AP 0222: How Do I Offer Enhanced Content Along with Posts?

AskPat 222 Episode Transcript

Pat: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 222, two to the third power. Not really, but anyway, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate you.

We have a great question today from Catherine, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's awesome sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, the super easy-to-use cloud accounting solution, for those of you who are looking to organize your finances and keep things easy so you don't have any headaches and you can just keep moving on with your business. Great for invoicing. They have a mobile app, an award winning mobile app, actually. You can keep track of expenses, income, and also all the things you need to do for tax season. Again, just push a button, easy. Yeah. I think you'll love it. It's something I wished I got started with earlier. That's one of my, “What would you do differently if you could start over again?” Yeah. Go to FreshBooks.com/askpat, and enter “AskPat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section for a free trial. Awesome. Now, let's get to today's question from Catherine.

Catherine: Hi, Pat. My name is Catherine Burhenne, and I'm a blogger over at AskTheDentist.com. We're actually a father-daughter team. My dad's the dentist, and I help him with a lot of the content and marketing for our blog. My question for you, Pat, is that I heard you mentioned enhanced content, and I'm seeing people do this a lot. By enhanced content, I mean providing a free download at the end of a post or another freebie or giveaway to encourage people to read your post and get more value out of it, and then, of course, subscribe to your email newsletter. My question for you is: how do you do this? I haven't found an easy way to do this.

We're using MailChimp, and I've actually been on a couple websites where there's a poor experience, where you try to download the free giveaway, and it says, “Error: you're already subscribed to the list.” I'm like, “I just want the free download from this amazing post.” I want to make sure that I'm giving our Ask The Dentist readers a great experience, of course, and would love to know how you are doing this. Thanks again. My dad and I are both huge, huge fans. If you ever have a question for the dentist, please let us know. We would be honored and thrilled to help out the one and only Pat Flynn. Thanks again, Pat. Keep doing what you're doing. Love all the value that you're providing us. Hope to hear back from you soon. Thanks a lot.

Pat: Catherine, thank you so much for the question, and thanks to your dad too. I'm so glad you both listen to the show. Congratulations on yours, and, if my assistant's listening, I hope we can give you both an AskPat t-shirt, so we'll hook you up there for having your question featured, which is a great question, actually. A lot of people are wondering about this, because this enhanced content deal is big now. It's a great strategy, the “in” strategy now for growing your email list. For those of you who don't know, enhanced content is essentially a way to give away something at the end of a blog post or a podcast episode or a video that is related specifically to that piece of content. A lot of you might have a lead magnet or a giveaway that's site-wide or brand-wide for your audience: “subscribe to my list, you get this free download.”

But this is one of those specific to a particular piece of content that you've published. The reason this works so well is because people who are on that particular piece of content who might enjoy it, who might love it, who might find it on Google or wherever the case may be, and end up on that page, they're going to love that topic. If you give away a specific item that's related directly to that topic, they're likely to subscribe to your email list for that. Sometimes, we have a post, and it's great, but then they get to the bottom of the post where we have our giveaway, and it's not exactly related to that particular piece of content, it's not going to work as well. That's why enhanced content, a freebie download at the end of these posts related to that particular piece of content that you've written or published, works so well. But it's not necessarily easy to think about how to do this, because, like Catherine was saying, a big problem is when people who are already subscribed to your list might want this brand new lead magnet specific to this blog post, they're going to get that error which says . . . and I know this happens for AWeber too.

You mentioned MailChimp, which is another great email service provider, Catherine. ”Sorry, you're already subscribed,” and then they don't get that email that has the link or they don't get access to whatever delivery mechanism you have to deliver that piece of content, that giveaway, whether it's a . . . specifically, just a link to a special page on your site that's hidden, or, in most cases, it'll be a small PDF or something. Maybe that giveaway is just a quick start guide to whatever that post or podcast episode was about. Maybe it's the transcript of your podcast episode. It could be whatever. Maybe a list of tools that can help you do that. I know in episode 115 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, I tested this out, and it works very well. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session115, you can see that I implemented the enhanced content at the bottom. That was about how my . . . and it was actually an interview with my assistant, Jessica, who helped me crush my inbox of 9,000 plus unread emails, and then I gave away a list of five tools that can help you manage your inbox and get rid of emails. That did really, really well for that particular episode.

