What would your business be like if you sold memberships? It might be more than fun to think about, in fact, it might just be transformative. With membership, would you include little add-ons or perks for your biggest fans? Or could it become the entire core of what you do? Likewise, what might you help your clients build?
Whatever you decide to do (or perhaps what a client has hired you to do), you can get it done with Memberful. It’s the best software for building membership businesses, used by the biggest creators on the web.
Memberful is for developers.
You have a goal in mind: to build a great member-powered web experience. But you’re a developer and want to build how you want to build. Good. Memberful is here to support that.
Memberful maintains a full-featured GraphQL API (complete with GraphiQL explorer), webhooks, and OAth Single Sign-on to make it easy to integrate seamlessly with any stack.
Your main site in Rails? No problem. You wanna do a Jamstack thing? Perfect. Do you have a React-powered app through and through? That’ll work.
You don’t have to build entirely from scratch.
For example, Memberful maintains a best-in-class WordPress plugin that easily gates content and adds membership to your website. So if you happen to use WordPress as your CMS, or are thinking of using it to build your website, you’ve got a first-class integration to work with.
If you’re looking to add membership to your existing business, you’ll want a solution that works with your existing technology, so you can launch a new revenue stream without rebuilding your entire tech stack.
You don’t even need to build a website to use Memberful.
If you’re not looking to gate access to content on a custom website, you won’t need a website at all to use Memberful. You can use Memberful’s hosted landing page feature to sell your memberships, and then deliver your member benefits like a private podcast, protected downloads, and newsletters right through the platform — no website required.
Say you already use other tools for your business. Maybe you do all your emailing with MailChimp. Great! Memberful fully integrates with MailChimp. Is Discord your community hub? No problem, Memberful seamlessly integrates with Discord, meaning you can offer paid subscribers perks that are unique to Discord, things like special channels or access roles.
What are some common use cases for Memberful?
Private Podcasts
Subscription Newsletters
Selling digital goods (or physical!)
Building communities
Membership-driven educational courses
Memberful handles the hard stuff so you can focus on what you do best, while earning revenue quickly. Even advanced features like gift subscriptions, coupons, referrals, free and paid trials and more, are right there for you to take advantage of.
Who handles all the emails?
Memberful does, and you get 100% control of the brand. Yet another thing you won’t need to worry about, which can otherwise be an awful lot of work and technical debt. I’m talking transactional emails here, like signup confirmation emails, welcome emails, forgot password emails, etc.
How does the money work?
Memberful has a free plan to get your feet wet. You can build 2 subscription plans and do website integrations. The PRO plan starts at $25/month and lowers transaction fees to 4.9% down from 10% on the free plan.
Where do those subscription payments go? You connect your Stripe account, so that money goes there, which is the best-in-business payment provider. That means you can offer additional features like Apple Pay and Google Pay which are great for lowering checkout friction for potential customers.
Have questions? Memberful has always-real-human based support at all times to help you.
The year’s already begun, but it is not too late to plan the rest of the year out and ensure you achieve the best results for your business.
There is still plenty of time to create a strategy, execute and generate impressive results this year.
To help you achieve this, I have shared a list of steps that will ensure 2022 is the best year for your small business.
1. Collect data from your previous activities
The key to finding success with anything is to gather data from your previous efforts. Your business activities from the previous years will help you to prepare for the new year.
You should not just assess your marketing efforts, but also other KPIs such as cash flow, accounts receivable collections, productivity, attendance, etc. Sometimes you will need to do surveys to unearth this data, but if you are already using software for accounting, bookkeeping, project management, and spend management, you might already have all the data you need.
Even if you do have data from all this software, I recommend that you combine it with a survey of your audience as this will help you get even more information. You can create a fun quiz to get more people to answer questions. Data makes it easy for you to assess where you are and set realistic goals your business can reach. There are many online form builders that help create surveys and quizzes quickly.
2. Create a strategy
Once you have a goal, the next step is to create a strategy that will help you achieve it. Use the data from your research to ensure you get this right the first time. Make sure you offer detailed instructions on this strategy, as your entire team should be able to understand what you show them. Even if someone new joins the team, they should be able to quickly decipher what you cover in the strategy.
