- [Instructor] Error message marketing.
I have a feeling you are going to love this angle.
One of the best keyword research tactics
I believe I have ever shared is on the topic
of error message marketing.
It's only something you will hear about
if you are subscribed to the Detailed newsletter,
but it has already produced
some great success stories from my readers.
Now, just to clarify when I say things like,
You'll only hear it from me,
or only in my newsletter,
that is not to brag or show off.
It doesn't matter, you are in this program
I am here to help you with this training
but rather I'm telling you that because
it's not saturated.
I haven't seen anyone else talking about this.
I came up with the angle,
I shared it with a few people
who have had some great success stories
and now I'm sharing it with you
in a lot more detail here in this program.
The tactic of error message marketing
allows you to rank very easily,
which is always what we want, right?
You want keywords that don't have too much competition
and become a literal hero
to any potential customers in the process.
In an example of one of the success stories,
someone who reads Detailed,
they took this idea and in just over a year
they sold the website that was running
based on this idea for $34,000.
It's now making more than
2 1/2 thousand dollars a month,
4,000 daily active users
and could probably have sold for a lot more
than that at this moment in time.
So the idea behind error message marketing is really simple:
Find errors in software or services
that your ideal customer would use
and write about their solution.
I'm going to talk about a 7-figure hosting company
who use this tactic to a lot of success,
but let me give you a real-world, personal example first.
For my email newsletters of which you may be a member,
you may be on one of those,
I use two companies.
I use Drip.com and ConvertKit.com.
At the time of recording this
I've only been using ConvertKit for a few weeks.
So, for Detailed blueprint when I wanted
to get this out to the world I had a waiting list first
and that waiting list was powered by ConvertKit.
I can't build my own landing pages
but I wanted to try it out and their landing page feature
is actually pretty awesome so I set it up,
I started sending people to the waiting list
and then not long later I received this email.
This is from Frank,
I've just blurred out his two email addresses there.
"Hey Glen, just FYI,
"there is an error on your new page
"when you try to submit details."
So, I'm going to highlight that,
you might have to go full screen to see it
but this was the error.
Basically, when Frank was trying to submit
the form on my website,
he was getting this type error
Fail to fetch warning,
which I couldn't actually replicate.
So that was really frustrating.
And obviously if I'm sending people to a page
I want to make sure they can give me
their email address if that's what
they are trying to do.
So, as anyone would do,
I went to Google and I searched for
'Type Error Failed to Fetch' and then ConvertKit
and the first result really looked like
what I wanted but that failed to fetch text
was no longer on the page anymore,
that disappeared.
The second result was ConverKit's own programmers
talking about this issue but in relation
to something else and the third result
just had nothing to do with the problem.
And I looked for a while but I didn't find
my solution whatsoever.
So this is the type of search query
where the volume is very low,
but it's also very easy to rank,
'cause there's little to no competition,
and if someone were ranking,
or if you were ranking for someone else,
you can literally be their hero.
If I had found a result there
which told me what the problem was
I would've loved that website.
I would've been thank you,
it's so important for me to fix that.
And remember I'm promoting a page
that I hope people will opt-in to.
I don't want to promote something that doesn't work.
I don't want a lot of emails from people saying,
"Hey, I can't give you my email address."
So you can believe that when Frank sent me that email
nothing else mattered.
The only thing I focused on was trying to fix that error.
And sadly, Google did not provide the solution
I was looking for.
I'm adding this in, just kind of a joke
but in the sense that if you are actually
a ConverKit user and if you ever come across this error
yourself, well they have a setting called
'invisible recaptcha' and it's supposed to prevent spam
but their tech team let me know that is buggy.
I fixed this on my own and I asked them,
"Hey, can I turn this back on?"
and they basically said, "No, you can't do that.
It's not working perfectly at the moment."
So, if you ever have the same issue, there you go.
But the most important part of this whole concept
is that you know exactly who you are targeting
in search results.
So go back to that query,
the type error convert key query,
the obvious answer for who I'm targeting
is ConvertKit customers.
No one else is going to be searching
for that in Google, right?
We can be 99.9% sure if someone is Googling that,
they are a user of Convertkit.
But the better answer, at least to me,
is that I know I have email marketers
and webmasters coming to my website.
So while we have something that is a program
for email marketers, I teach them how to send better emails
or maybe I have a better solution than ConvertKit.
That is the kind of thing I wanna rank for
because I know the people who are searching
for it are the exact kind of people I would want to reach.
So just to give you some inspiration
because maybe you can't relate to that one.
Let's go and look at another idea.
So one thing I like to do for my websites is test
how quickly they load and make them load quicker.
This is a tool called Pingdom.
They have a free website speed checker and its really nice.
It tells you how fast the website loads.
You can check how fast it is from different locations
around the world.
And they tell you some of the problems on the website
that you can improve.
Pingdom told me about is that I need to parallelize.
I can't even say that word.
I need to that p-word downloads across host names.
So I love Pingdom.
I love that they give this away for free,
but they do not tell you whatsoever
what the error messages mean.
They do not explain it to you in any detail.
So as I do because I wanted to understand what that was,
I googled it and then a website called Kinsta came up
with that guide how to fix that blank word
that I'm not going to say, downloads across host names.
And I love them for that.
They gave me exactly what I was looking for.
I used the tool, really useful tool,
but it gave me error messages that weren't very helpful.
I googled it and I found this website
and it was a huge solution for me.
And about six months later due to being such
a good steward of helping me in certain things
over the years, I actually became a customer of Kinsta.
