Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg » Social Media

5 Things I’ve Learned from Running BizSugar

Guest Author — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:03:55 +0000

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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Attack of the Consumer! The Many Ways Consumers Can Put You Out of Business Online

Guest Author — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:04:02 +0000

This is a guest post by David Rodnitzky.

Having the best prices and largest selection of products means nothing on the Internet if you don’t back it up with incredible customer service. Treat customers badly and you will be out of business – period! Bad customer service will get you banned from major advertising networks, skewered in organic results, and ridiculed on social networks. Here are the top ways consumers can crush your business online.

Advertising Bans

If consumers complain about your business, your money won’t be green enough to buy advertising online. Both eBay and Amazon uses customer reviews as a baseline metric of eligibility to participate in their marketplace.

On eBay, too many negative customer reviews will get a seller kicked off, or in eBay terms, the seller will be declared “Not a Registered User.”

I once worked for a company that had been kicked off eBay and Amazon for bad customer service (not my fault, honest!). It took eight monthsand hundreds of pages of documentation to get us back on both sites. Had I not had personal connections at both companies, it’s unlikely I would ever have gotten the company back into the listings.Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) also use customer ratings to reward good performers and push bad performers out of the results. Most CSEs have a “trusted” or “approved” rating system that is designed to give consumers guidance on which vendor to choose, especially when price is not an issue. Shopping.com, for example, will list the vendor with the combination of the lowest price and the best customer reviews first in its results. As seen in the screenshot below, the store is called out as a “Smart Buy!” and is listed first.

Google AdWords advertisers are increasingly being held accountable for the quality of their customer service. Google has integrated star ratings from consumer review sites like Epinions or Biz Rate – but only sites with four out of five stars or greater results get an extra line in AdWords with their star ratings. If you saw five ads on AdWords and four of them had star ratings next to them, would you click on the one that didn’t?

Google is also starting to integrate “+1’s” into AdWords results, just as Facebook has integrated “likes” into Facebook ads. These social extensions are another way to give consumers an indication of whether a potential advertiser is delivering value prior to a click.

And Google reserves the right to suspend any advertiser’s AdWords account if it concludes that the advertiser is treating customers poorly. This is broadly defined to include anything from unclear landing pages, a lack of a privacy policy, misleading ads, or unclear billing practices. Suffice to say, if you are operating in a grey area of customer service, there’s a decent chance that Google will block you entirely from running AdWords ads.

Organic Search and the Voice of the Consumer

There used to be an adage that stated something like “a satisfied customer will tell three people about your business, a dissatisfied customer will tell ten.” These days, the voice of the angry customer has been dramatically amplified through review sites like Yelp and PowerReviews, as well as the built in reviews on commerce sites like Amazon.

Let’s start with Yelp. A recent Harvard Business School study found that increasing a restaurant’s Yelp rating by one star directly led to a 5 to 9% increase in annual revenue for the restaurant. That’s not surprising, considering how much Google’s organic results love Yelp. With almost 7.5 million pages indexed, there’s a high likelihood that whatever restaurant, plumber, or manicurist name you enter into Google, Yelp will be at the top of the results. And for users who have yet to decide on a specific vendor, Yelp’s listings – as with CSEs above – are sorted based on the quality and quantity of positive reviews. Bad customer service gets you pushed out of Yelp’s results.

Products are not immune to the power of customer reviews in organic search. Type in virtually any product and the odds are that you’ll find Amazon’s customer reviews prominently listed:

And even if you don’t type “review” as part of your query, Google’s Instant Search algorithm will frequently suggest a review-related query to you:

Social Media Mass Mobilization

Social media appears to have been a godsend for angry consumers. In the old days before the Internet, angry consumers had little recourse if they were mistreated by a company. These days, one bad customer experience is all it takes to destroy your company’s good reputation.

One broken guitar (and a lack of empathetic customer service) resulted in over 11 million views on YouTube of the catchy jingle United Breaks Guitars. A decision by GoDaddy to support the Stop Online Privacy Act led to an online petition on Reddit (and partially instigated by Tamar) that got thousands of domain owners to transfer their domains off GoDaddy, a revenue loss of around $370,000 a year. NetFlix’s sudden and dramatic increase in prices led to massive consumer backlash, including 67,000 negative comments on their Facebook page. Need I go on? How about Verizon’s decision (and quick retraction) to add a $2 convenience fee, or Bank of America charging $5 to consumers to use debit cards.

Social media makes it easy for like-minded consumers to band together and amplify their message, it spreads rapidly, and it always feels more genuine than the talking heads from a corporate PR team. As a result, we’re seeing large corporations closely monitoring any complaints on social media, and addressing them in hours, instead of weeks or months.

So What Does This Mean?

Let’s quickly recap: if you provide bad customer service, you could be kicked off all the major online advertising channels, the organic search results might be filled with horrendous reviews of your business, and you might be ridiculed or worse by millions on social media. To put it another way: as a business, you can no longer control the message that gets out about your products and services; provide bad service and you are almost certain to be paid back in kind with negativity online.