Here's how I did it. This is the cheat hack way, but this is using one specific tool called LeadPages, which I know a lot of you have heard me talk about before. It's a company that I'm an advisor for. They specifically have a method of digital content delivery with this in mind, because this is exactly how LeadPages got so big. They started to give people access to these HTML templates, these lead pages that people would have to then, first, subscribe to the email list to get access to these templates, and people would often want more than one of them, so they created a delivery mechanism which allows you to put a specific form on your site, whether through a lead box or a specific lead page, and when people subscribe to that list, even if they're already subscribed, LeadPages will send them that digital asset, that PDF file or whatever.

So you upload that PDF file, for example, that ebook, to LeadPages, and they will deliver it to every person, whether they're subscribed or not, to that … they'll deliver that asset to them. If they are subscribed, that's it. If they aren't subscribed, then they are now subscribed. So that's how I use it. LeadPages is fantastic. If you go to AskPat.com, you can get set up with LeadPages there. Now, you don't have to get LeadPages. There are ways around this, and the best way to do this, Catherine, is whether you're using MailChimp or AWeber or Constant Contact or GetResponse or whatever, InfusionSoft. The best way to do this is—and this is something that I sort of figured out because before I had Leadpages, I wanted to do this as well.

Essentially, what you do is you can actually customize the page that people land on if they are already subscribed, so you can customize the page people land on if they are already subscribed, and so you create a new page on your site, a custom page, just hidden. Keep it hidden from Google. There are different ways to do that, but whatever the case may be, all you have to do is, in AWeber or MailChimp, make that the page people go to. That is the page that people can land on if they're already subscribed, and, on there, they can download that file. You also send people who subscribe to your email list there as well, who are brand new. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it would be to create a separate list. So, Catherine, you might have a list for the whole site, but then you have a list specifically for this one particular post, and this would, essentially, allow you to tag people as people who subscribed on this post, but also allow you to create a different follow-up sequence, or at least initial follow-up email that has a link for the specific PDF file as well.

That way, you don't need to get LeadPages. You had it in there, but, I mean, I know AWeber does this. If you have people on multiple lists, they count as . . . if you have a person on two email lists, they essentially count as two people. You're paying for that. You got to weigh the pros and cons. With that said, you can set up rules, for example, if people subscribe to one list, they unsubscribe to another. So you can set up a second list that delivers this new digital asset, and have a rule in place where if people subscribe to this list, they unsubscribe from the main one, so if they are already subscribed to your main list, they are now subscribed to the new list, but you still have them overall in your database, only counted one time, and then you'll just have to remember that the next time you send an email and you want everybody to see it, to make sure to mark that particular list as one that you want to send it to.

That's a little bit of a, I mean, it's a “free” way to do it. I mean, you have to have an email service provider, of course, but you don't have to subscribe to LeadPages to do that. Like I said, if you're going to do this constantly and consistently, I would definitely recommend LeadPages. It's definitely, and, by far, the easiest way to do this. LeadPages connects with AWeber and Infusionsoft, MailChimp, and all the other primary email service providers out there and allows you to do this. Crazy. Catherine, I hope that answers your question, and I hope you try this out one way or another. Gave you a bunch of examples of how you can do that there. Again, I appreciate you and your question and your dad listening to the show too.

Like I said, we'll send you both a t-shirt. Thank you so much, and for those of you listening who have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is go to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much. As always, I want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. They've been one of the first sponsors for the AskPat Podcast and a huge supporter of the show, so thank you so much to FreshBooks. If you'd like to get FreshBooks for free for seven days, seven-day free trial, go to FreshBooks.com/AskPat, and enter “AskPat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section. Again, it just makes it so easy to organize your finances, especially if you're doing invoicing. They make professional looking invoicing.

It makes it super easy for you to get paid from your clients or your customers or your coaching students. If you're doing any of that stuff, FreshBooks is a winner for you. If you'd like to get FreshBooks for seven days free, go to FreshBooks.com/askpat, and enter “AskPat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section. Thank you again, and, as always, I'd like to end with a quote. Today's quote is from Peter Shankman, the founder of HARO or HelpAReporter.com. He says, “You can't make anything viral, but you can make something good.” I love that, because we always try to make things go viral. You just got to make things good, and, eventually, some of those things will go viral.

Thanks so much. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.