This is a guest post by Brad Shorr. Check out his earlier posts on How to Hire Your Social Media Marketing Partner and How to Hire Your SEO Partner.

It’s very difficult for small and mid-size firms to select the right interactive marketing agency — as evidenced by how often agencies get fired, and how frequently client-agency relationships subsist at a low level of productivity and mutual satisfaction.

The best way to prevent agency angst is to select the right agency to begin with. Here are 25 selection criteria to help you do this. I’ve listed the most important ones first, followed by several others that are also important for agencies that get passing grades on the first set of criteria.

A couple of side notes:

1. First, a quick definition of terms: An interactive agency is one that provides a full suite of digital services that typically includes SEO, paid search advertising, email marketing, social media, mobile marketing, and branding support. Web development could be part of the mix, but not necessarily.
2. Second, a bit of disclosure: I work for an interactive agency, one that works primarily with middle market B2B’s in industries like sustainable packaging and mobile credit card processing. This is good, because it gives me a great deal of insight on what works and doesn’t work in terms of client-agency dynamics. It’s bad because some readers might perceive this article as an infomercial. I’ll do my best to be objective; my guidelines should apply to just about every type of business.

25 Key Criteria for Choosing a Marketing Agency

Highest Priority Criteria

1. Follows industry best practices. In my mind this is the number one selection factor. How does the agency decide what strategic and tactical activities to undertake? What industry sources inspire and inform those decisions?

2. Has a documented process. Marketers know how to talk the talk. But slick presentations don’t translate into effective execution; for that, the agency needs a systematic set of procedures for every one of its service offerings. Ask to see them.

3. Has a flexible process. Processes are vital, but inflexible processes are recipes for relationship disaster. Experience tells me that on one level, most businesses are the same in terms of marketing needs. But on another level, every business is unique. A good agency knows how to balance efficiency with flexibility. Ask the agency and referrals for examples of how that issue has played out.

4. Use of subcontractors. Does the agency do all the work in-house, or does it rely on subcontractors for key functions? The more of your work that gets farmed out, the less it is under the agency’s control – and your control. Subcontracting arrangements can lead to serious execution problems including miscommunication, missed deadlines, and cost overruns.

5. Establishes objectives and evaluation criteria. One of the biggest relationship killers is the situation when the client wonders, month after month, whether the agency is producing results. It’s crucial for the agency and client to define objectives and evaluation criteria before inking a deal. Can the agency lead that effort? Is this a priority for them?

6. Assigns a relationship manager. If 10 people from your firm are talking to 10 people from the agency, confusion reigns and it’s just a matter of time before the entire regime goes down. It works best when the agency has a relationship manager in place to serve as a conduit for communication. If the agency is vague about how communication will be handled, it’s a red flag.

7. Provides relevant case studies. Has the agency produced documented results for similar organizations?

8. Willing to start with a trial project. Rather than starting with an expansive and expensive contract, clients and agencies are better off testing the waters with a trial project. This approach narrows scope, reduces risk, and provides a safe way for both parties to get comfortable working together. Is the agency open to crawling before it walks?

9. Has strategic thinkers. Some agencies are pure technicians: all tactics and no strategy. Unless you have a total grasp of fundamental interactive marketing principles, a lack of strategic guidance from the agency will inevitably lead to a misapplication of effort and poor results.

10. Value to the agency. Cut through the sales pitch and find out: How important is my firm’s business to your agency? If you are a small fish in a big pond, you likely will pay maximum prices for minimum service.

11. Can they say no?  Forgive me for saying this, but the client is not always right. It’s not in your interest to hire yes men. You want a partner bold enough to challenge your thinking and tell you when are heading down the wrong path. Ask for examples of when the agency has said no. Many client-agency relationships fall apart because the agency followed a client’s wishes against its better judgment.

12. Receptivity of your own staff. Just because your firm’s leadership is enthused about the new agency doesn’t mean your staff will welcome it with open arms. Many relationships disintegrate because of resistance at the all-important ground level. Is your staff on board and ready to embrace a new marketing approach?

Second Tier Selection Criteria

13. Proximity. Long distance relationships that depend entirely on email and phone communication seldom hold up over time. If you have a narrow requirement, such as a PPC campaign manager, it could work, but for multifaceted engagements, there will be times when face-to-face meetings are necessary. How will a remote agency handle those situations?

14. Stability. “Here today, gone tomorrow” occurs all too often in the world of interactive marketing. How long has the agency has been in business? Is it profitable? Does it have a business plan? Funding? What kind of employee turnover does it have? Client turnover?  These are questions you must ask.

15. Horizontal scalability. Suppose you start an engagement with SEO and email marketing, but down the line want to add social media or try PPC? If your agency can’t handle those services, you will be forced to hire multiple agencies or start all over again, neither of which is a great option.

16. Vertical scalability. As your business grows and marketing gathers steam, can the agency handle your more complex needs? Going back to #10, this is a danger of being the biggest fish: if you’re so big to the agency that you are all they can handle, you could outgrow them. This issue needs to be examined carefully.

17. Access to top management. As I said in #6, having a relationship manager is beneficial. However, if that person becomes a roadblock between you and the agency’s leadership, you will have a difficult time sustaining the relationship or salvaging it if serious problems arise.

18. Referrals. Agencies should be able to provide referrals. If they can’t or won’t, it’s a red flag.

19. Credentials. Does the agency have any industry-accepted certifications, such as being an AdWords Partner? What formal training has agency personnel received? Who specifically has been credentialed and trained?

20. Ongoing education. How does the agency keep current with the rapidly changing landscape of interactive marketing? Do they go to seminars and conventions? Do they hobnob with industry thought leaders? If your agency uses out of date techniques, its work will produce poor results or even backfire.

21. Know who is on your team. An agency with a staff of 100 sounds great – unless only two people are assigned to your account.  You’ll want to understand who’s going to be on your team, what their roles are, and how much time they will devote to your account.

22. Office tour. Seeing is believing: a tour of the agency’s office will tell you a lot about its culture, efficiency, and stability. For large-scale engagements, this is a must-do activity.

23. How well do they market themselves? If the agency touts itself as an SEO dynamo, and their site ranks poorly – it’s a poor indicator.  Similarly, if you’re looking for branding help and the agency’s website is incomprehensible – red flag. I do give this criterion a low priority, however, because for whatever reason, I know of many really good agencies that don’t do a great job of marketing themselves.

24. Attractiveness of fee structure. Without taking sides on the issue of hourly versus project fee structures, I think it’s important that you are comfortable with whatever system the agency uses. If not, you’re liable to have concerns in the back of your mind all the time about being overcharged or underserviced. Either way, you won’t be happy.

25. Web development capability. If the agency has can build and support websites, it’s a good tiebreaker. All other things being equal, the more work that can be pushed out to one agency, the better.

Over to You

• What factors are most important to you in evaluating a marketing agency?
• What factors would you consider in addition or instead of these?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media at Straight North, a Chicago-based Internet marketing agency. Brad has also worked in-house for a large industrial firm and as a freelancer. Follow Brad on Twitter.

[ How to Select an Interactive Marketing Agency is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Anita Campbell.

When my company, Small Business Trends, LLC, first purchased BizSugar in the summer of 2009, the best way I could describe it was as a miniature version of Digg, except that BizSugar focused soley on sharing information geared toward small and mid-sized businesses. This is still true. But as BizSugar has grown over the last couple of years, it’s also become a small business networking site where business owners can discuss issues, get and give advice, and gain insight into the ins and outs of running a small business.

As the site has changed and evolved, so have I, both in my understanding of how the site functions best, and how to help it continue to grow. If you’re considering acquiring or building a user generated content site, here are a few things I’ve learned that may help you.

Learn to Use the CMS

BizSugar is built on Pligg, an open source content management system. The great thing about it is that it’s free. The not-so-great thing is that it’s not quite as user friendly as WordPress. It has fewer plugins and a lower level of functionality, but the benefit is that it’s geared toward managing a user generated content site, so it
makes sense for BizSugar. Pligg has improved a lot since we acquired BizSugar, but we had to learn many of its quirks. We tried working with a few developers who said they knew the software, but in reality, they didn’t. Because it’s not as popular or widely used as WordPress, it’s difficult to find developers who know Pligg well.

We were fortunate to find a developer well versed in PHP, and who was willing to take the time to learn Pligg with all its idiosyncrasies. We invested in him learning the software, and he’s now a full time employee. Whether you learn it yourself, or find someone who knows it or is willing to learn, and whether you use Pligg, WordPress, or some other CMS, it’s essential to be able to fully administer the site from the back end. Take the time to learn which features to use and which to ignore because they don’t fit your strategy, or your market.

Work on Building a Community

A community does not build itself. Many entrepreneurs and companies will launch a community site only to be disappointed six months later when nothing much is happening on it—when it’s a ghost town. You have to bring energy to it, and you have to “prime the pump” at first, until enough people know about the site that momentum builds on its own.

In order to accomplish this, we implemented initiatives like our Contributor of the Week, where we interview and recognize valued community members. We also run contests on BizSugar to bring attention to it. And we highlight top contributions in our weekly “Top 10″ newsletter. Reward your members for contributing and participating, and your community will not only grow, but thrive.

Actively Manage the Site

Many people think a web business runs itself. I know of very few that do. The idea of “passive income” is an alluring one, and there may be some ways to create that, but a small business networking site isn’t one of them. For instance, Pligg sites are magnets for spammers and those who try to manipulate the voting, so you have to actively manage the site, or it will be overrun with spam, effectively killing the community, and the site.

BizSugar sees more than 10,000 spam entries every day. The best way we’ve found to combat this is a combination of technological spam filtering and manual moderation. Automatic spam filters only go so far, so having a team in place to actively manage the site is essential. Without our moderation team, BizSugar would be destroyed by spam in the space of a week. Make sure you have a moderation plan in place before launch, or your site could be dead before it even really gets off the ground.

Remain Committed to Your Target Market

BizSugar’s target market has always been — and remains— small businesses and entrepreneurs. We’ve worked to stay true to that niche. Many people have suggested that we expand the site to include other topics such as entertainment, sports, and the like. But once you stray from the site’s original intent, it becomes far less valuable for your niche market.

Small business information isn’t as exciting as celebrity pics, and the business information would quickly get buried if we tried to expand into unrelated topics. We’d prefer that small business information shine and take center stage, and our members appreciate that because that is where their interest lies. We want BizSugar to be known as the place to find blog posts, tips, and advice from small businesses, for small businesses. It may take longer for your site to take off and grow in your chosen niche, but the end result will be worth it. And really, does the Internet need yet another celebrity pic site? Offer something of value, and your members will reward you for it.

Optimize Usability

Shortly after acquiring BizSugar, we redesigned the site, keeping it fairly simple. We made the navigation more prominent, and eliminated several extraneous features from Pligg. Just because a feature is included in the software doesn’t mean you have to use it. Also, by our moderators being ruthless in eliminating off-topic information or borderline, low-quality content, our users have only the best content available to them, and don’t have to slog through spam to find useful, actionable information.

We are continually working to improve BizSugar, to make it better and easier for members to use. Just a couple of the initiatives we’re currently working on are integrating Facebook and Twitter logins, and adding more community features. Some of the ideas for optimizing the site’s usability have come from our members. Because they’re invested in the site, they have an interest in seeing it succeed, and in helping us to improve it. We’re appreciative and grateful for the suggestions we receive from members. That level of interaction and interest in the site is a testament to the work we’ve put in to make BizSugar a useful, trusted site.

There’s so much more that goes into building a community site like BizSugar, but I’ve found these five lessons to be the most helpful in continuing to push the site toward success. BizSugar wouldn’t be what it is without the outstanding team I’m fortunate to work with, or without every member who contributes valuable and helpful information to the site every day. And that collaboration is really the most rewarding part of running BizSugar.

Anita Campbell is the Founder of the Small Business Trends website and CEO of BizSugar, an online community of small business owners.

[ 5 Things I’ve Learned from Running BizSugar is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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It’s my birthday and I have some great news!

In January of 2011, I said that I’d make our Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 subscriber only. And I did. Many loyal readers have checked in on the newsletter throughout 2011 to get both evergreen content, the content that typically embraces these monthly updates, in addition to something completely new, monthly digital trends – the stuff you use for presentations and proposals, for arguing that social media and online marketing does have a firm place in today’s landscape. The newsletter, which was sent within the first week of the month, would include new research findings from surveys conducted by research groups such as the Pew Research Center, new discoveries from a marketing firm’s eye tracking study, or data that was recently culled across a multitude of SEO agency case study reports.

This year, I am pleased to bring back our Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 thanks to an excellent sponsor, HubSpot. HubSpot has recently launched a most amazing Marketing Grader tool to help you measure the effectiveness of your website. Please be sure to check it out as it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever seen, and I would be saying that even if they weren’t a sponsor!

And now, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: the evergreen portion of my Internet Marketing best posts delivered straight to your doorstep on my birthday as you’ve come to expect year after year. Want the trends, news, and findings too? Sign up right now at a totally reduced cost for 2012 for a limited time.

SEO

• Quick and Dirty Competitive Research for Keywords: If you’re looking for keywords to target in your SEO campaign, this guide will tell you what to do with available online tools and websites.
• Internal Linking: The Benefits of Great Information Architecture for SEO: Sometimes you don’t have to beg other webmasters to link to you. Consider focusing your link building tactics internally — that is, on your site. Breadcrumbs, navigation, and related pages are a great way to start.
• Does Google PageRank Really Matter?: The answer is no, but it’s still a metric that is close to Larry Page’s heart. Think instead about social media traffic, good content, a cleanly coded website, slow progressive growth, and your site’s authority.
• SEO Checklist: 60 Essential Checks Before Launching a Website: Is your site ready to be launched? Ask these questions and then answer them.
• The Meta Description Tag: Are you using the meta description tag effectively on your websites? Here are some applications of meta tags and arguments as to why you should be using them.
• How to Do an SEO Audit: How well is your newest SEO client’s practices? Do an audit to find out. This audit will cover their keywords targeted, tools used, site architecture, backlinks, and other elements to make sure you have a full understanding of what the client needs to take action and do better.
• 10 Metrics to Check When Your Traffic Crashes: With Google consistently trying to provide the best search experience, your rankings may fall at any time. This is how you can evaluate where it happened.
• 12 Popular Keyword Organization Tips and Tools: This post contains a list of tools that help organize some unruly keyword lists and includes tools like Ad Group Filter, RKG Duck, Wordstream Keyword Grouper, Spyfu Keyword Groupie (obviously using a different “keyword group” name not to infringe on any copyrights or trademarks!), and a number of others.
• A Guide to Geocoding Images for Local SEO: Image optimization is a big part of a cohesive SEO strategy. Wouldn’t you want your image to be associated with local places? This is the article you need to make that happen.
• User Friendly SEO: These are the tactics that search engine optimizers should use to optimize for search engines and user experience.
• 8 Necessary SEO Steps During a Website Redesign: Every so often, we have to redesign our site. But how do we make sure the search traffic we had stays intact? Auditing the site and working out which keywords and links are the top performers is a given.
• The Heart of SEO: 8 Everlasting Truths: This is misleading; this is only part 1 so it has 4 truths. Part 2 hasn’t been posted as of the compilation of this report, but you should know that SEO is about a strong brand, that you must perform research, real value produces great results, and you must understand where to circulate the message to get the best results.
• Technical SEO: Tools and Approach: Which technical factors matter for SEO? This is a review of what tools (e.g. wget, curl, Xenu, etc.) can help you assess how well your website is performing technically.
• Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World: Duplicate content poses a problem for SEO because when two pages share the same content, one page may get indexed (the one you don’t necessarily want, perhaps) while the other gets hidden. This post is a somewhat technical approach toward dealing with duplicate content issues. It’s pretty exhaustive too. There’s even a 22 page PDF of the article in case you wanted to take it with you.
• New Edition of the Ranking Factors for 2011 is Now Live!: SEOmoz recently came out with a survey that asked many practitioners their experience with keyword rankings. This data is compiled here. This is the newest data since 2009.
• The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research: …and the tools you need to use to do a great job.
• Small Business SEO: 46 Experts on the Biggest Mistakes SMBs Make with SEO (and How to Avoid Them): What have small businesses done wrong in the ways of SEO? DIYSEO asked 46 experts who weighed in on many things, from forgetting a local focus, doing too much at one time, having bad quality links, not optimizing their online listings, and much more.
• How To Take Your Keyword Research to a Higher Level: This post explores what differentiates quality keyword research from the junk that you get from a tool. Yes, it will take time. Yes, you’ll be happy with the results.
• Infographic: SEO Salary Guide: If you’re looking for general salaries for SEO, this infographic might tell you what you can expect to be paid on average by city. If you’re looking for a good salary, you may wish to relocate.
• SEO Checklist for Local Small Business Websites: If you’re ever planning on starting a small business website, this is a decent but basic checklist of the considerations you need to make in order to make sure it’s well SEO’d. Have a look.
• Should I Change My URLs for SEO?: This beginner SEO question comes up often. And since it’s being touched upon in this post, I figured it’s worth including here too.
• Introducing:  The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors: All of this SEO in an easily digestible infographic.
• Bing Rankings Cheat Sheet: People still use Bing, so understanding what works for rankings on that site is important. Here’s a list of what Bing seems to prefer for those top rankings.
• SEO Best Practices for Restaurants and Eateries: I’m not sure how many of you readers actually have a restaurant or eatery (or know someone who does), but this was pretty solid advice.
• The Complete Google Panda Reference Guide: Google’s Panda update has left site owners and SEOs confused and befuddled, but this guide summarizes the history and explains how you can be successful despite this algorithmic update.
• The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded: SEO is not the same today as it was 6 years ago. Today, we think about XML sitemaps, local integration, keyword usage in images, PR tactics, and so much more. Your strategies must employ content creation, community management, local/maps optimization, among others. How many of these new tactics have you adopted?
• How User Generated Content is Changing SEO: This is an analysis of how search results changed in the last year alone and how it impacts your business. Get more reviews, people! That’s one of many ways to be more visible.
• How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search: Why is social media so important? For those die hard SEO practitioners who don’t see the value in social, this article shows the last few months’ impact on search engine rankings. The more you share, the more likely the content will rank.

