While no two organizations are created equal, the motivations behind joining one often are.  

By understanding what draws new members in—and just as important—what keeps them there, nonprofits can better understand where to allocate their marketing time and resources. Take a look at this infographic from abila’s Member Engagement Study, to see what universal truths members share across organizations.  

To dig down deeper on these stats, try running a survey with your current members to see how their responses net out against the averages below. Supplement this data by creating ideal member personas (free template here), and then match your content to meet the needs of this ideal audience. 

And just like that, you have the bones of a content strategy for member acquisition, engagement, and retention. Want some more in-depth information on membership marketing? Take a look at our Guide, Growing and Engaging Your Member Base. 

We’ve got more nonprofit resources where this came from.
Take a look at our latest ebook, A Crash Course on Inbound Marketing for Nonprofits >> 

When I made my start in the working world, I believed a terrible lie about my inbox.

I thought that the best employees respond to emails immediately. So of course, I prided myself on replying to emails quicker than any of my coworkers — even if that meant dropping whatever important task I was supposed to be doing.

Thankfully, this competitive spirit around my inbox didn’t last long. While I still love the feeling of “inbox zero,” I’ve come to understand the amount of time your inbox can steal. According to a study by McKinsey Global Institute, the average worker spends 28% of the workweek reading and responding to emails.

Emailing may seem like the most basic of tasks — write, attach, send, reply. But it turns out, it takes a thoughtful strategy to ensure your inbox isn’t the mortal enemy of your productivity. With our latest ebook — 27 Email Hacks That’ll Make You More Productive — we’ll help you unburden yourself from the weight of email overload.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to triage your inbox effectively, filter out unwanted messages, and use templates to write your emails faster. Then we’ll show you the secret features of Gmail and Outlook to help you take back your workday.

Don’t waste another minute clicking back and forth to your email tab.

Get your copy today.

Years ago, my Ammirati & Puris colleagues presented a final version of a television commercial we were creating for Compaq Computer (now a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard) to a gathering of client contacts.

The spot was good, but it was a bit dark, a point made to us by one of our lead clients. The possibility of a reshoot, at agency expense, hung ever so ominously in the air. That’s when one of the Compaq people we were working with, Jack Todd, spoke up.

“I was at the shoot with the Ammirati team,” he said. “I approved the dailies and then the rough cut, so if there’s an issue with the spot’s lighting, it is as much my fault as the agency’s.”

In moments like this, most clients would remain silent and let the agency take the hit, even if it meant something as costly as a reshoot. Not Jack. He saw himself as our partner. He was brave enough to share responsibility with us, even though the consequences, financial and otherwise, could be serious.

The discussion went back and forth for a few minutes as we worked through the alternatives. In the end, we would do what we could to brighten the spot in post-production, but it would run as filmed, no reshooting required.

I was never close with Jack, nor was my team. He was a largely unknown, almost remote figure, but when it was time to stand up for the agency, Jack stood up. From that day on, I knew we could trust him.

This is a story with a (relatively) happy ending, but what happens when you find yourself not trusting a client? How do you respond?

There are a nearly infinite number of reasons why an agency might feel this way, but I suspect the majority coalesce around three issues: the work, the relationship, and the money.

Not trusting the client about the work

Put any two people in a room and there likely will be a debate about the work, by which I mean not only a piece of creative, but also a strategy recommendation, a media plan, or anything else you produce on behalf of a client. But trust issues? Most clients I know are quick with an opinion, but a lack of trust often occurs when a client is not being straight with the agency, is not helping make the work better, and is reluctant or reticent to share what they really think about what you presented.

Now you can try to muddle through, but I see the absence of clear direction as your problem, not the client’s. The challenge is to elicit honest and thorough feedback from even the most recalcitrant, uncertain, and withholding client, so that you extract input you and your colleagues can act on.

You do this by 1) framing the issue precisely, 2) listening deeply to questions and concerns, spoken and (especially) unspoken, and 3) addressing those questions and concerns by exploring every possible option. With an unwilling client, you need to work incredibly hard to gain “I really mean it” buy-in.

Not trusting the client about the relationship

With relationships, it simply could be your client doesn’t like you. But what should you do in this situation?

Your first recourse is to find someone on your team the client does like, then ask them to serve as the face of the agency, with you receding to the background. I have been in several situations where a client did not like me, but did like someone else on our team. Sometimes it was a creative person. Sometimes it was a strategist or planner. On occasion, it was another account person.

In these instances, I took on a supporting rather than the lead role, ceding terrain to the person the client felt more comfortable with. I was happy to do this, grateful there was someone (or someones) the client liked and respected.

Your last recourse, after you’ve explored all other staffing options, is to change the casting, knowing that it is better to change personnel on an account than it is to lose it, even if it means “firing” yourself from the account.

Not trusting the client about the money

The client’s goal: To get as much service, productivity, and output as they can from the agency for the fewest dollars possible.

Your goal: To be paid fairly for your efforts.

Mind you, none of this is personal; it’s business.

If your client tends to grind you down on price, build in some financial cushion upfront, providing the necessary “give” in your fee that you can concede that won’t bankrupt your shop. If you still find yourself consistently unable to command a fair fee for your efforts, you face a decision: Do you keep the client, asking other, more profitable clients to, in a sense, underwrite this underperforming one? Or do you make the difficult choice?

If the account is small in fee and the work unremarkable, you likely shake hands and wish them well. If the account is large in fee and the work is amazing, you have to think long and hard before you make a decision. In many cases, you keep the client, knowing how deep the impact on staffing would be were you to cut them loose.

A Matter of Trust

Even if you don’t fully trust the people you are dealing with, you still can like them, and you can find a way to manage the relationship. The only thing that truly should erode trust is if your client is being dishonest, dishonorable, or worse.

In situations like these — rare though they be — there is only one option at your disposal, and you already know what it is.

Most marketers know by now that Facebook is an important business tool for companies of every size and industry. With a daily active user base of 1.13 billion (1.03 billion on mobile alone), you know it can help you reach new audiences you may not have been able to reach otherwise. It can also help you get found more easily in search, create a community around your business, promote the content you create, and develop a strong brand identity.

But what about using Facebook for lead generation? Attracting new leads using Facebook — leads that might eventually turn into paying customers — is one of the most intriguing reasons to use Facebook in your marketing.

And yet, we find that only about half of marketers use Facebook to source leads. This needs to change. And even if you are generating leads on Facebook, we all could probably use a little boost in our lead generation efforts.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with what a lead is (and isn’t), and the two types of leads you can generate on Facebook.

The 2 Types of Leads You Can Capture on Facebook

Although definitions can vary, in general, a lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service by giving you their information in some way. People can show interest in a variety of ways: filling out a form to download an ebook, requesting a demo, or completing an online survey. 

Unfortunately, simply Liking a status update, photo, or video on your Page doesn’t make someone a lead. That type of action doesn’t indicate interest in your company or product — it’s possible they just Liked your post because it had a cute puppy in it, ya know?

On Facebook, there are two ways you can generate leads: direct leads and indirect leads.

