Successful Online Side Hustle” when you register.

In this short 24-page e-book, you’ll discover my signature ‘Freedom Code Framework’, outlining the actionable steps you can use to start implementing your dream.

Start your Freedom journey to escape the 9–5 and the daily commute.

The post The 5 Step Process For Producing Successful Money Making Ideas appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

* This article was originally published here

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3 Reasons Why You’re NOT Starting Your Online Side Hustle – And One Simple Way to Fix That

‘I’ve got a great idea!’, you think to yourself.

From a distance, all our ideas look good.  We have a feeling they are going to work.

Some of us even sit down and write a simple business plan, and share it with our partner, friends or even family.  

But as the dream and thought bubble takes form our humanity and fear show up on our shoulders, taking on the shape of demons in the center stage of our minds.

They glower in the dark of night. They whisper in our ears in the early waking hours, somewhere between our dreams and a nightmare. 

This non-virtuous circle of fear is fed by ourselves and other people too.

3 big reasons you never go from idea to action 

1. Self-doubt: Your mind starts asking questions on a loop –  “Will this actually work?”
2. A guarantee: We go looking for surety and that looks like this internal conversation “If I know it will work then I will do it”. 
3. Friendly fire: Friends and family sit at our elbows and project their own fears. The mental diatribe? Are you crazy? “It will never work, think of your family”. 

What’s the solution? 

The monkey mind mayhem stopping you from starting is never-ending. But there is a solution.

To make your side hustle dream a reality you need a routine, or as Seth Godin says “a practice”. 

• Athletes show up every morning and practice. 
• Musicians sit down every day and play riffs and scales and practice. 
• Chefs turn up and cook trial dishes that sometimes are put in the trash. That’s practice.
• Writers craft hundreds of words every day and wrangle them into magic. They practice.

And they all do it despite how they are feeling that day. They aren’t waiting for applause. Not expecting affirmation. No guarantees of success. 

But they show up. 

Many of them set a time to start and a time to stop. Some writers set a goal to write 500 words.  

The Jerry Seinfeld Approach 

Jerry Seinfeld became famous because he got good at telling jokes. How did he do it? 

“Jerry said it was simple. To be a better comic, write better jokes. To write better jokes, write every day”. 

His system: Don’t break the chain:

Get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.

“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.”

He didn’t write a whole monolugue. He just committed to the priactice of writing one joke per day. He didn’t care if it was good or bad. He just wrote one joke.  

So show up. Sit down. Strap yourself in. And start. Don’t wait to be perfect. 

Make creating and starting your art, your side hustle… a daily “practice”. A routine.  

There are no guarantees. But magic will appear if you strap yourself in and do the work. Start your art. One day at a time.

Every day.

The post 3 Reasons Why You’re NOT Starting Your Online Side Hustle – And One Simple Way to Fix That appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

* This article was originally published here

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Productivity vs. Efficiency: What Really Matters in the Workplace

Productivity and efficiency are easily among the most used keywords among business leaders and organizations. No matter which industry they operate in, organizations are obsessed with improving productivity or efficiency to become more successful.

However, the question remains. Is productivity the same, or is it different from efficiency? Are they simply two sides of the same coin? Is one more important than the other?

Let’s explore what these two metrics mean for organizations and how they can be leveraged for success.

Understanding productivity

In layman’s terms, productivity can be defined as the output against a unit of a given input, such as a time period. If the organization or employee produces more output with the same resources, productivity increases. Similarly, productivity will also increase if the same output is produced by fewer resources.

Most organizations measure productivity by calculating output against time. Since measuring productivity is a relatively straightforward task, it is no wonder why this metric gets a lot of attention.

Formula for calculating productivity

There are various formulas for productivity, ranging from simple to complex. However, they all follow the same pattern given below.

Output / Input = Productivity

Consider an organization that produces $10,000 worth of goods or services in 1,000 hours. That $10,000 is the output and the 1,000 hours becomes the input. Using the formula given above, you end up with $10 per hour, which is the productivity level of the organization.

Understanding efficiency

Efficiency is all about having the ability to create the desired output with minimal or zero waste. Waste, as used here, can be either materials, time, or both.

In other words, efficiency denotes the degree to which resources are being used to achieve the desired output. Being efficient means that you are achieving the same results but with fewer resources.

