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Fifteen Landing Page Performance Killers Afflicting Education Marketers

Fifteen Landing Page Performance Killers Afflicting Education Marketers

Are your landing pages performing well in your education inbound marketing? If not, these landing page performance killers may be afflicting you.

Let’s talk quickly about why landing pages are so significant. The first thing you need to know…

Without high-performance landing pages, your inbound strategy will not work.

That’s not an exaggeration. Much like a catalyst in a chemical reaction, landing pages are the component of your inbound marketing that makes desired behaviors happen like email signups, enrollment callback requests, campus visit signups, and more.

Secondly, your homepage is not a landing page.

Too many schools trying to use inbound marketing just dump everyone at the homepage — it won’t work.

So assuming that you’re not using your homepage as your landing page, here’s the performance killers that you need to watch out for.

Performance Killer 1: No Goal

Every page on your website should have a goal that’s attached to your larger inbound marketing strategy. Nowhere is this more important than your landing pages.

What’s the goal for each of your landing pages?

Typical education landing page goals would be…

• Signups to your email newsletter
• Signups for a campus visit
• Scheduling a recruitment call
• Giving an online donation
• Collecting alumni or student testimonies

Performance Killer 2: Weak Headline

Headlines are the first chance you’ll ever get to entice your reader to do what you want them to do. They must be useful, urgent, promising, simple, and concise.

Headlines that have proven to do well:

• The direct statement headline. Example: Our alumni rock! See why…
• The question headline. Example: Are you tired of looking for financial aid on your own?
• The how-to headline. Example: How to decide if commuting is right for you
• The “reasons why” headline. Example: 10 reasons why you should consider an online degree program

Performance Killer 3: Confusing or Nonexistent Call to Action

Calls to action are the part of your copy that drives conversion merely because they come right out and ask (or tell) your audience to do the thing that will meet your landing page goal.

As obvious as it may be to you, your site visitor cannot read your mind. So if you don’t tell them exactly what you need them to do, chances are, they’ll do something else — like navigate away!

Make sure to come right out and ask for the desired action, whether it’s in a button, body copy, or linked text. Calls to action should typically be brief and straightforward like…

• Sign up now!
• Request a callback
• Get your free copy

Performance Killer 4: No Specific Audience

Marketing personas make your copy and design personal, relevant, and timely. Without them, your landing pages will be vague at best and irrelevant at worst.

Performance Killer 5: Weak or Nonexistent Offer

What kind of value are you offering your visitor in exchange for their contact info or money? You have to make it worth their time to not only put in their information but to receive further communications from you.

The best offers are the kind that answers visitor questions. Well-suited content for landing page offers include:

• College buyer’s guide
• Dorm life survival manual
• Financial aid reference
• If you are a faith-based school: a devotional to discern God’s will

Performance Killer 6: No Clear Next Step

Your landing page doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it’s part of a broader inbound marketing strategy. You should know precisely how traffic can land on your page and where it will go next.

Even if your visitors do what you want them to do, you should offer to take them further into your website on the thank you (i.e., confirmation) page. Especially if you have new, fresh content that would interest your audience, offer it to them in the form of well-written headlines like those irresistible, tabloid-esque ads at the bottom of your favorite news site.

Performance Killer 7: Too Many Ways Out

Landing pages should have one goal: Get the visitor to do what the marketer wants them to do.That’s why you should clear your landing page of any links that allow your visitor to do anything other than what it is you’re asking of them.

That means no navigation bar. No footer. No sidebars. No links other than the call to action and your logo, which I recommend should link to your homepage.

Keep your landing pages clean, direct, and concise.

Performance Killer 8: Poor Copy

Speaking of concise, let’s talk web copy. If the landing page copy reads more like an academic journal than a landing page, performance will suffer.

Check out my article on writing killer web copy for actionable tips on writing high-performance copy. But there is one thing I want to say here:

Besides being concise, punchy, and direct, your landing page copy must center on the needs and desires of your visitor. “Org-centric” landing pages show your visitor that you’re only interested in what they can do for you.

“Visitor-centric” landing pages focus almost exclusively on the offer — the value the visitor can receive from giving you their info, their permission, or their money.

It’s easy to think that you’re building trust with your visitor by writing about how great you are, how many awards you’ve been given, or how much you’ve accomplished.

But on a landing page, they don’t want to know what you’ve done, accomplished, or have. They want to know what kind of value is in it for them.

Performance Killer 9: No Rich Content

High-performance websites make good use of rich content like images and video. Science suggests that our brains process visual information much faster than text, which means that we’re naturally drawn to visual information over text.

According to Buzzsumo, ”Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images.” And, “Articles with an image once every 75–100 words got double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images.”

The math is simple. Rich content such as images, videos, and infographics improve education website performance. You must have them!

Performance Killer 10: Copy Doesn’t Match Your Adwords

If your visitor comes to your landing page from Google or Bing Adwords, the copy on your landing page should match the same words you used in your ad. Otherwise, it’s just plain confusing.

Chances are if your visitor doesn’t immediately feel as though they’re in the right place, they’ll navigate away, resulting in a high bounce rate and low conversions.

Make sure your landing page headline assures your visitor that they made it to the right place by matching the language you used in your ads. If you have multiple AdWords campaigns going, consider creating separate landing pages for each one and track how well each Adwords/landing page combination performs.

Performance Killer 11: Asking for Too Much Info

I know it’s tempting. But you can’t ask your visitor to give you their life’s history all at one time. If you’re asking for their physical address, email address, phone number, birthday, and their mother’s maiden name, it’s probably too much.

If all you need to move them to the next step in your inbound marketing strategy is an email, then just ask for that. If it’s a name and an email, then just ask for that. No more than what you need for the next step.

Remember, you can always ask for more information (as needed) through your ongoing communications with them.

Performance Killer 12: Not Mobile Friendly

We don’t just live in a digital world. We live in a mobile world. At least half of your visitors are browsing your website (and your landing pages) on a mobile device of some kind. If your landing pages are not mobile friendly, you’re pretty much throwing away 50% of your chances of success.

Performance Killer 13: No Hero Spots

If your landing pages are not performing well, consider placing hero spots such as testimonials or quotes to show (rather than tell) the visitor that you’re worth their time. You should take the chance to tell these stories anytime you can to boost trust within your education brand and increase engagement with your audience.