Direct Leads

Direct leads are generated by sharing content that links directly back to a form on your website where visitors can share information in exchange for an offer — whether that be an ebook, coupon, infographic, or any other piece of content. This form is housed on a landing page dedicated to that specific offer.

Indirect Leads

Indirect leads are generated by using Facebook on the path to conversion. For example, if you shared a blog post that had a call-to-action to a landing page at the bottom of the post, your initial Facebook share is helping direct visitors to that landing page.

While directly promoting landing pages is an instant gratifier of leads generated, providing content without a form makes your Facebook presence a friendlier home for content that your fans will want to come back for again and again.

Now, let’s dive into 12 ways you can capture leads, whether they are direct or indirect.

12 Types of Facebook Posts to Help You Generate Leads From Your Business Page 

1) Post landing pages for offers directly to Facebook.

One of the best ways to generate leads on Facebook is simply to send people directly to landing pages for lead-generating offers. (If you don’t have many lead-generating offers yet, read this blog posts for ideas.)

When you do this, make sure the offer has a compelling featured image that’s getting pulled into the Facebook post. To ensure Facebook pulls the right image from your blog post into your Facebook posts, you’ll need to first optimize the image size for Facebook and then add the proper open graph tags to your website, which you can learn how to do here.

You’ll also want to make sure it’s clear to the reader where you’re sending them. If they think they’re clicking into a blog post and find themselves needing to fill out a form, they could get confused or frustrated. Use verbal phrases like “Download your ebook” or “Get your cheat sheet” to indicate where you’re sending them. 

Here’s an example from IBM’s Facebook Page, which reads, “Explore our 2015 Corporate Responsibility Report”:

In addition to using clear language, you may want to nix the stock photo from that image in favor of your own, custom image. Even the least design-savvy of marketers can easily create a custom image in PowerPoint that includes the name of the offer, just like we did in the example below. (Click here to browse through and download our collection of 100 free social media image templates.)

2) Post the blog posts that generate the most leads.

Another way of generating leads from the content your team is producing is to simply pick the blog posts that generate the most leads, and post those ones to Facebook. (Learn how to do a blog lead generation analysis here.) The topic and title of the blog post will intrigue your audience to click and read, and then they’ll find a CTA within that post — preferably high up, near the intro — to either a solution to a problem they’re having or to something they want to learn more about.

Pro Tip: Our social media managers have found they’re able to generate more leads from Facebook by posting blog posts containing anchor text CTAs in the introduction. If you aren’t using anchor text CTAs yet, you may want to read up on the study we did on anchor text CTAs on the blog and consider adopting them yourself. In every single post we tracked for that study, the anchor text CTA was responsible for between 47% and 93% of a post’s leads.

Here’s an example of a Facebook post linking to a blog post that includes an anchor text CTA in the introduction:

And here’s that anchor text CTA, indicated by the red arrow:

3) Include links to landing pages in your image captions. 

Most marketers understand the importance of using visuals like images and videos in your Facebook strategy. For example, Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. To turn these higher engagement rates into lead generation opportunities, consider including links to your website in the descriptions for your images — especially your profile picture and cover photo descriptions.

Whether it’s to a blog post, a piece of lead gen content, or just an “About Us” page, links are opportunities for interested folks to get to know your company better, and the descriptions of your profile picture and cover photo are prime real estate to do it. That way, any time people view your cover photo directly, they can access the download link.

Make sure you shorten your links and add UTM codes so you can track clicks on them. Shortening and tracking features are available in the HubSpot Marketing Platform and in tools like bitly.

Here’s this practice in action on HubSpot’s Facebook Page:

4) Use videos to promote lead gen offers.

Facebook’s organic reach has dropped to 52% so far in 2016, thanks to the tweaks in Facebook’s algorithm to help mitigate the increasing amount of content on its platform. But videos are the big exception here. In fact, posting videos has actually helped neutralize some of that pain for marketers.

Why? To start, Facebook’s algorithm favors video content. As a result, video posts have 135% greater organic reach than photo posts. So if you’re trying to increase your lead gen efforts on Facebook, you’ll want to start using videos to help introduce and promote those lead-generating content, whether they’re offers, events, courses, or something else.

In addition to the text CTA you can add in the video’s description, remember to add a verbal CTA to the video to “register” or “download,” both earlier in the video and at the very end.

Check out how L.L. Bean used a video to encourage sign-ups for their course:

Here’s another example from us here at HubSpot, in which we used a how-to video to introduce a gated offer:

We’ve also created videos specifically to promote lead-generating content, like we did here for our career assessment called The Next Five: 

5) Use Facebook Live videos to remind people to register.

Videos can be pretty time-intensive to create. (Not to mention intimidating.) But you don’t necessarily have to pull together the time and resources to create a perfectly scripted and edited marketing video to leverage the power of video on Facebook.

Facebook Live is Facebook’s live video platform that lets anyone broadcast live videos from their mobile device straight to their Facebook News Feed. The best part about these live videos is that they’re meant to be a little scrappier and more spontaneous than normal marketing videos — that’s what makes live videos special.

What’s more, Facebook Live has proven itself pretty incredible for engagement rates. Facebook’s initial data revealed that people comment 10X more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos.

So get the conversation going about your lead gen offers by creating a live video to promote them. You might promote an event by showing the setup live, for example. Or, you might promote an offer by hosting an open Q&A on live video where you actually interact with Facebook commenters live and on camera.

Just like you’d do with your normal videos, add a verbal CTA to the video in addition to the text CTA. In a live video, though, you’ll want to repeat that CTA even more than you would with a pre-recorded CTA. Why? Because when you first start live streaming, you may have zero people watching. Even a few seconds in, you could only have a handful of viewers.

As people find your video on their News Feeds, they’ll join in — but that means you’ll want to repeat the CTA a few times to catch people up. You can also add a text CTA in the video’s description.

6) Pin posts that link to lead gen offers to the top of your feed.

Pinning a post to the top of your Page’s Timeline allows you to highlight what would otherwise be a typical post. It’ll stay at the top of your Timeline for up to seven days, after which it’ll return to the date it was published on your Page’s Timeline. A pinned post is signified by a small blue-and-white pushpin icon on the top right of the post.

Here’s an example from Apttus’ Facebook Page:

You can pin any type of post, from text to images to videos; even live videos. If you pin a Facebook Live video, that video will simply show up at the top of your profile with the whole recording, indicating that the Page “was live” at a certain point. Here’s an example of what that looks like from Refinery29’s Facebook Page:

7) Add a call-to-action button to your Facebook Page.

Alright, this one isn’t technically a type of Facebook post, but it’s a pretty crucial lead generation tactic that no marketers will want to miss out on. Back in late 2014, Facebook added a feature to its business Pages allowing users to place a simple call-to-action button at the top of their Facebook Pages. This button is simple but powerful, and it can help drive more traffic from your Facebook Page to your website — including landing pages, contact sheets, and other lead generation forms. You can learn how to install and use the Facebook CTA button here.

You’ll find you have seven pre-made button options to choose from: “Sign Up,” “Shop Now,” “Contact Us,” “Book Now,” “Use App,” Watch Video,” and “Play Game.” Once you choose a button and link it to a page your website, the button you chose will appear up at a fixed location right below your cover photo and to the right.