Formula for calculating efficiency

By improving efficiency, organizations can reduce the hours, budgets or labor needed to produce the same output. To calculate efficiency (in percentage), organizations can leverage the following formula:

(Expected Input / Actual Input) x100 = Efficiency

Take the example mentioned previously. The organization expects to do $10,000 worth of work in 1,000 hours. What if the organization achieves the same in just 800 hours? By using the above formula, it is understood that the organization has achieved an efficiency of 125%.

The relationship between productivity and efficiency

As seen above, productivity is all about getting more work done during the same time period. On the other hand, efficiency is about getting the same amount of work done but in a shorter time period.

As such, productivity and efficiency are interlinked. If productivity deals with the quantity of the organization’s output, then efficiency is about its quality.

Organizations cannot afford to ignore one in favor of another. If employees know what they must do and how to complete it quickly, the workflows improve. As a result, employees gain more time to focus on their tasks instead of spending time trying to understand the next set of tasks.

While efficiency may not always improve productivity, it ensures that the output meets expected requirements without errors. As a result, organizations no longer need to spend more time, labor, and resources to fix their mistakes.

In short, productivity and efficiency together will give the organization “true productivity”.

Therefore, productivity and efficiency must go hand in hand to ensure the success of an organization. While it can be challenging to achieve a balance between these two metrics, the benefits are considerable.

How to increase both productivity and efficiency

For an organization, it is imperative that measures are put in place to increase productivity as well as efficiency. Higher productivity and efficiency levels directly correlate to smarter use of available resources such as time and materials.

Of course, it also means the organization becomes capable of delivering more products and services at a higher quality. As a result, there is an improvement in revenue, profitability and growth for the organization. On the other hand, poor resource utilization can result in increased costs that can put a burden on the organization and its competitiveness.

Therefore, no matter how well an organization is performing, it is essential that they track and improve both productivity and efficiency. Here are a few tips for doing so:

Solicit feedback from employees

To better understand what employees need to do to improve their efficiency and productivity, the organization must seek to gather their feedback on a regular basis.

Surveys and team meetings are excellent ways to understand those needs. Of course, the organization must also focus on creating a safe environment. This allows employees to share their opinions and ideas without fear and risk of being penalized.

By gathering information, the organization gains a better understanding of the roadblocks that employees face in improving themselves and their output.

Clarify goals and responsibilities

It is difficult for employees to be productive without a clear understanding of what’s expected from them. By clarifying the goals and objectives, it becomes easier to achieve the results. Moreover, it encourages employees to work harder and even promotes teamwork. Therefore, leaders must try to establish clear goals at the outset of any project for optimal productivity and efficiency.

Ensure efficient resource allocation

Ultimately, the efficiency of employees is greatly influenced by their skills. Therefore, by allocating employees with the right skills to the right task, leaders can considerably improve their team performance. Efficient allocation of resources allows organizations to prevent issues such as increased costs and missed deadlines.

To ensure optimal resource allocation, leaders and managers need to understand the skills of their employees as well as their tasks. Efforts must be made to ensure that employees are not overallocated or under-allocated. Otherwise, their performance can drop drastically.

Leverage time tracking

Tracking employees’ time is useful in more ways than one. Time tracking certainly helps in monitoring and evaluating the performance levels of employees. Additionally, it provides insight into the daily activities and tasks of the employees, enabling leaders to improve task and work distribution to improve overall productivity.

In addition, time tracking allows organizations to achieve other benefits such as increased accountability, lower burnout and cost reduction. Employees are also able to focus on and prioritize their work better.

Implement automated tools

In today’s workplace, automation is a key enabler of productivity and efficiency. There are several kinds of automated tools available for different kinds of work. By leveraging these tools, organizations can automate many mundane and repetitive tasks such as administrative work. Since these tools take over those tasks, employees become free to focus their efforts on more complex endeavors. This improves productivity.

Moreover, automation tools are able to complete those tasks at a much faster rate and with a high degree of accuracy. Therefore, there is a corresponding rise in efficiency as well. Any organization looking to increase overall performance and become more competitive must seek out the right automation tools for its employees.