Performance Killer 14: Slow Loading Time

The days of dial-up are far behind us — and no one wants to go back! So, if your landing pages remind visitors of what that experience was like due to slow loading times, then your performance will plummet.

Make sure your landing page isn’t bloated with super large images or performance sucking plugins. Keep the backend clean so the user experience is fast.

Performance Killer 15: Not Tracking Metrics

You can expect only what you inspect. If you’re not tracking metrics like page views, click rates, or source of traffic, you’re not going to achieve the performance you’re looking for on your landing pages.

Use analytics tools like Google Analytics (free) or paid landing page services with metrics baked right in like Unbounce or LeadPages to see where your visitors are coming from, what they’re doing on your landing page, and where they go afterward.

You can’t improve performance if you’re working in the dark. Analytics will show you what’s working and what’s not working.

Performance Help

There’s nothing worse than putting scores of hours and thousands of dollars into a website that doesn’t perform well. Get ahold of us today for a free consultation and put our years of experience in marketing, development, and design to work for you.

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3 Education Website Performance Killers

3 Education Website Performance Killers

Feel like your higher education website performance isn’t what it should be, but can’t put your finger on the cause? Here are three of the most common reasons higher ed websites fail.

Your design is impeccable… your copy is tight and right on the mark with brand guidelines… your page load speed leaves your competitors in the dust… your site navigation is easy and intuitive.

So why in the world is your higher education website not pulling the traffic volume you want, bringing in the leads you need, or the donations your development team is looking for?

Website performance issues like these are not only frustrating, they can cripple your enrollment, development, or alumni programs (among others). That’s why you’ve got to get to the bottom of the problem, fast.

That’s exactly what we do here at Caylor Solutions. Through our proven three step process, we help higher education marketers, development officers, alumni professionals, executives, and enrollment officers identify and resolve the obstacles holding them back from their organizational goals.

So let me share with you the three most common reasons that higher education websites fail — because more than likely, it’s one of these performance killers that’s eating away at the marketing results you know you’re supposed to be getting.

Website Performance Killer #1: Scattered Objectives

A school’s website cannot be all things to all people. Problem is, higher education institutions by nature have multiple audiences to market to.

Even more challenging is satisfying multiple internal stakeholders. Like so many higher ed marketers, I’m sure you’ve fought the battle of everyone wanting their space on the home page. They all have their own objectives, dreams, and needs for the website — but someone has to have the final say.

So do you design your website to speak to all of your audience and internal stakeholder needs, or do you choose one and ignore the rest?

The good news is that your home pages can most certainly perform well addressing more than one audience. Bad news is that it cannot possibly address the needs of every department who’s putting in a request.

Today’s savvy users demand clarity and ease of use. They expect the site to serve their needs above all else, not the needs of internal stakeholders.

Scattered objectives will kill your website’s performance. You must identify what’s most important to your organization’s long-term objectives and eliminate all other competing objectives for your website, and more specifically, your home page. (Hint: Meeting your audience’s needs is always the best thing you can do for your organization.)

Website Performance Killer #2: Revenue Comes Last

Think about all the companies that dominate the larger marketplace. Google. Apple. Walmart. Amazon. What is one thing common to all of their digital marketing strategies?

They put revenue first.

They don’t do anything that doesn’t somehow move their audience towards actions that lead to purchases. And here’s a little secret (one that I’m sure you’re well aware of by now): education is driven by revenue as well.

Determining your primary source of income — more than likely enrollment — should help you focus your energies and provide a clear answer when asked “Why is my link not on the home page?”

Hopefully this isn’t a hard sell to your internal stakeholders. Everyone is benefited when school revenue goes up. So put revenue first in your higher education website.

Website Performance Killer #3: Unclear Path to Conversion

Once you have identified your target revenue drivers, look for ways to build a funnel of conversion. Conversion funnels are the ideal series of pages or content that your audience would likely go through to come to the decision to enroll or donate (See? Revenue first!).

Conversion funnels are made up of series of content like emails, landing pages, forms, blog posts, videos, etc. The thing that makes them funnels is that you’ve thought through what the optimal path is for your audience to take to come to their decision. Here’s an example of how a funnel can work:

Perhaps your email highlights a question that your audience has, which leads to a blog post that further answers their question and asks them to fill out a form, which leads to a phone call, or another video.

The types of arrangements of content you can create are endless — but they must ultimately lead to conversion!

If you view each marketing channel (like email, blogs, videos) as a separate, standalone marketing activity, then your paths to a decision (conversion) will be unclear to your audience, and that will kill your website’s performance.

Performance Enhancers

These higher education website performance killers are hard to spot at times, and even harder to resolve. But the team and I at Caylor Solutions would be happy to come alongside you to help you reach your organization’s goals.

Our team of brand strategists, designers, writers, and social media experts will put their decades of experience in higher education marketing, enrollment, and development to use for you to get you the marketing results you need to drive revenues for your school.

Ready for a marketing performance boost? Get ahold of us today.

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Seven Ninja Hacks for Your Alumni Blog

Seven Ninja Hacks for Your Alumni Blog

Keeping your alumni blog up-to-date is a building block of your alumni marketing strategy. But it can be a bit of a pain for an over-worked, higher education marketer like yourself. So leverage these 7 ninja hacks to make your alumni blog a big success.

Ninja Hack #1: Become one with your alumni blog.

For most marketers, the day they began blogging was an exciting day full of promise. Creativity was high, and it was all so new.

But after a couple months… your first year… two years in… blogging just gets old. That’s when you can forget why you started blogging in the first place, and you let it go. You miss deadlines and skip posts.

But you must become one with your alumni blog. You must remember why you started and how it connects with your goals as an alumni marketer.

Blogging is a proven marketing strategy that helps you:

1. Drive traffic to your website,
2. Convert that traffic into leads,
3. Establish authority in the area you want your school to be known for, and
4. Drive long-term results across all your marketing channels like email, website, and even direct mail.

Remember that pivotal moment in young grasshopper’s life when Mr. Miyagi gave him his first lesson in martial arts? At first, “Daniel-san” didn’t get it. It was just a boring chore that wouldn’t help him accomplish his goals.

