Taking the Marketing Approach to UX

The key to successful marketing is advertising a solution, and selling the tool that provides it. Put another way, by looking at the jobs people are trying to accomplish, marketers can better interact with their prospects. Now imagine we think about UX in the same way: the key to a successful product is creating a solution (a better way to make a hole), and not just a tool (the drill).

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” – Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School.

What Does Marketing Have to Do With Anything?

Sales and marketing teams often spend more in-person time with customers than the engineers or product developers do. As a result, the best information about what the user needs may be coming from the people who know those users best: the marketers.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and author of many books on business and marketing, has studied many successful businesses, and the solutions that made their marketing successful. He theorizes that Theodore Levitt was right: people want to buy a solution.

Fedex and Their “Jobs-To-Be-Done” Philosophy

Imagine how hard it was starting FedEx. The US Postal Service was the main competitor, millions of dollars of startup capital were required and, as with any new business, there was a pretty big risk that it would fail. Imagine yourself in this situation, starting a new company like FedEx with these huge risks. How would you discover what your customers really wanted?

Start by looking at things from the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ perspective. What are people who use the postal service trying to get done?

One thing only: Get their package from one place to another as quickly as possible. The traditional mail service in 1973 was highly unreliable and many packages were lost or damaged in transit. The founder of FedEx provided customers with a solution: FedEx focused on getting a package from one place to another in days, instead of weeks or months.

This illustrates an essential point. What customers do is more important than who they are. Regardless of age, social status, or gender, when you buy a drill, what you want is a hole, and marketers know this.

What Does This Mean For UX?

Selling a solution works well in marketing, but user experience designers aren’t marketers or salespeople. We don’t want to sell a solution – we want to build solutions.

Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google describes Google as more than just a tool. In his 2011 speech at D: All Things Digital, he says, “we’re trying to move from answers that are link-based to answers that are algorithmically based, where we can actually compute the right answer.”

A search engine is a tool that responds with links. Google is a solution – a way to provide people with answers. Back in 1999, the best way to do this was providing links to relevant sources, and Google did so. Now, as algorithms make it possible to provide answers directly, Google is moving toward that.

Try typing “London temperature” directly in Google. Before the search results, you’ll see a box where you’re shown the most recent temperature for the city and the temperature predictions for future dates.

Or type “Berlin flights.” Before any results show up, you are shown a summary of flights to Berlin. Better yet, if you turn on location, you’ll be shown flights from your location to that specific city.

In other words, you are being provided a direct answer to what you’re looking for. Google’s ultimate goal is to give you answers to even more complex queries, for example, “the best way to lose weight”. One thing they could possibly do is to intelligently compile the most popular advice on losing weight, compare that against scientific research on what works and display the summary at the top.

How is it that Google understands exactly what visitors are trying to get done, and provide such a successful product to solve visitor’s needs? It all comes down to user research.

Start with User Research

Earlier, I said that what customers do is more important than who they are. Ask yourself a few questions to see if it’s true in your case:

1. Do you identify more according to your ancestry, or your occupation?


2. How do you introduce yourself to others?


3. Are you more likely to ask someone about their activities, or their looks?

User research is about how users spend their time, what they care about, and what actions they take. By learning about your prospective customers before beginning any product development, you can create a truly successful product.

Observe What Your Visitors Already Do

Use available tools or services to get a better understanding of how people interact with your site or application. These are so-called “behavioral tools” which allow you to observe the actual way your users behave.

Before using these tools, write down your own predictions. How do you believe users interact with your site or application?

I cannot emphasize enough how important this is because of the hindsight bias which is basically looking at past events and interpreting them as being predictable. Every time you tell yourself “I knew it all along” after an event occurs, you’re probably a “victim” of this bias. Here are some examples:

• After some unexpected event occurs (like the 9/11 attacks or the 1986 space shuttle disaster), there were many people that cited Nostradamus and some verse as a “proof” he predicted it was bound to happen.


• The “analysis” part on news networks after some event occurs. When the Madoff ponzi scheme was busted, you saw all sorts of experts saying “if only this and this was in place, this would not happen”.


• In one study, several students were asked if a particular person nominated for the Supreme court would be confirmed. 58% said yes. After he was confirmed, the same students were again asked if they thought he would be confirmed. This time, 78% said yes.

