[The following is the full transcript of this episode of Blogging with Lesli Peterson. Please note that this episode, like all episodes, features Lesli speaking extemporaneously–she is unscripted and unedited.]

Today I want to talk to you about featured listings. 

Nothing. And I mean nothing has changed the financial position of my blogging business more than featured listings. 

We make more on featured listings than affiliates, than ad revenue, than products, than email marketing - more than anything else comes from featured listings. 

So today, I want to talk to you about the eight steps that you can take to set this up for your business. 

Let's start by defining what a featured listing is. 

If you've got a post on your site, preferably one that's doing well through search, and you add to the top of that post a blurb about a product business, a destination, anything - an affiliate, that is what I would call a featured listing. 

Our featured listings include a photo, 100 ish words, and a link. And again, because I'm in the travel space, most of our featured listings are destinations. 

So I might have a list of the best weekend getaways in Georgia as a post. And at the top of that post a destination like Alpharetta, Georgia or Blue Ridge, Georgia would buy a featured listing space at the top. 

So at the very top of that post, the first thing people see when they come into the post after the introduction, would be our feature partners. 

And we have a maximum of five for each post with a photo 100, word blurb, and a link out to their site a nofollow link out to their site. 

So those are featured listings. We use directory software directory plugin to do this. And each one of those positions are either a company that we've done a contract with, or they're an affiliate listing for us. So that's what a featured listing is. 

And I'm going to put an example of that link to the weekend getaways in Georgia in the show notes below. So you can click out. And you can see exactly what I'm talking about. 

Like I said, this feature listing, we've been doing that, I don't know, eight years now. And it really changed the revenue trajectory of our business. 

And there's a couple of reasons why:

Number one, it works really well for our customers. It gives them an opportunity to get in front of more eyeballs than they would otherwise to leverage the content that we have on our blog that's ranking really, really well. 

And second of all, it's easy for me, once I got the software set up and a sales process in place, it only takes me about 15 to 30 minutes to do this the first time. And then I'd say about 80% of our customers renew year after year after year. So at that point, any changes they want to make if they want to make it at all, usually take only about 10 minutes, and they're done. So it's easy for me my cost per hour to do the work is very minimal. And the beauty of it is that it works so well for our customers. 

So if you want to put this into place, let me give you some steps to do this. But before I give you the steps, I want to lay the foundation for success. 

We did not start doing this in year one, or in year two, I think it was year three when we started, I could be wrong with that. But we started doing it when we had a significant number of round-up posts ranking really well on Google. And these are posts that are driving a lot of traffic and a lot of visibility. So if you're not in that place yet, if you're just starting your blog, if you're just starting a blog with a focus on SEO, then this might be something you want to listen to and put in your back pocket. But it might not be the right solution for you just yet. 

For those of my friends out there who have been blogging for a long time, who are getting significant traffic from SEO, and you're not doing this. You are leaving hundreds of 1000s of dollars on the table, and I want you to listen. 

So here are steps one through eight, to set up featured listings as part of your blogging business. 

Commit to doing it

Step number one is decide to commit to it. This is an annual contract with your clients when done right. And selling one contract is not going to be worth it for you. Selling one featured listing, not going to be worth the effort it takes to implement this on your site. 

So when you are ready to do it, make sure you are ready to do it. You've got to commit for yourself and for your customers. Because you want them to be happy, you want to serve them, we want to do this with integrity. And that takes commitment. 

So that's the first thing if you're not ready to commit, it's not time to start. 

Define your marketing message

Number two, let's decide that you've committed and you're ready to go. What you want to do is put your story or your marketing message together. 

And let me tell you a little bit about what ours sounds like. This is when we're selling to someone for the first time. 

We explain to our customers that this is a one of several products that we offer that allows them (their destination for us for you might be something else, especially if you're not in travel or hyperlocal), but allows them to get their message in front of people that they might not otherwise be able to get their message in front of. 

I'm going to give you an example. 

We work with a destination out in Florida, on the coast, on the Atlantic coast. And it is a fantastic, fantastic place for couples, especially for families to go and visit and we went there I don't know, four or five, six times in a row several times before we even started working with them, we were just there with extended family. 