But then there was this beautiful moment in the movie when it all came together for Daniel. In that moment, Mr. Miyagi showed him how much progress he had made—and how it all was working to move Daniel toward his goals.

That’s what your blog is like. There’ll be days you don’t see it working at all. But you must keep blogging consistently!

Become one with your alumni blog.

Ninja Hack #2: Answer your alumni’s questions.

As we talked about in this post, every journey on the Internet starts with a question. By brainstorming the various questions that your alumni audience would look to you to answer for them, you’ll…

1. Increase click-through rates in your emails,
2. Drive traffic to your website,
3. Improve your search engine rankings, and
4. Make your alumni much, much happier.

Ninja Hack #3: Automate your alumni blog.

Around here, it’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of automation. In fact, I save up to 5 hours a week on my social media marketing using automation tools.

Finding ways to get technology to do the repetitive tasks for your alumni blog will not only save you time in blog production, it will take a lot of the monotony out of the process—which means you’re more likely to get it done.

If you use WordPress for your alumni blog, leverage WordPress’s blogging functions to make it streamlined….create a post template and then WordPress will automate the table of contents, organize your tags and categories, and even let you publish via email if that works for your team.

And you should consider creating an RSS-driven automated campaign in your email management provider. By doing so, your email management software will automatically pull the blogs that you’ve posted, assemble them into an email newsletter (complete with your awesome feature images), and publish it to your email list.

With an RSS-driven email campaign set up, you’ll drive traffic from your email list to your blog and produce consistent content for your email audience.

Ninja Hack #4: Run in a pack. (i.e., Guest blogs)

Do ninjas run in a pack? Well, even if they don’t, you should. By having alumni write guest posts, you can tap into their audiences and drive more traffic to your alumni blog.

Each time you publish a post written by an alumnus, have them share it with all of their friends and followers on social media. Also consider posts from beloved professors and others within your alumni affinity groups. This is an incredible way to add value to your alumni readers and expand your followers.

Ninja Hack #5: Use rich media.

Rich media such as pictures, gifs, videos, and infographics are like using ninja stars. They are powerful tools that grab attention and pull your readers into the post.

Text-heavy blogs are hard to get through—most people avoid them and read something else. Rich media will break up the text and make your alumni blog more inviting and engaging for your audience.

Ninja Hack #6: Be real.

You may represent an academic institution, but your alumni really don’t want to read academic treatises when they come to your blog. So write in a casual, informal style.

Also, write about the human, emotional, or relational side of things. You’re more than a news channel, so be sure to tell your alumni how your current students, grads, and faculty felt when they received that award, got accepted to your school, got their financial aid, or when they gave to your school.

Ninja Hack #7: Post content that matters.

The Internet has evolved a lot since the late ‘90’s. But unfortunately, there are a lot of alumni blogs out there that still read like online diaries rather than a professional college or university publication. You must remember ninja hack #2– your alumni blog is a way to answer questions and publish valuable content.

The objective is to create content that’s so useful that your alumni keep coming back for more. So post resources and tips that add value like resume support, tips for networking, interviewing skills, new job opportunities, etc.

Time for a Comeback

Your alumni blog might be in need of a serious makeover, or you might just need to crank up production again. No matter what’s ahead of you, the important thing is to get your blog rolling again.

Inbound marketing is a game of careful, patient consistency. One killer post isn’t going to meet your marketing goals. It’s the consistent publication that will set you apart and keep your audience coming back week after week.

Could you use a few marketing ninjas to help you revive your alumni blog? Get ahold of us.

The call is free… and we won’t make you wax our car.

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Nebraska senators tour state for look at literacy, dyslexia

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Six Stories Your Alumni Newsletters Should Be Telling

Six Stories Your Alumni Newsletters Should Be Telling

Your alumni newsletters are one of the most powerful marketing tools available to you. So make sure they say what they need to say to increase your open and click through rates.

Since the early days, American marketers have created and published newsletters as a means to cultivate their audience, raise brand awareness, and build customer loyalty. Publications like John Deere’s agricultural magazine, The Furrow, have proved for over a hundred years that consistently publishing great content was the best way to engage an audience.

[1895] The Furrow begins publication as “A Journal for the American Farmer.” The magazine’s distribution grows to 4 million readers by 1912. Today, it is published in 14 languages and read in 115 countries, making it the most widely circulated farm magazine in the world. — via Deere.com

Today, you want to use your e-newsletter to accomplish the same thing, even though you’re not printing it on paper and mailing it. (Of course, I’m a big fan of print marketing, so if you’ve got the budget and an understanding of what makes compelling print, then go for it!)

While there are differences between digital newsletters and printed newsletters, to be successful, you have to approach your alumni marketing e-newsletter with the same thoughtful commitment as you would a printed publication.

Alumni Newsletter Setup

Before you launch or relaunch your alumni marketing newsletter, make sure you take the time to…

1. Craft your strategy for this content channel,
2. Create a marketing budget for it,
3. Identify your KPI’s, and
4. Establish a workflow for your team so that someone is monitoring daily, weekly, and monthly metrics to show you if you’re reaching your goals or not.

Now that you’ve done your homework and set up everything for your alumni newsletters on the back end, it’s time to create engaging, consistent content for your alumni audience. Here are six things that all your alumni newsletters should say to increase open and click-through rates.

Outcomes and Successes

First of all, your alumni newsletters should focus on the outcomes and successes of your college or university. This is one of the first things on your alumni audience’s mind. They want to know, “How is my school doing?”

Now this can be tricky, because while you’re sharing about the success of your institute, you don’t want to write these stories in an organization-centric way.

Make your audience the hero of the story.

Fill your content with gratitude for your alumni audience and show them how it was alumni engagement and support that created the win, not your organization’s skill, prestige, or merit.

Alumni Successes

This might be obvious, but your alumni newsletter should feature alumni success stories. The reason I have to mention this is because the alumni success stories are not easy to capture.

Putting a web form on your website asking alumni to share their stories with you is just the beginning of finding the stories that your newsletter needs to feature. This is simply not enough. Your alumni are not coming to your website looking for a chance to share their story. Often alumni are humble and discreet folk, not wanting to show off their success.