Blogging

• Top 10 Attributes of a Successful Blogger: If you like writing, have good grammar skills, are creative, and have an entrepreneurial spirit, you might make a great blogger for yourself or your company!
• 21 Real Blog Metrics Your Company Needs to Track: Whether it’s pageviews, time on site, calls to action, or reader comments/votes, all of these metrics are helpful to fulfill certain goals, such as understanding how engaged your readers are, finding out where the readers are most interested, or whether your sales are being supported by appropriate content, so take a look at this post, reevaluate your blog, and see if you need to fix it up a bit.
• A Definitive Guide to Blog Content Scraping & How to STOP It!: Ever get your blog content stolen by another new blog who wants to get established? This is the definitive guide on how to handle that, from proactive stances to applying rel=”author” (plus full instructions on how to implement that) to finding out who is stealing your content altogether.
• Top Corporate Blogs: What are the best corporate blogs? SocialFresh ran a contest and picked their finalists. If nothing else, you should take a look at these corporate blogs and see where and how they’re doing it right!
• 10 Proven Tips for Getting More Engagement on Your Business Blog RIGHT NOW: There are lots of great tips on how to make a great blog, including not moderating comments, rewarding engagement, giving readers ways to connect with you, publishing posts around the time you get visitors, and more.
• 7-point Checklist For Bloggers Who Want to Create a Profitable Blog: As bloggers who want to monetize, a checklist can come in handy to see if you’re following the steps needed to drive your blog into moneymaking territory.
• Adding Revenue Streams into Your Website or Blog: How do you monetize your blog? It’s not only AdSense that you can use. Michael’s post should inspire you to make more money for your blog.
• 40 Dead Simple Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog: This post really has 31 tips for blogging, from design tips to writing post ideas to how to respond.
• 7 Habits of Professional Bloggers: Bloggers who do so professionally are willing to learn, creating a sustainable online property, creating content consistently, have self discipline, maintain integrity, have courtesy, and always aim to grow bigger.
• Ultimate Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization: There have been a lot of guides on blogging and SEO, but this is the latest and has good info.
• 5 Reasons Why Deleting Your Blog Posts Is Stupid: …or why Steve Rubel shouldn’t have done it.
• Neil Patel’s Guide to Blogging: This article touches upon the Neil Patel way of blogging — and he’s been doing it for quite awhile. He starts off with a list of how he crafts a blog content, how he chooses topics, social promotion, timing of the post, and more.
• 12 Flavors of Content to Attract Your Audience: Whether it’s video, webinars, long-form content, Q&A, whitepapers, or whatever else tickles your fancy, you can gain a big audience if you continue pushing compelling pieces of content.
• Using Authorship Markup to Increase Click-Through Rates in the SERPS: A new tag lets you identify authors in search engines and helps you get seen. This tag is rel=”me” or rel=”author,” and this article walks you through getting set up.
• How to Title & Tag Your Blog Posts: This post explains how to have blog titles that are keyword optimized for SEO and capture the reader’s attention.
• Creating a Corporate Blogging Policy? Here are Six Areas to Consider: Corporate blogging policies should surround the following areas: the general policy, policies for writers, and internal comment policies. Externally, it’s important to have a solid “about” page, the official blog’s comment policy, and bios/pictures for all bloggers.
• How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts with These 13 Questions: This article touches upon blogging from an SEO perspective, giving you questions and solutions on common SEO questions. The focus is high quality content.
• About to Publish a Post? STOP! Read This: This article follows the previous title tag post very well. It includes considerations for the types of things you need for good SEO (and again, attention) when publishing blog posts.
• 5 Lessons Fortune 500 Companies Can Teach You About Blogging: Some Fortune 500 blogs are really great. This is a post that looks at some of the high performers and gives examples on how you can do the same.

Marketing Automation

• A Guide to Marketing Automation: Inbound marketing tactics include marketing automation, a way to segment leads and scale personalized communications. This article introduces this element and explains how it helps a cohesive inbound marketing effort.
• 4 Ways to Get More out of Marketing Automation: A lot of my general audience doesn’t understand marketing automation, but did you know that it’s responsible for more than $300 million in revenue? Here’s how to maximize it.
• 4 Ways to Grow Your Business with Marketing Automation: Sometimes you don’t need to man everything in a marketing engagement. Automating your marketing efforts may be fruitful. Here’s what you can do to change your business course. Enjoy!
• How to Fail at Marketing Automation: …and four characteristics that work.
• 5 Disastrous Misconceptions About Marketing Automation: Marketing automation is not something you can do alone; you need to put it together with a strong inbound marketing plan. It’s about being active all the time, watching the progress of your campaigns as they go through their cycles. These facts are discussed in more depth in this article.

Link Building

• 10 Years of Link Building Advice: Link building advice can be hit or miss, but some link builders have given us pretty good advice even as far back as 2001. These golden nuggets are shared and discussed.
• Link Building 101: What’s link building? This is your introductory guide. (The next link goes even further.)
• How to Build Links: The Ultimate Guide: This is one of several really helpful link building guides, covering topics in social media, viral content, guest posting, news, link requests, face to face networking, and much more.
• A Guide to Long Tail Link Building: It’s always more advisable to target long tail keywords versus the broader ones (e.g. “travel,” or “jewelry”). This article explores how to get into this tactic and its benefits.
• Creative Tips for Link Building on a Shoestring Budget: One of the best ways to get links is via writing guest posts. How many of you actually do that?
• How to Train a Link Builder: It seems that there’s a lot of turnover in the link building space, so training new link builders will be a frequent occurrence.
• Notorious S.E.O: The 10 Crack Commandments of Link Building: Link building as seen from the Notorious B.I.G. angle. This is a really creative piece.
• 10 Ethical Ways to Buy Links: While some may argue that you need to nofollow links purchased via paid reviews (which is suggested here), link buying isn’t over and is a great way for many people to get the visibility they feel they deserve and the SEO value that may come from it.
• 25 Reasons Why Another Site Will Link to Yours: How are you getting links to your site? Are you being resourceful? Offering discounts? Publishing videos? Helping people make money? This and 21 other reasons are why those links are coming.
• Understanding Your Backlink Profile: Backlinks are important to find out the health of your site in search rankings. However, they could be manipulated. It’s important to analyze your backlinks regularly to see if there’s anything unhealthy going on.
• Kicking off a Linkbuilding Campaign with Questions: If you’re link-building for yourself or for a client, these are questions you want to have answered for a good understanding of what you’re doing and where.
• Link Building with the Experts – 2011 Edition: Every year, this interview series asking link builders about the trends in search engine optimization and how it impacts link builders.
• Into the Minds of Link Builders: Three link builders are asked tough and fun questions on tactics and strategy.
• Proven Ways to Use Content to Attract Links: This is part 3 in a series of posts that explain link building. To get good links, you don’t have to build brand new content. Repurpose! Add a new twist! Use forums. There are many ways to go with this.
• Link Building for E-commerce Sites: Anchor text is important when it comes to link building – you want traffic but also conversions. Here’s a good framework for making that happen … and it isn’t necessarily only for e-commerce sites.
• 10 Reasons Why Your Link Requests are Failing: If your requests are spammy, you don’t have clear messaging, the links aren’t converting to traffic, and you’re just building a link and stopping there and not focusing on a relationship, your requests will fail at generating the right response. It’s hard work. Are you prepared?
• Link Building in 2011: This is an interview with 2 known link builders on the impact of SEO and links.
• 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away (and Improve Your Brand Too): Want to build links? Here are 99 ways, from giveaways to community building to media connections to offering discounts and so much more.

Local Online Marketing

• Local Search Ranking Factors: David Mihm comes out with local search ranking factors every year, and his research is indispensable for those focused on local SEO.
• 9 Ways to Start a New Local Business Using Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, and Google: These easy (and mostly affordable steps) can put your local business on the map. The big investment in this case is time.
• 10 Unorthodox Ideas for Local Citations & Links: If you have a local business and want high rankings, these are some creative ways to move forward to get some nice links: hosting parties at the event, selling products for sale online and offering feeds for the products, integrating badges or writing a guide of local places in Foursquare, and more.
• Local SEO 101 Guide: Want to learn the basics of local SEO? Hire a company or check out this guide for how to DIY.
• Review Management: 7 Tips on Avoiding Bad Reviews: Don’t want a bad review? Here are some tactics to keep them off the Yelps of the world and affect you negatively. Communication is key!
• Local SEO Tracking: How to Track Offline Conversions: Whether it’s by custom URLs or custom phone numbers, offline conversions can be tracked thanks to a bit of analytics know-how.
• 13 Must-Have Tips for Local Search Marketing: If you represent a small business in a physical location and want big visibility, this guide will help.
• How to Make Awesome Landing Pages for Local PPC: Sometimes customization makes a ton of sense, and in local PPC, the more personalized the message seems, the better.
• 5 Tips for Content Marketers on Google Places Optimization: If you want your Google Places page to shine, fill out the information, encourage participation, use keywords, and focus on what you’re best at.

Branding

• 125 Tips for Building an Irresistible Brand: Ask yourself some questions, jot down your answers, and think clearly about what makes your brand tick to build an amazingly powerful brand.
• 10 Ways to Beat Online Obscurity: Are you a rockstar? Maybe not. But you can be if you’re willing to follow the tips in this article.
• How to Deal with Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand: How do you deal with “badvocates?” Here are steps you should take to close the gap and solve problems that can taint your brand.
• The 4 Layers of Online Brand Marketing: With your brand as the core, you then have a website, then content development and off page SEO, and finally social and reputation management. Are you integrating all facets of the pyramid to establish your brand?

Content Marketing/Development/Copywriting

• 3 Ways to Get Great Content from Your Boring Business: Shannon Paul suggests three ways to make your boring business exciting to prospects: through problem solving, through creativity, and by being the media.
• SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics (Content Development): This is definitely one of the best articles in this year’s report. This Distilled guide to creating viral linkbait and infographics should not be ignored. It talks about how to brainstorm contnet to gathering data to presenting it with visual appeal to sharing the final copy.
• Linkbait and Content Marketing: And now, a great walk-through of the mindset you need to be in to provide some amazingly great viral content that people will share and which will drive links to boost visibility for your business.
• What to Look for in Freelance Writers: When you’re hiring a writer to produce content, you want to create a good business relationship with clearly communicated deliverables (which is the case in more than just writing engagements). Don’t commit to long term engagements unless you’re really sure about the writer, though.
• Making the Leap: Egocentric to Empathy in Content Marketing: Sometimes you need to look at your company in the eyes of someone else: your customers. Once you do this, you can engage differently and get a different view of how to market. This post explains the process of how to think like your customer.
• 5 Reasons Copywriters Need to Get Data … or Get Out of the Business: If you can put numbers and accountability on your copywriting skills, you are a winner. The future sees copywriters as having more responsibilities in analysis, since writing content nowadays just isn’t enough.
• The 7 Deadly Sins of Content Promotion: Don’t be greedy. Don’t be gluttonous. Don’t show envy. Each of these sins is dissected as a strategy, a problem, and a solution.
• 6 Content Tips: How to Write When You Have Nothing to Write About: I got a comment on my blog that other day from someone who felt she wasn’t inspired to write anything for her blog. But there are so many things you can write about! While this won’t have you scribbling notes (okay, typing posts) for months, you might be inspired to improve upon your content development strategy for good SEO. The more original content you have, the better your SEO. Always remember that.
• A Kick Ass Guide to Growing Your Website Traffic Online: From platform to linking strategy, this guide covers everything needed to build a site that is networked enough for some good traffic.
• 10 Steps to Writing Better Content : I love this tip – “write drunk, edit sober.” Aren’t you more creative when you’re a little tipsy?
• 6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work: Is your infographic going to resonate with your audience? By doing research among a social audience, communicating with your designer, getting outsiders’ opinions, including links, and publishing the infographic with all of these considerations intact, your infographic can travel far.
• A Quick and Dirty Guide to Content Marketing: Whether you’re creating written or video content, cornerstone or spicy content, content that tells stories or solves problems, there’s an approach that will suit you and your readers. This article touches upon different content marketing angles and email autorepsonders to sell yourself and your services.
• Copywriting Essentials from A to Z: From Action to Zing, here is what you need to keep in mind for a great copywritten piece of content that will grab the attention of the people who you’re looking to connect with.
• Great Content for SEO: Simpler than You Ever Imagined: Build a survey, send it to your customers, record their responses, and leverage it to build what people want (via search, of course). Simple, right?
• 21 Ways to Create Compelling Content when You Don’t Have a Clue: You can steal ideas, borrow name recognition, get inspired, and do so much more to create some really good content that works.
• Infographics or Articles: Which Type of Content is Best for Your Idea?: This article takes a deep look at infographics versus linkbait articles and explores why you should do one (or the other).
• A 5 Minute Guide to More Persuasive Copywriting: Or in five words: Write for a real person.

PPC Marketing & Paid Search

• How to Write the Best PPC Adverts: PPC ads is a bit of psychology, so you might want to consider some tips to make them clickworthy. Then again, you also need a great product!
• Paid and Organic Search: Why the Marriage of Both is Important: After looking at analytics from a year’s worth of client data, Razorfish determined that you should buy keywords even if you’re in position #1.
• 25 Tips for Giving Your PPC Campaigns a Boost: Whether you’re using Facebook PPC or Google AdSense, you may want to follow some tips to maximize ROI (with minimal effort).
• What Visible Quality Score isn’t Telling You: There will be things you’ll need to monitor yourself when it comes to the quality score. Geography, for example, comes into play here. There are things you can try to see better impact of your ads.
• 14 Things to Ask Before Starting a PPC Project : These are questions for PPC practitioners to ask before starting work on the campaign.
• How to Write the Best PPC adverts: Five years has taught this now seasoned PPC pro how to get qualified leads through the sponsored search results.
• The Secret of the Quality Score:  I didn’t catch this post until February even though it was published in January, but it’s good stuff. Your quality score is determined by the probability someone will actually click through to your ad. There’s some interesting data and findings here.
• 5 Common PPC Optimization Mistakes: This is a great read for newbies especially.
• Why Display Is Changing The Value Of Search: As someone who does a lot in paid advertising, I take solace in knowing that display advertising is apparently going to be the future of search — coupled with retargeting. Display advertising looks to increase over time, especially from eMarketer studies and available data.
• When Should You Delete a Low Traffic Keyword?: If you have a really difficult and overwhelming PPC campaign, you may want to tidy up low performing keywords. Here’s an analysis of the impacts of doing so.
• How to Use Google AdWords to Reach the People Who Didn’t Click on Your Ad: This is called remarketing and is a brilliant use of banner ad campaigns — stalking! It’s also the reason for this reddit submission. See, it’s really good.
• Are You Creeping Out Your Customers With Remarketing?: Remarketing campaigns are pretty powerful, but if you’re chasing your followers everywhere they go, they may get spooked. Think about frequency caps to limit your ads, use different offers/themes, refine your ads with topic targeting, and use negative audience lists. Remarketing is great if done right!
• Start Collecting Your Cookies! Setting up Remarketing Tags 101: Remarketing is the hottest PPC method yet, and here’s how you can get started to launch and monitor your new campaign.
• How to Acquire Demographic Insights from Your Remarketing Campaign: Using data given by your campaigns and Quantcast, you can paint a picture of the people your remarketing campaigns are targeting so that you can make your marketing message resonate better.
• 43 Paid Search Signals You Need to Understand: These are the signals that reflect the user who is searching and the behavior of the user and thus must be understood for maximum gain.
• 9 Tips for Using Product Listing Ads: Here is advice on taking advantage of Google’s new ad format which should be a great opportunity for advertisers and for end users.
• 8 Best Ways to Find Negative Keywords: Whether you’re using someone else’s keyword list as inspiration (why not?) or monitoring what’s being said (or not) in the media, you can definitely find negative keywords for your campaign to avoid paying for that which would never convert.
• 3 Awesome Remarketing Ad Strategies: Have you ever seen an ad unit … EVERYWHERE? That’s remarketing. And if it converts, that means it’s been successful. Here’s how you can make that campaign work.
• Should You Buy PPC Ads for Your Brand Keywords?: There are many reasons why you should buy PPC ads for your brand keywords (so yes, the answer is yes!) Here they are.
• What PPC Practitioners Should Know About Robots.txt files: To prevent low quality scores and unapproved ads, PPC practitioners need to know about robots.txt files. Here’s how you can identify and solve that issue.

Public Relations

• How to Create a Good Blogger Pitch : This is the best blogger outreach post I have ever read.
• The Front Page Isn’t What it Used to Be: This is a simple reminder why you can’t rely on your website alone. You need to be firmly grounded on all major platforms serving as the “new front page” and aim for placement throughout these new mediums.
• 9 Essential Tips for Warm Blogger Outreach Pitches: Every so often, I share a blogger outreach article because people always do it wrong. My key takeaway from this article is to do your research. No, seriously. People pitch me all the time despite the fact that I clearly say I don’t want pitches. Obviously, the research part is overlooked. I wonder how much traction those PR campaigns really get if that’s the case?!
• Blogger Outreach Guide: How to Get Started: If you’re tasked with doing outreach on behalf your client or perhaps for yourself, it’s important to find the right people. This guide gives you tips on creating that pitch and finding people who can seek out the right people — your community manager.
• Recommendations for Blog Commenting as a Marketing Strategy: Blog commenting can be a great way to market yourself and your business if you do it right. This writeup explains the benefits and illustrates best practices for making it worth your time.
• 8 Tips for Blogger Outreach: Networking is important, but how do you reach the influencers you’re looking for? I blogged about this last year, and while those points are incredibly valid, so are these: flattering people on Twitter, finding them on a social network (especially if you can’t locate the email address), searching for opportunities via Twitter, and other lesser-known tactics are discussed.
• Outreach Tips and Tricks to Increase Efficiency and Effectiveness: If you’ve done any personal outreach, doing something above and beyond can certainly help make that campaign a bit more effective for you. The suggestions here are quite smart yet simple to implement.

Social Media

• Why Most Social Media Departments Fail: This is my own post and most popular post on Techipedia this year, highlighting some case studies encountered by myself and colleagues on why social media sometimes just doesn’t work for companies. Hint: it’s in the approach and communication, not in the fact that viability isn’t possible in some industries.
• Process: A Pragmatic Approach to Social Business: A social media planning process requires 8 full steps to execute and measure effectively: education, research, strategy, planning, implement, manage, measure, renewal.
• Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps: This is a HUGE list of great tips to make your site social friendly. Tips like minimizing obstacles to comment, displaying voting icons after the article, having a well-written title, and more are discussed in this lengthy article.
• Why Social Media Departments Fail: This post speaks from the heart (and is my own) on why social media marketing initiatives are completely useless without goals and a cohesive marketing plan.
• How To Find The Perfect Network For Your Content Promotion Campaign: Today, we look at all of the social media sites out there to see what’s worth promoting where.
• 14 Best Practices for Long Term Social Media Success: These are the traits that successful online businesses exhibit day in and day out: they have governance and rewards, guidelines, a training program, an editorial program, a mission and purpose, and they serve their customers and prospects.
• 10 Considerations When Creating a Social Media Policy: If you ever need to create a social media policy, look at this list of advice for things you may need to consider:  an understanding of chain of command, disclosure information, monitoring of usage, and much more.
• 21 Types of Social Content to Boost Your SEO: Viral content helps build links. Whether you write something that’s passionate, that’s controversial, that’s epic, that lists a bunch of great resources, and that’s visual, you can definitely reap benefits if you truly understand what a social audience is looking for.
• Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?: Whether you create a social media council that integrates many team members or you take it on yourself, humanizing the brand is a primary goal for social media, since it’s all about human interaction. How do you approach it?
• The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist: Social media influences SEO, so this post tells social media marketers how to best craft your social messages to yield the best SEO value for search effectiveness.
• Tracking the KPIs of Social Media: With social media analytics, you should track traffic, fans/followers/ social interaction, and how well the content is performing. Here are tools on how you can do these measurements.
• Social Media for Small Business: 6 Effective Strategies: Businesses starting in social media may need this most, but I think it is valuable to any business. First, the customer is always right. (Well, almost.) Second, sometimes you have to pay. Third, followers are just a number. Fourth, [constant] self promotion won’t help you. Fifth, benefit from expertise. Finally, there are people you can hire to help.
• An Insider’s Guide to Social Media Etiquette: I’ve written about social media etiquette myself, but this one makes it more business-centric, like not using logos (if you’re representing yourself as a person, not a company, that is) and refraining from retweeting praise about you. This is good stuff.
• Don’t Abuse Social Network Pings: Social media gives you ways to connect with people you know easily, but there are certain etiquette rules to take into consideration.
• Social Media for SEO vs. Customer Engagement: You should be doing social media for customer engagement (relationships) but also for SEO value. Are you coordinating both efforts? Are you doing both?
• How to Grow Social Media Leads: New Research: The more you blog, the better it is for your leads. Also, the more Twitter followers you have, the better you will fare as well in leads. They call that social proof. You also get better results with a larger Facebook fan base. Do these findings surprise you?
• Social Media Consultants, Experts, and Gurus, Oh My!: Earlier this year, I worked on a campaign with a client who wanted nothing more than LOTS of new followers. He didn’t know why he wanted it, but he wanted it. Naturally, it felt odd to just build numbers for him, and I gave him the explanations as to why. This is the blog post that I could’ve used before the campaign to align expectations. Numbers aren’t everything.
• 6 Areas of Your Business that Should be Listening: Amber Naslund and Jay Baer show the benefits of listening across sales, marketing, customer service, R&D, HR, and management.
• The Rules of Social Media Engagement: It’s important to put rules into place when you involve yourself in the social media space. It makes you more productive as a company. This post includes 25 guidelines that you should consider when crafting those company policies.
• 9 Companies Doing Social Media Right and Why: Here are some good case studies of businesses who do social media the right way. What’s your business doing?
• Secrets of Social Media Revealed 50 Years Ago: Research by Ernest Dichter in 1966 has found that there are 4 motivations that people use to communicate about brands: product involvement (a great experience), self involvement (sharing information about oneself), other involvement (desire to help others), and message involvement (a great message). Do you think all of this is still the same today? This and other discoveries still hold true.
• Optimizing Social Media Campaigns for Search: Together, search and social are extremely powerful. Come up with ideas, get your external content on your main site, get tracking in place, optimize, and consider load times to create a powerful social and search machine.
• Your Secret Weapon for Standout Social Media Success: In a real time world, your response times need to change. That means when someone wants your attention on social media, you better reply within minutes. This post includes the various desired response times for a variety of channels.
• The Number One Least Asked Question in Social Media…Why?: Why are you as a business engaging in social media? Why should your customers follow you? Because you rock? Do your customers think so?
• 50 Kloutless Ways to Get Value from Twitter: …or any social network, really. Summary: network (the verb).

