This is Part 7 of my Beyond the Words series exploring the various and sundry ways in which you can add multimedia such as images, videos, audios, and downloadables (PDFs) to your website to spice it up.
Alas, I believe we have reached the end of our sojourn in the Media Library and investigation of the wonders it holds.
One last little piece of the puzzle to take a look at before we go.
Sometimes, writing it in a blog post isn’t enough. Sometimes, you want to give your readers a Word doc or PDF file, like an eBook, they can download directly from your website.
One idea that comes to mind and that I set up for my clients all the time, is the download of the freebie they offer folks for signing up for their list. (Oh, say…for example…something like “How to Jump Start Your Web Project” which you can sign up to get here: https://npoweredsites.com/sign-up/.)
Yes – you can typically include the download directly in your Welcome email via an email marketing service like Aweber or Mailchimp.
But an even better idea is to take advantage of every opportunity to bring a potential client back to your website – give them a reason to spend time exploring your knowledge and expertise and all you have to offer, and grow that old Know/Like/Trust factor.
So in your Welcome email, why not give them a link to a web page on your site where you’ve included the download link to the freebie?
“And how can I include that download link to the freebie,” you might ask?
Well…let me tell you, it’s super easy.
The Media Library comes to the rescue again here. Including a plain link is as simple as clicking your ADD MEDIA button in you blog post editor.
When you Upload Files you can either click the SELECT FILES button or simply drag your PDF (or Word doc or Excel) file right onto your web browser. WordPress does all the heavy lifting here. It uploads the file, and inserts all the necessary code so that when someone clicks on your link, they are prompted to download the file.
Be sure to change the Title on the INSERT MEDIA screen. This will be the text that displays as a link to your reader, so you want this to be useful and descriptive. (By default, it shows as the file name which isn’t usually all that helpful.)
And make sure that you link to the Media File in this instance. When you’re working with adding images to your posts, you typically don’t want them to link to anything, but in this case, this is what triggers the file to download or open.
One other little trick which I consider to be just good manners…
Once you’ve inserted the link to your PDF, I like to force it to open in a new browser tab so that they don’t end up clicking away from the content they were just reading.
To do this, hover over the link and click on the little ‘gear’ icon to bring up the LINK OPTIONS window. Then click the Open link in a new tab checkbox and UPDATE.
(side note: My general rule of thumb with this is to do as little as possible to distract readers from your website. If you’re linking to a document or a website outside of your own, have it open in a new tab. If you’re linking to something else within your own website, you can have it open in the same window which is the default when you include links so you don’t need to do anything special to make this happen.)
There are all kinds of practical uses for including files your readers can download.
Coaches and consultants always have intake forms and Welcome Packets. You might not include those in a blog post, but if you have a client portal page, it makes it easier on you and your clients for them to be able to easily access those in one place.
One of my favorites that a coach gave me was a template for what she called my Top 6 Checklist to help me plan my to dos for the day and be clear about my priorities (even though I never was able to keep my list to just 6 items each day – I’m still working on this one).
Coaches have a bazillion kinds of these tools that they use over and over again with clients, so streamline the steps it takes to share those and include them on your website.