While some marketers choose a CTA and keep it the same for weeks and months at a time, consider taking your marketing game a step further and switching up that button — and the web page it links to — to match your team’s and business’ goals and the campaigns you’re running at the time. For example, you might align the CTA both with your cover photo design and a pinned post around a single campaign.

8) Ask for input on your products.

One way to feed two birds with one scone (as my colleague Carly Stec would say) is to post a status update to your business’ Timeline asking for feedback on one of your products or tools and linking to a landing page where people can sign up for a trial — or, if it’s free, to simply download the tool. You’ll encourage sign-ups by linking directly to the landing page, and your followers will love the opportunity to give their two cents.

The obvious risk here is that you’ll be opening up the floodgates for negative commenters, so be selective on the tools and products you post for feedback. Make sure you’re posting something you’re proud of and ready to receive feedback for. You’ll also want to have at least one or two people ready to respond to Facebook comments as they roll in — both the positive and the negative.

If you do receive negative feedback, respond as quickly as you can to show you care, and prevent them from turning into something more serious. If you get complaints about the product, use the “customer is always right” approach and say you’re sorry. You’ll get respect from other customers for being upfront. Share you appreciation for folks’ feedback. Finally, ask how you can help — and then actually help. Take notes on the feedback you get and send it to the people who can make things happen. (Read this post for more tips on dealing with negative comments on social media.)

9) Run a contest or giveaway.

People love contests and giveaways. Not only are they fun for your followers, but they can also teach you a lot about your audience — all the while engaging them, growing your reach, driving traffic to your website, and (drum roll, please) generating leads.

If the goal of your contest is to generate leads, publish posts on Facebook (in addition to your other social media accounts) that include an attractive featured image or video, language that’s compelling and simple, and a link to your contest page where they can fill out a form. Read this post to learn more about running successful social media contests.

(Before you start your Facebook contest, though, make sure you can actually run it legally by reading through their Page Guidelines. Facebook has cracked down on contests due to liability issues, so read through their strict rules ahead of time.)

Below is an example from Canva’s Facebook Page. Notice they pinned the post to the top of their profile.

And here’s another example, this time from Yoplait. They promoted their contest using a video to get more visibility on folks’ News Feeds.

10) Make a Facebook event page for your next webinar.

While we’ve already covered sharing landing pages with dedicated content offerings such as ebooks or contests, webinars are another great format for capturing leads. While you can promote your webinar’s sign-up form by posting them to your business’ Timeline, another way to spread the word is by creating a Facebook Event with with a separate registration page on your website.

Once you invite someone to a Facebook Event, you can encourage them to register on a separate landing page, where they’ll become a lead. In terms of reaching new audiences, Facebook Events are also more visible than standard Facebook posts on the News Feed.

Facebook also added new features that help businesses promote their events and see how they’re performing. For example, you can create ads for the desktop and mobile News Feed that boost awareness of events and drive responses.

Image Credit: Facebook

If you host events and webinars often, you can also use the Events tab on your Page to share with your followers in a single view. That way, people visiting your page can scroll through your upcoming events and webinars. (If you don’t see the tab on your Page, click “Manage Tabs” at the bottom of your tabs and reorder them so Events is one of the first to appear.) Read this blog post for more tips on hosting great webinars.

11) Run targeted ads to extend your content’s reach.

One of the best things Facebook can do for your business is expand your reach to new audiences that are likely to be interested in your content — and possibly become followers, leads, and even customers down the road. This is thanks to Facebook’s very sophisticated targeting options, which let you target your ads to people based on things like location, age, gender, interests — even the things they do off of Facebook.

There are three, overarching formats for Facebook ads that I’ll cover in brief here: boosted posts, right-hand column ads, and News Feed ads. The main distinction here is the placement of the ad, as well as the amount of writing and size of image that is allowed.

1. Boosted Post: This is Facebook’s way of letting marketers turn otherwise normal Facebook posts into ads by “boosting” them. The post will show organically to some users, but to get better reach, the admin will press “boost” on the post (shown only to admins, not to other users) so it shows to a larger number of fans and to targets you can select ahead of time.
2. Right-Hand Column Ads: This is the most traditional on Facebook, it appears on the right side of a user’s Facebook News Feed. We often see less expensive clicks and conversions when using these ads, along with more advanced testing options.
3. News Feed Ads: These appear directly in a user’s News Feed and look more like native advertising, although you can also add a small CTA button. They’re part of a tactic called “dark posts,” which means using News Feed-style ads that don’t actually get published to the News Feed of your Page. In our experience, these ads have a higher engagement rate than right-hand column ads (which makes your Page look super healthy), but they can also be more expensive.

While we won’t go too much more in depth on Facebook advertising (download our Facebook advertising ebook if you want to learn more), here are two examples of Facebook ads in users’ News Feeds. This first one is a boosted post that targets people based on their Facebook connections:

This second one is a News Feed ad, which lets you add a CTA button to the post — in this case, “Sign Up.” These CTAs are only available for News Feed ads.

12) Run lead ads to simplify the mobile signup process. 

As if Facebook’s addition of CTA buttons to its link ads wasn’t exciting enough, Facebook added an entirely new feature called lead ads in 2015, which lets users sign up for lead-generating offers and content without leaving Facebook. It was created specifically to simplify the mobile sign-up processes by making it super easy for mobile users to fill out your forms.

Why? Because the forms will autopopulate instead of mobile users having to pinch-and-zoom and type into tiny form fields. Basically, when you click on a lead ad, a form opens with your contact information automatically populated based on what you’ve shared with Facebook already, like name and email address. Talk about solving for form friction. Of course, you can edit your contact information before you click “Submit.”

Image Credit: Facebook

We won’t go into too much detail about lead ads here, but creating them is easy: All you have to do is choose your ad creative, set your targeting and bidding type, and then customize your form fields. (Learn more from Facebook here.)

How do you extract the leads you get from lead ads? If you’re a HubSpot customer you can integrate Facebook Lead Ads directly with your HubSpot account. If you’re not a HubSpot customer, you can export a CSV straight from your Facebook Page, download them from Ads Manager or Power Editor, or request it directly through the API. 

We hope you found these ideas for ways you can generate leads from Facebook helpful. Remember, though, that Facebook is constantly changing. While the ideas here are a strong start to success, nothing beats testing each strategy for your own audience. 

These are just a couple ways you can generate leads from Facebook, so we’d love to hear from you. How do you generate leads through Facebook? What works — and doesn’t work — for your Facebook Fans?

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Blogging can be a powerful way for you to build your personal brand and increase the visibility of your company within your industry. Ideally, both at the same time.

Your end goal, of course, is to become a top leading expert on the topics that matter to your niche. And when you’re first starting out, committing to a niche is important. You must own and dominate it.

Yet, a day will eventually come when you’ve exhausted your niche. You’ll realize that you have finally worked “until you no longer have to introduce yourself,” as the great anonymous once put it so eloquently.

What do you do then, when the “law of diminishing blogging returns” kicks in?