That’s why it’s important to try and write your predictions first to stop this bias from occurring and realize the unexpected interactions of your users with whatever it is you’re testing. Stop the “I knew it all along” thought before it’s too late.

Ask Users What They’re Trying To Do After You Observe Them

You can do this after observing what they do using various tools. Specifically, ask them what they are trying to get done by clicking on x and then on y and then on z. There are many usability testing and survey tools to accomplish this, but after all, they’re just tools.

What you’re trying to get done here is ask the right questions and come up with answers that will improve your prospects understanding.

It’s simple: First observe what they do and then try to find why they do what they’re doing by asking questions. What were you trying to accomplish while clicking on x and then on y? Why did you click y after clicking on z? etc.

To give you a good idea about how to get started with this, I recommend you first:

a) Install behavior analysis tool(s) and run it for at least 7 days and make predictions how they’re going to behave before you start running the heatmap tools, as mentioned above.

b) Get at least 10 users and ask them what they are trying to get done with your tool.

If your prospects are close to you, you might consider making in-live interviews. If your prospects are all around the world, then get their contact info and conduct an online survey. I recommend you talk to them directly and not just sending them a generic survey via email.

c) After the heatmap study, see any unexpected occurrences and ask your users what they were trying to get done by clicking on y and then on z.

It’s Simple To Get Started

User testing provides UX designers with the information they need to create successful products. Just as marketing teams learn from speaking with users, so can UXers. And in doing so, you can come away with new insights and lessons that will help you create the perfect solution.

Image Source: Flat Line Icon Set via Shutterstock.

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Taking the Marketing Approach to UX

Optimizing Landing Pages for Multichannel Marketing

Strictly defined, a landing page is a singular web page that’s built to receive visitors from a defined subset of a target audience. These pages are responsible for persuading visitors to heed calls to action that will fulfill a marketer’s conversion goals.

The average person may think that all landing pages do is capture email addresses, but that’s not the case. Landing pages may also be used to facilitate downloads, persuade visitors to subscribe to newsletters, show videos, pitch sales, upsell existing customers, or offer other navigational options.

Technically, any web page that’s being used as the go-to destination for advertising and SEO can be classified as a landing page. This is particularly true in multi-channel marketing where different promotional avenues may require different configurations and styles of landing pages that are best fitted to receive the kind of traffic that each channel pushes.

Optimizing a Landing Page

Advertising and SEO aren’t enough to turn visits into qualified leads. Most of the time, marketers have to do varying levels of optimization to make sure the pages get good visibility while serving up good user experiences that encourage conversions. Here are nine steps to optimize a landing page for various promotional channels:

1. Determine the Landing Page’s Purpose

The first step in creating a functional landing page is deciding what it’s for. Are you using it to generate leads? Perhaps to pitch a sale? Whatever it is, the purpose has to be solitary and focused. Trying to get a visitor to do more than one thing usually leads to confusion and failure.

The landing page’s purpose sets the tone for everything from its headline to the body text and right down to its call to action. Keep in mind that Internet browsing attention span is short and volatile. If you bore or confuse your audience, your conversion rate suffers. Keep the messaging simple and united at all times.

2. Identify and Set the Value Proposition

In marketing, it’s never about you and what you want. It’s always about what’s in it for the target audience and how you can leverage that to get what you want in the process. That principle applies strongly to landing pages. It’s never about you, your mailing list or your sales figures. It’s always about the perceived value that your audience will get from absorbing your content and heeding your call to action.

When writing the copy, make the promise explicit every step of the way. Tell the reader how your offering either increases their pleasures or takes away their pains. Write about that in the opening paragraph and make it lead nicely to the benefit statement. Underscore your offers other benefits by enumerating them in short but impactful bullet points. Lastly, make it clear that your audience can only help you fulfill your promise by taking on your call to action.

3. Create at Least Two of Each Element

Landing page design and copywriting aren’t the most exact of sciences. You may have every reason to think that one headline or color scheme is better than another, but the majority of your audience could think otherwise. For that reason, testing is an essential part of landing page optimization. It provides empirical data straight from the field that helps you assess which parts of your landing page are working and which ones need to be improved.