Ultimately, the fact is that productivity and efficiency must be inextricably linked for an organization to experience true productivity. As the benefits are considerable, organizations must seek to employ proper mechanisms and tools to improve these two critical metrics.

Of course, since both productivity and efficiency are interlinked with time, organizations will do well to invest in a robust time management platform. A global cloud-based time tracking system can help organizations capture every minute of work. With that data, leaders and managers can make the best decisions for improving productivity and efficiency levels across the board.

Guest Author: Arpan is an assistant content marketing manager at Replicon. He enjoys learning and writing about technologies that are making the world a better place. Arpan enjoys good books, traveling, and writing on a wide range of subjects, from coffee to technology.

The post Productivity vs. Efficiency: What Really Matters in the Workplace appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

* This article was originally published here

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5 Online Side Hustles That Can Make You Over $10,000 a Month

Revenue in the global online education market is projected to reach $146.9 billion by the end of 2022.

Why it matters

This large and lucrative online education market provides the opportunity to transform your knowledge into a digital product and sell it online. This opportunity is available for everyone today (not just the big boys like the universities and colleges!). 

So packaging your knowledge and making money from it is democratized! And the best part? You can start with minimal risk by launching an online side hustle. There are so many free platforms that make it easy to get started.

Selling your expertise on the web is one of the easiest ways to earn $10,000+ a month online. You can start it from home as a digital side hustle while still holding down your 9-5 day job. 

Earning an extra $10,000 a month could change your life.

What’s also great about an online course is that it is scalable. What that means is that you don’t have to show up once you have created it. This means you are no longer trading time for money.

The hard part is that you may need to spend some time after work creating the course. But if you’re a passionate expert who has built up expertise and love what you do then packaging your know-how into a course and creating a product is a much more efficient way of educating rather than showing up in the classroom or lecture hall everyday.

In the news

Lynda (now re-branded as LinkedIn Learning) was an online course platform that was sold to LinkedIn in 2015 for $1.5 billion and Microsoft bought LinkedIn a year later for $26.2 billion. 

Back in 1995, Lynda Weinman taught digital media and motion graphics at the Art Center College of Design in California. She started an online side hustle (yes they existed back then!) to help her students with free web resources.

She realized that having to show up everyday and presenting the same lecture on the same topic as not the best use of her time.

She realised that if you record a lecture and then share it online it can live forever and only required her to deliver the content once.

Go deeper

Creating a course from scratch can be difficult unless you use an education or an online course platform to help you start, design and host the course.

Here are three of the top platforms where you can create your course, host it and even create optimized marketing funnels to promote it using best practices and templates.

#1 Kajabi

Kajabi is one of the best online platforms. It allows you to do much more than just hosting and delivering online courses or memberships.

Kajabi have helped 1 in 3 of their customers (who are both experienced entrepreneurs and side hustle amateurs) earn over $100,000 a year using the platform.

It is much more than a course builder and the pricing reflects that. With Kajabi you can:

• Build well designed course websites
• Create a blog
• Build sales funnels 
• Set up and start your email marketing

Pricing starts at $119 a month when paid annually and with a 14 day free trial and includes the following features:

• 3 products
• 3 funnels
• Unlimited landing pages
• Unlimited marketing emails
• 10,000 contacts
• 1,000 customers
• 1 website
• 1 admin user

#2 Teachable  

Teachable is a freemium platform, this makes it a good choice for beginners who have never created a course.

As standard, all plans include:

• Creating your course or coaching service quickly with their intuitive drag-and-drop builder
• Unlimited hosting 
• Enroll an unlimited amount of students in your online school
• Integrate with MailChimp, Zapier, ConvertKit, Google Analytics, Segment, and more

You can sign up with the freemium product and then the paid version starts from $29 paid annually.

The free version doesn’t include a custom domain. But it provides the following features (which are limited but a good place to start).

• 10% transaction fees on sales
• Admin users
• Courses
• Coaching
• Digital downloads
• Unlimited students
• Integrated website and builder

#3 Thinkific

Thinkific is a market leader, with 32,000+ bloggers, programmers and marketers who use their platform to create and host their courses.

Its presence in the market is significant with 50,000+ course creators, 100m+ courses taken and $650m in sales generated by its users.