You’ll have to dig deep into your alumni network to get to know your alumni and hear their stories. Then, you’ll have to ask them personally to share their story with you for the alumni newsletter.

This, coupled with the work necessary to schedule and perform interviews, can make the process long and drawn-out. But once you get your story workflow ironed out, you’ll begin to have a steady stream of stories for your newsletter.

Link to Your School’s Mission

Once you’ve conducted the interviews, highlight those making a difference in the world through the lens of the mission of your school. Your alumni newsletter stories need to create a connection between the success of the alumni and mission of your school.

Again, do not write an organization–centric way. Keep the alumnus as the hero of the story. But weave a thread in there that ties your college or university to the life of your alum.

Exciting Majors

As you craft in captured stories for your alumni newsletters, try to highlight various majors that your alumni might not be familiar with.

1. Use alumni success stories to show your audience the experience that an alumnus had within the major.
2. Share current student stories that showcase what it’s like to be in the major right now.
3. Interview a current faculty member to tell your alumni where the major is going.

Sometimes it is easy to only highlight the successful business person, as it’s more challenging to find the golden nuggets in social realms. But do your best to look for stories highlighting your humanities and sciences as well as your business programs.

Get Personal

Your alumni newsletters should be speaking to your audience in a very personal way. Practically speaking, that means that you should organize your mailing list by affinity groups like business, sciences, arts, parents, etc.

If you have the bandwidth, craft several versions of your email newsletter for each audience segment. If you don’t have the bandwidth, continue writing one newsletter for all of your groups, but design one-off email marketing campaigns catering specifically to each affinity group that you have.

Variable Data Email

Yet another way you can get personal with your email is called “variable data email.” At first, the name might scare you—but don’t worry! If you’ve ever used merge tags to personalize emails with the recipient’s first name or last name, then you can do variable data email.

Basically, instead of merging information from your contact database like a person’s name or address, you are using merge tags to tell your email management system to insert text based on merge tags that you’ve specified earlier. Here’s how this marketer describes it:

The system works with dynamic tags, which are specially formatted place holders within the email.

When the message is sent, a script looks for the tags and follows a set of rules to decide which block of code should replace the tag. Usually there will be a default block of content which displays if the rule doesn’t apply, and then one or more alternatives which are triggered by the values in the contacts database.

So by using variable data email, you can personalize each email based on the affinity of the alumnus, even if they’re all on the same list.

Inspiring Faculty

Your alumni newsletters should also feature the voices and life stories of long-term professors. Never underestimate the bond that your alumni have with their former professors. By interviewing professors and sharing about their work and interest today, you’ll rekindle those old feelings of connection within your alumni audience.

The real power in featuring your inspiring faculty within your newsletter is that more than anyone else in your organization, your alumni have connected with your professors.

Think about that.

They don’t know you. They probably don’t know much about anybody in the administration. But they know that professor who took the time to talk with them outside of class, helped them understand the subject, or encouraged them in their hard times.

Leverage these important relationships by featuring inspiring faculty within your alumni newsletters.

Showcase Alumni Engagement

Your alumni newsletters should be showcasing alumni engagement. This is a bit different than featuring the alumni success stories because with these stories you are showing how alumni have reconnected to the mission of your school.

Now, I know that our development buddies are going to want every one of these stories to feature an alumnus who made a gift…

But it’s important to show other ways in which alumni have been involved with your college or university like volunteering, recommending the school to prospective students, talking to prospects and parents, or hosting gatherings.

As you know, there are many ways in which your alumni can get involved to help advance your school’s mission. So illustrate to your alumni audience how they can get involved by featuring stories of alumni engagement within your alumni newsletters.

The Baseline

There are a lot of things that your Alumni Newsletters can say, but these six things should be the baseline for the content that you feature within your newsletter.

If your alumni newsletter strategy has plateaued or is failing, and you’d like an expert hand to come alongside you to get it back up and running the way it should be, we’d be happy to help!

We’ve got years of experience revitalizing higher education marketing content so that open rates, click through rates, and audience engagement go up.

So, get ahold of us. It’s free and there’s no obligation.

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Random Hacks of Kindness Jr – Kids Designing Apps to Better Our World

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The Chronicles of Life Coach

The Chronicles of Life Coach

Top Life Coach Connecticut Secrets

Therefore, coaching is an exceptional relationship reflecting a partnership that’s manifested through honesty, respect, and mutual objectives. Coaching is a collaborative process which demands specific abilities, including listening and questioning, to ease the approach. This form of life coaching is so straightforward and very powerful.

Coaching is all about empathy, asking the correct questions, listening. As soon as you get taking a look at life coaching you will discover there are life coaches in numerous niches. Life coaching is a quite an extensive term if you take a close look at it. Life coaching is about putting the of the particular person what is for him. It Is action-driven in that it helps you to look at where you are in the present moment, where you would like to be, and then helps you to bridge the gap.

A great coach has to possess the wisdom and experience required if he’s got to be credible for the others. An exceptional coach will work together with you in the identical fashion. Many coaches provide a no-charge, no-obligation exploratory coaching session, so make certain to use this to your best advantage. It takes a seasoned coach to be in a position to study clients and determine the driving force for every one of them, since no 2 clients are going to have the exact same driving force.

For this to be possible, he needs to have the ability to build and maintain a good rapport with the person. It is thought that becoming a life coach is fairly simple, and the pay is high too. For example, a life coach can’t prescribe medication or determine that you’ve a mental illness. It is possible to discover a life coach in any niche you require someone to aid you.

The Ultimate Life Coach Trick

Next, you’ll want to make certain that you exercise regularly. To begin with, you’ve got to work out what energizes you and makes you truly feel alive. 4 tips on why you’re the way you’re. Suddenly, the requirements of the kids return into focus and you realize you’ll need to co-parent with an ex who may be even more troublesome to address than ever.

You may be confused about what you wish to do in life which is perfectly fine. It’s so very simple to be swept along within this life. If it were it would signify that each and every Life Coach needed to be a specialist on his clients lives and that’s obviously not possible.

If you aren’t offered paid vacation time via your employer, you might want to think about saving up some money so you find it possible to afford to take some time off anyway. When it may seem that the more time spent in the office, the more work you’re going to be in a position to receive done, that isn’t true in the slightest. It is crucial to plan in such a manner you do not lose out on some excellent time in your life.

