Trying to build an online business is an extremely difficult challenge. The old saying – ‘build it and they will come’ – no longer holds. According to Forbes and ReferralCandy, there are over 102,000 US-based online businesses that are generating over $1,000 per month. This means that thousands of people are trying to compete with you for the same dollars.
After some time, people realized that the only way to grow an online business is to attract and engage an audience – people who listen to you, pay attention, and eventually, buy what you have to offer. One of the most effective ways of creating a following is by crafting valuable content that your audience will love.
The problem is that these days, everyone and their mother are trying to use content to skyrocket their business. That’s why you need to differentiate and provide something extra to your readers, something valuable they could use on an ongoing basis – extra downloadable material.
Whether you are writing a blog post, offering an online course or trying to capture leads; wrapping up your content and providing some extra juice via a downloadable resource will blow away your readers.
There’s another saying that still holds – ‘underpromise and overdeliver’. This is what you’ll learn how to do in today’s blog post.
With Piktochart, you can download visual projects in various formats. Create printables and visuals that can be shared on all social media channels. Get started for free.
3 Different Use Cases
All good strategies offer some flexibility. This one is no exception – you can always adapt it and use it in different ways. Let’s go through some of them you can start using right now.
Engage Users By Offering Additional Information After A Blog Post
You can only fit so many words on a blog post, but if you know enough about your topic, there is always more information you can share with your readers. A very common practice is to break up your content into a series, but we suggest you try something else: turn that content into a visual infographic and offer it as an extra, free downloadable resource.
Will Blunt, which we’ve covered in the past, is an expert at this strategy. Observe the image below. After a huge, and extremely valuable post titled The Secret SEO Strategy No One Is Talking About, he goes the extra mile and offers an additional, downloadable resource – the SEO Strategy Template.
Bonus tip: If you are feeling ambitious, you can always ask people’s emails in exchange for the extra content!
Offer A Downloadable Summary Of Your Online Course
There are two ways to increase your sales: either get new customers, or get your existing customers to buy more. You should never overlook your existing clients. In fact, if you really want to differentiate yourself, you should keep adding value, even after they’ve purchased.
A great way of doing so is by offering a downloadable summary of your online course for people to print and pin near their desks. This could be a short, concise and to the point coverage of the most important points in every unit, or a summary of the 3 most relevant takeaways of the whole course.
People who’ve already purchased don’t expect extra bonuses, but if you offer one, they will appreciate it and remember the way you do business.
Increase Your Conversion Rates By Offering A Downloadable Infographic
Leads are the lifeblood of your business. If your venture isn’t seeing a constant and healthy stream of new leads every month, chances are you won’t be able to grow and get new business.
A great way to make sure you always get fresh leads is to offer something valuable to visitors in exchange for their email. LeadPages has this practice nailed down to perfection. As a way to entice users, they offer a free report that teaches how to create HD videos in exchange of your email.
BloggerSidekick uses a different approach – instead of a separate landing page, they have a small floating bar where they offer a free download of their Blog Strategy Canvas in exchange for your email.
Using Piktochart To Create Your Downloadables
Now that you know how beneficial is to engage and surprise your audience, let’s take a quick look to how you can design any downloadable resource in less than 60 minutes. For that, we are going to use Piktochart. It’s lightweight, super easy to use and it’s fully loaded with beautiful templates, icons and everything you could need – plus, it’s free!
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1 – Pick your poison. The first step is to pick which strategy you want to follow. If you are a beginner, we suggest you follow the first one as you can probably implement it right now. Either you can write a new post, or pick one of your most read articles. Both would work!
2 – Select the most Important sections. As an infographic is a visual medium to be skimmed in a few seconds, you should limit the amount of content you fit into the design. Start by picking the 3 (or 5) most important points that would provide the most value to the reader. In the case of this post, we would pick the 3 different strategies you could follow: (a) a downloadable extension of your blog post, (b) a summary of your online course, and (c), a downloadable resource to get more leads.
3 – Pick a Piktochart template. Wouldn’t it be great if creating infographics was just as simple as writing regular ole text-based blog posts? Unfortunately, we aren’t quite there, but the closest thing to it are our templates! We have dozens of beautiful pre-made template you could use today as the foundation of your infographic. Try using one of our Report templates. These come with blocks that are optimized to fit on A4 pages. This will allow people to easily print it and pin it somewhere around their workstation.
4 – Translate all the information into a beautiful design. Now that you’ve picked your content and your template, it’s time to start filling the blanks. Remember: try to keep it as simple and visual as possible. Piktochart’s built-in icon library is my favorite tool to convey a message without using words.
5 – Offer it to your audience. Now that the major work is done, it’s time to start ripping some benefits from your efforts. You can always share a Piktochart link, but if you need to offer a downloadable version, Piktochart allows you to save your design as a PDF file. Once you do this, you can upload it to Wordpress and link to it when needed!
Piktochart offers professional templates for creating infographics, presentations, reports, posters, brochures, and more. Create attractive visuals within minutes for free. Get started now.
Create attractive downloadables for your ecommerce website with Piktochart.
Create posters, flyers, cards and infographics. Sign up for free and customize a template within minutes. The process is simple. Replace the text. Add icons, images and illustrations. Sync the charts with spreadsheets. Export in PDF or PNG format. Get started now.
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