The platform allows you to add multiple media content types including:

• Videos 
• Quizzes 
• Text 
• PDF 
• Surveys

Thinkific offers a free plan but again it doesn’t provide a custom domain.

The features include:

• 1 course
• 1 community
• 2 spaces per community
• 1 administrator
• Unlimited Students
• 0% transaction fee

4 more ways to make $10,000+ a month online

The options for starting an online side hustle in a digital world are infinite and that leads to confusion and inaction. 

The big questions?

• What should I do?   
• How do I start?

The best way to discover what works is to simply start. It has never been easier to do that with low cost tools and access to your market via the internet, social media and your smartphone. 

Here are 4 more ways to make $10,000+ a month online.

1. Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon)

Amazon makes it easy to find products and sell them via the platform. What’s great about this online side hustle is that Amazon does all the heavy lifting. An app to find a product and all the fulfillment to get it to the customers. It even provides customer support for you.    

On a recent podcast with Ann Sieg we discussed how to source products, sell them and deliver them to customers on Amazon.

Many of her students at E-commerce Business School go onto create multi-million dollar businesses. 

Victoria who was a full-time nurse and mother of three was able to hit $41.29 k in sales in just 90 days and all while working 12-hour night shifts! Now that is a great online side hustle.

2. Freelancing

According to Canva research, design is one of the best categories to start a freelancing side hustle. The second top spot was app developers but the next best category was for digital design skills and expertise.

The top 4 revenue results

Monthly sales for top earning freelancers are the following:

1. Illustration – $406,000+ (Design) or $33,833 per mth
2. Proofreading and editing –  $341,000+ (Writing) or $28,416 per mth
3. Animation – $309,000+ (Design) or $25,750 per mth
4. Video editor – $280,000+ (Design) or $23,333 per mth

3. Online Coaching

According to Growth Market Reports, the global online coaching market size was valued at around USD 1938.41 million in 2021 and is projected to reach around USD 4567.44 million by 2030, expanding at a CAGR of 13.4% during the forecast period, 2022–2030.

The growth of the market is attributed to increasing demand for virtual training services and online coaching platforms

When done well, online coaching is a very lucrative side hustle. If you can work out how to scale it then it can become a multi-million dollar business. 

One of the best online coaching entrepreneurs is Amy Porterfield.   Her area of coaching is in “Online Marketing” and she has built a multiple 7-figure online business.

The secret to scaling online coaching? Turn your expertise into a product.

4. E-Books

I was traveling through Italy and as I love to read I had brought a hardcover book with me. It was an autobiography of Steve Jobs. It weighed nearly 2 pounds. 

The weight and size proved to be cumbersome. I vowed never to do that again. Now I carry around my entire library of books in my iPad and despite adding more books the weight never increases.

Amazon changed the book market forever with the launch of the Kindle.

Recently I interviewed Allan Dib on the Jeff Bullas Show Podcast and we discussed the extraordinary success of “The One Page Marketing Plan”, a book he published in 2016 that has over 6,763 ratings. 

Allan has made $10,000+ a month from his book and in a later podcast episode we will take a closer look at how he did that.

How a science blogger wrote and self published an e-book that became a Hollywood movie blockbuster

Andy Weir was a science trained programmer who started a blog and then decided to self publish the chapters and sell it on Amazon for just $0.99. 

He wanted his novel, The Martian, to be as scientifically accurate as possible, doing extensive research into orbital mechanics, conditions on the planet Mars and the history of human spaceflight.

The Martian ended up on the  New York Times bestseller list, and by 2013 the printing and film rights were sold for roughly $100,000 but the movie went on to earn $670 million in box office sales.

He said he has earned more from the audible version of his book over the physical book and movie rights.

The data

The rise of Kindle has made it possible to self publish and to earn $10,000+ a month but you do need to be one of the top authors on Amazon. 

Here is some data to get you inspired:

• 30-34% of all ebooks sold are self-published
• 300 million self-published books are sold each year 
• $1.25 billion worth of self-published books are sold each year
• Amazon pays $250 million in royalties to self-published authors each year

Wrapping it up

There are almost infinite ways to make $10,000+ a month online and I have just listed five.

If you’re struggling to choose an online side hustle, start with an idea that is at the intersection of what you are good at, what you love doing and what the world will pay you for.