If you don’t have enormous amounts of counseling experience or a sociological background, I wouldn’t suggest this method. It’s what you opt to do with these experiences that will figure out if it’s a good or bad choice. It’s been a great experience and I’ve benefited much from my relationship with this fantastic platform.

The 3 methods by which you’ll be able to develop into a Life Coach. Without changing your whole life, quitting your work and ending your marriage, you can start to live life on purpose, one small step at one time. Once you think that you’re qualified to become a Life Coach then it’s time to do it. There are 3 principal methods by which you may develop into a skilled Life Coach.

You can pick your life. These tips change my life, and I am certain they will change your life and mine. You shouldn’t decide to be a professional Life Coach until you do the complicated work of researching and deciding on a school, or other system of acquiring the required education.

Contact a Life Coach Connecticut

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The Definitive Solution for Video Seo Services You Can Learn About Today

The Definitive Solution for Video Seo Services You Can Learn About Today 

The Do’s and Don’ts of Seo Services

By selecting a service provider you will find the best services as they’re fully skilled in understanding the demand of internet small business need of your business and the way to match them with the needs of the visitors by creating and keeping a great website. For this, it’s important that professional services are utilized to as to allow the company in receiving excellent search engine benefits. Web business services like buying or selling a solution or service online is among the essential innovations from using this market.

Why Almost Everything You’ve Learned About Seo Services Is Wrong

Search engine optimisation services assist a business to find market and promoted online in the most effective way by sharing blogs, content and receiving available on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and so forth. Hiring the help of e-commerce SEO agency would be profitable in the event you’re working under strict timeline or you have not enough expertise within this field as they have all the skills necessary to enhance the visibility of your site in all of the search engines result pages. Today, Ecommerce website development services have come to be an important requirement for internet promotion.

Getting the assistance of search engine optimisation professionals will make your site a magnet to users and with that generate a lot of traffic to your website. A web hosting service is the initial step of Internet hosting service that enables individuals and organizations to supply their own site accessible via the World Wide Web. Web growth services are those services, which are quite necessary to showcase your services and products in a comprehensive fashion and impress prospective customers beforehand.

Search engine marketing services are extremely important for every single business, as it’s referred to as an excellent advertising tool for your brand. They help to make a productive website which is useful for the customers, users and visitors to get relevant information and also helps to maintain and sharpen the performance of the website to make it more impressive, informative and relevant for the public. If you don’t take up SEO marketing solutions, your potential clients won’t be in a position to find you online. From the aforementioned aspects, it’s clear why one must utilize SEO marketing services. Credible SEO advertising services isn’t restricted to creating more leads but they need to convert also.

Search engine marketing companies in India are on an upsurge on account of the increasing quantity of consumers in the business. They majorly focus on planning out the necessary elements required to build a firm market expose to their clients.

Their experts here opt for the appropriate keywords very carefully when they’re working on this technique. You will find a lot of self-acclaimed experts, but in regards to delivering results, the majority of them failed. It is essential that you consult from a specialist by telling them about your organization and its products.

SEO will raise the quantity of qualified traffic to your site from biggest search engines which will also help find measurable results regardless of any size, type of site with good ROI. Similar to any other advertising and marketing tools, SEO appears to be absolutely the most effective one and it’s a type of inbound marketing. A New Jersey SEO professional with several years of experience will be in a position to analyze any website and knows this.

Seo Services – Dead or Alive?

Their search engine marketing methods ought to be transparent and clear. Search engine optimisation isn’t a mystery that’s difficult to crack. Thus SEO is the secret aspect as to how one wants to propagate the company on an advertising front. SEO for businesses As the amount of likely internet users is rising day by day, each and every company is concentrating on them.

Contact a video seo expert

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EdTech and Teaching Tweet Recap w/e 11-11-17

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7 Best Apps for Student Goal Setting

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5 Irreplaceable Pillars of Alumni Digital Marketing

5 Irreplaceable Pillars of Alumni Digital Marketing

Alumni marketing is presented with significant and unique challenges that digital marketing is well equipped to solve. But you must have these five pillars in place to make it work.

There are several big hurdles for the alumni marketing department to jump over that are unique to alumni marketing.

For one, alumni don’t always stay in the same region. In today’s global economy, alumni are traveling more and moving to farther-off  places in search of work.

Two, alumni don’t always self identify. Many times, alumni will go to different schools completing their degree, or they will go on to graduate studies in another college or university. And if the student services did not cultivate loyalty within the student during their studies, they may not put their school on their LinkedIn profiles.

Also, alumni are a very diverse group of people. The individuals in your alumni body have different experiences, backgrounds, and taste. It’s hard to serve all of them with the wide brush of being called or labeled “Alumni.“

That’s why having these five pillars of digital marketing in place is so important. They will keep you on track despite all of the distractions and possible pitfalls your marketing can experience.

Five pillars of digital marketing for Alumni Pillar 1: Content

Digital marketing must begin with content. Great content attracts, converts, and cultivates your audience throughout the development cycle.

It’s also the building block of every digital marketing strategy or campaign you’ll launch. You can’t have a winning social media strategy without great content. Likewise, you can’t have a successful newsletter, blog, or video blog without great content.

It’s been said before, and here it makes sense to repeat it again: Content is king.

So what kind of content do you need to be creating to cultivate and engage your alumni audience?

The answer is simple, yet hard to execute. You need to create content that answers their questions.

What are your alumni asking from you that other content sources cannot answer? Or, what questions would they rather you answer instead of other sources?

Here are a few common questions alumni look to their alma maters to answer:

• Where can I find other alumni like me?
• How can I get in touch with other alumni?
• What is my school doing today that I can be proud of?
• How is my alma mater making strides forward and getting better?
• How can I help future and current students?
• How can my alma mater help me now in my current career?

All of your content should be created with the goal to answer some kind of question that your alumni audience has and is seeking from you.

But you don’t want your content to come off as some kind of FAQ page. That’s why this next pillar that I’m going to show you is necessary to create the kind of content that will attract your alumni to you.

Pillar 2: Story

Great content is story-driven. By that, I mean every piece of content needs to be a story that fits into the metanarrative you’re telling alumni through your marketing.

What’s your metanarrative?