After you create your strategy you can organize a Q&A session where employees ask you questions and you answer them. You can then create one to five-minute explainer videos based on these questions.
Anyone who joins the team later can go through these videos instead of you explaining them again. But of course, it is essential to maintain an open-door policy so that they can contact you if they have any other questions.
Sharing some templates that help people quickly apply what they learn will be extra beneficial.
3. Add TikTok to your marketing mix
TikTok was called a fad just like Facebook and Twitter. But it has become the quickest social network to reach 1 billion users and it has helped many influencers and businesses earn millions.
Instagram and YouTube see it as a big threat, that’s why they are releasing and promoting features such as Reels and YouTube Shorts respectively.
These new features do make Instagram and YouTube more effective, but the number of people you can reach on TikTok is higher than on any other platform. If you want 2022 to be your best year ever, this network should be part of your marketing.
So, start creating more short videos and posting them on TikTok. These could be entertaining videos or tutorials. People are generating thousands of views by sharing financial advice, excel tips, recipes, and so many other helpful things. An example is the @miss.excel account Kat Norton shares excel tutorials.
Think about what your audience’s biggest problems are and then solve them with videos. These could be screen recordings or videos where you explain the tip in person.
4. Build an email list and Facebook group
Social media and search engines are good for driving traffic. But to drive sales, you need a list of customers you can nurture. The best option for this is to build an email list, but a Facebook group can work too. So, if you aren’t already building an email list, start now.
To get the most subscribers, you should create a lead magnet or a video course and give it away in exchange for signups. It’s a lot more effective than asking people to sign up for your newsletter like everybody else.
Getting them to sign up to your email list is only the beginning though. After they sign up, you should nurture them with more content that will help you build a strong relationship. After that, you can promote your products in the newsletter and generate sales.
For some ideas, on how to get this right check out Digital Marketer’s website. You can sign up for lead magnets like these Facebook ad templates.
After you sign up, Digital Marketer nurtures you with more content and promotes relevant products.
5. Incorporate paid marketing techniques
Less than 50% of searches on Google result in a click and social networks are constantly changing their algorithms to lower your reach.
If you want to get the same results you did in the past, it is not sufficient anymore to depend on organic marketing methods only.
You need to supplement it with paid methods. You can get an average of 2.5X return for every $1 you spend on ads. Wouldn’t you be happy with earning more than double the amount back for every dollar you put in?
This is why if you aren’t already using ads, you should start now. You can start with something as simple as retargeting as these ads tend to have the highest ROAS (return on ad spend). You can retarget people who visited your website, signed up to your list, or viewed your videos.
After you get some results with warm traffic methods such as these you can begin driving cold traffic.
At the beginning, create simple ads with images. You can take a background texture and slap some persuasive text and your logo over it. But after you get a hang of it you can create more video ads as they generate more clicks.
Another great paid marketing technique you might want to try out is influencer marketing. Some influencers will also promote your products for free. However, you might need to give your product to them for free so that they can try it before posting.
6. Track all your efforts
The only way you will know if your business is improving is if you track your efforts. So, use tracking tools or pick software with built-in analytics to measure your productivity, revenue, and happiness. You can use the data you collect to improve your business strategy later in the year or in the next year. The goal shouldn’t be just to ensure that 2022 is the best year. You need to build on it in 2023, 2024, and thereafter.
Now work on your business’s 2022 plans
This is the step-by-step strategy you can use to grow your business. It will work whether you are just launching your business or already have one.
Always start with the data collection, follow this with choosing a primary goal, and then create a strategy that will help you reach it. Finally, you can execute your strategy and track it to make sure you reach your goals. This can take up some time, but it’s worth the effort.
If you knew how to publish content that ranks on Google, would that change your business? There’s no one in this world (with a website) who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for the keywords of their choice.
Whether you already have a website, a business, or just an idea floating around in your head-ranking for the right keywords will make you money as long as you have the right offering.
Ranking on Google is a proven way to attract a lot of website visitors that are looking for what you offer. The good news is it’s not a magic trick. It’s a valuable skill that you can learn with a little research and a proven process.
Did you know that more than 90% of all businesses are now investing in some form of content marketing? SEO and content marketing are practically synonymous with one another. This combination is one of the top B2B marketing strategies because the ROI is incredibly high. It’s impossible to ignore the earning power of Google and other major search engines when it comes to leads generation and sales.