Social Networks

• A How-to Guide for Submitting Content to Fark: Chances are if you’re reading this, you may never see the need to submit something to Fark, a social news site for funny/odd news. With content on Fark being totally manually selected, it’s hard to get the attention of the editors. Here’s the type of content that works.
• Twitter for Brands: 6 Winning Strategies: Brands on Twitter may elect to take different types of approaches to be successful. Here are 6 that are taken by Ford, Zappos, JetBlue, and other well known Twitter accounts.
• 10 Ways to Get More ReTweets: This article analyzes some research from Twitter scientist Dan Zarrella to find out what and when you should tweet. Plus, the Twitter button helps too.
• Why and How to Use Facebook Comments for Your Blog: High quality comments? Yes, Facebook Comments allow for this. Here’s why you should enable them on your blog.
• How to Build the Perfect Facebook Page: Tim Ware is amazing at Facebook page design, and in this post, it shows.
• How to Succeed at Facebook Advertising: This blog post is a case study of a store that used Facebook ads. Some findings include leveraging endorsements of existing fans and use highly engaging content.
• How Small and Local Businesses Can Use Facebook: This is a really nice interview covering the benefits of Facebook. I especially like Greg’s detail.
• How to Improve Engagement on Your Brand’s Facebook Page: This report has been under scrutiny for being too basic, but Buddy Media says that the best Facebook posts are timely, concise, and engaging.
• The Ultimate Guide to the Facebook Edgerank Algorithm: News feed optimization is important if you want to pull in decent traffic from Facebook. Here are those algorithmic elements dissected so you can see more engagement and better return on your Facebook marketing methods.
• 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank and Exposure: Want more Facebook visibility? Encouraging interaction and sharing great content will help you get on your way.
• How to Improve EdgeRank on Facebook: This is an infographic that discusses the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm and shows how you can improve it.
• Facebook Edgerank: How I Increased My Facebook Edgerank Score to 141: This is a great case study of how a mommy blogger saw an increase in overall Facebook engagement.
• 5 Ways to Build a Sticky Facebook Fan Page: With case studies to explain how to do each, this post is a good primer to creating friendly Facebook pages.
• An Optimizer’s Guide to Facebook Ad Reports: Understanding Facebook advertising analytics can give you a leg up  on the competition. Here’s a huge chart for your perusal.
• How to Time Your Facebook Updates to Reach the Most Fans: When do people stick with and/or unsubscribe from your updates? When do updates disappear from news feeds? How do I measure the success of Facebook updates? These questions are explored in the article from PageLever’s CEO.
• Cost Per Like Campaigns On Facebook: The CTR, Conversion Rate, Reach Tradeoff: Do you want to see the best return on your Facebook campaign — the highest cost per likes? This article gives good direction on how to focus on Facebook PPC.
• Buying Facebook Fans is a Horrible Idea: While this isn’t really strategy at all and most of my reports contain that, I really like this fresh take on why buying FB fans won’t bode well for your brand. This relates how it will kill the algorithm that gives you status messages any visibility: EdgeRank.
• How to Build a Thriving LinkedIn Group: Making good choices and promoting well means you’ll see good LinkedIn group results.
• The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering LinkedIn: Well, we had a Facebook article, so we need one for LinkedIn. This is a good one that includes 20 hidden tricks, such as a vanity URL, optimization of your profile, tracking company buzz, using LinkedIn groups, checking in on updates, and much more.
• HOW TO: Optimize Your Company’s LinkedIn Profile: Did you know that you can optimize your LinkedIn company profile for multiple audience segments? That’s pretty powerful. Read about this and other tips on this Mashable post.
• 7 Quick Ways to Turn Your LinkedIn Profile into a Social Media Marketing Workhorse: Your LinkedIn profile can get you leads, connections, and so much more — if you actually do more than set it and forget it. This article shows you how to take your profile to the next level.
• 5 Tips for Using the New LinkedIn Company Pages: A lot of companies jump onto LinkedIn and create pages, but do they take advantage of everything, including monitoring? I doubt it. After reading this article, you might be taking a different approach.
• 16 Smarter Ways to Use LinkedIn to Build Your Business: From creating meaningful connections to mining your datastream, LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for business connections. Here’s what you can do to make the most of it.
• How and Why to Use Pinterest for Business: The new social network Pinterest is all the rage for those who love visuals. Here’s why it works for business and here’s how you can use it.

Usability

• A Client’s Guide to Usability: A good usable site is the one reason people will actually come back to you. This is the type of guide you send a client before you design their site so that they understand that a maze of difficult pages won’t get them any loyal visitors.
• The Website, the Webcam, and the Test Plan: Simple and Exciting Website Usability Testing: This has turned website testing into more of an exercise, with useful information on how you can apply this (based on a real case study) for your own website usability tests.
• How to Improve the Usability (and Conversion Rate) of Your Forms: Filling out forms doesn’t have to be arduous for your users. Consider some of these items to make the process simpler.
• Technical Site Audit Checklist: This is a GREAT checklist of the various considerations you need to address when launching a new website.
• Improve the User Experience by Tracking Errors: Are you doing any 404 page or other error monitoring? It’s something you should do so as not to upset your users. Here’s how to find and fix them.
• 15 Title Tag Optimization Guidelines for Usability and SEO: Your title tag is being read by users, search engines, and web browsers alike. How do you make them stand out and appeal to all?

Conversion Rate Optimization/Landing Pages

• A Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – Part 2: Part 1 of this guide was written on the site in November 2010, so feel free to check out the CRO link in the post. To succeed, the author suggests that you include calls to action, have credibility, write great copy, and much more. Oh, and yes, there will be a part 3 to this guide too.
• How to Implement a Conversion Rate Optimization Process: Like social media, CRO is one of those processes that takes time and energy to fine tune your performance for best results. This detailed post shows the tools needed to start, how to measure your results, what happens during the analysis phase, how you implement changes based on findings, and how to test these results. Not so easy.
• Testing, Testing, 1-2-3: A/B Tests Boost Creativity, Productivity, and Bottom Line: Small changes can help improve your sales, so it’s important to consider A/B testing as much as possible.
• A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing: An Introduction: With the preceding article, it only helps to learn a little more about why A/B testing is so important. Here’s your intro guide.
• 10 Site Tweaks to Make Your Customers Actually Click “Buy”: If you’re building an e-commerce site and want people to buy your product, big and attractive buttons with calls to action are the best way to ensure you get a buyer.
• Your Web Design is Killing Your Conversion Rate: Is your website or landing page design killing your conversion rate? You offer many choices or perhaps use the wrong background color. These things can hinder the effectiveness of your site and put a dent in your revenue.
• How Images Can Boost Your Conversion Rate: If you are looking to buy a product online, you probably prefer pictures of the item, especially if you’ve never owned something like it before. Right? This article includes lots of studies that show the benefits of images on product pages.

Affiliate Marketing

• 12 Ways to Pick the Best Affiliate Program: Looking to engage in affiliate marketing? There are dozens of programs out there. How should you choose the best? Consider product, competition, EPC, tools, and other elements to make the best educated decision.
• When to Launch an Affiliate Program: If you have an online marketing program that’s working well, it may be time to get an affiliate program on board as well. But do you have the staff to handle it? Can you handle the inbound support? These are questions to ask before you launch.

Brand Evangelism

• Inspiring Brand Ambassadors: If you’re looking to help get your customers to do word of mouth marketing for you, a brand ambassador program is something to look into. This guide lists the benefits and explains why and how you should proceed.
• Fans Aren’t Just for Rockstars: For big brands, it’s time to connect more closely with your customers. This is a process you can follow that makes that all possible.

Web Development

• Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed: This is a theoretical way to view UX, complete with why you cannot design it (it’s based on how the user interacts with the product). But you can design for UX.
• 7 Simple Fixes for Your Small Business Website: Does your site have good navigation? A contact page? A good About page? Title tags that are informative? Well, if not, it’s time to review these guidelines and create a website that truly will resonate with your prospects and customers.
• HTML5 and SEO: New Strategies for Optimizing Code: If you code for SEO, you’ll find that HTML5 takes things to a different level. This article discusses some tags you can do without (as they’re deprecated) and tags you should start considering instead.
• What Potential Impact Can HTML5 Have on SEO?: Each major element of code is dissected with some indications as to how it will fare with the search engines.
• Top 15 Free Things Every E-Commerce Website Should Do After Launching: Once you launch a new site, you need to think about product feeds, a sitemap file, getting analytics set up, and much more.
• How to Make Your Website Look More Legitimate: Beyond having a presence online that you are happy to share with legitimate pages and information, to be truly legitimate, you need to get a media kit, press mentions, social profiles, a reusable logo, and a website that looks very professional.
• Does Good Web Design Really Matter?: Do you hate some websites? Why? If your issues stem with bad design, you’re with 94% others who agree that design can make or break a website. Therefore, it’s paramount to create a design that really resonates with your potential viewers

Community Management

• 8 Ways to Deal with Negative Comments in Online Communities: There are many things you can do with negative comments: ignoring it, lawyering up, changing it to a positive discussion, removing the comment (and possibly banning the commenter), educating the customer, confess and beg forgiveness, fight, or own it. What are you?
• 8 Ingredients that Make a Community Manager: Who are the best community managers? They need to be passionate, available, and good communicators.
• What Does a Community Manager Do?: There’s no one-size-fits-all job description for a community manager. It’s actually a LOT of work. Here’s what it might look like, though.
• The 2011 State of Community Management: Year after year, this report has served as one of  the best resources for community managers. It covers strategy, leadership, culture, content, and so much more. It’s a 95 page report primarily based on survey findings of 109 individuals which you can download as PDF for your personal pursuits.
• How to Build a Great Contest: This is a case study of how a contest was run successfully via Twitter and Facebook. What contest ideas are you trying for your business?

Reputation Management

• Our Online Reputation Management Playbook: Ever search Google and see “companyname scam”? The writer has. Here’s how he successfully conquered this reputation management problem.
• How to Combat Fake Reviews While Managing Online Reputation: Who cares if you have some negative reviews? Try to get as many positive (legitimate!) reviews as you can and you’ll find that conversions will soar.
• Using Google Analytics to Monitor Your Brand: With a few tweaks, you can learn a lot about how your brand is faring across search results.
• How to Avoid Negative Reviews and Bad Publicity for Your Online Store: The more someone is unhappy about an experience, the more likely his friends have to hear about it. (Surprisingly, though, in this case, the store was unnamed even though the writer says that “word travels fast.”) Still, the lessons to take away from any negative experience is that marketing and customer service go hand in hand, and you could truly make a difference and prevent negative reputation marks against your business if you actually are proactive about what people are saying about you.

Web Analytics

• Using Regular Expressions to Group Keywords in Google Analytics: Did you know about the pipe, carat, dollar sign, question mark, or plus sign tools of the trade for Google Analytics? Well, take a look at this guide and you’ll learn a thing or two.
• A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics 5:  If you know about Google Analytics, not much has changed, but GA has been upgraded to version 5 and sports some new features. This article takes a look.
• Web Analytics: Frequently Asked Questions and Direct Answers: This article addresses FAQs such as how to sell analytics to a skeptical client in 30 seconds, why some keywords have 0 visits in Google Analytics, how to attribute offline sales to the online marketing, where to find competitive intelligence, and much more.
• How to Use Events as Goals in Google Analytics: Here are some tips on how to set up Google Analytics to assess engagement on your site.
• 11 Analytics Metrics that are Actionable: Focusing on the right metrics makes your life easier and your time more productive. Here are 11 metrics you should actually care about.
• Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value: Social media can’t be measured, you say? When you finish reading this article, you may disagree with that sentiment. Comments are the conversation rate, shares/retweets are the amplification rate, favorites/Likes/+1s are the applause rate, and your long term revenue and cost savings is your economic value.
• Using Google Analytics to Uncover Hidden Problem Areas: Have you seen your site’s analytics yet? If your website exists specifically for some ROI, it’s time you analyzed your top exit pages, high bounce rates, your site search, and site elements to determine if there’s anything needing improvement.
• Data Analysis 101: Seven Simple Mistakes that Limit Your Salary: This article looks at pretty charts (that aren’t particularly useful) and shows how you could totally create or construe the data incorrectly.

Domaining

• Practical Domaining: People buy domains for many reasons — for search traffic, misspelled words, exact match, and more. If you’re into the art of domaining, you already know this. If you’re not but want to learn, here is your introductory guide.

Video Marketing

• Video Posts: Are You Doing it Wrong?: If you ever blog about video, and many people don’t realize this, it’s not useful just to include the video without any detail. I can’t stress how many sites just let you submit the video without ANY detail whatsoever. Here are the steps you should follow to get people passionate about what you’re posting. The video alone still doesn’t cut it.
• 8 Ways to Maximize Your YouTube Marketing Results: With YouTube being a powerful search engine, it’s the go-to place for video marketing. Compelling videos coupled with a branded page can yield great results.

Email Marketing

• Top 10 Ways to Use Email Marketing Effectively (Email Marketing): Whether you’re focused on design, goals, or social media promotion, email marketing should be considerate of some of these elements so that you do create an effective campaign that works.
• 4 Steps to Understanding the ROI of Your Newsletter: By understanding email marketing metrics, defining a baseline using historical data, assessing ROI, and testing (and retesting, of course), you can learn much about how to improve your newsletter for greater engagement.
• 4 Mobile Email-Marketing Tips: People are reading their email on mobile, so it is important for you to think about mobile email marketing in the same way that you do regular email marketing.
• 5 Email Marketing Tips for Increased Open Rates: If you’re looking to get people to open those emails you’ve sent, you should make a good first impression, time your emails appropriately, format the email in such a way to avoid spam filter traps, get rid of those folks who just don’t read the emails, and continually optimize the sign-up process.
• Email is (Still) Important and Here’s Why: Email is my best method of communication, but so many people think that Facebook and Twitter have replaced that. (Oh, and phone calls.) Nope. Not for everyone. Email has suffered the fate of value theory — but for me, it’s incredibly valuable. Do you think email is dead?
• 7 Email Case Studies: Publishers Who Forget About the Fold: Did you forget about the fold? Your core messaging should be easily visible. Don’t require people to scroll down.This report dissects many emails and shows where they failed.

General Online Marketing (and everything else)

• 109 Ways to Make Your Business Irresistible to the Media: Want to be quoted in the media? You can be — just follow some of these steps, which include being social, thinking visually, launch a brand new product, write an e-book, give the interviewer control of the discussion, and much more.
• The Ultimate Small Business Website Guide: This guide is truly ultimate. It talks about the benefits of creating a website, how to plan one, how to set one up, how to integrate social media and email marketing, and how to review your analytics.
• Drip, Drip, Drip – Building Prospect Trust One Drop at a Time: A lot of websites fall into this trap of assuming someone checking out your site wants to buy now or later, but this thought process is fundamentally incorrect. It’s important to build relationships via your website for these people to convert when they’re ready.
• A Holistic Approach to Marketing: Integrating Social, Search, and People: A great online marketing initiative integrates search, social, and paid together.
• The Noob Guide to Online Marketing: This exhaustive article also contains a tremendous infographic that you might as well hang up as a poster on your office wall; it covers the gamut from social media to analytics to PPC, email marketing, lead gen, and whatever else. The “Wheel of Marketing,” as he calls it, has so many spokes.
• Jedi Mind Tricks: 17 Lesser Known Ways to Persuade People: Using support from numerous studies, these tips help you get what you want, which is great in business. For example, if something happens often enough, you’ll be persuaded. How many of you have friends or family that were Facebook holdouts but eventually joined due to the prominence around you? Also, did you know that men prefer email than face to face discussions? (This woman prefers email too.)
• 7 Repeat Business Strategies for Small Businesses:  Why does repeat business make sense? Because they’re targeted, easy to reach, cheap, and there’s no middle man. So here’s what you can do as a small business to get more repeat purchases.
• Marketing to Early Adopters: This is a great article from Mukund Mohan on how he identified adopters and reached out to them for his business.
• 21 Big Marketing Ideas for Small Marketing Budgets: I really like the tips in this article because they don’t require the deepest of pockets to implement. You’ll probably just need a community manager who can be active on blogs, message boards, social networks, and blogging to succeed at most of these tips.
• My Dad Taught Me Cashflow with a Soda Machine: …or how to teach your child to become a kick ass entrepreneur. The lessons you can pick up from selling soda are really applicable in business, and I love the approach.
• Tasty Ideas to Maximize Online Marketing for Events: This post explains how to promote an event with a model focused on Audience > Objectives > Tools > Tactics > Measurement. Plus, there are 27 great online marketing and public relations tactics that can help!
• The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur: This isn’t a bad article, but he should have used numbers and not roman numerals or whatever he did there. It also has a good number of questions and answers from readers.
• 100 Ways to Connect: Relationship building at its finest.
• 14 Best Practices for Brands to Grow their Audiences in Social Media: Successful brands have gotten to that point because they designed an effective channel strategy, constructed a listening framework, initiated training programs, served customers and prospects, among other things that kept them at the front of their customers’ minds and hearts.
• Know. Like. Trust.: This is a reminder of the failures of many businesses with their own marketing; they forget to get consumers to know them, to like them, and to trust them.
• Email Overload: The Secret to Getting Inbox Zero Every Time: Answering email is good customer service. Good customer service is good marketing. Why this falls on deaf ears for perhaps 85% of people I email to is beyond me. These are my personal tips on how you can truly conquer your inbox. As we speak, it’s over 3 months after that post was written and I still have nothing in my inbox.

