This is another entry in my “Book of Principles.” To see where this all began, click here. For a full listing of all posts, click here.

Years ago I offered free advice as part of my “solve part of their problem” strategy.

One day I got a request from a business owner who, after creating content for a number of years, had successfully ranked a fairly good number of pages for a fairly good number of keywords that were driving a fairly good number of visitors.

In the end, he was getting fairly good results. But not really good results. At least that’s how it was explained to me.

Soooooooo…
So I looked over his site, found the content to be surprisingly good, and stared at a page for a good few minutes before it hit me what was wrong.

I was still on that page. Nowhere on these popular, high-ranking pages was there something that guided me one step, ANY step, closer to his goals. So, I sat on the page and realized, as I had before…

There is always a next step. I’m only hoping they find it if I don’t show them what it is.

Every piece of marketing leads somewhere and, in my experience, if we don’t light the aisles to show the exits, our prospects will just stumble around in the dark.

#1) YouTube Videos
I’ve created a fair number of YouTube videos over the years. Some of which were fairly successful (14o,000 views at last count for the best, another dozen above 50,000), but even with all those views I wasn’t moving the needle. So I made one tweak and added this below every video:

For more information visit: http://www.mywebsite.com

That was it. Quite literally overnight my traffic to one site increased by about 10%. As did sales. On paper they should be able to find the next step…but they weren’t. So, instead, I showed it to them them…and they did.

#2) Share This
SocialSav continues to grow. And the reason it’s growing is something I’ve spoken about before: I incentivize sharing. But I don’t do that just in their account, I do it at the bottom of every email.

Because those next steps don’t just come before someone is a customer, they come after as well. After I provide an email full of unique, free value, I simply show them a next step. And, wouldn’t you know, many take it.

Ask Yourself
I’ve often found that these next steps show up at the most visibile parts of our marketing. Sometimes those are YouTube videos, sometimes those are tweets, sometimes those are print ads, but the next time you see big numbers in a marketing report simply ask yourself:

“What is the most valuable, effective next step these people could take for both their experience and our goals? And what can I do to help them take it?”

Even a few links below your most organically discovered YouTube videos can make a small, measurable difference.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.