The bottom line is that when you publish content that is original, useful, entertaining, and worth sharing it’s bound to surface near the top of the search results. Not everyone can publish an award-winning literary masterpiece, but you don’t have to when you follow a basic template for publishing SEO content.
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. You can plan to appear at the top of the search results with a little research and a calculated effort. But before we start…
A word about SEO content
Just to be clear, SEO content is any form of content that is optimized for specific keywords. This means it could be a landing page, an image, an infographic a product page, etc. In the following steps, you are going to learn how to plan and publish articles that rank.
This is especially beneficial for building traffic to your website through a blog, which is a major aspect of traffic generation. This is the very same template used by every SEO company and consultant (give or take a few tricks) and the following steps are proven to get your content to the first page of Google.
Publish what people are looking to find
You could be the most gifted person in your industry but if you’re not publishing content people are actively searching for, you won’t generate much traffic. The first step to a successful piece of content is to make sure the topic you’ve chosen is something that generates enough interest. Keyword research is an underrated and powerful aspect of how to publish content that ranks on Google.
Make a list of topics from your seed keywords
Make a list of potential topics based on your main products or services. For example, if you sell pool tables, consider publishing content about the following topics:
The rules of 8 Ball pool
Dimensions of a pool table
How to move and set up a pool table
How to change the felt on a pool table
How much room do I need for an 8 ft pool table?
The idea is to come up with questions, issues, problems, and content that people would not only find useful but also lead them to purchase a pool table from you. If not now, then possibly in the future.
In most cases, the keywords should hold potential business value but there are times when they will simply serve other purposes (building trust, resources for clients, etc.)
Identify vital keyword metrics
A very important part of your planning is to identify the volume of monthly searches and the difficulty of ranking at the top of the search results. Assessing the cost per click is also useful but it’s not going to make or break your decision since it only provides insight into the commercial value.
To find these metrics you will need a keyword tool. In the examples shown below the tool being used is SEMrush, which offers a free version (with some limitations).
Assess the monthly search volume
This part of your planning is critical to generating traffic. You need to see whether the keywords are even worth pursuing. The volume can be tricky because you need to decide on how many visitors a month will make an impact on your business. Enter your keyword into any keyword tool of your choice.
If your search term only gets 30 searches a month you need to understand that’s ONE person a day (on average) that searches for that term. If you’re not in the number one spot you won’t be seeing much traffic. You should however look for different variations for better search volume.
On the flip side of the coin, when you rank in the number one position you tend to rank for a great many different variations of your keyword. To find out how much traffic your search term is worth search for the keyword on Google.
Click on the #1 website in the organic results and copy the URL.
Enter the URL into SEMrush to see what traffic the page is generating
This insight not only gives you a clearer idea of what traffic you could potentially receive but also may lead to some more great keyword ideas. You can use the keywords your competition is using if they aren’t too difficult to rank for.
Assess keyword difficulty
The success of your content can be delayed quite a long time if the competition is difficult. For the most part, you want a keyword that can be ranked in a relatively short period. Obviously, the value of the keyword may determine how long it takes to rank but for the most part (especially if you’re not an SEO) you don’t want to have to build a lot of links to your page.
Most keyword tools will provide a metric for keyword difficulty. Stick to easy keywords if you’re a newbie and the furthest you will ever venture is a medium difficulty keyword.
You can also assess the search engine result page (SERP) to see what websites currently hold the top 10 positions. If you’re competing against Wikipedia, Forbes, Entrepreneur, etc. it’s probably best to choose another keyword. The number of backlinks you need to beat them would be insane, along with absolutely riveting content.
Establish search intent and content type
BY now, you’ve found the keyword that you can rank for that has a decent amount of monthly search volume. Your research hasn’t ended yet. The next step is to make sure you understand EXACTLY what people are looking for when they search your keyword. You confirm this by assessing the top 10 results on the SERP for intent and content type.
Search intent
Establishing search intent (aka user intent) is pinpointing what people are expecting to find when they type in a keyword. Make sure you’re on the right track by briefly reading through the top pages that rank for your keyword. You’ll get a sense of what the pages offer, the quality of the content, and the depth of the topic.