Thanks again to HubSpot’s Marketing Grader for making it possible for you to enjoy these great content pieces again on Techipedia. Again, it’s a fantastic tool: it analyzes all of your marketing — not just your website — reviewing over 30 different factors and then providing an overall Marketing Grade on a 1-100 scale, including:

• Competitive Benchmarking: Is my marketing more or less effective than my competition?
• Lead Generation: Are my marketing efforts generating enough leads and sales?
• Mobile Marketing: Is my web presence optimized for mobile devices?
• Social Media: How effectively are we using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in our marketing?
• Blogging: Is my blog driving results that justify the time investment, or are we wasting time doing the wrong things?
• Overall Analysis: What are the strong points and shortcomings in our marketing?

Marketing Grader also outlines why you should take particular steps to improve and what your top priorities should be. With customized action items to help the top of your funnel, the middle of your funnel, and your analytics, Marketing Grader makes it easy for you to figure out your next steps.

Don’t forget that you can get this all monthly (plus more!) by signing up to my monthly newsletter, reduced 80% for a limited time

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post from James Bentham.

SMS, really?

As most brands and organizations now have a mobile optimized version of their website, the focus is now on encouraging users to travel to your site and interact with the brand itself in order to push increased revenue.

Experienced marketers will tell you that customers are much more likely to respond to campaigns that engage them on a personal level. The marketing strategy must be relevant and timely while meeting the customer’s individual needs. In terms of rate of response, the simple SMS dominates the market. It can add real value to a marketing strategy and continues to grow with the decline in consumer spending. Marketers are being forced to find ever more cost effective ways of engaging with users.

A few statistics…

When you break down the figures involved in SMS marketing, the results can be quite staggering. Here a few examples:

• 77% of the population of the world own a mobile phone.
• Of all the SMS messages sent on a daily basis, 98% are opened, with 83% opened within 3 minutes.
• While only 6% of marketing emails are responded to, SMS campaigns have seen as much as 45% response rates.
• In other words, SMS has a higher response rate from direct communication than telemarketing, email, or post.

Why it Works

1. Speed: SMS messages are delivered almost instantly, with the user engaged in a matter of seconds wherever they are in the world.
2. Flexibility: The variety that SMS marketing offers is almost endless. Messages can deliver text alerts, subscriptions, broadcast advertising, competitions, campaigns for customer loyalty, customer profiling, cross-selling and reminders, the list goes on.
3. Response: As previously mentioned, SMS campaigns have a very high response rate. This can be put down to the ease and speed by which users can reply, with relatively little effort.
4. Personal: Messages can be easily customized to the demographic that they are targeted at, such as gender, age, location, activities, or preferences.
5. Cheap: Lastly, and potentially crucially, SMS messages are cheap. Costing as little as $0.05 (2.5p) per message, there are few other methods than provide such a strong ROI.

Implementation

There are far too many ways of utilizing SMS marketing to list, but to give you an example, here are a few examples of potential implementations.

• Promotions/Offers
• Customers love to receive offers, especially if they don’t have to work for them. SMS messages allow retailers to deliver promotions and discount vouchers straight to their mobile, based on previous purchases from the brand.
• SMS enables delivery of offers via geo-fencing, which means a customer may only need to walk by a store or relevant location to receive a discount voucher via text, as long as they are opted in to the scheme.
• Customer Profiling
• If you already have a database of customer details, a simple profiling campaign can boost a marketing strategy and increase the amount of customer data you hold at the same time. Incentivize the exchange of key customer information in exchange for a prize or a discount voucher. This could include iPad, clothing or meal voucher giveaways.
• Reverse Auctions
  • This involved giving something valuable away by allowing customers to make what they think will be the lowest unique bid for the product via text. Unsuccessful bidders receive a prompt to bid again, encouraging repeated interaction and numerous entries per customer.
• Receipts
  • Sending customers receipts via SMS not only helps the environment by reducing paper wastage, but also allows you to attach details on competitions, cross selling promotions or surveys for example.

Getting Started

So you’ve decided you want to go ahead with an SMS marketing strategy, but where’s the starting point? Here are four easy to follow steps to get your scheme up and running.

Contacts

The first step is to build up a database of customer contact details if you don’t already have one. This isn’t as tricky as it may sound, as again you can incentivise the process. For example, ask new customers to register online in return for alerts, complete surveys or enter competitions which require certain contact details. Once you have acquired this list, it is important to segment and profile your customers in order to target certain groups correctly.

Make your customers feel like they’re part of an exclusive text club, rather than just a boring mailing list, by offering premium and exclusive content. This is how you’ll persuade them to part with their contact details.

For best practice though, always remember to offer an “opt out” tick box in email forms so customers do not receive unwanted correspondence.

Personalize your data by segmenting the contact database into demographics and specific target groups. For example, by gender, age, purchase history etc. This will then allow you to tailor your campaign to certain customers, increasing response rate and relevancy for the user. Targeting the wrong user for a campaign can be severely detrimental to your brand image so this is really worth doing.

Copy

Texts are limited to 160 characters so you need to be concise and to the point when getting your message across. The simplicity of an SMS is its appeal, so don’t try to be too technical. Do make sure you include an unsubscribe option, usually via a text back.

‘Calls to Action’ are essential within marketing texts. Ensure that you’ve made it completely clear what you want the consumer to do after reading your message. This could be a phone number, a link to a mobile website and ideally a time frame which will create a sense of urgency.

Platform

Choose a platform that can deliver both inbound and outbound marketing campaigns. Ideally, this system should be flexible and web based, allowing you to either create the campaigns yourself from scratch or offer a managed service to guide you through the process.

Tracking Success

In order to maximize your continued success with your SMS marketing campaigns, it’s vital that you track and report the results of the initial scheme. Set goals before the campaign is launched and ensure you know which metrics you want to focus on, such as recipients received and number of responses.

Monitor these variables throughout the campaign and if you are utilizing a multi-step delivery system, you can dynamically tweak your message to improve response rates.

Final Thoughts

Although now a slightly dated technology and less glamorous than an all-singing, all-dancing mobile app, SMS marketing schemes still have a place in a brand’s marketing strategy. The balance of high ROI to relatively cheap implementation cost make it great value for money and a very personal way of interacting with customers if done well.

[ Is SMS Marketing Still a Viable Strategy? is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Harrison Jones.

Onsite optimization of websites is the most important factor in ranking better in search engine results. You can build all the links you want, but if your website isn’t optimized, Googlebot won’t be able to crawl the site properly. Over the past several years, Google and Bing have released guidelines for webmasters to make websites more crawlable. This is a consolidation of all the guidelines released by Google and Bing over the years to improve onsite optimization. Audits should be performed before the launch of any new website design, and at least twice per year to keep up with changes in industry standards.

Canonicalization and URL Structure

www or non-www, that is the question. Rather than wasting your time rehashing this topic, I have written a handy guide that explains URL structure best practices in full. To summarize the article, there should only be one URL used to get to the homepage of your website. Whether or not you choose to use www is your choice. Just make sure there is only one version, and it’s not followed by an index.php, index.html, etc… URLs should contain words only and no numbers or symbols. The words should be separated by dashes instead of spaces or underscores. All words should contain lower case letters. Each URL should contain a keyword phrase, and should be no longer than 5 words in length overall.

Content Optimization

Every page on the website should have unique, high-quality content using proper optimization techniques. Homepages should have a bare minimum of one paragraph of keyword-rich content. A good rule of thumb would be around three or more paragraphs. Without quality content, Googlebot will have a tough time determining the relevance a page has to the keyword you want to target. The title of the page should be contained within an h1 tag, and should include a keyword – preferably a keyword similar to the page’s title tag. Use plenty of keywords in the body, but avoid keyword-stuffing. There’s no real rule of thumb about keyword stuffing, but if it looks like keyword spam, it probably will be read as spam by Google.

Each page should employ a content hierarchy to establish importance of key phrases. Titles should be in h1 tags and only one per page. Subhead titles should be placed in h2 and h3 tags with a keyword included in it. Bolding and italicizing text within paragraphs will show importance of the phrase to search engines.  Linking to other pages on the website using good, keyword-rich anchor text as well as other trusted websites will also increase the value of the content. Every page on a website should have around one hundred links. If a page contains too many links, it will be penalized for being spammy. Non-navigation links on pages should look natural to the content. Follow this content optimization checklist before publishing content to ensure it is properly optimized.

Cloaking or duplicating content is a huge no-no for SEO. Cloaking content is a very risky practice which will get your website heavily penalized by search engines. Matt Cutts recently did a wonderful video explaining how cloaking works and why it’s bad. Duplicate content on pages is another way to get on Google’s black list. Internet leeches love scraping content from websites and reposting it on other websites to collect advertising money. Google grew smart to these practices, and changed the algorithm to filter out duplicate content. Even having two pages on the same site with duplicate content will get your site penalized.

If you absolutely must have duplicate content on your website, which is necessary in rare cases, use the rel=canonical attribute to tell the spiders to only pay attention to one of the two pages. Copyscape and Plagiarisma are two great tools for finding content-scraping leeches that stole your content. BluePay is a credit card processing company that has fallen victim to content scraping. The bottom half of this competitor’s page was completely scraped from BluePay’s homepage. Scary, isn’t it? To check for duplicate content within your own site, do a search for a snippet of your content within quotation marks. This will show you instances where your content appears twice on the website, and may point you to possible bugs on the site. If you do find another website that has scraped your content, you can fill out a request for Google to remove the content.

One last key point to mention about content optimization is advertisements. If your website is oversaturated with advertisements, Google may penalize it. If your website is about GPS tracking for trucks and you have text link ads about online poker, you might get penalized. Avoid creating a mosaic of advertisements on your website. Use ALT text with keywords liberally for all advertisements, links, and images. This will help search engines better understand the content.

Geo Redirects

Geo redirects are a great way for international websites to forward its visitors to the correct language version of the site. Keeping that in mind, it may be the worst SEO mistake of your life. If your site is accessed by going to www.mysite.com and all backlinks point there as well, why would you want it redirecting to www.mysite.com/en/index.html? By automatically redirecting people away from the root domain that all backlinks are pointing to, you will be cutting your link value in half. Create a language selection option on the homepage instead.

Image Optimization

Image optimization is a commonly overlooked practice, but it does carry a lot of SEO value if done properly. Read my article on image optimization best practices for a full guide on optimizing images. This practice is mainly important for getting images indexed in image searches. Add captions and ALT tags using keywords for each image. ALT tags should be no longer than 50 characters. Filenames should include keywords, and should be separated by dashes.

Internal Linking

Each page should contain around one hundred links per page. You may think that number is outrageously high, but it’s really not hard to achieve. Before getting started, run Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links on the site, and fix them. Make sure all internal links are text links. This is especially important with navigational links. Any halfway decent designer will be able to put together some nice text-over-image links with CSS. All category and main pages should be linked throughout the global navigation. Include footer links at the bottom of the page as a secondary form of navigation. This area should link to subcategory, terms of use, social media, privacy statement, sitemap, and contact pages. Be sure to use good anchor text for the subcategory links in the footer. Also be sure to include good links with anchor text throughout the page content. Breadcrumbs are another great form of internal linking, and greatly improve a site’s usability.

Microdata

Microdata is a little-covered topic in relation to SEO, but it does pack a powerful punch. Microdata creates a mode of communication between your content and search engine spiders. You can define the meaning behind sections, elements, and words on each page. This helps build a trust with search engines – especially Bing. I have put together a couple articles on this topic already. If you run an e-commerce site, check out my article on e-commerce microdata. If you run a B2B corporate site, check out my other article about corporate B2B microdata.

Noindex and Nofollow

Depending on the type of website you are building, there may be some pages you specifically do not want indexed or ranked for. Any irrelevant pages like terms of use, PDF files, privacy policy, and sitemaps should be nofollowed. Use your own discretion as to other pages you may want to nofollow. Site search results should also be nofollowed and noindexed. Site search results can be indexed, and will create duplicate content issues if you don’t add the nofollow and noindex attributes to them.

Title and Meta Tags

Title tags should be unique for every page, and contain a primary keyword phrase that is relevant to the page’s content. If you have room for two keyword phrases, separate them with a comma. If the site is a well-known brand, you may want to include the brand name in the title tag. Title tags should be 50-65 characters in length. If the string is longer than 70 characters, it will be cut off in SERPs.

Never use meta keywords. Meta keywords are used by spammers and scrapers all the time, so Bing has decided to flag all pages using meta keywords as spam. Meta descriptions should be included on every page. They should include a keyword phrase similar to the title tag. Descriptions should not exceed 160 characters in length. Never reuse the same description for two pages.

Webmaster Tools

Google and Bing Webmaster Tools have a few tools necessary for SEO. The most important tool is the sitemap submission feature. First, you will need to generate a sitemap for your website. Once you have generated a sitemap, upload it to the home directory of your server and submit it through Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Sitemap submissions will tell search engines that you have new content, and it should be crawled on a regular basis. Submitting RSS feeds to the sitemap will also carry a lot of SEO value since Google and Bing love RSS feeds. Both webmaster tool suites have an option for doing this.

Webmaster tools can also be used to set the crawl rate, check for crawl errors, and to instantly submit the site for indexation. If your content is updated on a daily basis, you may want to change the crawl rate to run Googlebot on a daily basis. Another great tool is the “crawl errors” feature. This will check for errors found while indexing the site. All errors found should be fixed immediately. If you have just launched a new design, site, or just write a very important blog post, you may want to consider using the “Fetch as Googlebot” tool. Bing’s equivalent is called “Submit URLs”. This will instantly index the page you submit and give it a nice bump up in SERPS, but beware – if the click-through rate is very low, that page may get penalized.

Website Architecture

Two or three clicks from the homepage is all it should take to reach any page on a website. Search engines are a lot like human readers when indexing pages. If it takes four clicks to reach a page, Googlebot will place low importance on that page. Likewise, a page reachable from the homepage will carry the most weight. When designing a site, determine the importance you want to place on each page, and create a content hierarchy for those pages when planning out your website. Pages containing your top keywords should be placed towards the top of the hierarchy while long-tail, less important keyword focusing pages should be buried towards the bottom. Now that Google indexes AJAX and JavaScript, there are lots of options to creating a navigation menu where you can implement an effective content hierarchy.

Website Design Mistakes

Three common web design errors that will wreck your website’s crawlability are frame usage, using all-Flash, and not setting up 301 redirects after moving content. Designers are not SEO professionals, so cut them some slack. Although, it is imperative that you review their plans before they implement any changes. If your designer wants to use frames, ask them if they plan on using Comic Sans while they’re at it. Much like Comic Sans, frames are completely outdated from a design and SEO standpoint. Frames require three html files to create the design while normal sites only use one html file. This confuses the heck out of spiders when crawling your site. Most of the time, none of the pages will end up getting indexed.

Flash is an eye-catching way to build a website, but if you plan on building an all-Flash site, then you might as well go sit in the corner, talking to a brick wall because that’s what you would be doing to search engines. Flash cannot be crawled, so don’t implement any site elements in Flash. Flash should be used sparingly, and for decorative purposes only. Another thing to watch out for is whether or not your designers set up 301 redirects after moving around any content. If they did, make sure they used 301’s instead of 302 redirects. If a page has already been indexed and gets moved without a redirect set up, it will come up as a 404 error, which will hurt the indexation of your site.

Website Security

Providing a safe and secure experience to your website’s audience will not only make them feel more confident in your site, but also search engines. If your company owns several domains, make sure none of the content is duplicated across the domains. If you run an e-commerce site, make sure a secure server version of the checkout process is available. Set up robots.txt to block certain pages from being crawled by spiders, but be careful not to block any pages that will hurt your internal linking structure. Check your website to make sure it isn’t infected by malware. Google Webmaster Tools has a free malware diagnostic tool. Web page errors will also cause search engines to mistrust your website. Run your site through the W3C Markup Validator to check for bugs that may cause indexation issues.

Summary

When performing a site audit, it’s helpful to create a checklist of violations to watch out for on the website. You can create one using this article, or you can use SEOmoz’s pre-made site audit checklist. Keep in mind that SEOmoz’s checklist is a few years old and is missing a few elements. Once the audit is complete, you may find it helpful to write up a list of structural recommendations with brief descriptions to help the client understand what you want to do for them.

Harrison Jones is an SEO Analyst at Straight North – a full-service Chicago marketing and web design firm. Harrison writes frequently about link acquisition, SEO, and video marketing. He has been published in several industry publications including Reel SEO and Search Engine Journal. Follow Straight North on Twitter for industry insight and conversations.

[ HOW TO: Guide to Performing Website Audits is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro.

Many current CEOs and business owners often have more to worry about than the 50 ways social media can drive traffic to a website or the 100 ways to help improve a website’s page ranking. In other words, they have more to worry about than trying to keep up with the latest and greatest marketing tactics. However, CEOs and business owners do have to worry about hiring new employees.

As early as seven years ago, hiring a marketing department was fairly simple. You first get a background check, then you ask about their past experiences, how they plan to use commercials and newspapers to advertise, how they plan to measure success, etc., and the interview was over. Today, there are many new marketing outlets that a CEO has to take into consideration when trying to find a marketing professional who can keep up. In some cases, a good candidate may not have much experience with the latest tactics simply because they are so incredibly new. Marketing in today’s world is a little bit like being on a roller coaster. Everyone, no matter what age or point in their career, is along for the ride. This interviewing process has, therefore, become very tricky.  To make matters worse, many CEOs and business owners are not up on the latest best practices themselves, so how can an interview go successfully?

If you’re worried you won’t be able to tell who to hire, don’t sweat it (there are many in your shoes). Consider a few of the newer things that now must be mentioned in an interview to make sure you hire the right person to help you utilize every marketing tool available:

5 Tips to Help the Unsure CEO Hire the Right Marketing Professional

Social Media—When looking to hire someone in a marketing department, test their knowledge of social media. Even if you do not know much about it yourself, check for these qualities and these answers:

• At the very least, someone hoping to get a job with your company should have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn account. Be sure to ask the candidate if they have these accounts, and then check to see if they have these accounts by logging into the sites and searching for their names. This can sometimes be tricky, so do not hesitate to ask for a Twitter name or a nickname they may use on these accounts.
• If they can manage their personal sites, they have a much better chance of managing your company’s sites. Check to see how many followers and connections they have on Twitter and LinkedIn (the more the better), and look to see if others participate on their pages.
• Ask them if they are familiar with StumbleUpon, Digg, Quora, and Google+. Chances are if they know a little bit of information about these sites, they’re pretty fluent in social media.

Understanding of SEO and Analytics—Getting your company online is no doubt crucial to the success of a business. According to Internet World Stats, 77.3% of the U.S. population regularly used the Internet last year. If someone was going to use the Internet to search for your company, SEO becomes very important. Ask the candidate about how they plan to increase organic search rates as well as utilize pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If a candidate does not know how search engines work, your company’s marketing efforts will suffer greatly. If you are unsure about SEO yourself, it might be a good idea to do a little bit of research or find someone in your company who is more familiar to sit in on the interview.

Marketing Offline—On a completely different spectrum, make sure your candidate knows how to effectively market a product or service using offline mediums. If you find someone who is very Internet savvy, they may have been ignoring the importance of more traditional marketing. Knowing how to communicate effectively through mediums other than the Internet is still an important part of a marketing department, so make sure you’re candidate isn’t too tangled in the web.