And a lot of people who think about going on vacation in Florida never think about this place. I don't know why. They should, but they don't think about it. 

So we have posts like best weekend getaways in Florida, or best beaches. And this destination is there. Because people aren't usually going to Google them to see what there is to do. They're just looking for where to take their family in Florida or where to go to the beach from Atlanta. And we want to put this destination in front of those people. 

So it is a great way, because those posts like weekend getaways from Florida and closest beaches to Atlanta are already ranking in first, second, third position. 

And we know people are seeing them. We know hundreds of thousands of people are seeing those posts every year. So this is the way to expose those seekers to this destination. 

And that is how we market it. 

So you'll want to come up with your special way of explaining how you're going to bring benefit to your customer, whether you're in travel or food or books or parenting or whatever the case may be. How you can bring that? How do you want to bring that message to your customer? 

You got to put it in your own words. But that's a little bit of how we do it. 

Pick and implement a tool

Now, you've decided to commit, you've put your marketing message together, it's time to do some tactical work. And that's determined the tool you're going to use, and then install that tool if necessary. 

So I use a like I said, a directory listing software, I use Web 2.0 Direct, which is a plugin. 

I know some people who are just using Gutenberg blocks to do this and that is perfectly great way to start. 

But I'll tell you why I like the directory software better, especially Web 2.0 Direct. And that's three reasons. 

Number one, if I have more than one featured listing in a post... for example, I told you we allow up to five featured listings in any given post. Then every time that post is refreshed, it rotates those five directory or those five featured listings, so I don't have to worry about saying, oh sorry, you, you're gonna have to be third in the list. 

It rotates them every time the page is refreshed. So I don't have to worry about one person getting more traffic because they're the first feature listing as opposed to the fifth featured listing. 

The second thing it does is I can set it allows me to set an expiration date. I sell our featured listings for a 12 month period (and I'm gonna go over that pricing with you in a little bit) but I sell them for a 12 month period. And so after 12 months are up, then they're immediately taken down if I haven't renewed them previously changed that expiration date. 

So I don't have to worry about somebody forgetting that somebody's up there and charging them for a year and actually giving them three years, I don't have to worry about any of that. 

And then thirdly, I don't take advantage of this, but it is available, there is a self service model with this. 

So somebody could come in and purchase a featured listing with you using their credit card or using Pay Pal, get it up or get it into a staging area for you to approve autumn automatically. 

So I did that for a while. But I just really liked the personal touch with my customers. So I turned that off. But that is available to you, which you can't of course do with Gutenberg blocks. 

So determine what your tool is going to be. If you want to use directory software, then go ahead and get that installed. 

Price your listing

Number four, you want to price your product. 

I charge $750 per directory listing for one year. And that price point is available for any of our posts that makes sense, that have 35,000 annual page views, or more. 

Now I have some posts that have nearly 200,000 page views a year. And then some that have 35,001 page views. I used to divide those up into different price points. But it just was too much of a headache. And what I do today is offer everything everything at 35,000 and above for $750. 

That works out to about two cents of you. And here's what I want you to think about. 

I again I'm not Pooh poohing social media at all. I know it's an important part of our business. But for those of you on Tik Tok, who are able to monetize your Tik Tok account, you can make from TikTok, anywhere between two and four cents for every 1000 views. 

With featured listings, I'm able to make two cents for every view, not every 1000 views -every view multiple times over on that post when I sell a featured listing. 

So that averages out to about a $20 CPM, which is the average CPM in the travel space. S

o as you're determining what your price points going to be, I want you to look at your top, you know, 20-30 posts, see what the average or minimum page view is annually for those posts. And then look up what the average CPM is for your industry. 

You can use those pageviews and the average CPM for your industry to determine what your price point should be. 

So again, any posts for us that is 35,000 page views annually and above, we sell a featured listing for which we charge $750 for the year. That works out to about I think point zero to one, I think is what it is, don't hold me to that because I'm not going to do a math in my head like that. But that is about a $20 CPM, which is average for travel. 