Practically anything in a landing page can be tested. Headlines, buttons, calls-to-action and color palettes can be exposed to a sample set of the audience to gauge visitor responses. Tools such as Google Analytics can streamline the process and help you crunch the numbers for accurate result analysis.

There are two main types of testing used in landing page optimization: A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the type that switches out singular landing page elements to see which one performs better. Multivariate tests, on the other hand, are experiments that measure which combination of elements performs best.

4. Determine Where the Page Fold is

In newspaper parlance, the fold is the not-so-imaginary line separating the top half from the bottom half of a broadsheet. The most important headlines, images, and news stories are placed above the fold while everything else is positioned below it.

We may be in a day and age where news publications have gone online and folds no longer exist as we knew them, but they go on in a different form. As far as web pages go, “above the fold” pertains to the area that’s immediately visible when the page fully loads. This area is prime online real estate and it will determine whether or not the majority of your audience will stay and scroll down.

Having said that, it’s crucial for a landing page to position vital elements such as the headline and important images above the fold. The promise of value has to be sensed by the audience within a few seconds and without scrolling down.

Granted, users will vary in devices and screen resolution preferences which means the fold may vary from person to person. However, you can compensate for that by planning for what the majority will use. For desktop devices, it’s a safe bet to assume that the average screen resolution will be 1600×900 or close variants of that.

Smartphones and tablets may have totally different display specifications and you’ll want to cater for them with either mobile-friendly counterparts of your landing pages or well-planned responsive webpages that scale down accurately to the devices viewing them.

5. Apply Basic SEO

Search engine traffic is still the best driver of qualified visitors to a landing page. Make sure to use keywords in important elements such as title tags, header tags, image alternate text and body copy. Make sure you use canonical URLs and if you can direct some internal and external links to the landing page, by all means do so.

Even when you’re not relying on organic search traffic to feed visitors to your landing page, you should still apply these optimizations. Title tags and meta descriptions display prominently when your landing page URL is shared on social media. PPC bots also crawl landing pages and award relevance points when these important SEO elements are filled in accurately. Basic SEO doesn’t require a lot of effort but it will reward your landing page in more ways than one.

6. Make Sure It’s Mobile-Friendly

By the end of 2014, it was reported that mobile Internet use has officially surpassed desktop usage. This is a huge development and the trend seems to only be getting started.

The mobile web is a big, open market and early adopters are bound to be rewarded. If you want to tap the latest evolution of the Internet as we know it, it’s in your best interest to make your landing pages mobile-friendly.

7. Remove Unnecessary Links

Think of links within your landing page as exit routes. The more of them you have, the greater the chances that visitors will wander off somewhere and never come back. To maximize your conversion rate, it’s usually best to have only one clickable item: the call-to-action button. This helps you funnel your traffic more easily towards the kind of user action that results in the fulfilment of your conversion goals.

Links aren’t bad per se, but make sure you absolutely have to have them before you place them on the landing page. Examples of these links are the ones leading to your privacy policy and terms of use. Just make sure they’re set up to open in new tabs or windows so you don’t end up pulling visitors away from the landing page itself.

8. Add Social Proof

Social proof is the psychological phenomenon where people assume that the actions and thoughts of others is the correct one. More often than not, adding elements of social proof to a landing page helps increase conversion rates by reducing the audience’s perception of risk.

By that token, badges, testimonials and statistics help you build a better case for your call to action. Social proof widgets are usually placed either on the sidebars or the bottom part of the landing page. They’re completely optional but they’re great to have whenever you can get hold of them.

9. Track it All with Analytics

No matter how good your landing page does when you launch it, there’s always room for you to improve it en route to better conversion rates. Track it with Google Analytics or other web analytics platforms and monitor key metrics such as bounce rates, average times on the page and conversion rates.

This will help you measure user engagement and understand visitor behaviour. It will also shed insights on whether or not you need to make adjustments in order to get the most out of the page and the promotions you’re doing.

Finished

Using landing pages for multichannel marketing isn’t the most exact of sciences and it needs constant testing with corresponding adjustments to yield the best results. Keep refining your craft and better traction won’t be far behind.