Communication—Marketing employees used to be focused on creativity, and then the marketing director or sales department would worry about communication with other businesses and consumers. Today, there are more outlets for communication than ever before. This means that everyone in your marketing department has to be good with words both in person and on paper.

Experience—Experience in a marketing department is always helpful; however it is not quite as important in today’s world. Marketing is evolving quicker than most sectors of the workforce, so it will not be uncommon to find a candidate who hasn’t come in contact with everything mentioned above. Because of this, it is important that you find someone who is willing to learn and willing to change, not someone who is stuck in their old marketing ways.

Effective marketing is about using as many mediums as successfully as possible. This becomes impossible when you have someone working in your marketing department who does not possess the latest qualities that are now required. Chances are these marketing tactics will change with time, so the most important quality of all for your future employees to possess is an ability to roll with the punches. If you have someone who knows a little bit more than the basics, but has a curiosity to follow the changing demands of the industry, your new department will be in good shape.

Also remember that there is nothing wrong with having someone a little bit more experienced in marketing sit in on the interview with you. Many CEOs and business owners are a little unsure about the latest cutting edge tactics, but this is to be expected. You pretty much have to live and breathe marketing in order to keep up these days, and let’s face it, a business owner has other things to worry about. After all, isn’t this why you’re hiring in the first place?

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to business phone systems. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including business insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading B2B Directory, Business.com.

[ Why Hiring a Marketing Department Has Changed—5 Subjects a Business Owner Must Now Consider in Every Interview is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Preston Ehrler.

As a business owner, do I really have time to blog?  I’m a business owner too, and I realize that we are already pressed to our limits for time.  We are responsible for everything, including finding new business, working with our existing customers, interfacing with suppliers, running our books, and infinitely more.  Attempting to convince a business owner that we should add yet another task can understandably seem like a herculean endeavor.  For anything that is going to take more time, the rewards must be tangible and immediate.  As many of us cannot clearly identify what the rewards are that can be reaped by blogging, it is not placed high on the list of priorities.  It should be.

So, you ask, how important could blogging really be for my business?

My answer:  Instead of spinning out a list of theories we’ve heard again and again, what if we looked at blogging from a different perspective?  Employing a new paradigm by utilizing real data, what can we learn about how blogging, coupled with an effectively constructed website, can affect your company?  What, specifically, can we extrapolate?  How do we know blogging is worth the effort?

Fact:  According to a recent survey by HubSpot, businesses that blog increase their site visits by as much as 55%.  My personal experience with my company has been even higher:

Providing your site works hard to convert your visitors (using “Siloing” techniques to push your visitors to the correct interior pages along with quality well-written content, and “Calls to Action” on each page), a single additional visitor can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars for your business. If you only spend an hour each week blogging and it helps bring in only an additional $20,000 of revenue, your blogging is worth $400 per hour.  Interested?

Let’s look at what, exactly, blogging can do for your company.

1.  Enhance Your SEO

The most popular question I hear when speaking to a prospective customer is “We want to be number one on Google, how can we do that?”  People want it easy and they want it yesterday, and why shouldn’t they?  A high organic ranking on Google virtually assures your site more traffic.  And while there are certain aspects you can undertake, if you have a small website (under 20 pages), what SEO can do is very limited.  Proper title tags, inbound links, and meta information are important, along with keyword placement on your pages. Yet, the most important aspect of SEO for a small site is blogging.  Simply by creating a new blog post, you add a page to your website that will be indexed at some point.  Therefore, the more posts on your site, the more pages your site becomes, the much greater chance your site has to be identified and ranked accordingly.  Although Google’s algorithms are a secret, it is widely believed that there has been a manifest move toward identification of quality content, and away from “junk content.”  What does that mean if you blog?  It means that Google will notice your posts and will rank you accordingly.  Therefore, the very act of blogging, adding great content, and keeping your site “moving” vs. “static,” will enhance your SEO ranking.

2.  Interest New Customers

By enhancing your site’s optimization and increasing your site’s number of visitors, you will have the opportunity to convert more visitors to qualified leads and even customers.  At the same time, through your blogging, you will be creating quality content that your visitors will appreciate in many ways, some of them very simply.  By posting content such as your restaurant’s specials, or your bar’s live music, or items you have on special at your furniture store, you’re enticing new customers to come and visit you.  Finally, if you go so far as to give your site the ability to sell certain products or to take advantage of an offer, you are already creating new customers.  Let’s say you own a local restaurant that keeps its content moving by posting a weekly blog about your specials.  Before blogging, you were averaging about 100 visits per day, and from those visits you booked 5 reservations online per day average.  When you started blogging your visits jumped to 150 visits per day, and your conversion rate of 5% remained the same, and you booked 7.5 reservations per day.  On average each reservation is for 3 people, and each reservation averaged $40 per person.  Therefore on average, that’s $300 more revenue per night, and over a month, that’s $9000, and over the course of a year, that’s $108,000 of top-line revenue.  Yes, blogging works for brick and mortar businesses!

3.  Engage Existing Customers

Everyone knows new customers are difficult to find, especially in this economic environment.  As one of my friends recently said, “it’s a slugfest for new clients out there.”  What are you doing to keep your customers interested?  How are you creating value for them?  One of the most important yet overlooked aspects of blogging is that it allows you to reach out and offer quality-content vs. a static site.  A static site, which most sites are, is a site with seldom, or never changing content, offering little reason to return.  Quality-content offered through a blog creates an engaged customer base that will return to your site to access that content.  Therefore, the act of blogging creates a customer who values your changing content and therefore values you.  Through the content, your customer will be much more difficult for one of your competitors to poach by simply under-cutting you on price.  Without the content you create by blogging, the perception of your company’s value, over time, can wane, and your product or service will become commoditized, putting you at great risk.

4.  Highlight Your Expertise

This past weekend, I had a twenty-minute conversation with two owners of a fireplace shop who possessed an incredible amount of knowledge on their products.  As they had been in business for thirty years, there was no question that they had the ability to create a blog on their all aspects of their business.  They knew everything, and I was impressed.  Everyone, to some degree, is an expert in their field, and blogging allows you to leverage your expertise for the whole world to see.  Selflessly imparting the knowledge you have through a blog will quickly begin to highlight you as an expert in your field.  The deeper your level of expertise in your niche, the more your blog will be read and passed on, therefore growing your traffic, minimizing bounce and increasing your conversion rate, all of which equates to more business.  Even if you just post one high-quality blog, from an expert’s standpoint, per week, over time Google will index those posts and when people search for keywords contained in your posts, up comes your site, and you have an opportunity to convert yet another visitor.  Impressive, most impressive.

5.  Create Online Revenue

Ultimately, the goal of any business oriented website is to augment revenue.  But why then are so many sites not built to easily enable the creation of revenue?  Recently, we had the chance to discuss redesigning a website for a prospective customer who sold their product by the pound.  They had a very enviable margin (65%) and sold approximately an average of 900 pounds of their product per order at $0.65 per pound.  Essentially their website would pay for itself after a handful of orders, yet the key aspect became their concern that existing customers and new customers would not find or embrace their website.  The solution offered was to create a blog on their website that would enhance their SEO, interest new customers and engage their existing customers, all while highlighting their expertise—which was significant.  Meanwhile, by creating the ability for customers to order their product right from their computer or smartphone, in conjunction with the additional traffic created by blogging, a new revenue stream would be created where one had not previously existed.  Giving their customers the ability to place an order 24/7/365 would also enable the company to leverage technology where their competition had not, therefore strengthening their client relationships.  How wonderful to have orders flowing to you, without having to ask for them, while simultaneously making ordering quick and seamless for their customers.

Conclusions

Of course, all businesses want to climb the Google ladder up to page one of organic search, and while SEO has become the buzzword for CEOs and presidents, the fastest way for a small company to achieve this is by blogging.  While most of us don’t want yet another task to add to our list, when closely examined, blogging is worth the effort.  By simply keeping new content flowing onto your website Google, new customers and existing customers will take notice, and engage you at a much higher level—as the expert you are.  Additional revenue, the ultimate goal, will undoubtedly follow.

Preston Ehrler started Webvantix to bring professional website design to businesses that need help. The Webvantix blog also discusses ideas for marketing your business online.

[ Is Your Business Worth An Extra Hour Per Week? 5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Blog is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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I hit inbox zero for the sixth or seventh time this week in not one but two email accounts which feed in 13 email addresses total. Once an impossibility, it’s now an everyday occurrence. In fact, it’s now a true mindset. Because I’ve streamlined this process so well, I figure other people would benefit from my tips to make inbox zero a true reality. This is especially important as web users have the expectation of fast replies in our fast paced social media world.  My workflow works great, so I’m offering the below to those of you who may want to use these tips for their own internal processes.

Use a Conversation Email System

This solution really is best suited for those using Gmail. In my case, 12 email accounts are fed through one gmail.com account. (I also have a dedicated Google Apps account for my Mashable emails.) Why is this so important? Gmail’s mail system offers the tools needed to be an email ninja: labels and threaded emails. Plus, its shortcuts (A for archive) make management a snap.

Labels are color-coded “folders” that designate inbound emails. You can either use filters (explained later) to automatically label emails, or you can manually set up labels. Labels can be color coded so that you can see everything at a glance and know exactly what type of email it is:

Threaded emails is a unique feature that I haven’t yet seen in a third party app where all emails with the same subject line are sent in one single frame. For example, let’s say someone emails me about a possible project. I reply back to him, and 3 weeks later, he replies back to me, keeping the same subject line intact. With Gmail, the previous two emails (his initial email and my reply) are still visible in the same window in a feature known as a conversation, so I know exactly what he’s referencing and can click to expand the entire correspondence accordingly. While Outlook, Thunderbird, and other email clients let you see the replies, they’re often cluttered in a bunch of >> and >>>> and eventually these emails get much too much out of control; this threaded window functionality is probably one of the best features ever for Gmail.

While I respect standalone email applications, having true portability for your email is killer and I have no plans to move back. Interestingly enough, I was never a fan of web-based email until I got hooked on Gmail. There’s a method to this madness.

As a catch 22, those rare instances when people change the subject line actually breaks the functionality that makes this system so productive; it’s happened 2 times in the past 6 years but is annoying enough that I still remember who they were. In those cases, I ask nicely for those senders to keep the subject line intact and not change it to reflect their new reply.

Answer Everything Quickly

What are you doing about that email that JUST hit your inbox? Are you saving it for later? If it takes 10 seconds to read and reply, take 10 seconds to read and reply to it. Can you stop doing what you’re doing without being less productive? If so, stop and reply, then return to your work. (If you adopt this mindset, you won’t lose 15 minutes of productivity when you switch gears; in a real-time world, you have to multitask to survive!) If not, allocate several blocks of time throughout the day that you can dedicate to email only where you read and respond to everything in your inbox. Make sure to do this so that when it’s time to sign off for the day, there’s nothing left in your inbox.

The answering part is crucial. Once you reply, you have to make a decision on what behavior you should be doing next:

• Is the email no longer actionable by you? If so, archive it. If you’ve enabled Gmail shortcuts (use the ? key to confirm; if not, turn it on in your account settings), hit A to archive and file it away.
• Does the email require a reply from the person you just emailed? If so, file it away anyway! You don’t need it sitting in your inbox if there’s nothing actionable by you. If you need a reply eventually, make a note (I use Remember the Milk; read about my widget integration here) to follow up with the person on a designated date. You can also use Boomerang to set reminders. RTM emails you a reminder right before your task is due, so you will be sure not to forget!
• Does your email reply depend on yet another person’s reply? I work with many teams on many different projects. Sometimes, I need to get an answer from someone and cannot immediately reply to the original sender. In that case, I keep the email in my inbox (it’s actionable) but am sure to chase down the reply as soon as I possibly can. Thankfully, my teammates are responsive, so it may take a few hours or a few days, but that email eventually gets filed. That makes them good teammates. Also, if I’m waiting for a reply from someone else, I usually still take the time to let the original sender know that I’m waiting on a reply from one of my colleagues. This makes me look responsible and also gives the people I’m dealing with confidence in my follow-through. It’s amazing how many people don’t instill confidence at all!
• Does the email require you to sit down and truly think about your reply? Keep the email in your inbox. Set aside time to get to this assignment as soon as you can; make a personal goal that it will be done by the end of the day if feasible or at least by the end of the week. Sometimes this means that I’m actually “working late,” but this also means that I don’t have anything on my plate by the time I’ve gone to bed and that’s a great feeling!

Use Labels

As I’ve explained earlier, labels are very important to help you figure out exactly what needs to go where. With Labels, I can see everything I need at a glance and can reference it quickly via search. A search like “label:bloggers techipedia” will find mentions of “techipedia” in all emails that I have assigned the Bloggers label to. It’s an incredibly organized way to make things happen. As you can see, you can assign multiple labels to a single email, and sometimes that’s necessary.

A very important part of true management is hiding those folders. A beautiful inbox is an organized inbox. To label something and archive it, I highlight the email (or have it open), type L and then choose the label on my drop down list. Then, the email is immediately labeled (and then archived after I hit A). But after that, I don’t want to be reminded of it, so I keep my labels out of sight (and thus out of mind). As you can see in the screenshot above, I have 50 labels. I also don’t see them very often, but they’re there and that’s all I need to know.

Use Filters Liberally

I receive anywhere from 300 to 1500 new emails daily. However, most of these emails never hit my inbox. That’s because I apply Gmail filters; that is, rules that immediately archive emails that I want but don’t have time to read. Emails about new followers on Google+, new DMs on Twitter, new newsletters from my favorite bloggers, cron job notifications, HARO emails — these emails are being auto-archived. Do I need them? Maybe not. Do I want them? Yes, because they’re searchable in an incredible archive of over 27 GB of emails (oh yes, I paid for storage). I can search and find out why someone’s name may sound familiar (“oh, he added me on Twitter in April 2009!”). I can read newsletters at my convenience. I don’t always check them, but I know they’re there.

I currently have over 100 filters (107 at the last count, and I probably missed a few!). How many of you have such a robust filtering system? Last I checked, Yahoo! Mail only supported 100 filters.

Report Spam Freely

Just like I have a great system for filters, I also have a great system for spam. The lesson is this: if I’ve never opted into your email list, I will flag your commercial message as spam. That goes for social media newsletters from my LinkedIn connections. That goes for people I may have met once at a trade show who got my business card who sent me an email with a template that clearly screams that it was sent to hundreds of people. That goes for people who contact me for link exchanges with my blog. That goes for anyone who sends me messages that are not personalized and are clearly for profit and commercial gain. If you can’t take time to clearly send me a message that is truly meant for Tamar Weinberg, my spam hammer awaits.

Even though I am pretty aggressive about reporting spam, my spam folder gets very few false positives. That said, I check it 3-4 times per day to make sure that nothing is there that doesn’t belong. When you’re aiming for true inbox zero, any numbers detract from truly reaching that goal. Seeing Spam (5) doesn’t make me sit at ease.

Mute Updates Not Relevant to You

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m on an alias that I just don’t care to be updated on. For example, someone may email moderators@somedomain.com and I just happen to be on their list where they are all congratulating each other because their child is finally potty trained. It may go in my inbox once — and that’s enough. But when everyone else decides to reply to all wishing their best, it’s a little overwhelming. That’s why muting is so important. As long as it’s not going directly to you, muting actually works wonderfully and hides emails sent to aliases that you may be a member of. That way, you still have the emails, but they’re just not visible. To Mute, the shortcut is the letter M.

…But Don’t Delete Your Emails

With email systems having storage of 7GB minimally (and more if you elect to pay for it), I don’t understand why you would want to delete an email. Archival is just as good as deleting it except archival allows you to actually reference it again if you need some information in the future (and you may never realize when you do!) A company I work with recently hired a new person, and she told me that we emailed once before at her old job. It wasn’t a very important email, so by some users’ standards, it would go into the delete pile. But if I did that, I would never have known what she was talking about! And I’d have just had to pretend I remembered everything.

Using a plugin like Rapportive, something I have praised in the many times over as one of my most indispensable tools ever, you can read more about the person as they email you AND you can see some of the most recent emails.

Use Macros

Did I just suggest something that isn’t truly personalized? The email purist in me is wincing, but it makes a lot of sense when you handle redundant communications. Macros are short phrases that are expanded to larger ones. For example, instead of typing out my address whenever people ask for it, I can type “myaddy” and it will be immediately expanded to the larger format. Since I often book phone calls on a free conference call system which has a dial-in number and PIN number, I don’t have to memorize the phone number when sending it to colleagues; I just type “freeconf” and it expands to the email. It also helps when you sometimes need to send a canned response that you’d later personalize; the Gmail Labs functionality just doesn’t cut it. For my PC, I use freeware app Texter. I recently converted a colleague to the Mac equivalent TextExpander and she hasn’t gone back.

Don’t Forget Common Courtesy

I know I do a great job replying to emails, but I also know it’s a skill that took me years to perfect (again, this is something I only succeeded at recently). One of my true lessons would be to reply when you can! It frustrates me to no end when someone truly took the time to email you and yet the recipient sits on a reply and/or doesn’t reply at all.  It angers me when one invests hours in an email reply, only to be met with total silence. It also irritates me when someone emails you asking for something, and you took the time to reply to their initial correspondence but requested more information, but they decided that the email thread ends there despite your insistence to keep the conversation going (after all, you asked and they merely are trying to help. Why would you ignore that?). That’s not something you’d do in real life, so why is online any difference? You’re still dealing with people.

When possible, take time to reply. I don’t care if the response is ultimately a “thanks but no thanks,” it’s still more suitable to being totally ignored.

What about Holidays or Vacations?

Yes, I really do reach inbox zero on a daily basis. And yes, I really do receive hundreds of emails per day. Sometimes I do sign off for the night and there are still emails in my inbox simply because I didn’t have time or needed someone else’s help to reply. Sometimes I even step away for longer periods of time. I observe the Jewish Sabbath AND Jewish holidays (25-75 hours of downtime minimally) and don’t touch the computer or any electricity at all during those times. While the recovery of total disconnection is a bit of a challenge and I feel buried, if you’re truly motivated, you can make this system work and still take some breaks just as long as you’re willing to work at achieving inbox zero on the days or even hours that follow (it’s doable, I promise).

Your To-Do List

The best way to handle inbound email is to consider your inbox your to-do list. Do you feel at ease when there are items on that list knowing that you’ll have to get to it sometime? If you aspire on a daily basis to clear your list, you’re well on your way to getting closer to inbox zero.

As most people who have emailed me can attest, I reply within minutes and never longer than a day (with some aforementioned exceptions). The system works for me, and with some small tweaks in your approach, it hopefully will work for you. Let me know if you try this and what you think about it.

Do you have any other ways to manage email overload? Sound off in the comments.

[ Email Overload: The Secret to Getting Inbox Zero Every Time is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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As many of you know, I have an annual tradition of giving back to the community on my birthday, which is why this year is no different. Of course, then, today is my birthday, & it’s a big one. Today, I’m 30.

I started this “best posts” idea 5 years ago & it’s grown huge. 2010 by far was the biggest year yet in the Internet Marketing realm. That’s why this is the biggest post I’ve ever written (with over 10,000 words). In honor of my 30th birthday, I have 300 posts.

Here’s how I do it: I read & review hundreds — thousands — of articles yearly, on all Internet Marketing topics from SEO to social media to general entrepreneurship (new for 2010!), also gathering intelligence via their rankings on top social sites & by stumbling upon new items in my feed reader. Since I can’t read everything written by the Internet Marketing community, I ask my Twitter & Facebook followers for their own recommendations. Based on specific criteria, normally actionable takeaways & evergreen content, I review the content & post it here to share with Techipedia readers & new visitors. The content is typically introductory but occasionally more intermediate/advanced, so there’s a mix that should work for everyone.