Content-type
Keep in mind that you’re trying to rank on a search engine. Google operates on an algorithm so it will always show web pages that it believes best answer search intent. The point here is that the content type tends to be very similar among the top-ranking results.
It only takes a quick glance to identify the content type that ranks best. It’s not that you can’t come along and do something completely unique and rank #1. You can. But why try to reinvent the wheel when you can make a safer bet on doing what’s already working.
Here are a few examples of content-type:
Listicles
Questions
Ultimate Guides
How-to articles
Content Creation
Now comes the fun stuff. Write your little heart out and pour out all the good stuff you’ve been dying to share with the world about your passion or business. If you want your page to be the number one result on Google, you better write something worthy of the number one position. Here are a few tips on how to do that.
Write an outline highlighting your major points
There should be a clear objective with every article you write. You should set out to accomplish a specific task and you can do this by writing an outline. Make your major points first. If you can read what’s going to be the major headings of your article and already get a general sense of what it explains, you’ve done a good job.
Make your content scan-able
People tend to skim through articles. Use H2 headings for your major points and break up your major points with smaller points using H3-H6 headings. This not only makes things easy to read but also summarizes your article beautifully for search engines by highlighting the important points.
WordPress actually provides you with a quick glance summary of your content when you’re “behind the scenes” writing or editing your article. Picture making your content like this when you’re doing your outline:
Use as much media as possible
Break up your text as much as possible with images and video. If you want to add audio-go right ahead. If you don’t have the perfect professional photo to illustrate your point-take a screenshot. An image every 300 words is a fantastic way to make your content much easier to digest.
According to a study in which 200 content marketers participated, a survey revealed that images were used in at least 48% of all content. Don’t forget that video and audio also give your audience more options for how they digest your content. This essentially creates more value than the average page.
Keep your language and vocabulary simple
Did you know that the average American reads at the eighth-grade level? Obviously, if you’re writing for a medical journal, things are going to get funky. Keep your writing extremely easy to understand and never assume people know what you’re talking about.
People will get frustrated and leave your website if they don’t understand what you’re talking about. Reserve your content for the masses and don’t exclude anyone by overcomplicating your text.
Use an app to boost the quality of your writing
Grammarly is a popular app that you can use to improve the overall quality of your writing. It not only corrects the spelling and grammar, but it also suggests different ways of wording sentences. That’s just the free version! If you opt for the paid version the software will do everything but write the article itself.
This isn’t the only piece of software you can use. There are amazing writing apps that offer different benefits depending on the style of your writing. These apps provide a great way to demonstrate professionalism when your copy always has flawless grammar and no misspelled words.
Just do better than what’s out there
At the end of the day, just do better than what’s out there. Be original because it goes a long way and make sure your article is better than what’s on the first page already. Make sure you’ve covered every aspect of the topic you’re writing about better than any other page. Give users more to look at and more to engage with on your page.
Optimize your content
You don’t have to go nuts with structured data markup (although it doesn’t hurt) but you do need to apply the basics of on-page optimization. This means strategically placing your keyword in the places search engines expect to find it. The following are the on-page optimization commandments:
Place your keyword in the title (the title should have an H1 heading)
Your keyword should appear in the first paragraph or first 100 words
Repeat your keyword at least two or three times within the body
The image alt tags need to have your keyword (and variations of it)
Include a meta description to describe your article in the search results
Build links to improve the ranking ability
Sometimes a page will rank with a well-written, well-optimized article. For difficult keywords, the final step on how to publish content that ranks in the search results is to build links to your page. Although link building is difficult, you don’t need to go to a San Francisco coding bootcamp to learn how. If we break it down to a few basic tips, most people can come up with a few great links in a relatively short amount of time.
Outreach is almost unavoidable
How can people link to your page if they don’t know it exists? You will need to contact website owners that are likely to link to content like yours. If you know people in your industry or a close vertical to it, that’s one of the best places to start.
For example, if you’re a physiotherapist you could coordinate with a dentist to link to your page on TMJ therapy. There is a strong relationship to the content and it would be a great link if you’re both in the same city (consult a local SEO guide for more link-building tips if you’re a local business owner).