Image Source: Outlined IT Icons via Shutterstock.

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Optimizing Landing Pages for Multichannel Marketing

Testing Your Marketing Efforts as a Freelancer

In today’s freelancing climate, one of the best things you can do in terms of marketing yourself is to think in what I like to call “Test Terms.” What does this mean? When a food company is developing a new product to release into the market, they don’t simply travel in a straight line from recipe to manufacturing to stocking the shelves at the grocery store. What happens is they perform a series of tests, which allow them to tweak their product until it gets just the right kind of response they’re looking for.

As a designer, it’s eminently possible to plan out a system that allows you to do the same thing, with similar results. However, many people remain stuck on one method of promotion, believing they’re too busy working to devote too much time to marketing themselves.

But the sad paradox of that belief is that, by not adjusting the way they market themselves, these freelance designers will always be too busy scraping by. They’re not getting the exposure they need to be choosier about the types of jobs they can take on, because the only jobs available are the ones that limited exposure gets them.

Everyone Tests Everything

One of the best ways to test consumers’ reactions to new food products is to get their direct feedback. Starting with just one local area, a company will test out a variety of different approaches to everything about the product. And I mean everything. Do people in this small town like the taste of this new product, or do they hate it? If they hate it, it’s back to the test kitchens to improve the recipe. Are they repelled by the packaging?

Get that designer back in here – time to revise! Are the ads falling flat? Well, you get the idea.

Image Source: Testing Statistic via Shutterstock

Every tiny detail of this new product gets tested and re-tested, adjusted and refined wherever needed. After they’ve made enough improvements that people are now responding well to the product, it’s time to take it to a new area. This process gets repeated again and again until there’s a hugely positive response and people are stockpiling the new food item like they’re preparing for Armageddon.

A similar process happens, by the way, in the movie business, the government (think road signs or jury duty summonses aren’t tested? Think again), and other consumer industries like toys and games.

Testing is a proven strategy to improving a product’s chances of success, and as a designer, you can very easily start taking advantage of some of these sophisticated testing methods to place yourself practically in the lap of your most desired clients. Of course you can and do test your approaches to design, but trying out new ways of marketing is easier to implement in your regular schedule than you might think.

Sharpen Your Pencils

Start with your main marketing approach, which might be your website, your business card, your cover letter, or your resume. How well does this approach work for you? Are the clients beating down your door, or is something not quite working the way it’s supposed to?

If you regularly hand out business cards at networking events, are they completely up to date? Do they display the important information clearly? Are you giving them to the right people? That last one is an important detail that many creative freelancers miss.

Image Source: Sharpen Your Idea via Shutterstock

Business cards are practically useless if you don’t use them properly. At a networking event, the people you typically end up chatting with aren’t people who can provide you with tons of high quality work. They’re people just like you – struggling entrepreneurs who need services on the cheap. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with these people, but it’s important to keep in mind the overall value of a client when you’re passing out those expensive business cards.

How good of a return on your investment will you be getting? Test out handing your business card to a different sort of person than you ordinarily would, and see what type of response you get.

In a similar way, your website may or may not be bringing you the steady stream of work that it could be. You may be the most brilliant, multifaceted designer the world has ever seen, and yet if no one knows about your work, you might as well be invisible.

The real key to getting better quality clients is not to put as much of your work “out there” as you possibly can. It’s making sure that the work you’ve done is being seen by the maximum number of eyeballs. In the design world, the best way to do this, in my opinion, is by doing a personal side project that you really love and are passionate about.

The Gold Standard Of Eating

It turns out that as a designer operating a business as a freelancer, you should be adjusting everything you do to market yourself – all the time. What do I mean by adjusting? In many restaurants, well before the rush of customers comes in, chefs create something called a Gold Standard, a single plate that sets the, well, standard for all the plates the kitchen will produce for that day. It’s such an important part of the culinary process that the plates used in most restaurants – the ones you eat your main course on – are known as Gold Standard Plates.

The original Gold Standard is a test plate – any changes to the dish are tried out there first. If something is off about the flavor, the ingredients, or the arrangement of the items, the Gold Standard will be the laboratory where those things can be tweaked.