Nothing happens until you create and then share it to find out if it works. There are no guarantees.  

The post 5 Online Side Hustles That Can Make You Over $10,000 a Month appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

* This article was originally published here

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6 SaaS Lead Generation Mistakes You Should Avoid

Generating leads is the lifeblood of any company. Leads are the backbone of a SaaS startup because the number and quality of leads influence all key metrics like revenue, churn and retention rates, cost per customer acquisition, etc.

All SaaS companies understand this. An idea of how important lead generation is runs through their DNA. It is ingrained in their brains.

But, despite knowing full well the criticality of solid lead generation, many SaaS marketers do it wrong.

Mistakes in SaaS lead generation quickly become fatal, leading to potentially disastrous consequences.

In this article, we will discuss top lead generation mistakes that plague the SaaS industry and how you can avoid them.

Be sure to read until the end to walk away with some eye-opening mistakes and insightful advice.

SaaS lead generation: fatal mistakes

Lead generation is to SaaS what oxygen is to humans. Just like humans can’t survive without high-quality oxygen, SaaS businesses cannot survive without good leads.

Mistakes in lead generation can result in a low volume of leads or, worse, unqualified leads.

Here are some of the most common SaaS lead generation mistakes you can avoid to make sure your company keeps moving forward.

Fatal mistake #01: Focusing too much on quantity. Ignoring quality.

Over 53% of marketers say more than half of their budget goes into lead generation. Interestingly, 29% of SaaS companies fail because they “run out of cash.”

Leads come at a cost. And when you focus on the volume of leads, ignoring quality, you end up with cold leads that contribute little more than mere peanuts to your business. Sometimes not even that.

But since quality isn’t quantifiable and does not manifest as soon and as clearly as the volume of leads, marketers prefer the latter.

When marketers are forced to come up with good numbers in boardroom meetings, they often make the fatal mistake of casting a wide net and picking up as many leads as possible.

Companies pump their money into driving paid ads and gaining leads. This increases their ad spend and results in little to no tangible ROI.

This brings a short-term win. You may get approving nods in the boardroom, but in the long run, these cold, unqualified leads become not only expensive but detrimental to business continuity.

But since these results appear over time, it is too late before marketers or shareholders realize their mistakes.

Understand the importance of quality leads and focus on gaining good leads instead of attracting just anyone who will listen to your pitch.

Qualified leads are cheaper and have a high lifetime value, and hence contribute positively to your business in every way possible.

One way you can enhance the quality of your leads is by talking to your sales department.

This may be the last thing you want to do, but those people could share some valuable insights on the kind of leads that convert and contribute.

When we say you should focus on the quality of leads, we don’t mean to imply that you should cast quantity right out.

Strike a balance between quantity and quality. Make sure you are attracting enough high-quality leads in your sales funnel that even if a set percentage of it converts, it could be sufficient to keep your growth trajectory moving forward.

Understanding your audience is also one of the ways of improving lead quality.

A SaaS company reduced its ad spend by 30-40% by eliminating unqualified prospects from their target audience.

This effort also helped them reduce the cost/lead acquisition by 0.51%, which may seem small, but could mean big things for startups.

Fatal mistake #02: Inaccurate buyer personas

Buyer personas play a vital role in helping you get quality leads. Accurate buyer personas are a sure-fire way to avoid fatal mistake #01.

But less than 10% of SaaS companies surveyed had actually quantified their buyer personas. This means they were basing their marketing messages on mere assumptions, with no data to back up their claims of how their targeted buyers are.

Furthermore, a whopping 55% of the SaaS companies survey had only “thought about their customers” without going deep enough to know every minute detail about them.

So, while it may seem impossible for a SaaS company to take buyer personas lightly, ignoring them completely is a common mistake.

Prioritize your buyer persona or customer avatar before deep diving into lead acquisition.

A solid buyer persona helps you narrow down your target audience, so you take your message to those who matter. This ultimately uplifts the quality of leads you generate and brings down other metrics like CPA and churn rate.

The first step to enhancing your buyer persona is identifying your lead qualification criteria. Who classifies as a high-quality lead? Answering these questions can help here:

• What is the job title of the buyer?
• Which industry do they belong to?
• What is their company size?
• What is their age?
• What is their preferred content type?
• What are their job responsibilities and pain points/struggles?
• What are the solutions they are looking for that would be “worth buying” for them?