If you’ve reached this point, you may want to start exploring topics that are outside of your core niche. After all, writing off-topic posts can have many benefits. To help you better understand this strategy, let’s walk through some of the reasoning, as well as a few tips for getting started.

5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

1) You can reach much bigger audiences.

Once upon a time I was a nobody, writing for an internet marketing company nobody had ever heard of. A smart content promotion strategy changed all that.

Suddenly, I was no longer writing about marketing topics just on the WordStream blog. I was writing for major industry publications like Search Engine Land, Moz, Search Engine Watch, and Search Engine Journal about PPC, display advertising, social media marketing and advertising, and SEO.

At this point, I was thrilled when a blog post would become a “unicorn” — getting tens of thousands of views, and absolutely thrilled whenever one would get a couple hundred thousand views.

This was a great achievement. But I soon realized I was hitting my own point of diminishing returns by writing about advertising and marketing. So I started going off-topic a couple of years ago. I started writing for Inc.com, mainly about startups and entrepreneurship — which I’m ridiculously passionate about.

Now, suddenly, the unicorns were even more sparkly and amazing. When I’d hit a home run with a blog post, it might get a million views. And if I hit a grand slam with a blog post, it might get more than 10 million views.

And they weren’t all about marketing; they spanned across topics like boosting your intelligence and making a first impression.

Bottom line: What you lose in topical relevancy you’ll make up for in volume.

2) You can start biasing future customers.

When you’re creating content, there are a couple of types of people you need to think about:

• People who know they need the product/solution you sell.
• People who don’t yet realize they need the product/solution you sell.

Writing about off-topics is a brilliant way to reach and start biasing that second group of people toward you and your brand. And that’s why I started writing about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs probably aren’t actively looking for articles about AdWords, but small business owners are definitely interested in marketing topics.

Writing about off-topics allows you to connect with people before they even need the types of services your company provides. By establishing a relationship through a shared interest now, you can increase the odds that later on those same people will come to you first and become your customers when the need arises.

3) You can increase your social media engagement.

If you’re fortunate enough to write for a large publication such as Inc.com, which has millions of fans on Facebook and Twitter, you’ll see your follower counts soar. All you have to do is write about interesting topics.

Every time Inc.com shares my content organically, I pick up more followers: When I started writing for the publication couple of years ago, I had less than 100,000 Twitter followers. Now, I have more than 300,000 followers.

Medium is another great platform to pick up new readers with your off-topic posts. Plus, publishing on Medium might help you get noticed by a publication with a large readership.

Just as one example, I published a post on Medium about multitasking that generated almost half a million views.

It was so successful that it ended up being syndicated on a couple major publications, and it was tweeted by the Arianna Huffington. Amazing, right?

Is multitasking killing your brain? Yes! https://t.co/n1Jne0MxxS

— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff)
February 5, 2016

At the end of the day, having more followers gives you an even larger promotional vehicle for your on-topic content, so why not give it a try?

4) You can truly express yourself.

Going off-topic gives you the opportunity to share more about yourself.

Simply publishing generic posts doesn’t cut it anymore. There’s way too much competition. You need to think about the tone and style of your content.

In case you couldn’t tell, I really like unicorns and memes. It’s kind of what I’m known for.

I want my posts to be useful by including data and actionable tips. But it’s equally important for me to write memorable posts, which is why I try to add some humor and use lots of visuals.

Remember: A little personality goes a long way and will make you more interesting. 

5) You’ll keep your sanity.

Once you’ve been writing for a few years, you’ll find that it will become increasingly hard to come up with new and interesting things to say about the same topics.

Take me, for example. If I were just writing about nothing but AdWords features and tips for years, I’d go nuts.

Diversify! For the sake of your own sanity.

How To Get Started With Off-Topic Content 

Now that we’ve covered why you need to write about a wider variety of topics, how do you get started?

• Do your research. Before you expand, think about how the off-topic posts you want to write will help advance your career. What audience could you reach and how could that help you?
• Find a way to set yourself apart from established influencers in the same space. How are you going to be memorable? Make sure you know what you want to accomplish and have a strategy to achieve your goals.

Once you sort through the initial research and planning, you’ll need to nail down where you want to publish. To get started, do a search for popular sites that feature posts on the topics you want to write about. Read the sites and figure out their style and what types of article perform well.

To do this quickly and easily, you’ll want to lean on BuzzSumo. With BuzzSumo, you can look into the top performing posts for any domain to generate a better understanding of what works well.

It’s also helpful to take a look at a publication’s guest blogging guidelines, as these typically offer insights around what type of content they are looking for. (Check out this post to learn more about the content submission process for 11 popular sites — from The New York Times to Business Insider.)

When you send your email, don’t just pitch one idea. Pitch a few original ideas with a unique angle to choose from. Or build off an existing article they’ve published:

I saw your great article on [topic] and wanted to see if you’d have interest in publishing an article about [topic] that I could write exclusively for you.

Look for content gaps and offer to fill those. Editors will be more receptive when you show that you’ve done your research. And if you’re having trouble coming up with unique, interesting ideas outside of your niche, turn to these tips:

• Use Twitter to audition topics. If you want to know whether you should invest your time writing about a certain topic, tweet about it on Twitter. If your tweet generates lots of engagement, then you can be confident that there’s an audience interested in that topic. If your Twitter audition bombs, forget about that topic for now. You can always revisit it in the future.
• Use BuzzSumo to discover topics. Again, BuzzSumo is a powerful tool that helps you discover which topics are super hot in any industry, and which posts are the most popular on individual websites. Yes, it’s paid, but I’d consider it one of the wisest investments if you’re serious about your content strategy.

Proceed With Caution

I can’t leave without issuing one warning about off-topic posts: Don’t overdo it.

The worst thing you can do is to lose focus. To prevent this, I’d suggest following the 80-20 rule, where 80% of the content you create covers your money “bread and butter” topics, and the remaining 20% of your efforts go toward off-topic content to establish yourself in a new niche.

Stay focused. And best of luck as you embark on your new journey and begin growing your influence in new areas.

Have you experimented with off-topic blog posts? Did you see positive results? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

Marketing agencies across the U.S. are in the midst of a revenue boom. In 2015, agency revenue increased 6.5% to a record $46.8 billion. This means more hiring, more promotions, and more new leaders trying to find their footing in the challenging agency landscape.

Taking on a new position of power can be a massive adrenaline rush, but the excitement can sometimes get overshadowed by feelings of inadequacy and panic. Did the agency make a hiring mistake? Can you actually handle this new responsibility?

Just know that you’re far from alone.

Being exposed as incompetent is actually the number one fear of executives worldwide.

Especially in the early stages of your new position, it can seem like an endless battle to push through those uncomfortable feelings. These seven survival tips can help you build your confidence and succeed early as a new leader.

7 Rules to Help New Managers Succeed

1) Don’t get hung up on your own perceptions of how you’re doing.

This is not to say that you should be recklessly unconcerned with your own performance, but you shouldn’t be obsessed with it. In fact, falling too hard into what psychologists call a performance mindset often means getting stuck in a cycle of feeling inadequate and limited by your own failures.