If you’re not sure how to find websites that will link to your website you can always spy on your competition to see who links to them.
Use software to uncover link opportunities
Tools that list your competition’s backlinks become invaluable when searching for link-building opportunities. Simply enter the URL of a page that ranks in the top 10 results for your keyword. Whether you’re using SEMrush or not, the results will look something like this:
You now have a list of the websites that link to your competition. The next step is to reach out to each website to see if they will link to you as well. If your content is better than what’s out there you have a great shot at earning a link.
Use stats in your content
Give people more reasons to link to your page. Writers will often site their resources by linking to a page. You can pick up some great links by incorporating useful stats that writers will use in their own articles.
Use original images and charts
Everyone needs images for their content! If you’re using charts and screenshots and resourceful images, people will link to your page if they use the image. It’s how people operate now so use it to your advantage.
Final thoughts
There are many ways to generate traffic, but none pose as much potential as when you know how to publish content that ranks on Google. Your resources are limitless for as long as you can keep coming up with great ideas people want to read about. Follow the steps above and you’ll be well on your way to seeing success in the search results.
I have a handful of good links to articles about performance that are burning a hole in my bookmarks folder, and wanna drop them here to share.
The new WebPageTest website design
From fonts to SVG: an icon migration strategy— Erwin Hofman notes that he was using icon fonts out of sheer convenience, but that there are loads of reasons not to use them. He provides details on his new strategy for using icons, which is based on the technique. Five years later, I’m still a big fan of just dunking the in the HTML where you need them. It’s just an HTML partial like any other.
Next.js Performance: Making a Fast Framework Even Faster— Ben Schwarz says that Next.js is already a pretty fast framework in that it does smart things that keep even React powered pages snappy. But performance isn’t something that can be left entirely to a framework. You have to do work. Fortunately, Next.js has some pretty handy helpers for things like dynamically (lazily) loading components, deferring scripts, optimizing images, and more.
Redirect Liquidation— Tim Vereecke covers a fascinating technique where instead of redirecting an old URL to a new URL, you let the old URL load, dynamically load the new content, then history.replaceState the old URL with the new URL. It’s faster, but just don’t do it for bots.
Performant A/B Testing with Cloudflare Workers— Philip Walton covers how A/B testing is a little trickier on static sites than server-backed sites, but you can pull it off (performantly) thanks to Cloudflare Workers which can manipulate HTML before it hits the browser, much like a Service Worker except at the edge rather than at the client. Save a cookie and you can maintain users in their proper groups.
A Unified Theory of Web Performance— Alex Russell tries to answer Tanner Hodges’ call for actually defining web performance. It’s one of those things that seems obvious (like it’s clear when certain things help and hurt web performance) but actually defining it is tricky. And not just defining it in terms of specific metrics (even that is tricky), but answer questions like: What are this discipline’s guiding principles?What does it look like to practice web performance? How do we do it?
Unveiling the new WebPageTest UI— I absolutely love seeing WebPageTest’s design evolve and improve. It’s one of those products that’s clearly a best-in-class tool for performance practitioners, yet had a prettttty gnarly design for a lot of years. This is way better. It’s like when Google Fonts finally got a redesign and the broad community let out a collective exhale of appreciation.
Caching Header Best Practices— Simon Hearne’s dissertation on Cache headers. When I first started caring about web performance, this was, like, the main thing. If you incorrectly send Cache headers, users might be re-downloading a file over and over unnecessarily when they don’t need to, which is about the worst thing possible. I’m glad to see headers keep getting attention and re-imagined as the web evolves.
Ahmad Shadeed covers the CSS fit-content sizing keyword. It’s useful! It just doesn’t come up super often. I find myself using min-content a lot more, like when setting up the height of a grid-template-row.
The fit-content keyword is actually closely related to min-content and max-content — it just has a little heuristic it follows that Ahmad nicely illustrates as a flow chart.
with fit-content, so that it neatly wraps around the . That way, even if the image doesn’t fill the parent space, and it can remain block-level.
We also covered PPK’s deep dive on fit-content last year. One of the key takeaways for understanding it is knowing that is it essentially a shorthand way of writing:
.box {
width: fit-content;
/* ... is the same as ... */
width: auto;
min-width: min-content;
max-width: max-content;
}