This list is very long, but I hope it’s not any less valuable. I’m sure you’ll have a year (or more) of reading to do, but it’s worth it to empower you with all this great content that has been written by brilliant peers. Enjoy!

Special note: This is the LAST wrap up post you’ll ever receive via Techipedia. If you found this content valuable & would like to receive new articles on a monthly basis, please subscribe to the monthly newsletter, available at a super low rate for a limited time.

Social Media: Getting Started, Implementation, and Execution

• How to Develop a Social Media Strategy: A Roadmap for Integration (Very Official Blog): Shannon Paul did an amazing job on this post, presenting questions & answers that help companies consider their goals for a social media strategy.
• Preparing a Social Readiness Gameplan in 7 Steps (Logic+Emotion): How can companies adequately prepare for social media monitoring & marketing? David Armano tackles the issue.
• An Open Letter to Marketers Who Abuse Social Media for Selfish Gain (KISSmetrics): Jon Morrow shows how do to social media right.
• Definitive Guide to Social Media Strategy Before Tactics (Online Marketing Blog): Lee Odden asked dozens of digital marketing experts for their take on social media strategy vs. tactics.
• Social Media Toolkit (Michael Fruchter): Here are tools to use to get the most out of social media.
• Social Media: What it is, How to Use It, and Where to Begin (One Man’s Blog): John Pozadzides introduces everything that rocks about social media.
• How to Write Your Social Media Plan in 8 Steps (Skyline Trade Show Tips): Need inspiration to get your social media plan in play? These 8 steps will guide you.
• 5 Ways Companies are Using Social Media to Lower Costs (Mack Collier): What are the benefits of social media? See how companies gain.
• 100 Thoughts on Social Media (Conversation Agent): This may be one of the shortest blog posts I’ve added to the list.
• How to: Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy (Mashable): Using AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action), you can set expectations, decide what you need to monitor, & visualize relationships.

Social Media (and Beyond): Small Business

• 6 Key Benefits for Using Social Media for Small Business (OPENForum): Improved search results, better brand management, innovation, and other benfits are explored in this article.
• The Ultimate Resource for Successful Small Business Websites (Samir Balwani): Here’s how small businesses can benefit from online marketing.
• Growing Your Business: 5 Tips from the Founder of Foursquare (Mashable): Dennis Crowley knows his stuff and shares good and creative tips to build visibility to business. Hey, Foursquare was pretty small once!
• 9 Expert SEO Tips for Small Businesses (Small Business Trends): Anita Campbell asks 9 people (including me) for their thoughts on online marketing.
• How 4 Small Businesses are Using Location-Based Services (Mashable): Mashable’s Erica Swallow asked 4 businesses how they’re using Foursquare and other geolocation services. It’s interesting to hear it from smart businesses.
• 11 Practical Business Uses for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (GigaOM): Some lesser-practiced tips are suggested here.
• How to: Get the Most from a Small Business Social Media Presence (Mashable): Generation Y entrepreneurs tell all in this piece on what a small business can do to get the most out of social media.
• Why Twitter is a Big Win for Small Business (Mashable): Three small businesses explain how they’re using Twitter and how it’s helping them grow.
• 5 Ways to Introduce Social Media to Small Businesses (AEXT.NET): The social media niche is a big echo chamber. Frankly, not all businesses know about social media marketing. Here’s why social media is an important extension of a website development strategy.
• 5 Big Social Media Questions from Small Business Owners (Mashable): This post tackles common business questions as it relates to social media marketing.

Social Media: Hiring and in the Workplace

• How to Get Any Job You Want Using Social Media (Blog Godown): Social media can be a forever changing resume of sorts.
• 10 Ideas to Keep Your Social Team Motivated (The Future Buzz): I love this post by Adam Singer. I’ve nodded my head on every single point since I have stories for each and every one!
• How to Nail a Job Interview (and Actually Get the Job) (Brass Tack Thinking): This particular article actually doesn’t talk about hiring via social media, but has some good advice for general job seekers.
• 5 Ways to Get a Job Through YouTube (Mashable): Did you know how Justin Bieber got to be so famous? Yeah, you guessed it. Here are other examples about how to leverage the popular video sharing site to get a job.
• 11 Ways to Lose Your Job on Facebook (Jeffbullas.com): This section is about social media and hiring, but how about the opposite? Here’s to firing via social media.
• How to Hire Social Media Strategists (Creativity Unbound): Edward Boches of Mullen takes a tactical approach toward hiring for social media. For him, it’s not just about Klout or following numbers.
• 20 Real Tips for Hiring a Social Media Consultant (Pam Moore): Looking for a consultant? Pam’s post has some great examples of how to find those “social media experts” who just don’t deserve to be hired. Ever.
• 6 Ways to Score a Job Through Twitter (Mashable): My online friend Shankar Ganesh got an internship with Zoho. They’re lucky to have him!

Social Media: Measurement and ROI

• Sexy Numbers: Measuring ROI in Social Media Campaigns (ReveNews): The elusive ROI question is dissected.
• 5 Objectives for Social Media Measurement (Brass Tack Thinking): Explore objectives measuring social media efforts and ROI.
• Are We Ever Going to “Get it”? (Peter Shankman): Peter rants about what companies are doing wrong when they think about what they can get out of social media.
• Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing? (MIT Sloan Management Review): Want an amazing article on ROI of social media? This is it.
• How to: Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign (Mashable): Jamie Turner offers suggestions on understanding qualitative, quantitative, and ROI metrics.
• The Perfect Social Media Measurement Plan (Search Engine Land): Brian Massey illustrates a system that automatically and reliably stores conversion data in a spreadsheet.
• Evidence that Social Media Really Does Drive Sales (The Next Web): Big companies prove that social media works.
• This is How You Measure Social Media ROI (Samir Balwani): Samir Balwani offers a nice analysis of how you can calculate social media ROI and suggests some great ideas for the future of social media.
• Practical Social Media Measurement: Awareness, Attention, Reach (Brass Tack Thinking): Amber Naslund shares how to measure social media with actionable things you can do today.
• Get Your Social Media Strategy in Shape with Spreadsheet Aerobics (Beth Kanter): Beth Kanter uses Facebook as the example in this post that explores how she evaluates the effectiveness of social media engagements.
• How to Measure Social Media Marketing Performance (Social Media Examiner): KPIs. Predictable Results. Incentivized sharing. That’s how you are accountable for your social media involvement.

Social Media: General

• How Social Media Drives New Business: Six Case Studies (TechCrunch): Businesses will benefit from reading about these creative ideas employed by other businesses to build traction and online visibility boosts.
• The 10 Stages of Social Media Integration in Business (Brian Solis): In his unabridged version of an earlier Mashable article, Brian Solis explains the various transitions a company might encounter when involving itself in social media marketing.
• 30 Tips for Using Social Media in Your Business (Inc.): Inc’s article has a lot of small ideas you can use to make social media more effective in business.
• Share Well with Others: How to Get Social Content to Go Viral (Search Engine Land): This post explores the motives behind content sharing, the ways content spreads, and tips for creating viral content.
• Social Media Supremacy: 10 Experts Reveal Their Strategies (ViperChill): Here are tips from 9 excellent social media practitioners (and me) who give advice on social media strategy.
• Social Media Etiquette: 20 Do’s and Don’ts to Avoid Looking Like an Ass (Directory Journal): I write another social media etiquette handbook, but I like this version with general but helpful things to consider in social media.
• Integrationg Social Media into Your Email Marketing (RhinoSEO): Some people are all about email. Some others are all social. Here’s a good way to mesh the two together.
• The 5 NEW Rules of Social Media Optimization (Influential Marketing Blog): In 2006, Rohit Bhargava formulated the concept of SMO, or Social Media Optimization. This is the 2010 version.
• How to: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style (Mashable): You might want to be a game show host, a friendly neighborhood service rep, a community builder, beehive, or friend. What’s YOUR style?
• 5 Steps to Dealing with the Relentless Pace of Marketing (PR Squared): Exhausted yet by social media? Have no fear; alleviate the load.
• The Expert’s Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media (WordStream): This guide discusses how you can benefit from diverse keyword research strategies, which you’d think is for PPC & SEO only. Nope!

Twitter

• 5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy (Online Marketing Blog): Lee Odden provides tips for Twitter marketing.
• 10 Indicators Your Business Should Rethink Its Twitter Strategy (Klout): Megan Berry of influence analytics provider Klout gives best practices on building loyal followers.
• 10 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers & 10 Essential Tools to Do It (State of Search): I’m not going to be the first one to tell you (and it’s not even the first time) that numbers aren’t everything, but wait…
• What Type of Twitter Account Should You Create? (Small Business Trends): I face this question all the time: should I create a personal account or a mixed business account? I say it’s up to you. See what Lisa suggests.
• How Twitter Can Make You a Better (and Happier) Person (Delivering Happiness): Here’s to the success of Zappos on Twitter. Tony Hsieh says certain values grew him as a person and made him happier in life.
• 9 Ways to Build a Twitter Community with Substance (Brass Tack Thinking): Building community on Twitter isn’t that complicated with this easy-to-read list.
• 21 Twitter Tips from Socially Savvy Companies (Fast Company): For those of you who have not seen this or read Brian Solis’s Engage!, here’s how Twitter is being used by businesses.
• 7 Sneaky Ways to Use Twitter to Spy on Your Competition (KISSmetrics): Hopefully you already do this. If not, get started.
• 7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing (OPENForum): Targeting users by location, occupation, and more is the premise of John Jatsch’s article on Twitter search.
• Tweet, Tweet: 9 Steps to a Successful Twitter Strategy (Business News Daily): Assess your challenges, plan your goals, listen, set objectives, & do more to get a solid Twitter strategy in place.
• 9 Ways to Use Twitter Lists (StayOnSearch): Ah, Twitter lists, the once-hyped products that now seem stagnant. You might elect to reevaluate, though, if you knew what you could do with them.
• Twitter Chats and Twitter Parties for Brands (Stephanie Schwab): Here’s how brands can get involved.
• 10 Practical Twitter Tips for Publishers (Adam Sherk): Adam works with some of the biggest publishing media companies on search and social strategy, so his advice is sound.

Facebook

• Facebook SEO Ranking Factors, 2010 Study Results (aimClear): Wow, the depth of this report is incredible. There are great insights on assessing the value of SEO for your Facebook profiles and pages.
• How to Better Engage Facebook Fan Page “Fans” (Social Media Examiner): Mari Smith on how to keep your Facebook Page lively and engaging.
• The Business Guide to Facebook Part 1: Your Brand Page for the Social Web (Brian Solis): This is part 1 of a 2 part piece that explores the importance of Facebook for businesses and why e-commerce (or f-commerce) is a business’s future.
• Facebook SEO (Blind Five Year Old): This post looks at Facebook SEO from the angle of Facebook’s Open Graph, so it’s more than your typical post about Facebook SEO.
• How to Build Your Facebook Landing Page (If You’re Not a Programmer) (SocialMouths): If you want tips on how to set up a Facebook landing page and have a graphic to work with, this is a good guide. For more, check out my post on How to Build the Perfect Facebook Page.
• 5 Facebook Fan Acquisition Strategies (Search Engine Journal): Brian Carter’s “complete Facebook marketing system” covers the gamut of getting fans that translate to revenue.
• 13 Simple Ways of Increasing Your Facebook Likes (The Next Web): Want people to Like you? Give them reasons to.
• Cracking the Facebook Code (The Daily Beast): News Feed Optimization explained.
• 6 Tips for Running Promotions Within Facebook’s Guidelines (Inside Facebook): Given the risks of running contests on Facebook due to some unexplained terms of service, Inside Facebook clarifies what is within reason and what’s disallowed.
• 10 Ways to Rock Your Facebook Campaign (Kommein): Here are practical tips on how to use Facebook to promote your business.

LinkedIn

• 5 Ways to Make the Most of LinkedIn (LinkedIn Blog): Ambassador Lindsey Pollak has some good tips for you to make the most out of the service.
• How to Improve Your LinkedIn ROI by Tweaking Your Profile (Sharisax): Make yourself findable by optimizing your profile. Should we call this LIO (LinkedIn Optimization)?
• 20 LinkedIn Case Studies and Examples for Professionals (Kyle Lacy): How are YOU using LinkedIn? Kyle features some LinkedIn gains from 20 pros.
• 10 Ways for Small Businesses to Use LinkedIn (OPENForum): With so many small businesses on LinkedIn, it’s imperative that you leverage that for maximum gain. Guy Kawasaki shares tips from LinkedIn’s employees.
• How to Make LinkedIn Answers Part of Your Routine (Social Media Explorer): Get qualified leads via LinkedIn by following Jason’s steps.
• Using LinkedIn for Online PR (Social Small Biz): I like that this post has some not so standard tips, such as connecting with journalists and influencers right after you’ve met them.
• Use LinkedIn Effectively (Chris Brogan): Know how to take advantage of LinkedIn? Probably not. Here’s a simple list of how to take advantage of the site.
• Top 5 Ways to Marketing Your Business with LinkedIn (Social Media Examiner): I have a client who said that this worked. Enough said.
• 5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix (Online Marketing Blog): The personal account & company group create an effective LinkedIn marketing plan.
• 10 Ways for Small Businesses to Use LinkedIn (LinkedIn Blog): LinkedIn is a viable social network, so businesses of all sizes need to leverage it. The post has small business owners in mind but is relevant to all companies.
• 10 Terrific LinkedIn Tricks to Grow Your Business! (OPENForum): Steve Strauss discusses more ways to maximize LinkedIn.

Leveraging Other Social Media Sites

• How to Promote Your Business on Flickr (Influential Marketing Blog): Rohit Bhargava introduces you to Flickr and shows how to build a strong account on the site.
• Case Study: How to Use Foursquare to Draw a Crowd Into Your Restaurant (Steffan Antonas): An orchestrated Foursquare meetup meets its match.
• How to Succeed on Yelp (Without Really Trying) (WebRanking): Local businesses should pay attention to what’s being said about them on Yelp. Be proactive & win.
• Advanced Delicious Search Operators (Modern Journalist): Even though Delicious is in turmoil, it is still a helpful social bookmarking site with useful search operators that improve your experience.
• How to Use Foursquare Effectively for Your Small Business (Business Insider): This is a slideshow/article combo with tips on how even a non-seasoned Foursqaure user (& business owner) can get the most out of it.
• 5 Ways to Leverage Foursqaure for Business (Penn Olson): One of the tips I don’t see very often is in this article: encourage shout-outs!
• Foursquare Business Strategies You Don’t Want to Miss (Samir Balwani): With only (!) 5 million members, Foursquare is still new enough to take advantage of. Local businesses, take note!

Blogging

• How I Really Built a Blog with 6,500 Subscribers (ViperChill): Mentioning Glen’s post should double his subscriber numbers. You’ll see why when you read it.
• 17 Important Things to Do After Starting Your WordPress Blog (Gloson): I love Gloson — he’s so smart (and so young!)
• How to Write a Blog That Matters (Justin Kownacki): Justin’s post is an excellent blog-building driver. Read it & you’ll see what I mean.
• 100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start … 2011? (Small Business Trends): This post has chock full of great inspiration for your next blogging project. You can’t run out of topics.
• How I Create and Manage a WordPress Website (Wolf-Howl): WordPress can run more than just blogs; it’s great for standalone sites. Here are some great plugins that you can use to optimize WP. The only thing it’s missing is W3 Total Cache, which I HIGHLY recommend.
• 34 Reasons to Start a Blog (Conversation Agent): Why should you blog? Let us count 34 ways.
• The Power of Uniqueness: 19 Starting Points (Problogger): Darren Rowse helps set you apart from other bloggers.
• How I Wrote 270 Guest Posts in 8 Months (YoungPrePro): Onibalusi took a lot out of his time to write some great guest posts (including two featured here). Learn his process.
• The 7 Traits of Highly Successful Bloggers (Dragos Roua): Authority, creativity, persistence, connectivity.
• 6 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging 4 Years Ago (ViperChill): As you’ve seen earlier, Glen writes amazing posts, and his tips for budding bloggers are no exception. You can learn a lot from him.

Reputation Management

• 5 Extreme Tactics for Removing a Reputation Attack from Google’s Index (Trackur): I like Andy Beal’s tactics: find a real violation & get them kicked out of Google. Works for me.
• 5 Reasons NOT to Delete Negative Reviews (Outspoken Media): Lisa argues why to leave negative reviews up.
• What to Do if You Are Attacked Online: Setting a Social Media Policy for Your Business (Small Business Trends): What types of things can you do when you’re faced with an online attack?
• Reputation Management SEO: 6 Advanced Tactics (SEOmoz): Rand Fishkin helps with reputation management: manage a handful of strong social profiles, speak at events, start an alternative blog, & more.
• What Trolls Can Teach You About Reputation Management (Flowtown): Trolls can be jerks, but sometimes wanting the attention they command is justified. JD Rucker highlights scenarios when you might just have to take the bait.
• 5 Ways NOT to Handle Reputation Management (Conversation Marketing): Here are mistakes you’ll make when your company gushes oil into the ocean.
• 10 Ways to Deal with a Social Media Explosion (Simon Lilly): Predict, plan, filter, rotate, evaluate.
• Turning Lemons into Lemonade: 11 Components of a Social Media Crisis Plan (Huffington Post): Since you’ll probably find out about a crisis nowadays on Twitter before you get official word, put out those fires quickly by following the checklist.
• 36 Reputation Monitoring Feeds You Can’t Afford to Ignore (aimClear): If you’re in the business of reputation management, keep tabs on what’s being said. Here are 36 places you need to look.
• 5 Online Reputation Management Mistakes (VeristLabs): These are mistakes most businesses commit when dealing with reputation managemnet crises.
• That’s Not Nice! Top 10 Tips for Responding to Negative Comments (NTEN): One big rule: don’t take it personally.
• A Practical Guide to Online Reputation Management (Target Internet): What’s ORM? What can you do to track it? How can you manage it?
• Online Reputation Management 101 (ClickZ): Like the post above, learn the ORM basics.

Content Development/Marketing

• 14 Lessons Learned from One of the World’s Highest Paid Copywriters (Copyblogger): This is a 3-part series that talk about how to get the most out of your marketing from Dan Kennedy. Here’s part 2 and here’s part 3.
• The 7-Step Process for Writing Enticing Product Descriptions (Marketing Words): E-commerce copywriting gets simpler with tips by Karon Thackston.
• Simple Strategies for Engaging Your Visitors (Six Revisions): What kind of content do you need? Fresh, targeted, valuable, concise.
• The Oatmeal Guide to Getting 5 Million Unique Visitors a Month (Content Converts): Matt Inman was just a regular guy a few years ago (I knew him!), but when he launched The Oatmeal, his life changed. Now, with over 5 million monthly uniques, he’s amazing.
• 18 Ways to Walk the Talk on Content (Conversation Agent): Good content can help your site soar to great heights, but if you are having trouble getting there, read this.
• Why You Shouldn’t Write for Other Writers (Copyblogger): Stop writing for bloggers. Write for your customers. Hugh MacLeod shares a personal story.
• The Creation and Promotion of Social Content (Search Engine Journal): Jordan Kasteler explains that content must stand for something to succeed.