When you magnify your shortcomings and allow them to cripple your confidence, you forget that you’re capable of improvement. And when that happens, you actually stop trying to get better.

Instead of letting your own performance dominate your thoughts and drive you completely crazy, why not put your energy into actually learning the ropes of your new gig? What you see as shortcomings and fixed flaws are actually just opportunities to get better, as cheesy as that might sound at first.

This all just requires a simple mindset change: View each challenging task as a chance to improve on a skill, rather than something that might set you up to fail.

2) Check your ego at the door.

When a promotion suddenly places you above colleagues who were your peers, things can understandably get a little awkward. You want to prove that you deserve your newfound position of influence, but it’s important to remember that your new title doesn’t automatically come with instant leadership qualities and respect.

The best thing you can do is approach your new role with a humble attitude, a learning mindset, and an open mind. You were promoted because your company’s higher-ups saw potential in you, but that doesn’t mean you know everything or that everyone below you somehow knows less. In fact, the best leaders understand that they aren’t always the smartest person in the room.

Keeping your ego under control will help people respect you more, and it will take off some of the pressure you put on yourself to always perform optimally. It’s not your job to always have the correct answer or the perfect foolproof plan; it’s your job to bring out the best in those around you.

3) Give yourself a frank self-evaluation.

Before you can begin to truly thrive in your new role, you need to take stock of where your leadership skills currently stand. Most people think they have a better understanding of their own abilities than they actually do, and this can be a big problem for new leaders. In self-evaluations, people tend to “overestimate what they can accomplish and overvalue what they’ve already accomplished.”

So how can you overcome this unconscious bias and take a good hard look at your skill level? Start by asking yourself what aspects of your new role seem the most unnatural to you. Avoid passing judgement on yourself. Identifying where you feel insecure or less confident is an effective way to get a better understanding of the boundaries of your comfort zone and where you need to improve.

4) Approach everything like a beginner.

Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki famously wrote, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”

If you approach your new role with the assumption that you’re already an expert, you unconsciously close yourself off to new learning opportunities. You’re letting your established beliefs derail any chance to absorb new information that could make you much better at your job, just because you feel threatened.

Having the mindset of a beginner in a new leadership position is especially important as it allows you to remain eager, open, and receptive to new information. Being a successful leader hinges on being able to put your preconceived notions aside in the face of facts or people who challenge assumed information.

5) Figure out what type of leader you want to be.

As a new leader, you might feel like you suffer from a lack of clear direction. You have a list of responsibilities that need to be fulfilled, but no one is standing over your shoulder telling you exactly how you’re supposed to do it. This can be a scary realization, but it’s useful to keep in mind that you’re not the first person to go through this, and you can leverage the experiences of others who came before you.

Identify a leader at your agency whom you admire, and ask yourself what qualities make them such an enviable leader. Consider asking them to coffee or lunch to pick their brain and discuss the challenges they overcame early on in their tenure.

Having a mentor can be a valuable asset as you begin to navigate your new role. Their experience can help quell your early jitters and remind you that you aren’t alone in the obstacles you face.

Just remember that at the end of the day, a mentor is a general role model, not an exact version of who you need to become to be successful. Use their advice to develop your own leadership style as you progress and learn what works and what doesn’t. 

6) Understand that the big picture isn’t just about you — it’s about your team.

It’s easy to forget in the midst of your own transition that your new team is undergoing a transition as well: They’re getting used to a new leader who they may not be very familiar with.

Don’t try to force your authority. Give your new team the opportunity to get to know you and adapt without pressure. If possible, set up one-on-one meetings with your team members as soon as possible to learn more about their individual responsibilities, their concerns for the future, and what they need from you to be successful.

Plan a group lunch or outing to get to know the team as a whole, and take the time to formally introduce yourself. Share the typical information about your background and experience, but avoid reading off a laundry list of accomplishments. This can make you seem inaccessible.

Instead, show some vulnerability: Discuss the areas where you think you can learn more from your new team. They’ll see you as someone who is willing to take feedback and learn for the benefit of the company.

7) Lean into the discomfort.

Maybe leadership job descriptions should all tack on this bullet point: “Must be comfortable being uncomfortable.” By the very nature of their position, leaders are dropped into uncomfortable situations on a daily basis. Whether it’s giving tough feedback, making cutbacks, or standing by unpopular decisions, get used to it — it’s now part of your profession.

But being uncomfortable is, well … really uncomfortable. We’re wired to shy away from situations that make us feel overwhelmingly awkward or disliked. Part of growing into a leadership role is learning to manage discomfort and do what’s needed for the agency — even when you’d rather hide under your desk. 

To strengthen your tolerance for discomfort, try rehearsing or writing down conversations you know have the potential to get awkward. And remember that having uncomfortable conversations is a lot like jumping into a pool of freezing water: If you keep standing on the edge, you’ll build up the jump in your head and only psych yourself out. Sometimes, you just need to take the plunge. 

Timing is everything when it comes to sales, which is why it’s so important to reach the customer at the right time, with the right message. What timing could be better to engage customers than real-time while they are viewing products/services on your website? Let’s discuss an underutilized tool called live chat and see how it can boost your business and give you a leg up on the competition.

What is live chat?

We all have come across a live chat window at some point during our online browsing. In a nutshell, it’s a customer service software that integrates with your website to initiate real time communication with visitors to your site. Live chat is extremely convenient for customers as it allows them immediate access to support, but it’s also a powerful marketing and sales tool that allows you to engage visitors to your site and start a relationship with them at the point when they’re most interested in learning more about you.

How does live chat work?

Typically a small customizable chat window will popup on the user’s screen inviting them to chat with customer support while still viewing your website. The chat window is usually discrete, yet noticeable and designed to look like part of your website to give users the peace of mind that they will not be directed away from your site.

The chat window can engage visitors with an automated greeting that is triggered when certain conditions are met, or a manual greeting sent by an agent. Either way, the proactive chat invitations are designed to increase customer engagement.

Live chat systems are more affordable than you think

The cost to add live chat to your website varies from company to company, but here are some general pricing plans for all businesses ranging from startups to big enterprises. Pricing can begin as low as $19 per agent per month and go up to $149 per agent per month. You can have as many or as few agents as you want depending on your business needs.

Live chat tracking and reporting features often include daily reporting of online chat activity, post-chat survey, chat ratings, queued visitors and wait times, goals achieved during a chat, and much more. There are also typically options for visitors to leave a message via a ticket form and receive a response the next business day when your live chat is offline.

Why choose live chat?

According to a survey conducted by Forrester Research, “around 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a web site can offer.”

Live chat is a powerful way to communicate with customers immediately and can reduce or replace your need for phone support.

Also, nothing turns off a potential customer faster than waiting on hold on the phone. If you staff your live chat appropriately, then there should be no or very little wait time for a response from a customer support agent. Prompt communication in a chat window will keep your visitors engaged and creates greater potential to convert them into customers.

How to optimize your live chat

Live chat communication should be warm and friendly to assist customers in their shopping experience. One simple way to do this is by using photo avatars that customers can associate with chat representatives as a reminder that they are chatting with a real person. Another way to keep that human touch is to avoid any robotic greetings or responses.