Your metanarrative is your brand. It’s the story you want your alumni and other audiences to be telling their friends about you.

So what story do you want others to tell about your school?

• Texas Wesleyan University wants their alumni in general audience to tell others that they are the small school that knows your name.
• Indiana Wesleyan University wants their alumni to tell their friends that they are the school that trains world changers.
• Ohio Christian University wants their alumni to tell their friends that they are the school with a solid, biblical worldview in every subject.

When framed in these story-telling terms, every piece of content you create (like a blog post, infographics, or video) is to be written as a mini-story that supports and illustrates the larger story, the metanarrative, that you are trying to tell your alumni about your school.

So if your metanarrative is that you are a school that embraces innovation, then tell stories that illustrate the innovation that’s happening in your organization, or stories that inspire others to innovate.

Make sure every content piece drives your metanarrative forward with your alumni.

Another aspect of having story-driven content is that every story you tell (a.k.a. piece of content) should have an emotional driver behind it.

Stories are emotional. Stories stir our souls and our emotions. This is why they’re so effective at motivating responses and behaviors from the audience.

If you leave out emotion, you will suffer low engagement from your alumni audience.

Bland, dry facts, stats, and figures do not motivate us to do anything but sit and absorb the data.

Especially when you work in an academic institution, you must fight the temptation to default to an academic style of writing. Even if your alumni hold PhD’s, they don’t want to read a dissertation every time they open up your email newsletter.

Pillar 3: Goal-oriented

The best digital marketing for alumni has goals attached to it that clarify the objective of every content piece and identify the metrics that you will use to determine if the content was successful or not.

What are the larger organizational goals that you are trying to accomplish through your alumni marketing efforts? What are the key performance indicators that show you that you are hitting the mark?

These are key questions that can only be answered by having a pre-set goal for every content channel in your alumni digital marketing.

Pillar 4: Website-centered

All the various pieces of content you publish in your alumni digital marketing should drive traffic to your website. This could be your alumni microsite, or your college or university main website.

Digital marketing is like baseball. Your website is home plate, and your content should lead your audience (the players) there every time.

Your blog is not home plate. Your newsletter is not home plate. You don’t want your players to hang out at first base, or even third. You want to get them home.

And when your audience lands on your website, it should be written and designed to drive conversions.

In other words, when they land on the homepage, everything about that homepage should lead them to the behaviors that your school has decided are important for you to reach your ultimate goals as a school.

Pillar 5: Audience-centric

First and foremost, the alumni department is a service from the college or university to your alumni. This means that everything you do should be audience-centric.

This begins with identifying the questions that your audience has in mind, which we talked about earlier in the blog. It then goes to determining what channels are best suited for your marketing personas.

Different audiences prefer different channels of communication to get the answers that they’re looking for. Services like Instagram seem to do great with students, whereas social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest do much better if you’re trying to reach out to moms.

Keeping your digital marketing strategy audience-centric is all about serving them.

So even if you’re not familiar with Instagram, you need to get your toe in the water and learn how to leverage this social media platform to reach your student audience. The same could be said for video content.

Audiences today show high response rates and engagement rates with colleges and universities that use rich content like video in their digital marketing. But sadly, many colleges and universities feel that content creation with video is too costly or complicated – so they simply miss out on a great opportunity for alumni engagement.

Holding it all together

There are lots of moving parts to Alumni digital marketing. But if you have these five pillars in place, you should be able to hold it all together.

These are the core concepts that hold up the entire strategy. They should also be somewhat of a roadmap for you to determine what is right for you and your alumni as you’re making decisions for your marketing efforts.

If there’s a pillar that you can use some help with, we’d be happy to help. With over 50 years of combined experience in marketing and development in education, the Caylor Solutions team is ready to help execute your digital marketing strategy.

Get a hold of us here. The call is free and there’s no obligation.

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Collision Repair Conroe TX And What You Need To Know

Collision Repair Conroe TX And What You Need To Know

Collision Repair Options

With a great deal of collision repair shops and skilled competitors around, it could be hard to find something which differentiates your shop from the rest. After the shop you select can guarantee their work, that takes the strain off of you. Finding the very best shop can be an intimidating challenge, however in the event you ensure that items above are covered, you’ll be prosperous in your search for a dependable mechanic. Fortunately, most automotive shops are available online, so earning a choice can be easy.

The insurance provider will try to restore your car with used parts. These days, you would find lots of insurance companies which offer exclusive automobile insurance covers under the name of full car insurance coverage. Many other collector car insurance businesses will merely write policies for vehicles of a specific age or older. For instance, one may not operate a car collision repair business without the understanding of performing those forms of repairs. Wheel repair companies make certain your tires look like new within a couple of hours. Finding the very best fence repair business in Dallas to set a fence for your office or home can quickly grow to be a detailed job.

Do not allow your insurance provider pressure you into making use of a shop only because it has the lowest price. To obtain the best finish on a car, it should have a down draft paint booth. Picking an automobile mechanic for your vehicle’s needs is vital. Based on the seriousness of the matter, the automobile body mechanic may settle the dispute promptly.

Do you charge to find parts for my vehicle. At times you can even see them specially designed to fit your auto’s model and make. When you take the car to an automobile shop for collision repair, it is very important to inquire about the several replacement parts used by the shop. Prior to agreeing to find the car fixed from an automobile shop, recommended by the insurance policy business, you should conduct an extensive research online. Taking your car with plenty of car dents to an auto body mechanic can be costly.

Choosing Collision Repair Is Simple

Auto repair specialists can execute a myriad of damage repairs and bodywork related to a collision. To guarantee a hassle free experience, auto collision repair specialists are prepared to assist you from the very start. A skilled automobile body technician can be located in several of the smaller shops around town too. In order to finish a PDR, a trained and competent auto body technician has to be in a position to obtain access to the area supporting the dent, so certain regions of your vehicle is not going to permit these kinds of repairs to be made. Finding the best mechanics to supply auto repair services is completely essential.

Auto repair may include damages to the interior or outside of the vehicle. Furthermore, repairs are finished on-site. A lot of people realize that dealing with this form of repair and locating a dependable body shop in Calgary is an unpleasant experience. In addition, timely repairs may also improve the performance and lifespan of your wheels. Producers of luxury cars value which you would prefer the best vehicle repairs performed. Some could even repairs” on the automobile that don’t actually fix anything. Alloy wheel repair may also help whether a vehicle is lacking polish, or in the event the rims need maintenance.