And again, we used to charge more for the ones that, you know, were over the 100,000 threshold. We actually even had a $500 price point for those things that were, I think, 25,000 page views a year, but it was just too much to manage. 

If you're feeling uncomfortable, or you're feeling like you want, you know, three different price points because of the way your CPM works, then, you know, consider that. I just know after I don't know, after about two years, we just decided to go to one price point for everything. 

35,000 pageviews and above. 

Add listings to build a case study

Okay, number five. What I want you to do is go ahead and add -before you do any selling- go ahead and add some featured listings to your primary posts, your main posts, the posts that get the most traffic from you. 

Now, that could be any potential partners that you want to work with in the future, and you just want to get noticed. It could be the way what I did was I started with the clients who are our best clients, already the clients that work with us, you know, through the years at that time, and that we loved and that loved on us. 

And I just said "hey, I'm gonna be adding you to this for a couple months. I just want you to know and I'm going to give you some information about it, you know when it's over, but just thought you'd be curious to see you know what I'm doing." 

The other thing I do is add affiliates. 

So for example, I've got a post, it doesn't get quite 35,000 page views a year. So it's not available as a featured listing to be sold. But it's experience gifts in the Atlanta, Georgia area for Christmas time. 

And I don't want to sell anything into that. But Getaway House is a place where, for those of you aren't familiar, you can go and stay and get away, has a great affiliate program. 

So we put them in there, and I use my affiliate link, and it does pretty well. 

So you can use your affiliates, you can use people who you are targeting in the future. Or you can use your fantastic partners that you already have, or a little bit of all three. 

But what you want to do is set it up. Use that tool that you've already put in place, set it up and add featured listings in there. 

And here's why you want to prove this model: you want to gather some statistics, you want to have a case study to use when you're selling this, when you're pitching this, when you're offering this. That's all going to help you close the deal. 

Share with your customers and prospects

And then, after a few months, we've got that all set up, then you're just going to share with your prospects and your customers what you've done, what's available with this case study, show what the price point is. 

You're going to use the marketing message that we talked about in step number two. 

And going forward, you are going to share this with prospects all the time. 

Anytime I have a legitimate person reach out to me saying they want to share something, they want me to share something or write a post about something or put it in my newsletter...and I think it's going to be a good fit for a feature listing, I share back with them what our feature listings are, what the price is, why it's valuable. 

Now, not everybody bites. But I've got it set up as a template. So it's easy to share, when it makes sense. And it takes me, I don't know, 30 seconds a minute to share that. And we get that's how we get new customers all the time. 

So if you've been blogging for a while, then you probably have a lot of people who are always asking you, for backlinks. We have a DA 60. I feel like I get- I'm not even exaggerating- I must get 75 requests for backlinks a day. 

I don't share this with linkbuilders. 

Number one. These are all nofollow links, because people are paying for them. So they're not going to be beneficial to them anyway. They're also they're wanting to pay you whatever $25, not $750. And they would pay you $25 for a lifetime do follow link that Google will penalize you for it's ridiculous. Don't do it. But I don't send that to them. 

Also, because you want, whenever somebody buys a featured listing in your in your article, you want the content to be a good match. Because else Google's gonna go "Why is this Orlando rental car company in a Dallas Texas post?" 

It doesn't make sense to Google, it doesn't make sense to your reader. You don't want to do that. 

So you always want to make sure that the content in your feature listing matches the content in your story. And usually with those link building places, that's not going to be the case. 

I'll give you an example of a place that's not an exact match, but worked still works. And and I love the story.

These people, the management, changed, so they're no longer a customer of ours. But Wilmington, North Carolina is a popular beach destination for people from Atlanta. And we don't work with them at all. 

But we have an article that, at the time, was ranking number one. I don't know what it ranks now. 

But Onslow County is a destination that's only, I guess, it's about an hour away from Wilmington. People don't know about it. And it's fantastic. We went in 2019. It was such a cute, cute place and that boys loved it. And we had so much fun. But people don't think about it because they don't know about it.