You also should make the most of your live chat software by monitoring the activity on your site to be sure you have adequate staffing for your customers’ needs. Analytics can help you to determine when most visitors are using your site, which will enable you be prepared for surges in chat volume and reduce the amount of time a customer spends in a queue.

What are you waiting for?

Live chat is a powerful and cost effective way to get a leg up on your online competition, tap into your client base to get them out of research-mode, and convert visitors into buyers. Seems like a no-brainer to me!

If you have ever run a Google AdWords campaign, you know how overwhelming maintaining an account can be. Luckily, Google has many features and tools that make managing campaigns easier and more successful. The catch? It is up to us to utilize them. Today, I am talking about an advanced feature that can help advertisers better reach customers by matching their search query. This seemingly magical feature is called keyword insertion.

What is Keyword Insertion?

Simply put, keyword insertion allows you to customize ad text based on the search term a customer uses. This helps provide a more relevant ad to the person searching and, in theory, higher click through rates.

For example, if you sell office supplies and you have an ad group for printer ink with keywords such as HP 564 ink, HP 920 ink, HP 951 ink etc. Using keyword insertion would automatically update your ad text to the term that is searched for. Check out the ads below, the search term “Buy HP 564 ink” and “Buy HP 920 ink” are met by the same ad but with modified text that includes the specific keywords.

Why Would I Use Keyword Insertion?

By having a more customized ad that includes the keyword of a customer’s search query, advertisers are able to speak directly to what the customer wants. For example, if you search for “inbound marketing packages”, an advertiser can set up their ad to say exactly what you typed in. Not only does this draw your eye to the ad with your exact search phrase, but it also gives you a better user experience as you’ve found exactly what you’re looking for.

As you can imagine, keyword insertion is highly beneficial to businesses with large inventories that have variations of the same item. These businesses can then make one ad with dynamic keyword insertion that adapts to each of their ad group’s keywords instead of wasting time and energy on building new corresponding ads.

How Do I Use Keyword Insertion?

Now that we know how convenient using keyword insertion can be, how exactly does it work? This is where our text ad comes in. When creating a keyword insertion ad, you will insert a code into the headline (or the body of text if that’s where you want the ad to change). Here is what it would look like:

Google will then attempt to replace this code with one of the ad group’s keywords. If a searcher’s query is not a match for one of your keywords, the text following the code will be used as a generic replacement. In this above example, “Printer Ink” would be used.

Note that the code in the example above contains brackets, the word “KeyWord” (with my desired capitalization which we will cover below), and the default ad text after the colon that the ad will use as a generic replacement if need be.Ex. {KeyWord:Printer Ink}

A Word of Warning

Now that we’ve gone over how beneficial keyword insertion can be and how to use it, it’s time to bring up a word of warning so you know what to avoid. There are several things that could go wrong when using keyword insertion including:

• One word headlines – If you have a headline with just an inserted singular keyword your ad will not only look boring but also spammy.
• Oddly worded text – Depending on the keywords in your ad group your ad could end up oddly worded. Ad text that makes sense for some keywords may not for others.

• Use of competitor’s name – While it is perfectly legal to bid on keywords that include your competitor’s name, you might run into copyright issues if you use it in the header of your ad.
• Wrong code entered – If the keyword insertion code is entered with extra spaces, parenthesis instead of brackets, or incorrect use of capitalization (see image below). It will effect your ad.

Lastly, keep in mind that keyword insertion is best when used with highly targeted ad groups. Industries such as ecommerce stores are a great example, as they have many products in a specific category.

Learn More

Hopefully this article has enlightened you on how keyword insertion can be of benefit in running an AdWords campaign. Just remember this feature isn’t for everyone and, like any other tool, it has its pros and cons! For more information on Google AdWords and integrating it with your inbound marketing strategy, Check out this FREE eBook “Why Google AdWords Should Be Part of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy“:

When done right, networking is an incredibly valuable investment of every professional’s time and effort. It helps us make meaningful business connections, get feedback, and advance our careers. And best of all, it pays significant dividends over time.

So why does it seem so unpleasant sometimes? It can feel fake, it’s exhausting, and frankly, standing alone in a sea of unknown faces with nametags and cheese plates can be utterly painful.

But there are ways to make networking less of a chore. It starts with reflecting on your current networking habits and learning where you might be making mistakes. I’m not talking about obvious mistakes, like talking super close to someone’s face or not dressing the part. I’m talking about the more subtle mistakes you may not even know you’re making.

Here are 13 networking mistakes that could be holding you back from developing meaningful business relationships and creating real value out of them.

13 Networking Mistakes You Need to Stop Making

1) You’re waiting to build your network until you need it most.

A lot of people neglect to build their networks until they’re desperate — perhaps they’ve lost their job, they’re looking for a career change, or they’re applying to graduate school and need advice or references. It’s hard to prioritize networking when you don’t have a specific goal you’re going after. But if you’re constantly doing things to help you build your network — even when you’re gainfully employed — then it’ll be strong when you need it most.

When it comes to networking, it pays to be proactive. Don’t wait until fate brings you a new networking opportunity; seek them out yourself.

“Put an hour on your calendar each week specifically focused on expanding your network.” Katie Burke, HubSpot’s VP of Culture and Experience, wrote in her article about networking.

“Ask a friend who the most interesting person they know is and go meet them. Email a blog author whose content you love with a specific comment or question about his or her work. Reconnect with an old colleague whose work you always admired. Sometimes, these conversations will lead nowhere. But many will generate new ideas, connections, and creativity, so it’s worth the break in the action from your usual busy day,” she added. 

2) You aren’t keeping up your personal brand.

When you network with new people, it’s pretty inevitable that they’re going to look you up online later to see what your deal is. They’ll look at your LinkedIn profile, your Twitter page, and your blog posts. They might even Google you. And when they do, you’ll want to have an active, interesting, and thoughtful online presence for them to browse.

That’s why, in addition to regularly seeking out new connections, it’s also important that you continuously develop your personal brand online. That means keeping your social media profiles (like LinkedIn) updated and regularly posting interesting, relevant articles and commentary to your social media accounts. It also means responding kindly when people message, email, or tweet at you, contributing to your company’s blog, and writing guest blog posts for other blogs and publications (like these ones), and getting personal brand exposure through earned media.

3) You’re afraid to attend networking events by yourself.

Even extroverts don’t like going to networking events and conferences alone. It’s straight up anxiety-inducing to stand around by yourself, wondering why everyone else seems to know each other already.

“For a long time, I never wanted to go to networking events by myself,” my colleague Amanda Zantal-Wiener told me. “But eventually, I realized two things: 1) When I went with someone I already knew, that ended up restricting the conversations I had; and 2) if I went into the event with the mindset that I’m a person who will start a conversation with anyone, it was really quite effective.”

Gaining the confidence to approach people and join in on conversations has a lot to do with simply being prepared. My advice? Approach every event you attend with a game plan, starting with looking through the speaker and/or guest list and identifying the people you’d like to talk with. Then, challenge yourself to connect with each of them. People really are willing to talk to you — especially if you’re the first one to say hello.

4) You don’t do your homework.

