Danielle Werbick tells publishers how she creates and deploys SEO campaigns for KnittingDaily.com
“Hundreds of thousands of people are sitting at home, and they want to Google ‘how to knit socks’, Danielle Werbick of KnittingDaily.com told the Mequoda Summit audience this morning. “We found out that ‘knitting socks’ and ‘sock knitting’ were big searches… hundreds of thousands of people and searching for these things.”
“When you look at our ebooks, you’ll notice they have really obnoxious titles” Werbick joked. “Knitting Socks with Knitting Daily, 5 Free Sock Knitting Patterns,” was their first campaign that had tremendous success, very aggressively targeting the ‘knitting socks’ and ‘sock knitting’ both in their title and in their landing page.
Werbick went through their own SEO campaign for this specific book using the following methods of promotion:
Website post: The editorial “wasn’t anything unique that our readers hadn’t seen before, they had just not seen them all packaged together before. So, it was all repurposed content”.
Email Newsletter: Werbick explained that they sent their first promotional email for this ebook to all of their subscribers. Leader Kim Mateus noted that your email newsletter list can be a great resource for pass-along, so even though people may already be on your email subscriber list, you should still promote them to your existing readers.
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Press Release: Werbick told the audience that their press release was also optimized for search and drove traffic directly to the landing page for the report. She stresssed the importance of driving traffic directly to the page and not to the home page.
Twitter: Their online editor who uses Twitter first tweeted the report, and then others in the company on Twitter re-tweeted it. Even though the report isn’t new, they sill still tweet about it now and again.
Werbick also noted that they’re able to re-promote this initial book every time they write a new article on knitting socks. “It’s ok if they’ve seen it before”, Werbick assured the audience, “they haven’t seen it before like this, as a package”.
Werbick told the audience that within 3 weeks of launching the campaign, they went from having zero visibility in Google, to having a page one ranking for most of their targeted keywords around knitting socks.
KnittingDaily.com has grown 65% in traffic since last year. They noted that they regularly clean their email list by deleting anyone who hasn’t opened or clicked an email within a 6 month time frame. First they’ll send an email that asks if they user still wants to still receive the email newsletter. They noted that they have a very low response rate to these types of emails. “If you have a huge list of very inactive people, that doesn’t do anyone any good”, Werbick noted.
Werbick claims a 40% open-rate on their email newsletter, which rises every time they “scrub” their list.