It's the same kind of situation I told you about in Florida. So we added Onslow County to the Wilmington post as as a featured listing and said, "Here's an alternative without the crowds." 

So that's not an exact match for the content, but it still makes sense. So we did it and did really, really well. So that's the that's the caveat to the rule. 

Build a renewal process

Okay, number seven. Once you've got once you've sent that out to your prospects, and hopefully you're -probably at the beginning- you're going to be fielding some questions. 

What is this? Why is this working? And you might have to jump on to phone call, it will be worth it. 

Because again, about 80% of our customers, they see the benefit once they're in there and they re-up year after year after year. 

It's almost like a it's almost like a subscription product. I don't sell it like that, but they like it so much that that that's kind of the way it works. S

o what you'll want to do -step number seven- is build a renewal schedule. 

Gutenberg blocks definitely doesn't do this, my directory listing software Web 2.0 Direct does not do this. It does not tell me "oh, this person, or this brand featured listing is going to expire in 90 days, 60 days, 30 days." 

It doesn't tell me that. So I whenever I build a feature, a new feature listing, or I sell a new feature listing... then I used to add it to my calendar. Now I added to our contract section and monday.com. So that I get an alert, 90 days out 60 days out 30 days out, so that I can then email them and say, "Hey, we're getting close to your contract expiring. Do you want to, you know, do you want to renew?"

And if they don't come back at me at the 90 day mark, then I get another reminder at the 60 day mark, etc, etc. 

So it's a really great way to make sure that you're going to get that repeat business.

And then if they don't want to re-up with you, ask them why.Don't be shy about saying "What didn't work for you? What can I do to make this work in the future? What were you looking for that that wasn't provided here?" 

Because sometimes it's going to be the case that people say, for example, I was looking for more click throughs. I had someone say that to me, and say why didn't get their number of click throughs that I was expecting. And so my, my marketing message changed at that point where I explained to people, this is not necessarily a click-through product, this is an impressions product. 

And that really made a difference in the way I was selling it. 

So you always want to ask, even if there's something you can't necessarily do about it. 

And I have other clients who are thrilled with the click-throughs that they're getting. But even if there's something you can't do about it, like increasing the click through, you can adjust your marketing message so that you're setting expectations correctly. 

And you're maintaining that integrity. 

Schedule quarterly reporting

And then the final step is to put on your calendar, a quarterly report.

I send impressions, quarterly impressions, to everybody who's bought a feature listing from me, every quarter. 

And here's why I do that: I want to keep the cost, my cost for this product, at a minimum, which means I cannot be sending personalized analytics reports every time they want it or every quarter, I just can't do that and keep the price point this low. 

So what I do is, every quarter, I send out a spreadsheet to everybody who's purchased from us. And I say, here's all the posts where we offer featured listings. And here's the impressions for those posts for the quarter. 

And then, it's it's a rolling spreadsheet, so they can see what it was compared to last quarter and the quarter before that, a quarter of that etc, etc. 

What's great? Also they can see all of the posts we have feature listings in. So I might have a client who writes back and says like, "Thanks for this. Hey, I just noticed that you have a featured listings available in daytrips in Georgia, we're not in now. And can we get in that one?"

And I'll say yes or no to them, whether we have five in there or not. 

So share your impressions quarterly. Make sure you're doing that. 

Number one. It keeps people it keeps you top of mind keeps people understanding what you're doing that you're offering a year's worth of value. 

Number two, it answers the question, "Am I getting my money's worth?"

Number three, it opens up other sales opportunities. 

And number four, when it comes time to renew it, you're not just coming out of the blue 12 months later and saying "hey, you want to give me another $750?" You're actually you've shown yourself three maybe four times before that. 

So those are the eight steps for crafting your featured listing. 

Best practices

And now before we go- I know this is kind of a long episode- but I want to tell you what types of posts work best and some best practices for doing featured listings. 

Number one, you want to sell feature listings for articles that are already ranking. The value to your customer here is not that you're going to... you know when you when you when you write a new post for a customer, you hope and pray and do all the work you possibly can to get that post ranking so you can get as many eyeballs on it as possible. 