Image Source: Fine Gold Ingots and a Gold-Nugget via Shutterstock

As a designer, incorporating a similar philosophy will be helpful in streamlining your marketing process. Creating your own “Gold Standard” of promotion will allow you to make quick adjustments locally, to one portion of your marketing campaign, before you roll out those changes to everything else. Whether it’s your website’s analytics, your business card, or your resume, zoom in on one single marketing material and find out what works and what doesn’t.

Usually the information you learn is transferable to other parts of your marketing package, and you may even discover that one or more of your marketing materials are unnecessary. You definitely need to have a website if you design them for a living, but what about business cards? A CV? Social media? How well are these things really working to directly deliver you the clients you want?

Different types of clients care about different things. Maybe your clients don’t care so much about your resume, but they would really love to read your blog or Twitter updates. Other clients might be the exact opposite – it’s essential to know your market and be able to provide them the proof they’re looking for that tells them you’re the designer for the job.

What Do You Think?

What areas do you utilize testing, and how well do they benefit your self-promotion as a freelancer? Are there any areas where you could incorporate more ways to test the response of your target audience?

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Testing Your Marketing Efforts as a Freelancer

Some Easy Methods for Marketing Your Design Business

Up until now, your new design business has been like a well-kept secret. Your friends and family know that you’ve put your talents on the market, but not many other people do (like clients). Here is how to pique the public’s interest in a way that doesn’t lump you in a noisy self-promoting mess.

Image Source: Marketing Design via Shutterstock.

Promoting Your Name Online

Online marketing is a never-ending revolving door, with something new flying out at every turn. To stay relevant as a designer, especially an independent one, you can’t afford to let yourself get buried under all the other content coming at your audience from across the Internet. When you understand your business goals and your target demographic, you can start making yourself a fixture in your future clients’ lives. Some ways to achieve this include:

• Blogging regularly, at least once a week, with a unique take on relevant topics. Occasional fun posts are okay too — describing the awesome trip you just took with your family or sharing your thoughts on the latest big-screen adaptation of your favorite book.


• Linking to other design industry blogs, especially well-read ones, in your own posts. Connections with reputable sites not only builds relationships with those sites, but it also improves your online visibility.


• Being an active member of online forums and the member communities of design websites, strengthening your community connection with your presence and authoritative insights.


• Sharing your latest projects on visual-friendly social sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. (Facebook and Twitter are also good for promoting your blog updates.)


• Once you’ve established yourself as a voice in your field, asking other established sites if you can contribute to their website (articles, infographics, etc.). (Note that it helps if your content has received a lot of engagement, showing them they’ll receive similar results with an original contribution.)

In every promotional outreach, your brand image is key. If you look the same everywhere, thanks to your consistent profile pictures, business name, and writing style, the design community will begin to recognize you — which establishes your name among a well-sought after audience.

Engaging Potential Customers Offline

Never underestimate the power of good old print marketing to keep your top-of-mind awareness in your local community. Consumers feel a stronger connection to something they can hold in their hand than to anything that flashes by on a screen, evidenced by the fact thatdirect mail leads them to spend more. Print pieces such as locally posted flyers and oversized postcards put your work, your name, your logo, and hopefully your face in front of potential clients as they go about their daily activities.

These items should showcase not only your own skill, but what others say about you, so throw in some good reviews you’ve received. If you don’t have many reviews to pick from yet, ask for recommendations from those who have praised your work in the past. Don’t be afraid to name-drop some of your well-known clients (with their permission, of course). After enough exposures, those who view your materials might just look you up online.

Offline marketing doesn’t have to be restricted to pieces of paper in various shapes, either. Here’s a list of ideas you can use to get people noticing your business as you go about your everyday life:

• Let clients know you’re thinking of them by sending them holiday cards that you design specifically for them. The personalization will stick out, allowing your service to become top-of-mind.


• Have a superb business card to hand out while networking. Good design on such a small medium is one of the most powerful ways you can demonstrate your skill to future clients.


• Hold a contest of your choice among local businesses, with the winner getting a free design service from you. This alerts potential clients to your existence and talents.


• Stick a branded car decal or magnet on your vehicle, for promotion that is both affordable and garners a high view rate.