Preparing for events, conferences, and meetings doesn’t just mean coming with a stack of freshly printed business cards. If you know certain people who are attending or speaking at an event whom you know you’ll be interested in meeting, then you should do research on them ahead of time. When you do your homework, you can skip the small talk and get right into the meaningful conversation you’re looking for in the first place.

“Time is the most valuable resource people can offer you, so respect it,” says Burke. “Do your homework on [the person’s] title, their background, their email address, their preferred mode of contact — e.g., never call Dharmesh, he’s made it clear he hates the phone — and their career history. That way, your conversation via email, phone, or in-person can focus on the advice you need help with, the subject matter you’d like to learn more about, or the organization you want to learn more about.”

In addition to coming prepared with questions for other people, prepare to answer the questions they’ll ask you. Practice your own pitch, as well as answering questions about your career goals.

5) You don’t follow up with personal messages.

So you go to an event, talk to someone awesome, have a great conversation with them, and exchange business cards before you part ways. Great! But don’t call it a day just yet. Unless you follow up with some sort of personal message, says my colleague Aja Frost, then you risk never talking with that person again — and losing out on a potentially meaningful connection.

That’s why you should follow up every great networking conversation with a personalized and thoughtful thank-you message or email. Here are 12 templates for follow-up networking emails that I’ve personally found super helpful.

Or, you can send something as simple as a short message along with your LinkedIn invitation:

Hi Shannon, it was great meeting you at the happy hour last night! I enjoyed hearing about the design project you’re working on. I’m an aspiring designer myself, so I’d love to connect and follow your work.”

A message like this gives the recipient both reassurance that you’re someone they should have in their network, and a jumping off point to start a discussion.

If the person you spoke with gave you some suggestions for your own project or career, follow up to let her know how that’s going — and, later, whether or not her suggestions panned out. 

Pro Tip: Set yourself up for a substantial follow-up conversation by building a bridge to your next exchange before saying goodbye. Benjamin Akande, dean of Webster University’s George Herbert Walker School of Business & Technology, suggests asking people what they’re working on right now. Take note of their response and mention it when you strike up your next conversation.

If you tend to easily forget small details or are meeting a lot of different people at once, make follow-up easier by (subtly) writing a note or two down on the business cards people give you, or make some notes on your phone.

6) You can’t follow up — because you don’t take other people’s contact information.

Ever given someone your contact information, but neglected to take theirs? That leaves you depending on them to contact you, rather than the other way around.

That’s what my colleague Padraig O’Connor cited as his biggest networking mistake to-date. “Sadly, these busy people would not always get in touch and contact was lost,” he told me. Since then, he even goes so far as to open up his own LinkedIn account on his phone and have people find and themselves as a connection right then and there.

“It also saves on data entry,” he added. Can’t argue with that.

7) You ask the same questions everyone else is asking.

Part of being good at networking is standing out from the crowd. How are you going to do that if you’re asking the same old, predictable questions everyone else is asking? This is especially true for folks who are in high demand, like event speakers or high profile attendees.

The best way to make a positive impression on someone is to ask questions that unleash that person’s passion or require them to tell personal stories.

“Asking more interesting questions gets you undeniably better answers,” wrote Burke in her article, on how to talk to anyone about anything. “So instead of probing on what someone does now (which typically leads to awkward humble bragging), ask what they wanted to be when they grew up, what their first concert was, what magazines they subscribe to, or which celebrity they’d want to invite over for dinner. Doing so relieves people of the boring back-and-forth of typical office party conversation and into far more interesting territory.”

For more ideas, here are 20 conversation starters to help you break the ice at a networking event.

8) You dominate networking conversations.

We’ve all been in one of those conversations. You know, the one where it slowly dawns on you you’re listening to a person’s life story and you may never be allowed to leave. Ever.

But have you ever been caught in a moment where you realized it was you who was doing this to another person? It can happen to any one of us, especially when we get excited about a particular topic or we really want to sell someone on our pitch. But dominating the conversation and monopolizing people’s time can make you seem self-important, uninterested in listening to other people, and generally annoying. Remember: Networking events are for mingling and meeting a variety of people. Multiple people.

“A lot of people use networking as an opportunity to hard-sell themselves,” said Hannah Fleishman, marketing lead on HubSpot’s product team, in an email. “This is a big mistake. We should be using networking to make new connections and leave great impressions on those connections. Stealing the spotlight to talk about all the amazing things you’ve done isn’t how you connect with someone — save that for your job interview.

“Have a conversation, ask questions, and be genuinely curious about the new people you’re meeting. People who can pick up on social cues, show an interest in others, and listen as well as they carry a discussion are the ones who stand out to me as someone I’d want to work with or stay in touch with.”

To learn more about the importance of listening to others, asking questions, picking up on others’ emotional cues, read this blog post on the 19 signs you’re emotionally intelligent (and why it matters).

9) You avoid being the one to end the conversation.

Ah, the art of gracefully ending a conversation at a networking event. It’s a tricky skill to master, but it’ll save you from ending up feeling trapped. 

“One of my bigger mistakes is that I let people dominate my time because I’m terrible at ending a conversation and moving on,” said Sam Mallikarjunan, principal marketing strategist here at HubSpot. “So I end up only talking to a few people for long periods, and wasting the opportunity to connect with more folks.”

So, how do you end a conversation without looking like a jerk? I actually wrote a whole blog post about gracefully excusing yourself from conversations. Here are a few of my polite suggestions for conversation-enders:

• “Did you see the restroom anywhere?”
• “I think I left my [laptop/bag/phone] in the other room. I’d better go grab it before it disappears.”
• “I need another drink, what about you?”
• “You love XYZ? You should meet Joe, he loves XYZ too!”

10) You’re overeager.

Once you meet someone at an event and exchange information, be cool. Being a likeable person has a lot to do with the interactions you have with others, so take care that you’re not overdoing it.

“Don’t add someone you’re looking to get to know better on LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Google+, and Medium in one fell swoop,” Burke told me. “It just comes across as too aggressive out of the gate. Pick one channel you know the person meaningfully engages with on a regular basis, and focus your attention there.”

When you do choose that channel, make sure you’re using it correctly, personalizing your messages, and being friendly and professional. In other words, don’t be this guy: Here’s a screenshot of an actual conversation that my colleague Siobhán McGinty was pulled into on LinkedIn:

There’s a little lesson on how not to network with people. If you’re not sure how to use LinkedIn for professional networking, read the networking section of this awesome blog post on how to use LinkedIn. 

11) You aren’t helpful.

In Burke’s post on networking like a pro, she reminded me of a concept revered by HubSpot’s co-founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah: the notion of being shockingly helpful. Focus on being helpful to others rather than on what you can get out of a networking relationship. When you rethink how you network in this way, you’ll see the quality of your interactions go way up.

Burke suggests starting with the goal of helping ten people per month in a meaningful way. Start with a list from your immediate network, and “once you’ve warmed up your shockingly helpful muscles, expand your network each week.” Trust me, this will pay off over time.

Remember: What goes around comes around. 

12) You don’t venture outside your existing network.

Speaking of expanding your network … far too many people avoid building relationships outside their existing network or field of work, even if they don’t mean to. 

