Hoping you'll be a faster student than I was
In the early- to mid-2000s decade online marketing was the wild west.
My fledgling website (now turning twenty this month!) was promoted with traffic exchanges until Google scolded me for doing this (I had AdSense and unnatural traffic was, and still is, a big no-no).
One of the larger players in traffic exchanges was a guy named Tony Tezak. He was well-on in his creator journey at the time and he was my referrer for dozens of programs.
I saw the traffic exchange presence he had, but only saw pieces of his email list, which was where the real value was.
This gem contributed to his success.
He was very online-approachable. He responded to emails personally, usually very quickly.
One time I noticed he was promoting a different program in his emails. I asked him about this.
He responded: “Every email should be promoting something.”
(This was how Hotmail grew. Every email from Hotmail promoted Hotmail.)
Here's what I appreciated just recently.
There's a natural extension of this:
“Every piece of content should have a call to action.”
Simply put, a call to action (CTA) is me asking the person viewing my content to do something.
If I write an article, I should invite people to subscribe to my newsletter, or check out something related to what I just wrote about.
If I post a note on Substack, I should ask a question and ask them to respond as a comment.
If I upload a YouTube video, I should ask them to subscribe, like, and comment.
If I do an X thread, my first post in the thread should ask them to continue, and then at the end I should ask them to do something else (since they got to the end of the thread).
If I upload a TikTok reel (which I haven't done yet!) I can put a call to action in the featured comment spot.
And so on.
It's a moving walkway for the customer journey.
CTAs everywhere produce a moving walkway for your potential customers to arrive where you want them to go faster.
With my hoard of side hustles, I'm confident I'll be back-filling a lot of CTAs in my content. Aside from updating the content, I'm confident this will increase how well the content can work together.
(Thanks Tony!)
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I’m John and I encourage people to work for themselves, and on themselves, every day to sleep better at night. I also hoard side hustles and look for ways to make them work together.
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(Cover Photo by Andy Fishburne on Unsplash)