• Consider running an ad or two in local print media, to reach a demographic that may not get online much, but enjoys unwinding with a magazine or newspaper. Anything you can do to expand your audience (without exceeding your ad budget) will help your visibility.

Most importantly, let people get to know you. Talk to them at business gatherings, at town events, in line at the coffee shop at lunch, wherever! If the conversation leads to what you do for a living, that’s a great opportunity; but if it doesn’t, don’t force it. Just establishing a pleasant connection between your face and your personal interactions may lead business later on.

Optimizing Both Strategies for Maximum Visibility

As always, your on- and offline efforts should work together. Being present and interacting in both fields is necessary for success. Design your promotional strategy around your intended clients. Prove that their business is worth your time and they’ll start to see you as being worth their time.

The optimum balance of print and digital marketing is different for every independent designer. Factors like the location, preferred media, and the level of market saturation will all have an impact on your marketing strategy. It may take you a few trial-and-error attempts to achieve the best return for your promotions, but even your small baby steps will help to make you more noticeable than you were before.

Finished

What have you learned in your journey to integrate your marketing efforts? Share your stories below!

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Some Easy Methods for Marketing Your Design Business

12 Free Ebooks to Teach You Blogging and Content Marketing

For those who are serious about blogging or just cannot seem to get their blogs to take off, sometimes all you need is some first-hand tips from the experts themselves. We hear you and since there are plenty of such ebooks lying around online, we’ve done the legwork and collected 12 such eBooks that are great collections of blogging experience, knowledge and tips that are the result of years of trial and error from those who have been there, done that.

Here you’ll see free ebooks on how to start blogging, how to become a successful writer, how to get money with blogging and get traffic, how to organize your blog and create strong visuals, and more. So, scroll down and enjoy!

Editor’s note: 7 of the books below are available absolutely free; the links you see are the direct download links. The last 5 books require some form of registration or at least an email address to download.

1. How to Start a Blog

This book is a step-by-step guide on how to setup your blog and make it successful. The ebook contains 7 chapters to help you set up, maintain, monetise, and promote your blog along with helpful resources and tools for bloggers. Ogi Djuraskovic is behind FirstSiteGuide, and a web enthusiast who helps people start their own blog/site. Other team members of FirstSiteGuide who took part in writing the ebook are experts in hosting, marketing, SEO and design.

Authors: Ogi Djuraskovic, Kristi Hines & the FirstSiteGuide Team

Available in: PDF

2. 365 Writing Prompts

365 Writing Prompts was written by The Daily Post team who do all kind of jobs (from blogging to coding) and have the goal of helping people start their own blogs. Get this on your reader, tablet or laptop and get inspirational prompts on each day of the year to write. For example, for June 20, you will get, "Moment of kindness. Describe a moment of kindness, between you and someone else — loved one or complete stranger.” Also available in Spanish, French and Indonesian.

Author: The Daily Post

Available in: PDF | Kindle | iBooks

3. Blogging For Dummies, 4th Edition

If you feel like a complete dummy in blogging, this ebook will teach you a lot new things in simple language. This ebook is helpful for amateurs and pros, who want to integrate their blog with social media and optimize it for search engines. Susannah Gardner is a writer and editor who helps people say exactly what they want to say, and the co-author, Shane Birley is a technologist (with a literature degree) who helps people build stuff online.

Author: Susannah Gardner, Shane Birley

Available in: PDF

4. Who’s There?

Seth Godin is an american author, marketer, and speaker, who doesn’t really need an introduction. Despite the title, Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web, this ebook is not going to tell you how to set up your blog to sell your products. It’smore about the influence of blogging on your future, career, ideas and the whole lifestyle that comes with.

Author: Seth Godin

Available in: PDF

5. The Blogger’s Workbook

This 10 page ebook was written by web designer and developer Heather Jones, who has been creating animated graphics for over a decade. The Blogger’s Workbook is her first ebook with first-hand tips. In this ebook you’ll find information on how to start a blog, add proper categories, schedule your articles, guest posts and more.

Author: Viva la Violette

Available in: PDF

6. A beginner’s guide to creating visual content

As we live in the world of overloaded information, to create a really awesome blog you need to not only write a good copy, but also frame your articles with proper images and other visual element. This 60-page ebook will tell you how to create high-quality images, photos, graphs, infographics and other design elements for your blog.