Don’t just assume answers to these questions. Quantify them with research and data.

Another fatal mistake B2B SaaS companies make is confusing their users with customers.

In the B2B space, users are not normally the people buying the software. The buying power rests with someone else, perhaps the CTO or CEO of the company.

So, don’t use your user persona as your buyer persona. Find who the buyer is, understand them, and build a persona around this research.

A team’s collaboration platform was struggling with high cost per customer acquisition. They were getting leads. But the leads’ expectations and product features weren’t a match.

They were not targeting the right people. This resulted in high churn rates and, of course, high CPAs.

They knew they needed to focus on the right audience. An in-depth buyer’s research and a bunch of other strategies helped them increase their SQLs by a whopping 700%.

So, don’t just “think about your customers.” Know them in detail.

Fatal mistake #03: Lack of content marketing strategy

It is hard to find a SaaS company that does not do content marketing in some shape or form. In fact, it’s interesting to know, only 15% of SaaS companies don’t have a blog. 

But the mistake that an overwhelmingly large majority of SaaS companies make while doing content marketing is that… they just do it. These SaaS content marketers do not have a focused strategy or a fixed goal that they are working towards.

They post blogs every now and then, but these blogs or the posting schedule does not have a set aim, and hence they fail to drive results.

Understand what you want to gain from your content. Is it leads? Or is it just authority?

In this case, you want to gain more leads while also coming off as a thought leader.

Learn about your target audience’s pain points and create content that offers valuable solutions and insights.

Also, make sure your content actually gets to its audience. That’s another mistake SaaS marketers often make. They create awesome content, but that content never goes beyond their website.

So, develop a strong content distribution system that ensures your content gets to the people you have created it for.

Additionally, posting once every month isn’t enough. Search engines and people both love it when you post regularly. So don’t commit yet another fatal mistake of posting infrequently.

HubSpot, a well-known SaaS company, recently crossed the 100,000 customers mark. While many factors could contribute to this success, one thing that stands out is the abundance of HubSpot blogging.

They post around 900 high-quality, valuable blogs each year. No one can ever deny the contribution of these blogs to their lead generation and customer acquisition success.

So, focus on publishing at least one blog post a week and share it across your social networks with a catchy caption.

A SaaS platform needed more organic leads to sign up for their product and opted for content marketing.

Along with distributing thought leadership content across different websites where they knew their buyers hang out, they also published highly informative content on the company’s blog.

As a result of their efforts, their traffic increased by 245%, and conversions shot up by 508%.

So, don’t just create content. Be smart with it.

Fatal mistake #04: Not optimizing web pages for lead generation

Some SaaS companies optimize their landing pages for lead generation, which is great. But they ignore other web pages that might be seeing more web traffic than those landing pages. This isn’t good. In fact, ignoring your high web traffic pages could be a fatal mistake.

So, while optimizing your landing pages for lead generation, don’t leave your website’s home page, about page, and other important pages in the ditch.

Make your USP clear, get to the point quickly, and tell the customers clearly how your platform will solve their problems.

Be smart about CTA placement, and don’t be too diverse in CTAs. Stick to one CTA per page to avoid a choice overload.

Fatal mistake #05: Not using social media for lead generation

Most SaaS companies use social media marketing as a top-of-the-funnel strategy.

This is okay.

But keeping it restricted to TOFU could result in you missing out on exciting lead generation opportunities that some social platforms offer.

Around 59% of marketers believe that social media marketing is an effective lead generation channel. But 97% of them use social media for promotion only.

Social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram have great tools and opportunities for SaaS platforms and brands in general to leverage and gain important leads.

You can share your blogs on your social handles or post a link to your offers. Make sure to identify which platform your target audience hangs out on the most and be active there.

A non-profit SaaS company wanted to get the most out of Facebook’s lead generation opportunities. Their marketing agency deployed a strategic Facebook ads campaign and managed to increase their Facebook-driven leads by 8% at 87% of the original cost in just 6 weeks.

