This is an email I sent to our team about a marketing workshop I recently attended.

Hi team,

I applied to an “invite only” marketing seminar hosted by Noah Kagan last Wed and got accepted so was 1 of 12 or so folks in a session with him.

As those of you who’ve been here a while may know, I’m a fan of Noah’s stuff (AppSumo and OkDork).  His ideas have made us money and made us a better company although I know he does rub some people the wrong way.  But that’s important IMO in marketing.  Being boring is the enemy, and Noah isn’t that.

So wanted to share some things I learned in the session.

First, it is worth noting that it wasn’t groundbreaking. I knew most of this stuff (often because I’ve read it on Noah’s blog before), but it was good to be among a group of peers and to have some ideas reinforced. It’s also clear that we’re quite ahead of most companies in what we’re doing, but of course, we’re not at our destination yet. especially when it comes to digital marketing, conversion rate optimization and tracking of data about our users

My 5 main takeaways:

• Clarity of metrics – In the case of Noah’s businesses, he is obsessed with emails to his newsletter.  That’s the metric they focus on most as they feel like that if that gets bigger, the rest will work out.  While i don’t think we’re that dissimilar (email newseltter is key), not sure we can boil it down to 1 metric, I think there are 2 to 3 that are key for us.  We’ll discuss in the next couple of weeks.  If we manage actively for those few metrics, we’re going to build something big.

• CTA optimization – In content, we have to put calls-to-action (CTA) high in the post.  Noah went through some heatmaps of content to show how far people read and most didn’t make it past the first 1/4 of content.  Burying your CTA at the bottom of a post is suboptimal as a result.  Tools that can help with this – CrazyEgg or Content Analytics.  CrazyEgg is better per Noah although Content Analytics is his offering.  Another lesson as this builds credibility when you acknowledge something of yours isn’t great.  It’s almost reverse psychology in some ways.
• Homepage design – Avoid distractions and tell people why they should sign up and that’s it.  He looked at our homepage and suggested getting rid of the header navigation and graying out our testimonials to keep the focus on entering email.  Conversion optimization is something we need to focus on as there is def room for improvement here.
• Guest posting or content syndication can be powerful – Find others who share your audience or have big reaches and create compelling content for them.
• Nobody reads sidebar content on blogs. Put everything into your blog post area.  People are blind to the stuf on the side.  Again, he highlighted this via heatmaps.

If any questions, def let me know.