Author: Shannon Johnson, Keith Frankel and Jon Smith

Available in: PDF

7. Pocket Guide to SEO

Forty agency has been designing remarkable user experiences for over a decade. If you have a blog, but have no visits then this is the guide you need. This awesome 15-page Pocket Guide to SEO will tell and show you everything you need to know about SEO: proper keywords, headlines, descriptions and more.

Author: Kim Stearns

Available in: PDF

8. How to Write Magnetic Headlines

Copyblogger is a software and training organization which provides expert advice, exceptional products and smart copywriting. This ebook is an in-depth guide on how to write killer headlines, touching on mistakes to avoid, working formulas, templates you can use and more. It is part of a 14-book how-to series on everything to do with content marketing, which you can get if you register on the Copyblogger site.

Author: Copyblogger

Available in: PDF (Editors Note: This link is from a university site. Otherwise, the book is only available upon registration.)

9. A Simple Guide to Blogging for Business

Wishpond is a company which helps people to create, publish and track their online marketing campaigns. They have worked with Facebook, Twitter, Mailchimp just to name a few brands. This ebook will help you to understand all the benefits of having great content on your site. You will be taught how to start blogging, find your target audience, write good content, promote your blog, measure results and more.

Author: wishpond.com

Available with registration

10. How to Make Money Blogging

Crystal Paine is a wife, mom of three, and speaker. In 2007 she founded MoneySavingMom.com, which has over a million unique visitors and around 4 million pageviews per month. If you have a blog and want to get money with it, you going to need this ebook. It shares insider tips and tricks on how to monetize your blog as well as list useful resources for blogging.

Author: Crystal Paine

Available with Noisetrade account, Facebook login or email address.

11. A Definitive Guide To A High-Traffic Blog

There are thousands of blogs out there around the Web. Thus, it’s really difficult to create a blog which will stand out from the rest ones. This ebook is packed with 15 years of experience and 14 sections of advice on how to find writing ideas, create competitive content, overcome writer’s block and draw visitors to your site.

Author: Todaymade

Available with email address

12. How to Build a Blog with 10,000+ Subscribers

Here is an ebook that will tell you how to grow your email list up to 10,000 subscribers in just 12 months. Glen Allsop moved to South Africa when he was 18, to be a social media manager for huge brands like Land Rover, Nissan and Hewlett Packard. These days, he is a successful blogger who runs his own marketing company and helps people make a living online.

Author: Glen Allsopp

Available in with email address

Now Read:
14 Free Ebooks for Web Designers

12 Free Ebooks to Teach You Blogging and Content Marketing

12 Free Ebooks to Teach You Blogging and Content Marketing

For those who are serious about blogging or just cannot seem to get their blogs to take off, sometimes all you need is some first-hand tips from the experts themselves. We hear you and since there are plenty of such ebooks lying around online, we’ve done the legwork and collected 12 such eBooks that are great collections of blogging experience, knowledge and tips that are the result of years of trial and error from those who have been there, done that.

Here you’ll see free ebooks on how to start blogging, how to become a successful writer, how to get money with blogging and get traffic, how to organize your blog and create strong visuals, and more. So, scroll down and enjoy!

Editor’s note: 7 of the books below are available absolutely free; the links you see are the direct download links. The last 5 books require some form of registration or at least an email address to download.

1. How to Start a Blog

This book is a step-by-step guide on how to setup your blog and make it successful. The ebook contains 7 chapters to help you set up, maintain, monetise, and promote your blog along with helpful resources and tools for bloggers. Ogi Djuraskovic is behind FirstSiteGuide, and a web enthusiast who helps people start their own blog/site. Other team members of FirstSiteGuide who took part in writing the ebook are experts in hosting, marketing, SEO and design.

Authors: Ogi Djuraskovic, Kristi Hines & the FirstSiteGuide Team

Available in: PDF

2. 365 Writing Prompts

365 Writing Prompts was written by The Daily Post team who do all kind of jobs (from blogging to coding) and have the goal of helping people start their own blogs. Get this on your reader, tablet or laptop and get inspirational prompts on each day of the year to write. For example, for June 20, you will get, "Moment of kindness. Describe a moment of kindness, between you and someone else — loved one or complete stranger.” Also available in Spanish, French and Indonesian.