Web Development and Website Strategy

• 18 Simple SEO Items Commonly Missed in Web Development (SEO.com): SEO is important when building a website, or it’ll be impossible find you.
• The Psychology of Web Design (Web Designer Depot): Psychology & web design go hand in hand. Understanding basic principles can help you build amazing sites.
• How I Grew My RSS Subscription Count by 243% (Quick Sprout): Neil Patel suggests tweaks that increased his RSS subscribers. There are takeaways here even for non-bloggers.
• 4 Design Elements Behind a Good Call to Action (letscountthedays): This post teaches you good calls to action on websites with visual examples to see exactly what you’re supposed to implement.
• 4 Tips for Search (and User) Friendly Design (Search Engine Land): Ian Lurie suggests that SEOs need to be more immersed in the design process.
• 6 Ways to Eliminate Pesky Duplicate Content (Search Engine Guide): Duplicate content can mean search engines sending visitors to the wrong pages. Removing them is important and should be considered in a web development strategy.
• The Ingredients of a Successful Website (Six Revisions): Passion. Talent. Partnerships. These are the true ingredients for websites that have tremendous growth potential.
• How to Put Your Small Business on the Web (Chris Brogan): Two words: home base. I disagree about GoDaddy and recommend Namecheap (client). But I don’t say that only because they’re a client; I’ve been a customer for 6 years!
• Removing Pages from Google: A Comprehensive Guide for Content Owners (Search Engine Land): Vanessa Fox writes a detailed step by step on how your content could be removed from Google — because sometimes you don’t want to be found.
• 5 Web Files that Will Improve Your Website (Six Revisions): Have you ever heard of Dublin.rdf and OpenSearch.xml? If not, read this article and you’ll see why they’re recommended.

Video

• How to Become Famous on YouTube (BlueGlass): What’s been successful on YouTube so far? Stephanie has answers.
• Video SEO: A Technical Guide (Yoast): Joost de Valk gives you a technical walkthrough on how your videos can see high rankings.
• YouTube SEO Experiment & Useful Tips (Distilled): Ever wanted to rank #1 on YouTube? Read about David’s analysis.
• 10 Killer Tips for Creating a Branded YouTube Channel (Mashable): A video agency expert gives advice on creating the best branded YouTube page.
• How to Add Captions to Your YouTube Videos (Small Business Trends): Captions help give videos an SEO boosts & captures attention of those who would otherwise not care about watching videos..
• How 12 CEOs and Founders are Leveraging Web Video (Mashable): Still think online video is for a bunch of amateurs? Think Blendtec or Garyvee. Think of the people who gained popularity using nothing but the Internet & their camcorders to spread valuable marketing messages.

SEO: Strategy

• 5 Strategies to Maintain and Improve Your #1 Rankings in Google — After You’ve Reached the Top (Winning the Web): SEO isn’t “set it and forget it,” because someone else can steal the throne. Stop them by reading & heeding this.
• The Definitive Guide to SEO for Images: 6 Steps to Image-Ranking Success (ZDNet): Learn how to get the most out of your images while adding specific SEO value to your pages.
• The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Competition (Wordstream): WordStream asked 35 experts how they evaluate the competition.
• Conversion Rate Optimization for SEO (Distilled): This is a nice actionable guide with helpful Excel formulas.
• 9 Steps to Diagnosing Lost Search Engine Traffic (High Rankings): Jill Whalen evaluated sites that saw a traffic decrease & shared her discoveries.
• WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need (ViperChill): Want to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines?
• SEO for Google News: Ranking Factors and Recommendations (Search Engine People): If you have a multi author news website, you are eligible to be a Google News source. Once you’re there, it’s harder to get ranked within Google Universal search.
• 6 Ways to Optimize Your SEO for Misspellings – and Why it Pays to be a Bad Speller (Winning the Web): Using examples, Gyutae Park shows the benefits of SEO for typos and how to get traffic.
• News Search Engine Optimization Tips You Should Know (Online Marketing Blog): I think that Lee Odden is onto something with these questions & answers.
• SEO Benchmarks and KPI (Huomah): Key performance indicators, you say? This is all about measuring the success of your efforts. The article is essentially a primer on making that happen.
• Cloaking is Good for You. Just Ignore Bing’s/Google’s Guidelines. (Sebastian’s Pamphlets): Sebastian X makes a good argument about the benefits of cloaking for user experience.

SEO: Information

• 8 SEO Myths Debunked (High Rankings): People don’t have a good sense of what SEO is. This High Rankings article addresses common misconceptions.
• SEO 101 Common Mistakes (David Naylor): Paul Carpenter shows 101 mistakes made on SEO campaigns.
• The Inside Line on SEO (SEO Book): Aaron Wall helps you find the signal from the noise when learning SEO.
• A Comprehensive, Intro to SEO Powerpoint Slide Deck (SEOmoz): New to SEO? After these 150 slides, you’ll feel like you’re ready to tackle the rest of the articles in this “best of” post. Enjoy!
• The 6 Flavors of SEO Your Company Needs (Outspoken Media): Your company needs SEO. All companies do. Here’s how you can visualize that need using people who are likely already working at your company.
• 9 Common SEO Campaign Mistakes (Econsultancy): Beginner SEOs, take note.
• Common B2B SEO Mistakes and How to Solve Them (Online Marketing Blog): B2B’s slow adoption of new technologies often costs them in viable leads. Perceptions need to change.
• The Simple Guide to Freelance SEO the Successful Way (SEO 2.0): Feelancer SEOs, this one’s for you.
• 25 Super Common SEO Mistakes (Search Engine Land): If you’re getting on SEO, you might want to read this.
• Google Experts Answer Your SEO Questions (Digital Inspiration): The “Google experts” are actually Google employees!
• 10 Things to Put in Your SEO Proposal (Conversation Marketing): Ian Lurie sets expectations early in the SEO process by putting things like labor sources in his proposal. I’d love to see one.

Link Building

• Guest Blogging Tips: Link Baiting vs. Guest Posting (Wiep): Wiep talks about content and how to promote it to build links.
• The Link Party is Never Over (Link Spiel): I like how Debra Mastaler “links outside the box.” She says, “I think it’s uber important to be different and push your marketing efforts in areas your competitors are not.” Totally agree.
• 10 Ways All Employees Can Contribute to Link Building (Search Engine Journal): You don’t have to outsource your link building efforts entirely. Your staffers might be able to do things out of the goodness of their hearts… really. Mark Thompson explores the possibilities.
• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis for Campaign Design (Search Engine Land): Ask experts a question, get some great insights. This post shows why link builders should analyze the competition.
• How to Really Build Backlinks and Dominate Google (ViperChill): A great article on how you can build backlinks — with some unique ideas.
• 62 Streps to the Definitive Link Building Campaign (WordTracker): WordTracker wants you to buy an eBook. I just want you to read the tips.
• 74 B2B Link Building Queries for B2B SQO Link Prospecting (Ontolo): B2B websites need link profiles too. Want to find sites to link to? Here are queries you can perform to get some new sites to send requests to.
• 10000 Search Engine Queries for Your Link Building Campaign (SEO Himanshu): As long as these search operators work, you’ll be busy for a LONG time.
• 5 Reasons Why I Won’t Link to Your Website (Wiep): Want a link? You may not get it if your site meets these criteria.
• “Inkbait”: A Case Study in Linkability (Search Engine Land): Infographics and linkbait: what makes them resonate among their target audience? Two pieces of linkbait are compared and key takeaways are shared.
• Link Building with the Experts Interview (Outspoken Media): A really great interview with top notch folks on link building.
• Link Building Tips for Personal Blogs (SEOmoz): What I like about this post: lots of deep information, some non-standard tips, and more.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing

• Developing a PPC Strategic Plan (The Adventure of PPC Hero): Don’t just take on PPC & immediately jump into keyword research. Critical analysis toward the creation of a strategic plan is paramount.
• Understanding & Improving Google AdWords Quality Score (RedFly Marketing): This really is an ultimate guide.
• 3 Steps to Mid-Tail PPC Profitability (Calculate Marketing): If your keywords are highly relevant, you’ll probably see the biggest PPC gains. But what about if the keywords aren’t so relevant?
• Google AdWords Suicide (1upDigital): Some advertisers get so immersed with Google AdWords that they threaten to commit suicide. Don’t let it get that far.
• How to Simplify PPC Management Using Google AdWords Editor (Web Marketing Today): This is a basic but helpful post from Christine Churchill on why the downloadable Google AdWords Editor is valuable for bid management.
• 36 PPC Myths (The Adventure of PPC Hero): A lot of PPC misconceptions explained.
• The Ultimate Guide to Quality Score: 15 PPC Experts Discuss the Nuts and Bolts of Google AdWords Quality Score and How to Improve Yours (WordStream): We’ve got SEO factors from SEOmoz, local search factors from David Mihm (below), and we might as well thank WordStream for their new introduction of PPC factors. Excellent stuff from the biggest experts in the industry.
• PPC Testing Part 2: Optimization Cheat Sheet (Search Engine Land): Want higher CTR? Lower CPCs? More traffic? Better ROI? These considerations from Josh Dreller will help you achieve those objectives.
• Match Types & Quality Score – The Truth at Last (ClickEquations): Craig Danuloff talks about the elusive Quality Score and shows how to improve yours.
• Top 10 PPC Campaign Mistakes (ClickZ): Kevin Lee’s reprint from SES Magazine covers frequent mistakes done in PPC by those just starting out in PPC account management.

Affiliate Marketing

• How I Make Thousands of Dollars Per Month Online (Jonathan Volk): Super affiliate Jonathan Volk wrote an incredible resource. This exhaustive guide covers a lot of great ground!
• Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck (Finch Sells): This post gives beginner affiliates some nice tips on where they should focus their energy.
• Newb Guide Pt 1: What is Affiliate Marketing? (NickyCakes): NickyCakes wrote an 8-post guide to affiliate marketing. At the bottom of each article, there’s a link to progress to the next section. If you’re looking to get started, check this out.
• The Ultimate Guide to PPC Affiliate Marketing (PPC Blog): An introductory article on affiliate marketing — and how your pay per click campaign can benefit the bottom line.
• The “Ugly” Truth (Mr. Green): Ugly ads (and websites) may perform better.
• 5 Mind-Blowing List Building Techniques (Zac Johnson): Building an email marketing list is pretty important for many affiliates. You can do many different things to grow that list, including employing triggers throughout your site, running a list swap, and more.
• 15 Affiliate Marketing Questions Answered by 3 Experts (Daily Blog Tips): Learn affiliate marketing from 3 guys who know their stuff.
• How I Make Thousands of Dollars Per Month Online (ViperChill): Glen Allsopp introduces you to affiliate marketing.
• Kirsty’s Affiliate Analysis Pack – Measure Your Success (Affiliate Stuff): Beginner affiliates will appreciate that Kirsty created these spreadsheets for you to see how you’re doing as an affiliate marketer.
• Top 7 Tips to Make More Money with Amazon Associates (Make Money on the Internet): Chris Guthrie shows you what worked (and what didn’t).
• How to Be an Affiliate with $5 a Day (Justin Dupre): This is a beginner post for affiliates explaining how most of the big players in affiliate marketers got started.
• The Top 6 Pitfalls of Affiliate Marketing for Advertisers (Marketing Pilgrim): Affiliate marketing campaigns may be very challenging. Here is a list of headaches you might be up against.
• How to Find Valid Affiliate Program Reviews (by Real People) (Ace Affiliates): If you do want to go into affiliate marketing, see how other people are rating various programs.

Analytics

• Beginner’s Guide to Web Data Analysis: 10 Steps to Love & Success (Occam’s Razor): Avinash Kaushik gives a tactical and humorous approach toward your first step into evaluating your website’s analytics.
• Examining Site Search Results in Google Analytics (Vertical Measures): Give me a show of hands if you don’t have the site search function enabled in your Google Analytics. Figures. Take a look at the benefits of this functionality.
• 7 Ways Google Analytics Can Help When Redesigning Your Website (iCrossing): Find out who your visitors are & how to develop a great website.
• Small Business Tips for Reporting Web Metrics (Online Marketing Blog): The tips provided in this article are not only applicable to small businesses. They serve a much broader purpose.
• Make Love to Your Direct Traffic (Occam’s Razor): Your direct traffic consists of people who proactively seek you out, so acknowledge them.
• 4 Questions with Avinash Kaushik: Kick-Ass Web Analytics (Bruce Clay): Avinash Kaushik is the father of web analytics as far as I’m concerned, so he can dominate this section all I want.
• Google Analytics: Event Tracking vs. Virtual Pageviews (Web SEO Analytics): If tracking users is important, implement these suggestions to improve site performance.
• Segmenting Social Traffic in Google Analytics (SEOmoz): Ever want to know how to tweak Google Analytics to get some deeper data on social traffic?
• Using Real Time Analtyics to Enhance Viral Campaigns (The Google Cache): If you’re active in the social networking scene, especially on some of the social news and bookmarking sites, real time data helps you understand and continue the momentum. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
• Using Google Analytics to Prove the SEO Long Tail Theory (Neil Walker): Neil tackles the question, “Does a longer keyword actually give a better conversion rate?” and shows you how to process that data for the answer.
• 10 Fundamental Web Analytics Truths: Embrace ‘Em and Win Big (Occam’s Razor): Lots of people spread misinformation about analytics. This post sets them straight.

Usability

• Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users (Think Vitamin): Psychology & design are closely associated. Rewarding your users with positive emotion builds trust & engagement. It allows people to be your brand advocates.
• The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing (Smashing Magazine): Two versions of a website: which performs better?
• Does Your Website Add Features or Solve Problems? (Brian Cray): Twitter is one of the simplest sites and is worth billions. Simplify & succeed, says Brian.
• What is User Experience Design? Overview, Tools, and Resources (Smashing Magazine): The detail in a Smashing Magazine article is extensive. Just take a look at the information here!
• 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies (Six Revisions): Common sense + data = news you can use. That’s what this article gives you with graphs to back up every claim.
• Overcoming the Obstacles of Usability Testing (UX Booth): Usability testing is here to stay, and the problems of the past no longer plague us. There are easy ways to implement usability tests on your site, so take advantage of them.
• The Definitive How to Guide for Conversion Rate Optimization (SEOmoz): Stephen Pavlovich gives wonderful tips on how he’s successfully improved conversion rates of his clients, even in highly competitive fields.
• Usability Testing is Broken: Rethinking User Research for Social Interaction Design (Usability Testing): Dana Chisnell points out flaws in designing the social web, referncing Google Buzz privacy violations. There’s a lot more to consider in today’s Internet.
• Designing for a Hierarchy of Needs (Smashing Magazine): This post takes Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and shows how it can be translated to design.

Landing Pages

• 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips (Unbounce): In this post, Oli Gardner provides “our authoritative, definitive, essential, and ultimate collection of 101 Landing Page Optimization tips.” Take a look and tell me if you agree.
• How to Design a Landing Page to be Conversion Focused (The Web Squeeze): This article takes you into landing pages vs. land & jump pages vs. microsites and debunks some of the myths surrounding great landing page design.
• How We Made $1 Million for SEOmoz with One Landing Page and a Few Emails (Conversion Rate Experts): Some case studies are just too good.
• How to Maximize Your Click-Through Rate and Add More Control to Your Landing Pages Using Ad Sitelinks (Redfly Marketing): This is a combination of paid search and landing page optimization, where you can create ad sitelinks and then choose the landing pages that appear to the user. It’s an interesting tactic because your ads get more real estate & higher CTR.
• Landing Page Optimization Tips: Analysis of 50+ Sites to Find Out What Increases Sales and Conversions (Visual Website Optimizer): Ask a social network and you shall receive. One company got requests to evaluate 50+ sites and found out some flaws in their landing page design. Here are common errors and how you can learn from them to better landing pages.
• 10 Ways to “Guarantee” More Sales and Conversions (KISSmetrics): Which landing page designs ensure you get sales? There are at least 10 out there!
• 25 Google Website Optimizer Tips for Better Product Pages (The Official Google Website Optimizer Blog): Khalid Saleh writes an excellent piece on conversion rate optimization, addressing various things you can change to ensure your site gets the best conversions.
• 10 Techniques for an Effective Call to Action (Boagworld): I read Boagworld when keeping up with one of my clients’ industries, and the content is top notch.
• 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Landing Page Conversions (Performable): Get some immediate results with these takeaways.
• 3 Tips for Building an Effective Landing Page (HubSpot): Encourage users to click on your calls to action.
• Why Landing Page Optimization is Crucial and How to Start (Bruce Clay): Ever have good rankings but an awful bounce rate? Time to consider landing page optimization!

Local/Mobile Search

 
• 13 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Local SEO Consultant (Search Engine Land): I like the variety of questions by Andrew Shotland, though I think it’s not a locals only discussion.
• Mobile Search: What You Need to Know (1upDigital): With more smartphone users in the wild, mobile optimization becomes increasingly important.
• Local Search Ranking Factors (David Mihm): As always, David Mihm comes out with a fabulous guide on what SEO experts believe are the elements that impact local search engine rankings.
• Principles for a Review Plan: Considerations in Encouraging Customer Reviews (Blumenthals): Mike Blumenthal created a matrix of considerations should you be interested in implementing reviews on your (local) website.
• Local Search Marketing Using Foursquare (Rynoweb): All brick and mortar companies should start seriously considering a social media strategy that includes Foursquare. If you’ve glossed over the social media sites and came here, hopefully you’ve considered the importance of using some social media elements to connect face-to-face with your customers!
• How to Launch that Web Site in 2011 (Outspoken Media): If you know anything about Google Local, you’ll know that every tip Lisa gives you in this post will be applicable for months or years to come.
• 23 Ways to Slam Dunk Your Mobile Conversions (for the Holidays) (Search Engine Land): Even though this headline is about the holidays, the takeaways from this article are good for all time. Shift your perception if you have a website; mobile is here to stay.
• Online Reputation Management Strategies – The “Rate Us” Page and Local Reviews (BuzzMaven): Scott Clark covers the gamut of customer reviews and explains why they are necessary.

(Personal) Branding

• When YOU Are the Brand (Chris Brogan): Chris Brogan’s food for thought for building your personal or business brand.
• How to Build Your Brand Working for Someone Else (Bruce Clay): There’s always fear that you can’t build your own brand when you’re not your own boss. Some employers might not let you. Others might once you get the permission. Here’s how to make it work while respecting your company.
• Madonna’s 6 Secrets to Personal Branding Mastery (Copyblogger): Yes, Madonna. Despite her reputation for whatever she’s doing, one can learn a few lessons from her for their personal OR corporate brand.
• Managing the Conflict Between a Personal Brand and a Corporate Brand (Britopian): If you want to build one brand while promoting the other, such as your personal brand while focusing on a corporate brand, it’s important to mend the 2 together by putting ego aside & being aware of your surroundings. It can be done. Michael Brito did it, didn’t he?
• Are Personal Brands for Moguls, Morons, or Megalomaniacs? (Jonathan Fields): Deep thoughts by Jonathan Fields on personal branding.
• How to Build a Potent Brand (6 Clues) (Personal Branding Blog): Here are questions and answers to evaluate when building the brand.
• 50 Seriously Great Tips to Elevate Your Personal Brand (Thought Changer): Cindy Yantis has a long list of things you can do to strike a home run in the personal branding department.
• You Don’t Know Jack About Branding (Hyder Media): Kenny Hyder gives us things to consider when building and consistently promoting any type of brand.
• Top 10 Branding Mandates (Branding Strategy Insider): Personal or corporate, a brand must live up to these expectations to thrive and survive.
• Personal Branding – Make Yourself the “Go To” Person in Your Local Niche Market (Small Business Advertising): …or how to be the Kleenex of your niche. (Or Band-Aid. I like Band-Aids.)
• The 7 Keys to Social Branding (Conversation Agent): Tamsen McMahon explains the elements to building a strong brand, and that it’s important to look at it through a social lens.