Fatal mistake #06: Adopting a one-size-fits-all approach

If you search for lead generation ideas on Google, you’ll come across gazillions of blogs promising to tell you how you can improve your lead gen game.

And while some of these blogs do point you in the right direction, it is important to find a good starting point to consider based on your unique business model and product offerings. For your lead generation efforts, ideas shared online are never meant to be implemented as is.

The strategies in blogs are often too generic. And when SaaS marketers implement them without adjusting for the SaaS industry, they struggle to achieve good results.

Your audience is unique. Your product is different. Your budget is different. You need to consider all these factors and develop a lead generation approach with customized strategies to build your business.

Conclusion

Effective lead generation is the key to a SaaS company’s growth. However, many SaaS startups commit fatal mistakes while attempting to score as many leads as possible and end up inflating their marketing budget with no tangible returns to account for.

Therefore, SaaS marketers must stay informed of the lead gen mistakes their unsuccessful peers have been making and learn from them to avoid going down the same sad route.  

Guest Author: Atul Jindal is a web design and marketing specialist, having interests in doing websites/apps optimized for SEO with a core focus on conversion optimization. He creates web experiences that bring conversations and transform web traffic into paying customers or leads.

The post 6 SaaS Lead Generation Mistakes You Should Avoid appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

* This article was originally published here

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5 Books Reveal Online Business Models That Are Changing The World [Part 4 of 5]

Subscription businesses are growing at 500% to 800% faster than traditional businesses and are estimated to be worth well over $200 billion at the end of 2022. 

Why it matters

Making money online isn’t just about having a good idea, how much venture capital you have raised, or how hard you work.

It’s about how good your timing is. 

Launching a new business into a fading and failing trend is a surefire way to lose a lot of money (Hint: You wouldn’t want to be starting a video rental store).

It would, however, be smart to start an online video streaming business with a subscription business model. And a company called Netflix comes to mind in that regard.

In the news

In a Ted Talk by Bill Gross on “The Single Biggest Reason Why Start-ups Succeed” (currently viewed over 10 million times on YouTube), Bill reveals that after analyzing 200+ startups the biggest reason for success was “timing” at 42%. Team and execution came second, and the uniqueness of an idea came third.  

Trend spotting is a skill the best entrepreneurs often have in common.  

Deeper dive

Here are 5 Books that will challenge your thinking about being an entrepreneur in a digital world. These books are worth exploring slowly and thoughtfully. 

These books reveal a few different business models that work well and are proven in the digital business world. These include:

1. Subscription Business Models (Physical and Information Products)
2. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) e-Commerce Business Models
3. Software as a Service (SaaS)  business models 

1. The Lean Startup: How Relentless Change Creates Radically Successful Businesses

This book by Eric Ries provides a broad landscape of the world of an online business.

In essence, it outlines the importance of measuring what works and what doesn’t with data in real-time. And we should always start with a “Minimal Viable Product” (MVP) to test what works and what doesn’t.

Business is both an art and a science and new technology has allowed anyone to test and trial ideas fast and cheaply to measure what succeeds, engages or fails. 

Out of this have come a few terms that may shape your approach to launching a new online business.

• MVP – Minimal Viable Product
• MTP – Minimal Testable Product
• MLP- Minimal Lovable Product

The Lean Startup provides insight into the fast-evolving landscape of digital businesses. It also provides great context for emerging online business models. 

The digital age has turned almost every aspect of our world on its head. This extends to our personal lives and how we do business.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs – in companies of all sizes – a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. 

2. The Forever Transaction: How to Build a Subscription Model So Compelling, Your Customers Will Never Want to Leave

This book by Robbie Kellman Baxter reveals how digital subscription business models are changing how we acquire, access and use products and services.

The idea is simple. Your customers pay a subscription fee and periodically receive delivery of your goods.

These can be physical goods such as HelloFresh (healthy food) and Dollar Shave Club (men’s razors) or they can be digital products or even services in the B2B category. An innovator in this space is Shuttlerock. They offer “Creative as a Service” (CaaS) where you can purchase video advertising creative for a fixed fee each month.      

More and more companies are concluding that the potential rewards of subscription-based products and services are worth the risk of radically changing their business models. They’re correct.

The membership economy is here and it’s here to stay—and if you want to compete for the long run, you need to join it. 