If you’re in an automobile collision, forget who’s to blame for a moment. Fortunately, the majority of the auto accidents are comparatively minor, and cause few, if any injuries. In the event you’ve been involved in a major or minor automobile crash, you’ll have to find the vehicle fixed. Within this case, if you are liable for the collision–or at least better than 50% responsible, you will be liable for your deductible and the insurance provider will pay for the rest.

Collision repair utilizes several different sorts of merchandise as a way to rehabilitate your car or truck. While it will never be a wanted experience, early preparedness can help smooth the process so that you and your loved ones can return to the road as soon as possible without breaking the bank. It is probably that you would have to consider collision repair for your vehicle. Managing automobile rust repair isn’t quite tough.

Whether auto body damage seems to be major or minor, a seasoned collision repair specialist should examine the vehicle for unseen damage. If repairing the automobile body damage will be more expensive than the vehicle is worth, it’s supposed to be totaled. It might also incorporate some damage to the structural portions of your motor vehicle.

Collision Repair Conroe TX

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Questions: The Key to Increasing Traffic to Your Education Website

Questions: The Key to Increasing Traffic to Your Education Website

Questions are a critical component of higher education content marketing. To increase traffic to your higher ed website, you’ve got to understand how questions make your content marketing work.

The beginning of everyone’s search on the Internet begins with a question.

It’s so deceivingly simple. Every time you and I go online, we’re trying to find the answer to a question.

When users go to Google, they literally type in the question they have in their mind. Google then finds the answer.

So if you want to rank higher in Google, you must answer the question that people are typing into the search bar. SEO really is that simple.

But of course, it goes farther than this.

Let’s say that the user arrives directly on your homepage. Perhaps one of your enrollment officers met them at a high school college fair and gave them a flyer with your URL. So now they’re on your homepage… and they’re asking a question.

“Is this the school that I am looking for?” Or maybe it’s even bigger than that. Perhaps they’re asking, “Do I even want to go to college?”

Maybe they’re asking questions that are specific to a particular department within your college or university:

• How do I give a gift?
• Where can I find other alumni like me?
• How do I get my college transcript?
• Does this college offer the major or program that I am looking for?

There are all kinds of questions that people have when they go to the Internet.

But the bottom line is that every time an Internet user logs on, they are asking questions. So, to drive more traffic to your website, landing pages, and other content, you cannot afford to ignore or forget:

Write content for the web to answer.

Write content for Google or Bing or Yahoo to answer. Write content for your website to answer. Always be thinking of which questions you are answering when you are creating content for your website, blog, newsletter, videos, or any other type of content.

Because if you create content without clearly understanding the question you are answering, you’ll be answering questions your audience is not asking. And eventually, they’ll turn you off and go somewhere else for the answer.

And your website traffic will suffer.

That’s why it’s so important that your content answers the questions your audience is asking today. Specifically, your answers must be…

Relevant

I’ve already covered this a bit in my introduction. But whatever question you’re answering in your content—whether it’s an e-book or a blog post—it needs to be relevant to your audience.

This is why I stress the importance of creating marketing personas before creating your content.

You need to know your various audiences so that you can understand the questions they’re asking.

Parents will ask different questions than prospective students. Current students are asking different questions than prospects. And alumni and donors are asking very different questions than all of the above audiences.

Make sure your content is giving relevant answers to your audiences. (Bonus Hint: Rarely is it relevant to go off touting your institute’s various awards and achievements. Let the relevance of your content speak for itself.)

Authoritative

Secondly, your answers have to be authoritative. This comes down to what answers your audience is looking to get from you.

Some private colleges and universities waste their time and resources creating content for questions that nobody is looking to them to answer.

An all-too-common example of colleges or universities going outside their area of content authority is when they become political commentators. Of course, you and your audience care about the current political climate—but putting your brand in the middle of the firefight is not always the best idea. Truth is, colleges and universities—on the whole—are not where people are going to get their political analysis.

Be sure to keep your content in the area of what people look to you to answer.

Like an ebook on how to pick the right major for your career goals or something of that sort. This is what you would expect, or hope, a university would talk about.

Timely

Thirdly, your answers should be timely. People rarely listen to answers that come before they ask the question. In the same way, people rarely listen to answers that come much later than the question.

It’s important to answer the questions that people are asking now.

I’ve written before about editorial calendars and how they can help your marketing team create the right content – at the right time – for the right audience. Editorial calendars are the tool you should be using to guide your content creation process so that you’re publishing content that answers the questions on your audience’s mind at that time.

The right time to release your ebook on preparing for dorm life? A few months before the semester begins. The right time to begin blogging about finding financial aid? About three months before the new semester begins.

These are the times when your audience is asking these questions. Do your best to answer their questions at the moment that they’re asking them.

Emotional

Next, your answers need to be emotional. No, that doesn’t mean they need to be overly dramatic. But it does mean that they need to have a story-like quality that helps your audience see themselves in your school.

You are creating content for human beings, not computers. The old adage of “show, don’t tell” really applies here.

So tell them a story.

Tell them the story of a student who came to your school. Tell them the story of a donor who started a scholarship fund… or how your latest research is making a difference in the world.

Whatever question you are answering, make sure that you bring the answer to life in a way that the audience can see what it’s like at your school.

Purposeful

Lastly, your answers need to be purposeful. In order for marketing to work, the audience needs to know clearly what to do next.

Marketing exists to motivate your audience to perform behaviors that support the goals and mission of your organization. This is why your answers must be purposeful in how they guide your audience to these behaviors.

Earlier, I wrote about the various types of behaviors that you should be tracking among your audience. We call these key performance indicators. Some of them include…

• Shares
• Click-through rates
• Content downloads
• Website traffic
• Form submissions

The Core of Content Marketing

There are many components to digital marketing—which makes the whole thing a bit complicated. However, the core idea of it all is rather simple: answer your audience’s questions.

If you can keep this North Star in front of you, you’ll rarely go wrong with your content.

And if you’d like a hand in defining the key questions that you should be answering in your content, we at Caylor Solutions would be happy to help.