Building a Brand/Brand Evangelism

• Why Social Media is Perfect for Brand Ambassador Campaigns (Mashable): Fifteen years, five case studies, and their takeaways.
• Humanizing Business & Brands: Your Ambassador Ecosystem (Logic+Emotion): Instead of focusing externally on creating ambassadors for your company, focus your sights internally. David Armano lists the various company segments that can be tapped into the role of ambassador for the marketplace.
• How to Convert Your Facebook Superfans into Brand Ambassadors (GigaOM): Because Facebook always comes up when discussing just about everything brand evangelism nowadays, we must take advantage of those fans.
• How to Create a Customer Advocacy Program (Forbes): Tapping into the voices of your customers is an important way to scale, increase credibility, and demonstrate commitment to customers, according to Jeremiah Owyang.
• How Do You Recognize and Attract Heroes and Champions for Your Brand? (Successful Blog): Liz Strauss tells you how you can identify those folks who are “waiting to lead,” because then they already love what you do, and they can help bring your business to much greater heights.
• How to: Activate Your Brand’s Super Influencers (Mashable): Ben Straley teaches you how to evangalize your community.
• 4 Great Examples of Brand Ambassador Programs (Ignite Social Media): Don’t understand what this section is about? Here are some companies that are leveraging their community as brand ambassadors and succeeding.
• Toolkit for Launching a Social Media Ambassador Program (The Social Workplace): Elizabeth Lupfer on how a company can build enthusiasm about their products/services via an advocacy program.
• Understanding and Activating Your True Fans (Conversation Agent): Looking at buisnesses as the tribe, is it possible to build fandom around such an entity?

Public Relations

• Why PRs Can Be Better Link Builders than SEOs (Econsultancy): Lots of link builders do nothing to work on relationships with the people they’re asking for links from, so they don’t have that edge that public relations folks do.
• 25 Tips from 25 PR Experts (eReleases): Here are short tips from the experts in public relations.
• Developing a PR Plan (Entrepreneur): How to get publications to talk about you: create a solid PR plan.
• Getting Press for Your Website Application or Service (Shoemoney): This is a humorous post on how to get press mentions. Take (most of) it to heart.
• The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases (Adam Sherk): Techipedia, the top leader, has been awarded the best unique solution with its award winning posts. That’s the idea of this list. I don’t think it will change through 2011, I have to say, so it qualifies as evergreen content.
• Katie Paine’s Dirty Dozen Public Relations Measurement Mistakes (The Measurement Standard): In PR, you might mess up, and chances are, you’ll pick up and be all the more better for it. If you can share the lessons learned with everyone else, that’d a really generous and wonderful thing.
• How to Write a Social Media Press Release (Inc.): In this day and age, press releases need a little more oomph to stand out among the crowd. A social media press release is the answer to this problem.
• 10 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now to Get Publicity (Get In Front Communications): Whether it’s leveraging your internal staff or doing a bit of research into the industry, there are many things you can do to get publicity for yourself or your clients.
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Leave PR to the Pros (BNET): Here’s why public relations should be handled by pros.

Community Management/Engagement

• How to Build an Online Community for Your Business (Flat Rate Biz): How to build online communities: help others and they’ll help you.
• 12 Keys to Building Your Online Community (The Rise to the Top): David Garland explains how to make your community rise to the top!
• Gamification: What is it and Why Do You Need to Know? (Stephanie Schwab): Brands should create community-focused game experiences out of their marketing efforts.
• How Are You Measuring Your Community (Outspoken Media): Are you taking advantage of your community? Here are metrics to track.
• 8 Things to Avoid When Building a Community (Mashable): Leah Betancourt talks about the things to avoid when engaging community participants.
• Building An Online Community: How to Start from 0 Members (FeverBee): If you have an audience, you’re pretty lucky. If you’re not, this guide should explain how to get to a community that actually has a few people.
• The Mind of a Community Manager (CommunityGuy): Jake McKee looks at two well known quotes & applies them to the job of a community manager with thought-provoking takeaways.
• How to Prevent a Community from Growing On Your Site (Small Business Trends): Building community is great, but you could also stifle the growth of your community too. Pay attention to Lisa’s tips.
• 10 Fresh Tips for Community Managers (Mashable): If you’re managing a community (in Jolie O’Dell’s words, you’re “social media junkie with oodles of personality who’s trying to balance marketing-driven execs with ego-tripping power users while still trying to maintain some semblance of a personal life”), then you might want to read this to preserve your sanity.

Entrepreneurship

• 8 Pivotal Lessons for the Budding Entrpereneur (EpicLaunch): Starting off as an entrepreneur might be a huge challenge, but pulling through it could reap huge rewards. Here’s the advice from someone who has been at it for 18 months.
• The 12 Dysfunctions of an Entrepreneur (Jonathan Fields): This post needs needs an introductory paragraph, but in its absence, I’ll say that these are the missteps you might make when you’re going into entrepreneurship.
• 7 Lessons Learned from Monetizing Quick Sprout (Quick Sprout): Neil tells us about the lessons made when monetizing his site, which is a lot more than just a blog. Since many entrepreneurs here are likely focused on online properties, I thought it’d be a good category fit.
• How to Quit Your Job When You’re Flat Broke (Even When Your Wife is Scared Shitless) (Escaping Mediocrity): I really like Genuine Chris Johnson’s post on how he’s been able to make debt into profit.
• How To Become Legendary- 23 Things Michael Jordan Taught Me About Entrepreneurship (OnStartups): Sports fanatic Jason Baptiste applies his knowledge of the basketball great to how to grow farther as an entrepreneur.
• Are You Making These Business Mistakes? (Quick Sprout): Successful business owners are asked about some of their biggest mistakes — so that you can avoid doing the same thing.
• Young Entrepreneur Advice: 100 Things You Must Know (Under30CEO): The question “what do you wish you knew before you started a business?” is asked to 100 different business owners. Here’s what they said. (Unfortunately, I’m not under 30 anymore…)
• Interview: 12 Top Entrepreneurs Share How Hard They Work (Daily Blog Tips): Think it’s easy being on your own? Think again. Very few entrepreneurs see a <40 hour work week.
• 5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Take on Big Companies (EpicLaunch): A niche focus or avoiding attachment to one model — these are ways you can take entrepreneurship to the next level.
• Commit To Your Core: 9 Reasons Why Every Entrepreneur Should Outsource (OnStartups): Scott Dinsmore explains why entrepreneurs will move ahead when they outsource. I’ve always been afraid to do it mostly for a fear of losing control, but I have also seen the benefits!

General Online Marketing

• An In Depth Guide to Creating Small Websites that Rank Well (SEOish): An excellent writeup from Pat Sexton on getting websites to rank well… maybe for some monetary gain.
• How to Use the “7 Deadly Sins” to Turn Visitors into Customers (Smashing Magazine): Showing examples with existing sites, this article goes great lengths to show how pride, gluttony, sloth, and other sins have helped companies convert visitors into customers.
• 10 Ways to Reduce Friction in Your Purchase Process (Problogger): By reducing friction or obstacles that may be hindering direct purchases, you might be able to get more people to buy your products.
• Lessons Learned from Helping Over 150 Startups with Marketing Part 1: Fundamentals (insight.io): Ilya Lichtenstein has a good three part guide (you can get part 2/3 right above the headline of the article) on how startups can be successful with their marketing initiatives, with topics covering targeting, media buys, and building traction.
• Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing (SEOmoz): I like this post for its sound advice; I also am about to launch a new website (stay tuned!) so I’ve found this checklist really handy.
• How to Become an Email Marketing Genius: The Simmer (Andy Sernovitz): Andy Sernovitz has a very strong point when he talks about effective selling via newsletters. Get them to read forever. Simple.
• Common Online Business Mistakes (from the experts) (SEO Aware): Melissa Fach asked some of the industry’s most well known folks what mistakes they see online businesses committing. Here’s the roundup.
• What is the Best Way to Learn Internet Marketing? (Dream Systems Media): Mat Siltala has an introductory post on what you need to do to get started in the word of online marketing.
• The Three Phases of a Successful Online Marketing Strategy (Samir Balwani): Samir discusses three phases of digital maturity broken down into owned/paid/earned/shared media elements, from creating a website to establishing an advertising campaign to building a strong online presence and more.
• I Spread Your Idea Because… (Seth Godin): Or: why things are usually viral.

Everything Else Under the Sun

• Leveraging Mechanical Turk, oDesk, Elance, and Craigslist for SEO (SEOmoz): This could go under SEO, but this post discusses interesting outsourcing tactics that have additional implications beyond just SEO. The comments provide additional resources as well. I’ll throw in a project I’m involved in called Entreave (US-based outsourcing) which is poised to be awesome.
• The Great Influence Debate (The Mountaintop): What I like about this post is the detail put into assessing what influence really is, especially the 7 forms outlined in the article.
• How to Organize a Retreat (Seth Godin): Just reading about the suggestions in this post by Seth Godin makes me want to attend a retreat. I’d love for conferences to be crafted this way.
• 15 Small Business Lessons from Richard Branson (OPENForum): Entrepreneur Richard Branson knows a lot, and now you’ve been imparted with his wisdom. Use it well.
• 10 Internet Legends Everyone Should Know (SEO 2.0): No, this isn’t about the people of the Internets that you must know about. These are the myths of the WWW.
• Step-By-Step Guide for Launching a Virtual Product (StayOnSearch): Need help launching a virtual product? This guide shows you the entire process, from creation to launch.
• Want to Invest in Domains? Here are 7 Golden Rules (Daily Blog Tips): How do you make the most money off domain names? An expert domainer tells all.
• Top 10 Myths About Domain Names (DotSauce): Social profiles will replace domain names? Really? That and other myths are debunked in this article.
• How (and Why) to Calculate Lifetime Value Per Visitor (Online Marketing Today): Justin Handley explains why customer lifetime value is important to your business & why it’s important for determine how much to invest into your paid advertising campaigns.

And in case 300 wasn’t enough, here’s the best 2010 posts on Techipedia:

• 3 Golden Business Rules for Social Media Engagement: The biggest flaws of social media are often repeated by well-intentioned businesses. These are easy fixes.
• Internet Marketing Advice for Beginners: This is a great introductory post on all the various elements of Internet Marketing.
• How to Get an Influencer’s Attention: The most popular post of 2010: I asked 40+ social media influencers how to get their attention, and they gave me their $0.10.
• 11 Characteristics of Highly Influential Blog(ger)s: Building a blog is not so difficult when applying these crucial skills.
• 7 Truths About Social Media Marketing: Everyone is being sold on the hype that is social media. I’d like to tell you the truth about it.
• Social Media Strategy from A to Z: This is by no means a comprehensive guide of social media interaction, but it definitely should give you a thought process about your involvement.
• No, You Can’t Automate Social Media: Automation is okay in limited quantities, but if you’re caught doing this, people will know.
• How to Use Facebook for Business and Marketing: One influencer told her followers that I should have sold this post as an eBook. I’m giving it to you for free.
• Is Social Media Becoming Boring?: Some people are sick of social media. You?
• 7 Traits of Highly Effective Viral Videos: How can you get your video to stand out?
• Why Most People Fail in Social Media: In this post, I share a few stories about people who don’t get social media, and what they can do to change that.

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Closing Thoughts

It’s been a great year. My son is thriving and just started walking. He brings a lot of great joy to our family. My book has been published in three languages: Italian, Portuguese, and German, and the German editorial team is already working on a second edition. I’ve been involved in some incredible projects, including plans for my own social startup (to be announced), and I think there will even be another one in the works very soon.

I’m starting to act as an advisor on several new social projects created by some highly motivated colleagues and peers; the social space looks extremely promising and there’s no shortage of some excellent things coming our way these next few months. I’m open to working with you on your social startups, so please be in touch.

I’m always interested in hearing about how I can help you on your business at any level, so please do connect with me and let’s see what we can do together.

Best wishes to you, your colleagues, and your families this year!

Photos by Shutterstock.

This post takes me an entire year to write due to reading and reviewing the posts and ultimately compiling them, and therefore consumes hundreds of hours of time. Since it happens every single year, please do not reproduce this on your site in any format. If you’d like to share this with your audience, please link to the post.

Oh, and if you like this post and/or want to say happy 30, I’m finally throwing in my Amazon Wishlist.

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2010 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Kwame Boame. Follow him on Twitter.

If you look around the social web a lot like me, you will agree that most social media campaigns suck. Some people think social media is just fun. Some however see it as an opportunity. What do you think about using social media for business? I hope you are still not confused by the whole concept.

If your business is already on the social web, you will need something to help you improve on your campaigns. You will need an audit.

When you audit your social presence, you will be able to make better business decisions when it comes to social media. You will be able to gather enough data from your own campaigns to help you improve your online marketing.

We are going to go through a series of questions that will help you in your audit. The audit has been divided into parts so that it will be easy for you to take notes.

Grab a pen and paper or open your word editor and let’s begin.

Branding

• Are my profiles complete? Make sure all your social media profiles are complete with the most relevant information. Fill out your bio by saying something about what people do with your brand. It’s all about your target audience; not just about you.
• Do I have exclusive profiles for my brand? If you have your brand name as your Twitter handle and a portrait photo of you on your profile, you are getting it all wrong. People want to be able to identify your brand. They don’t want to get to know the CEO. You can introduce yourself another way, another day. Get rid of your photo and put your logo there.
• Do I have custom profile landing pages? Custom landing pages can increase your social media efforts. You may want to create a custom Twitter background, custom Facebook fan page landing tab (with FBML) and custom YouTube channel backgrounds.
• Are my profiles well branded? Don’t give your brand another image by mixing things up. I have seen people mix up colors on their YouTube Channels, Twitter profiles, and Facebook fan pages. For example, they use a green background on Twitter, black background on their YouTube channels and maybe red on their Facebook fan page landing tabs. They completely ignore their brand colors of green and white (or blue or white maybe). A situation like this confuses people and makes it difficult to identify your brand. If your colors are green and white, use those colors all over your social profiles.

(And that was the UK. In 2008.)

Integration Audit

• Am I integrating my social media profiles? Can you please share your Twitter feeds on LinkedIn? (Just not like this.) How about telling your Twitter followers what is up on your Facebook fan page? When you integrate your profiles, you help build the relationships you have already started on each social site. It helps build loyalty, generate conversations, and it also gets you more followers if you do it right.
• Do I have social media integration on my business blog? If you have a business blog, you have to integrate your social media profiles on it. Ask your blog’s readers to follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your YouTube channel, add you on LinkedIn, or “Like” you on Facebook. There are plugins that can help you do that. Also, you should consider sharing your Twitter feeds and Facebook updates on your blog’s sidebar.
• Am I integrating offline marketing with my social profiles? You can promote your social media profiles by integrating offline media. You could have a T-shirt for Twitter, one for Facebook and one for YouTube. Your Twitter T-shirt could have your handle printed on it. For example, I’ll put “I tweet. Follow me @Sociatic” on my Twitter shirt. Make your handle big and bold so people can see it. Think of places you could wear your T-shirts to. You could also add your social media profile URLs on your business cards, in your catalogues, on your flyers, etc.

(Get this shirt style here).

• Am I integrating on other networks? When you write guest posts, do you include that people should check you out on the Twitter or Facebook in your byline? Do you do any guest posting at all? Consider integrating your social profiles on blogs.  Another way you can integrate is using your social profile URLs as your website when leaving comments.

Content Audit

• What types of updates do I share? Do you share other updates relevant to your followers? Do your updates request for conversations? I have seen people share their family holiday plan on their business Twitter profile. That’s not the way to go. Your updates can make or break your business. Be careful what you share.
• How many times do I update in a day? It is not necessary to update 50 times a day. When you have nothing to say, don’t update. When you do, they are not genuine because you had to actually think about something to write when you had nothing to say. When you have something to say though, you can think about how to put deliver it; maybe you will want to add some emotional angles.
• Do I hard sell with my updates? Do you always tell people to “buy now”, “buy before midnight”, “For the first 300 people”, etc? What you should do is to be insightful, insightful, insightful… and then “New price reduction on our favorite product, “X”. Visit http://shorturl.com to take advantage.”
• What feedback do I get from my followers concerning my updates? People are definitely saying something about what your business is saying or doing on the web. What are they saying about it? What do they complain about? What do they praise you for? I hope you still have that pen and paper in your hand.
• Do I have bait? Do you have something you can give out for free? Give it out to the people who take the action you want them to take. Examples of baits are: graphics, eBooks, whitepapers, scripts, website themes, coupon codes, etc.

Measurement Audit

• What part of my social activities do I measure? If you haven’t already, get measurement tools to measure all your social activities. The data will let you know where you are effective and where you suck. Some tools you can use are Social Mention, Trackur, and PostRank. You can also get Google Analytics installed on your Facebook Fan page. Facebook Analytics for domains was recently announced as well.
• Do I have alerts set up to notify me of brand mentions? If you don’t have alerts set up to notify you of conversations involving your brand, do it now. You can use Google Alerts or Social Mention’s alert feature. I prefer Social Mention because they are more thorough than Google.
• What social media site gives me the most traffic? According to your web analytics, what social media site gets you more traffic? Why do you think you keep getting traffic from that site?
• What social media site gives me the most leads? What social media site gives you the most leads? You should track this too. Don’t assume the site that brings you more traffic gives you the most leads. This is wrong. Sometimes the site that gives you less traffic gives you the most leads.

Overall Campaign

• How much time do I put into social media? You need to know the average time you put into social media every week or every month. This is going to help you realize how much time you are utilizing or wasting on social media depending on your results.
• What results am I getting from it? Are you reaping great benefits from your social efforts? Are you getting ROI on your investments on the social web? Don’t give up if the results are not good. Social Media marketing is about building relationships and conversations. Building relationships takes time so you have to give it enough time before you will see good ROI.
• What is working for me? What activities bring you more positive results? What works for you in terms of generating leads? What social media site works for you best? What types of bait brings you more leads? Analyze every part of your social media efforts and write down what’s working.
• What is not working for me? Now list all the things that are not working for you in your campaign. What bait is not working? What social media sites are not working? Write all of them down. No, don’t quit them yet. Make some changes to them and measure it another day. If it still doesn’t work, quit it.
• How effective is my overall campaign? From your results, determine whether your campaign has been successful. After you decide that, decide what’s next for you and your campaign.
• Should I get help? Did you get great results all by yourself? If you did, I bet you will love to do it again. If your campaign wasn’t successful, would you outsource it or rather learn more about social media on your own so that you can do it yourself? Put some thought into it and decide.

Conclusion

Did you finish up all the ink in your pen? Yeah, that’s good. It means you got a lot of ideas from the audit. It will be best to re-plan your social media campaigns. Divide your plans into days. You can make a 30 day plan or 45 day plan to improve your social media campaigns. Your plan should be based on your audit; both the good sides and bad sides.

What other questions will you ask yourself in a social media audit?

Kwame Boame is a marketing consultant who blogs about brand communication on his blog, Sociatic.

First photo by Shutterstock. All other photos are linked to their respective pages on Flickr.

[ How to Audit Your Social Media Efforts: 20+ Questions to Ask Yourself is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.