Author: The Daily Post

Available in: PDF | Kindle | iBooks

3. Blogging For Dummies, 4th Edition

If you feel like a complete dummy in blogging, this ebook will teach you a lot new things in simple language. This ebook is helpful for amateurs and pros, who want to integrate their blog with social media and optimize it for search engines. Susannah Gardner is a writer and editor who helps people say exactly what they want to say, and the co-author, Shane Birley is a technologist (with a literature degree) who helps people build stuff online.

Author: Susannah Gardner, Shane Birley

Available in: PDF

4. Who’s There?

Seth Godin is an american author, marketer, and speaker, who doesn’t really need an introduction. Despite the title, Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web, this ebook is not going to tell you how to set up your blog to sell your products. It’smore about the influence of blogging on your future, career, ideas and the whole lifestyle that comes with.

Author: Seth Godin

Available in: PDF

5. The Blogger’s Workbook

This 10 page ebook was written by web designer and developer Heather Jones, who has been creating animated graphics for over a decade. The Blogger’s Workbook is her first ebook with first-hand tips. In this ebook you’ll find information on how to start a blog, add proper categories, schedule your articles, guest posts and more.

Author: Viva la Violette

Available in: PDF

6. A beginner’s guide to creating visual content

As we live in the world of overloaded information, to create a really awesome blog you need to not only write a good copy, but also frame your articles with proper images and other visual element. This 60-page ebook will tell you how to create high-quality images, photos, graphs, infographics and other design elements for your blog.

Author: Shannon Johnson, Keith Frankel and Jon Smith

Available in: PDF

7. Pocket Guide to SEO

Forty agency has been designing remarkable user experiences for over a decade. If you have a blog, but have no visits then this is the guide you need. This awesome 15-page Pocket Guide to SEO will tell and show you everything you need to know about SEO: proper keywords, headlines, descriptions and more.

Author: Kim Stearns

Available in: PDF

8. How to Write Magnetic Headlines

Copyblogger is a software and training organization which provides expert advice, exceptional products and smart copywriting. This ebook is an in-depth guide on how to write killer headlines, touching on mistakes to avoid, working formulas, templates you can use and more. It is part of a 14-book how-to series on everything to do with content marketing, which you can get if you register on the Copyblogger site.

Author: Copyblogger

Available in: PDF (Editors Note: This link is from a university site. Otherwise, the book is only available upon registration.)

9. A Simple Guide to Blogging for Business

Wishpond is a company which helps people to create, publish and track their online marketing campaigns. They have worked with Facebook, Twitter, Mailchimp just to name a few brands. This ebook will help you to understand all the benefits of having great content on your site. You will be taught how to start blogging, find your target audience, write good content, promote your blog, measure results and more.

Author: wishpond.com

Available with registration

10. How to Make Money Blogging

Crystal Paine is a wife, mom of three, and speaker. In 2007 she founded MoneySavingMom.com, which has over a million unique visitors and around 4 million pageviews per month. If you have a blog and want to get money with it, you going to need this ebook. It shares insider tips and tricks on how to monetize your blog as well as list useful resources for blogging.

Author: Crystal Paine

Available with Noisetrade account, Facebook login or email address.

11. A Definitive Guide To A High-Traffic Blog

There are thousands of blogs out there around the Web. Thus, it’s really difficult to create a blog which will stand out from the rest ones. This ebook is packed with 15 years of experience and 14 sections of advice on how to find writing ideas, create competitive content, overcome writer’s block and draw visitors to your site.

Author: Todaymade

Available with email address

12. How to Build a Blog with 10,000+ Subscribers

Here is an ebook that will tell you how to grow your email list up to 10,000 subscribers in just 12 months. Glen Allsop moved to South Africa when he was 18, to be a social media manager for huge brands like Land Rover, Nissan and Hewlett Packard. These days, he is a successful blogger who runs his own marketing company and helps people make a living online.

Author: Glen Allsopp

Available in with email address

Now Read:
14 Free Ebooks for Web Designers

12 Free Ebooks to Teach You Blogging and Content Marketing