So Kinsta actually hosts the very website
you are on right now.
I like to think I have a pretty good relationship
with their team, so what I actually did
because I know that they follow this model quite a lot,
this error message marketing,
I reached out to their CFO, Tom.
I'm not gonna try and pronounce his surname,
I'm not having much luck with that in this video,
but I asked Tom is this working for you guys?
Is this something you are proactive about?
Was that just accidental that you put that together
or are you really focused on it.
And he gave me two really interesting quotes.
The first was that yes,
these posts convert visitors into customers.
So when he ranks for error messages from other tools,
they end up becoming customers of Kinsta,
the web hosting company.
And another comment he made to me was
that these posts drive constant traffic
and they are great to increase brand awareness
and to show visitors that you are an expert in your industry
And I agree, I got a much better impression of Kinsta,
because they kept solving the error messages for me
of this other tool.
Tom even when is far to give me some traffic screenshots.
So here's a single article,
getting around 50, 60 visitors a day, just one article.
Here's the stats for another article,
started getting hundreds of visitors per day
in less than one year of Kinsta putting that on their blog.
And this is organic traffic by the way.
This isn't social media shares.
This isn't Facebook ads.
This free natural organic search engine rankings.
Search engine traffic.
So I hope at this point you're starting
to see some of the potential here,
hopefully we've got some gears turning in your brain.
So let's look at how to take advantage of this
to grow your own website traffic.
So option one is hopefully pretty obvious:
solve your own problems.
If you are using a certain software in your industry,
in your day-to-day activities that are relevant
to your niche and you have problems with it
and you find the solution to their problems write them up.
That ConvertKit solution which at the time
of me recording this video I just figured that out,
there is no one explaining that solution in Google.
There is not one person who says turn off
invisible recapture on your landing forum to fix that error.
I can go and write that up.
I'm not gonna get floods of traffic landing on my website
of course, but the people who do land there especially
if I had a product for email marketers
and similar are the exact kind of people
I would want to reach.
I know who is going to be landing on my website
and I know it's pretty easy to rank for that.
So option one, take your own problems that you solved
with software services that you use on a frequent basis
and share the solutions with other people.
Option two is to go to your competitors websites
and see what kind of error message, problem queries
that they rank for.
So when SEOmoz say, I am not a software service company
like Moz, let's just say they were a competitor of mine
I could use a premium tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush
and so on and see what they are ranking for
and then stop putting in different queries
to see what their ranking for; problem, broken, fix,
error, things like that.
And in example, how to fix 404 error on Google Webmaster,
how to fix crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools.
I know for certain I am dealing with a webmaster
if I rank for those queries,
because who else is going to be searching for that
but people who own their own websites
or do marketing for websites.
The search volume isn't huge but the idea here
is to become the hero for someone.
And of course this doesn't just work in SEO,
here's an example in the world of cryptocurrency.
I'm on the website one CoinDesk,
I search for all of their rankings
that have the word error in them.
So coinbase error, Bitcoin call fatal error,
if you've had those problems or you know the solutions
and you can create a video or a blog post
or an article for that specific thing,
you could be the hero for someone else.
Another approach you can take is to do
a pretty cool site search.
So in the finance space we could take nerdwallet.com
and then we could find queries
that show up in that blog post titles.
Whether it's the word fix or error or problem
and in this case we can see
that Nerd Wallet actually ranked pretty well
for excess contribution to the IRA.
Here's how to fix this.
Did you send too much money to the IRA by accident?
Here's how to deal with that problem.
Here's how to deal with that problem,
that can give you some ideas and inspiration
for blog posts if you were in the finance space
that you could be writing yourself.
Option number three you can just download relevant software
and go crazy.
So if you're working in an industry that isn't something
you care about, i.e you have a client
in a different industry, you can go to websites like G2,
Capterra, GetApp, go to the specific software category
that you care about,
whether it's church website building software
or accounting software or whatever it may be,
download some of the tools
and just start playing around with them.
See what doesn't work.
See what you can't figure out that other people might
have the same experience with,
that you can then figure out and write the solution for.
And option four is to go big and broad.
Just don't even focus on a specific industry,
just focus on error messages, problems,
things that are broken
and see what people are searching for.
My phone was hacked, how do I fix broken registry items?
My computer has been hacked, my email has been hacked.
So any keyword research tool you wanna use,
this is a premium tool Ahrefs,
but this also works in the likes of keywords everywhere,
which is just free.
It is a Google Chrome extension,
you can use the Google Keyword Planner.
Again, this is free and you can be creative with this
but you can start searching for phrases
such as error message, software problem, can't fix,
how to fix, isn't working, isn't loading, isn't responding,
it's broken, you know just be creative.
What would you search for
if you had a problem with something.
So I really hope you starting to get some ideas here
because you really can be the hero for someone
and rank pretty easily and just create
so much brand value in the process.
And remember, the true value here in my experience
is that you know exactly who you're going to reach.
Kinsta they are a WordPress hosting company
and one of their marketing angles is that
they are a very fast hosting company.
If people are using a tool to see how fast their website is
they wanna rank for those messages.
They know, and I think this is really smart,
they know they are reaching people
who want a faster website,
because otherwise why would they be using that tool
and of course that is exactly what Kinsta offer.
So try to be creative with this one,
see if it applies to your niche in some way,
I am certain it will.
It doesn't matter what industry you're in,
there's some software or some service
that people are using that they haven't been able
to figure out or they keep finding an error message for
and you can be the hero for them in that situation.