Great design, stellar content and loads of traffic don’t mean anything without sales. And even before that goal is achieved, a step-by-step process of conversion is occurring as prospects move closer to customer or client. And if you want to achieve success, you need to understand and stay abreast of the latest thinking in landing page techniques, smarter email marketing, copywriting tips for conversion, and more.
That’s the description for the sold out Authority Intensive Conversion Panel: The Art and Science of Inspiring Action session I’ll be participating in next week in Denver. I’ll be joined by fellow panelists Brian Eisenberg, Joanna Wiebe, Annie Cushing, and Dean Levitt. Along with our moderator, Brian Clark, each of us will discuss a facet of the conversion process whereby content marketing leads prospective customers and clients down the sales tunnel.
Painless Prospecting and Content Marketing
If you’ve read The Invisible Sale, you know that I’m a huge proponent of using content to create propinquity. I talk at length about pushing your content to the edges (guest posting on other people’s sites) in order to generate awareness, propinquity, and drive inbound traffic to your website via anchor links embedded in your guest posts.
It is this ongoing passive creation of inbound traffic that I refer to as a Painless Prospecting sales lead generation program. Because while there is certainly bit of pain associated with the creation and distribution of the original content, Â the ongoing and continual generation of new sales leads as a result of this content is not.
First Click Content vs Second Click Content
What I have not traditionally spoken much about outside of conversations and work projects with my current clients is the difference between first click and second click content. But it is my belief that this second click content is as, if not more, important to the development of a successful digitally powered sales lead generation program.
Whereas first click content is designed to drive a prospective customer to your website from either a guest post or Google, second click content is designed to answer specific questions and propels the prospect one step further down the sales process pipeline. First click content concerns itself with concepts and goals like virality, most clicked, and most shared. Â Second click content focuses on answering very specific questions with highly detailed, in-depth, and to a non-targeted prospect, largely boring but highly informative answers.
The Role of Second Click Content
So if second click content isn’t designed to achieve page 1 Google SERP, Â what then is the role and importance of producing second click content? Stated plainly, second click content is what converts that web visitor into web sourced customer.
Today’s content marketers find themselves in a quandary.
In order to win the much vaunted Google SERP, Â they have to write content that is over-simplistic, sensationalistic, and quickly consumed. Because the belief is these are the types of content that gets linked to, shared, retreated, commented on and liked throughout the various social media platforms. All of this social activity combined with well SEO’d Content, results in better rankings on Google.
However, while this content often achieves search engine placement and virality goals it does not help the prospective customer move one step closer to making a buying decision. That’s the role of second click content. Second click content is content that is created on your website not to achieve first page Google or to become the most retweeted piece of content you create this year. In fact, if done correctly, second click content tends to derive most of its inbound traffic from other content on your website or from guest post that you placed.
Second click content is the follow-up. It’s the content that is really deep, examines a concept in a very thorough manner and often answers very specific, niche questions. It is this depth and thoroughness of the content that makes it an ideal anchor link to place in those guest posts you are publishing on other people’s websites. Second click content gives you the ability to really provide the depth of information required buy serious buyers reading a guest post without having to include all of that deep info in the actual guest post itself. Which in my opinion is the proper use of anchor text inside a guest post. And because you are utilizing second click content and anchor texts properly, you increase the chances and likelihood that the owner of the website on which you are guest posting will allow that anchor text to remain in the final published post.
Do You Need Help Turning Website Visitors into Web Sourced Customers?
If you need help strategically planning your content marketing and guest posting strategy  to properly leverage both first and second click content to drive your sales lead generation programs, contact me using the form below. We work with midsize B2C and B2B organizations that want to harness the power of Painless Prospecting programs to grow their business. And we’d love to help you.