And are we surprised? It’s way easier and more comfortable to stick with what’s familiar, and at the end of the day, we all want to sound smart.

But if you don’t expand your network, you risk creating a virtuous closed loop and rarely challenging your own perspective. To solve this problem, you need to be proactive: Start with the goal of following ten new people on Twitter and LinkedIn this week who are experts in something you know nothing about but find interesting. Don’t let the algorithms pick these people for you — actually go out and search for them. It could open you up to people worth learning from.

13) You don’t ask for anything, or you ask for too much. 

It’s helpful to come to a networking event or conversation with a specific goal in mind. Maybe you’re looking for a job and want to get advice on how to build your resume — or even get a referral. Or perhaps you already have a job and you’re looking for feedback on your project, or you want to spread the word about your company’s work.

Once you have a goal in mind, the hard part is letting the other person know about your goal without coming off like you’re using them. When you’re networking, it’s okay — even encouraged — to have an “ask.” Not only can it help move the conversation and the relationship along, but it can also provide some welcome context to your follow-up.

However, there are two mistakes people often make here: Either they don’t make their “ask” clear enough, or they overdo it and ask too much of someone.

“My last VP told me that not enough young people early in their careers make a proper ‘ask,’ my colleague Sophia Bernazzani told me. “They just talk, and maybe get a business card, without asking or saying something more definitively.”

But no one’s a mind reader. You’ll never get what you’re looking for if you don’t ask — and it’s all about asking politely and genuinely. For example, if you’re looking for a job and the person you’re talking with doesn’t have any openings, you might ask him:

• Well, what’s the outlook for future opportunities?
• Do you know anyone else in the industry who might have something?
• Any thoughts on what my next step should be?
• Do you know someone whom it might be good for me to talk with?

If you’re talking to this person via email, here are 12 networking email templates with language that might help you better position the request.

On the other end of the spectrum, you shouldn’t ask for too much from someone you barely know. There’s a huge difference between asking someone for advice on your next career move and asking them to be your mentor forever and ever. Same goes for asking for a quote for a piece you’re writing, versus asking them to review the entire piece and give you in-depth feedback.

We hope these tips will help you make more meaningful connections, expand your network, and strengthen your emotional intelligence.

What other networking mistakes can you add to this list? Share with us in the comments.

Picture your website as a home. Your prospective student database lives in this home. You want your school’s website to gather and store as much information as possible from prospective students. To get these prospects to enter your home (i.e.database) and provide that information, you need to create as many doors as possible.

Your website may present strong content, but does it provide a pathway for website visitors to reach back to your school? Your prospect database’s doors are the calls-to-action (CTAs) you have strategically placed all around your website. Maybe there are no calls-to-action (CTAs), or not enough CTAs, or easily ignorable CTAs.

Maybe you have just one big, honking CTA – a bright red button that screams “APPLY NOW”.

Ouch.

The Enrollment Journey Takes Time 

Most of your website visitors aren’t ready to APPLY NOW. You need to use your content to delightfully nurture them down the path from first visit to application. Not scare them away when they’re already overwhelmed by the thought of just how important of a decision selecting a school is. 

Instead, your website should offer up a variety of offers that align with different points in a prospect’s journey. That means don’t get rid of your “Apply Now” button. After your awesome content stream has gently pushed visitors down the funnel, some of them are indeed ready to apply.

But it also means you need plenty of CTAs for people still wandering around the backyard garden exploring, those settling in the kitchen for a bit for a good chat, and those curious enough to head upstairs. 

When you provide all sorts of doors (i.e. offers) for your website visitors to enter your house, you’re filling the top of your funnel. The more prospects you bring into the top of your funnel, the more pro-active you can be about targeting and nurturing the best prospects into applying and ultimately enrolling.

For more on applicant nurturing, see our guide: From Stranger to Student >>

As long as you keep any given offer on your website, it remains an open invitation for new prospects to enter your database. Even as you sleep, your offers are generating leads and keeping your application funnel working.

So where to build your doors? Here’s a process and some tips for placing the right CTAs in the right spots that will open the floodgates to your prospect database. 

Look at Your Current CTAs

If you only have the “APPLY NOW” CTA, don’t think you can skip this step. Catalog what offers you have where, what they’re offering and how they’re performing. This information will give you some baseline guidance on what’s working and what isn’t.

Where do your “APPLY NOW” buttons convert well – on program pages, but not the home page or campus life pages? Now you know your home and campus life pages need a different kind of CTA to engage visitors. 

You may find that offers for certain types of content convert better than others. Your “Use this checklist…” CTAs absolutely kill. But your “Access your report…” CTAs get ignored. That could be a sign to reformat a long report for more bit-sized consumption, say a slide presentation big on images and bullet points.

Try to figure out why a CTA is under-performing. Maybe some of your report CTAs do well, but you have one that doesn’t. Looking more closely, you see that report CTAs on topics and pages geared towards parents convert, but those targeting young students don’t.

Examine Your Current Content

Look at both gated and un-gated content. Review your best performing gated content, looking at its topic and format. Your best performing content isn’t just generating high conversions, but also quality prospects. Develop those topics and prioritize those formats that are already attracting exactly the sort of student you want at your school. 

Analyze your high performing un-gated content as spots ripe for the right CTA. Do you have a collection of high-powered posts that rank well and consistently attract lots of traffic? Are the CTAs on those pages performing well or clogging up your machinery? If they’re gumming up the works, the CTAs probably don’t align well with the topic of the blog post or its audience. 

If one of your power posts goes into how students can convert their real world experience into course credit, having a CTA to view a video of on-campus housing doesn’t make much sense. Does interest in on-campus housing fit the persona of the older prospect returning to school? Instead, you can create and gate a calculator that helps them estimate how many credits their current experience would generate. Or post a CTA to view a video featuring alumni sharing their school/work balance stories.

Need CTA templates? We’ve got 50 you can download and cutomize >> 

Work Your Best Performing Content 

Select some of your best performing content, gated or not, for your different personas at different stages of their enrollment journey. While you can (and should) add CTAs for this content in other, relevant spots on your website, you can also create separate landing pages for them. 

If you have a collection of power posts on a similar topic, sew them up into an ebook (free templates here) or presentation. Put up a landing page for the now-gated ebook and promote the landing page link via your social media channels as a distinct campaign. 

If the program-page CTAs for your “Setting Up for Trade School Success Tool Kit” convert like crazy, give this content its own landing page to promote as well.  

Aligning Your Offers Boosts Your Numbers 

The CTAs need to make sense for who the visitor is and where he is on your website. What he’s reading or watching are clues where he is in his journey. It’s the ever-important cross section of persona-journey stage to make sure you’re making the right offer at the right time.

Put together a worksheet of all your personas and the topics/questions they have at each stage in their journey. Make sure you have CTAs for each cross section. Then make sure the CTAs are placed on pages with content that connects to that cross section.

If the only door from the backyard garden is an express elevator to rummage around the attic, no one’s going to go through it. Give your website visitors multiple doorways attractive to them, which gives you and your admissions team multiple ways to continue to keep the application machinery producing.