This opportunity with a customer takes that part, that risk element, away. So you're offering them exposure on articles that are already ranking. That's the value. 

It works really well for lesser searched brands. So I gave you those two examples: that destination and Florida and the destination along the coast. Where those are places again, from the travel perspective, those are places that not a lot of people are searching for. 

So I put them in articles that I know people are searching for, where they're a good fit, and it gets them more exposure than they might otherwise get. 

So that and that of course would work with any industry, when it comes to the brand. 

And also is allows you to reframe a brand. If a brand is trying to crossing into another industry or they're trying to get thought of in a different way.

For example, one of the first featured listings I ever did was for Highlights Magazines - a long time ago and a different blog. 

They were really popular for kids, but they weren't being utilized like they could be and should be, quite frankly, in the homeschool world. 

So I had a homeschool post. And Highlights Magazine was featured there because we were trying to reframe how people thought about them. 

Another example, I haven't done this or seen it. But that just came to mind as an example.

I had, when we bought our RV, we had an RV mattress in there. And it was it was horrible. So we bought a regular standard mattress at TempurPedic and put it in the in the RV and it worked just fine. 

So if you have, for example, an RV post and your brand, maybe TempurPedic is wanting to be reframed or, or understood to be a viable product in the RV market, then you can have your your TempurPedic mattress post featured listing in your RV posts. 

So if you have anybody who's trying to break into a new space, or be viewed at from a different angle, then you can accommodate that by making them a featured listing in that post. 

Most people aren't going to be looking up, "can I use a TempurPedic mattress in my RV?" but they are going to be looking up the best, you know, the best products for somebody who's just bought an RV. And if your TempurPedic mattress is featured there, then that's a way of reframing that branding. 

It's like a second alternative to lazy thinking, I guess. 

Now, it's also a really great way to extend your relationship with those brands beyond the posts or the social or the newsletter that you did with them right away. 

So if you I'm thinking just again, about travel. I have a travel contract coming up or I'm going to a destination, they've paid us to come to the destination to write a couple posts on them, to share it on social media, and to add them to our newsletter. 

But when that's over, and they're happy with the job that we've done, I'll present to them the featured listings, and explain to them the value of that and how we have written these posts for them...and we're looking forward to seeing them rank. But if they want to get exposure, long term exposure immediately, not just you know, 24 hours on Instagram, but 12 months with maybe you know, a post that sees 100,000 people in a year that this is a great way to do that. 

So and then what's fantastic is this destination probably doesn't want to bring me out again next year and pay me the same amount of money to do this again. But they might want to stay top of mind with the people who are coming to search on our blog for things beyond that things to do in destination posts. 

And this is a great way for me to extend that relationship with them. If they enjoyed working with us. This is another way that you can continue to work with us. Little less money, little less effort on our part, but you're still getting those eyeballs a great way to extend the relationships that you already have in place. 

And then the last thing I want to mention is be sure that you're doing this for 12 months. That makes it worthwhile for you; it makes it worthwhile for the client. 

So you want yearly or annual contracts. 

And these are great things to package together. So we do sell you know you could buy a one time feature listing on our site for a year, but we also have packages. 

So I might include it might include five featured listings on five different sites and some social shares and inclusion in the newsletters. 

It's a great way to package things into a higher priced product. Might not work the first time you're working with a client but after they begin to see the value of that feature listing and of working with you and how amazing you are, then it's a great way to increase that price point by by packaging them together. 

So I understand that it is a difficult thing to come up with product ideas that are new and unique. You know, we're always just trying to sell social or trying to sell newsletter or trying to sell a visit with a post if you're in travel, for example. And this is a great way to, to do that to to bring more value to your customer, and a little bit easier work effort for you. 

And long, long term benefits that, when done correctly, like I said, can bring you more money than ad revenue. And I hope that you'll at least give it some some consideration. I know you value your time, and you value all the work that you have already put into your blog. I value that about you as well. And this is just another way to leverage that that success that you've already had.