Strategy consultant Robbie Kellman Baxter (who I interviewed on my Podcast “The Jeff Bullas Show”), has been helping companies excel in this business environment for more than a decade.

In her book, The Forever Transaction, she reveals all her secrets. You can also find a few more of them on my YouTube Channel!  

Whatever industry you’re in, Baxter provides the inspiration, tools, and insight you need to build and execute a business model that will leave your competition in the dust.

You’ll also master all the essentials of succeeding in the membership economy, like subscription pricing, Software-as-a-Service, digital community engagement, and freemium incentives as a way to turn casual browsers into cash-paying super-users.

With The Forever Transaction, you have everything you need to build durable, long-term relationships with every customer, and leverage them for ultimate business success―today, tomorrow, and forever.

3. Aggregator Navigator: The Ultimate Playbook for Selling Your Amazon Brand Successfully 

This is a short but revealing book on building multi-million dollar e-commerce businesses on Amazon.

In a recent interview with Josh Dittrich on my Podcast “The Jeff Bullas Show” titled “Turning an Amazon Side Hustle into a Multi-Million Dollar Business” we discussed the fast-growing online business opportunities in the “FBA”  eCommerce segment (Fulfillment by Amazon).

The rise of a new business model that outsources the acquisition of products on Amazon and the distribution and fulfillment on the platform is a huge opportunity for potential entrepreneurs and those who want to start a side hustle.

In Aggregator Navigator, Josh Dittrich shares what he’s learned from building and selling two Amazon businesses for an eight-figure amount.

He says, “I didn’t have any special training in this. I’m a father of five from Minnesota who learned as I went along. I’ve written this book so that anyone who hopes to do what I did is able to learn from my experiments, mistakes and wins, whether they’re self-taught, as I am, or have an MBA from Harvard Business School. Building a business you can sell for millions of dollars takes the right strategy and daily steps, and you’ll learn exactly what you need to pull it off”.

Watch the interview on YouTube. 

4. That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea

In 1997 Marc Randolph had an idea, using and leveraging the internet to rent movies.

It worked for a while and then the advent of high-speed broadband changed the game. You no longer needed to watch a video on your VHS machine as the movie could be watched instantly via the web.

Many ideas end in failure, but some lead to billion-dollar companies. In this book, Marc Randolph outlines how an idea worked and then it didn’t. 

The Internet changed how we create media and distribute media. The online media business model has been evolving since the web and search engines changed the game. The subscription media model is everywhere. 

• News Media – Washington Post and Wired Magazine
• Entertainment Media – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and many more 
• Investment Newsletter media – Motley Fool 

Almost every media company offers its information as a subscription. You now don’t own a movie, you “rent” or subscribe.

5. Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry

The rise of the Internet disrupted how we bought and used software to power our businesses. 

This industry is known as “Software as a Service” (SaaS).

In this book by Marc Benioff, we learn how salesforce.com grew from a start-up in a rented apartment into the world’s fastest-growing software company in less than a decade.

For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change.

Showing how salesforce.com not only survived the dotcom implosion of 2001, but went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and sparked a $46-billion dollar industry.

Benioff’s story will help business leaders and entrepreneurs stand out, innovate better, and grow faster in any economic climate.  

Wrapping it up

Traditional business models have been disrupted and they will keep evolving. You need to discover what you are good at, what you enjoy doing and then create. Seth Godin said it well, “Do what you love is for amateurs. Love what you do is for professionals”. 

 So create a product or service that is built on your “good” and fall in love with the process. 

Enjoy the process and practice of creating every day as an artist and entrepreneur. Show up every day and step into the process and routine so you are not at the whim of emotion. The flow will come out of the routine of “go”. 

Then share your creation and discover the answer to a big question: Will the world pay me for that?   

Your business model will be imperfect at first. But the process of turning up every day and being curious about what your daily action produces will be the difference between success and failure.

Read Part 1 of this series: 6 Books That Inspired My Online Side Hustle Success

Read Part 2 of this series: 5 Books To Supercharge Your Creativity

Read Part 3 of this series: These 6 Books Reveal How to Get Free Traffic on Social Media

The post 5 Books Reveal Online Business Models That Are Changing The World [Part 4 of 5] appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

* This article was originally published here

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