Just give us a call. It’s free, and there’s no obligation.

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Education Fundraising Appeal Letter Checklist

Education Fundraising Appeal Letter Checklist

It’s year-end fundraising season! A time when education marketers and development officers work hand in hand to inspire donors and alumni to give generously. As you work on your fundraising appeal letter, refer to this helpful checklist to make sure your letter hits the mark.

1. Do you have a clear problem to solve?

There are lots of problems in the world. The good work your private college or university does every day contributes to the solution of many of these problems.

But with a mission as vast as education, it can be hard for donors to grasp the concrete problem they’re being asked to help solve.

So you must make sure that your fundraising appeals clearly define a problem your donors can actually solve by responding to the letter.

Consider these two examples:

• Can donors solve racial tensions in America with their gift? No, but even a gift of $25 can help scholarship a minority student, which diversifies your student body.
• Can donors solve generational poverty with their gift? No, but their gift can help scholarship a first generation college student, which helps lift families out of poverty.

Your fundraising appeal needs a clearly definable problem that your donor can help solve by giving.

2. Do you have a clear call to action?

The first point on the checklist is to have a clear problem—now you need a clear solution.

What do you want the donor to do? Pray? Join the alumni association? Give $25, $50, or $100 to the annual fund?

Clarify your call to action and state it at least once on the first page. You don’t want your reader to have to try and figure out what to do, and you want them to see it clearly from page 1.

3. Does your annual fundraising appeal have an attainable goal?

Fundraising appeals with a clearly defined, attainable goal perform better than those with ambiguous, indefinite goals.

In other words, how much will it cost to solve the problem, and is it close enough to what’s reasonable for your donor?

Show your annual gift donors (those who usually give once a year at $50 to $500 per gift) how much money needs to be raised to make the problem go away in terms that makes their gift significant.

Here’s an example: Instead of simply stating the $1 million budget, show them how a gift of $100 can help close the tuition gap for a student who’s behind on her payments.

4. Does your case for support begin with the emotional triggers of your donor?

As a marketer, you know that students enroll in your school because something about what you stand for and create resonates with their core values and desires. Choosing a college or university is at first an emotional decision, and then a rational choice.

Same is true for fundraising. A number of emotional needs and motives cause people to give:

• Sense of duty to their faith, religion, or denomination
• Pride in their alma mater
• Pride in their community, state, or field of study
• Need to feel a part of a community or cause
• Anger or fear at the way things are in the world

Powerful appeal letters remind the donor of how giving will satisfy these emotional triggers.

“Your gift to help fund the Bryan Sommers Sports Program ensures that more students like Bryan get the hand up they need to succeed.”

“Your prayerful support of the Rogers Nursing Center keeps the spirit of excellence alive in the hearts of nursing students… especially those like Sarah, a single mom in our night school.”

5. Does your fundraising appeal letter convey a sense of urgency?

All of us are procrastinators at heart. We need a healthy dose of urgency to carry out any decision.

“If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.” – Rita Mae Brown

That’s why your appeal letter needs to convey clearly why your donor should give right now instead of later.

• Perhaps the end of your fiscal year is coming up, and you have a funding gap.
• Or, maybe your donors only have a few months to give and claim their tax exemption for the gift.
• Or, maybe you have students whose applications will not go through in the next few weeks unless your scholarship fund budget is met.

The urgency of the need must be clear and compelling. Don’t beat around the bush on this one.

6. Is your appeal letter personal?

Unlike marketing or sales copy, appeal letters are written directly to someone, as if to a friend or family member. Because of this, they must be personal.

Your appeal letter should make good use of the word “you” whenever possible. Your letter must be all about the donor, their accomplishments, their desires, and their concerns.

Use pronouns like “I” and “we” with caution.

In fact, I recommend using first person pronouns only as a way to show the connection between the author of the letter, the cause, and the donor. Some examples:

“I’m writing you today because I know you’ve been there for our new students time and time again…”

“As a fellow alumnus, I’m asking you to give as generously as you can…”

Also, make sure the letter addresses the donor correctly. It should be friendly and familiar, nothing like “Dear Dr. Charles (Chuck) Schumacher III…”

7. Is your appeal letter donor-centric?

Successful appeal letters make the donor the hero of the story. Essentially, the letter shows a problem that only the donor can help solve. It’s an invitation to be the hero.

So instead of citing all the great exploits of your college or university, tell your donor how their giving made those accomplishments possible.

Instead of telling the donor how great your team is, show them how great they are by giving to make great things happen.

8. Is your appeal letter conversational and easy to read?

Personal letters, unlike essays and other academic writing, sound like the author talks in normal, everyday language.

Even if your average donor is a Ph.D., your letter should have all the warmth and ease of reading as if you were writing to your grandmother.

State your problem clearly and succinctly. Avoid jargon and professional terms that confuse people. Don’t be afraid to break a few grammar rules—and never use semicolons!

Keep paragraphs short—one or two lines each, three max.

Use adverbs and adjectives only when you need to. Rely on the strength of descriptive verbs to tell your story and motivate your reader to action.

9. Does your appeal letter include a story or testimonial?

Our brains are hard-wired for stories, not statistics or data points. Stories incite emotions within us as we read about the problem – and inspire us to action when we read about the solution.

Share a story about the challenges facing a real student. Or, feature a testimonial of how your donors have saved the day for a student.

10. Is your appeal letter skimmable?

This means that your appeal letter is easy on the eyes. I recommend using a 14 serif font, unless you’ve tested another font that works better for your donors.

Indent each paragraph. Use emphasis, underlining, and subheaders to highlight key points in the letter.

You don’t want to overdo these emphasis techniques, but your letter should have enough of them for donors to read quickly over your letter and understand exactly what you’re saying.

Delivered vs. Perfect

At the end of the day, letters in mailboxes raise more money than perfectly crafted letters that were never sent.

Do your best to plan appeals with enough time in advance to revise them, secure approval, get them to the printer, and land in people’s mailboxes on time.

Marketing and Development are two teams that must work together for the good of your organization. This checklist should be helpful as you work with your development team on this year’s annual appeal letter.

For more guidance from our team of marketing and development professionals, feel free to reach out to us here! The call is free and there’s no obligation.

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