The solution to this ‘threat’ is really quite simple: provide great customer service! Love and listen to your customers! Read and adopt Zappos’ code of ethics. Conduct and act upon a Net Promoter Survey. If you aren’t actively working to “wow” your customers, you’re probably dying a slow, gradual death. You can hire the best agency, an awesome SEO genius, and an army of social media gurus – all of this talent cannot stop consumers from telling the world the truth about your business.

David Rodnitzky is CEO of PPC Associates, a leading SEM agency. Follow him on Twitter @rodnitzky or visit his AdWords blog.

[ Attack of the Consumer! The Many Ways Consumers Can Put You Out of Business Online is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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How to Hire Your Social Media Marketing Partner

Guest Author — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:51:38 +0000

This is a guest post by Brad Shorr. Want more? See How to Hire Your SEO Partner from November.

After taking the social media plunge, companies quickly discover that it is vastly more complicated and time-consuming than they thought. The normal response is,

HELP!

But companies must avoid a panicky response, because hiring a social media marketing (SMM) partner requires careful study. As I’ll run down in a minute, SMM involves a wide range of activities that require totally different skills. So,

First, we’ll take a look at what the activities are, to help clarify the type of support you need.
Then, I’ll review your best SMM support options.
In conclusion, I’ll offer several suggestions of what to look for in a potential SMM partner.

Social Media Marketing Activities and Skills

There are any number of ways to slice and dice social media activities. This is basically how our agency organizes the work. (If I’ve left out anything, your comments and suggestions would be most appreciated!)

Pre-launch SMM Activities

Strategy involves competitive research, benchmarking, messaging, audience identification, determining platforms for engagement, setting overall program and conversion goals, and setting up metrics. It requires experience and analytical skills.
Setup and implementation involves setting up and optimizing company pages within each platform, designing landing pages for offers, and creating editorial calendars and syndication schedules. Required skills include web design, web development, conversion optimization, editing, and familiarity with the platforms.

Ongoing SMM Activities

Content creation is original text, images, video or HTML content created for publication on Twitter, Facebook, the company blog, etc. Writers need to understand SEO copywriting and have the ability to write in a conversational and engaging style. Skill in videography, photography and web design may also come into play.
Content syndication involves the actual publishing and sharing of content on social media platforms. This requires a lot of organization and repetitive activity.
Social media monitoring is the systematic procedure, ideally executed in real time, of scouring social platforms for mentions of your company and perhaps competitors or other topics. People doing this work need to be comfortable with repetitive work but also savvy enough to respond to tweets and otherwise represent the company on social platforms.
Engagement and community building is the time-consuming task of connecting with relevant social media participants. It’s about finding the right Twitter followers, managing a Facebook ad campaign, and attracting blog subscribers and members of LinkedIn Groups. It requires creativity, experience with a variety of platforms, and very good communication skills.
Optimization is a set of activities aimed at increasing the visibility of your social content on search engines and within social platforms. This work requires a basic understanding of SEO and keyword research, along with an intimate knowledge of the mechanics of how information is shared on the various social platforms.
Reporting and continuous improvement involves capturing the appropriate social data (e.g., Twitter mentions, Facebook Likes, referred traffic), analyzing it, and then acting on the information. This is a strategic exercise that takes a fair amount of technical skill to set up.

Companies usually discover they have some, but not all, of the necessary resources in-house. They may have great strategists, but no personnel available to do the grunt work. More typically – at least in B2B – there are people who can handle day-to-day activities but nobody with a strong grasp of strategy or SMM best practices.

Once you know what you need, where do you turn for help?

SMM Support Options

By now, most big traditional ad agencies have SMM departments. They generally fit well with large consumer brands, especially if they are existing clients. They have the ability to support you in any or all of the areas I just described, but are probably looking for a very broad scope of engagement. The advantage here is, or should be, full integration with all advertising activities. Possible downsides are cost and lack of flexibility.
Fully dedicated SMM agencies are much smaller shops that focus exclusively or primarily on social media. They may specialize in B2B, B2C, particular size companies, particular industries or even particular platforms. They, too, are probably looking for broad scope engagements, but not necessarily. The advantage here is, or should be, a very high level of expertise and creativity. A possible downside is difficulty integrating with other marketing activities.
Many Internet marketing agencies, including mine, offer SMM in addition to SEO, PPC and other widely used services. A major advantage here is solid integration with other Internet marketing activities. A possible disadvantage is less sophistication than what a specialty shop would offer.
The world is full of freelancers who specialize in one or more areas of SMM. These people are, or should be, extremely knowledgeable in their area of expertise, and are also extremely flexible in how they work with you. Flexibility is definitely an advantage; a possible disadvantage, not likely with the other three options, is that you could wind up with a team comprised of several outside and independent resources.

As I see it, these are the major options companies (or entrepreneurs) have at their disposal. Again, if I’ve left anything out – please share your knowledge with us in comments.

What to Look for in an SMM Partner

Understanding the types of resources that are available should help you identify agencies or freelancers that fit your situation. Once you’ve done that, here are ways you can drill down to the SMM partner that fits best.

Size matters. You don’t want to be a small fish in a big pond. How important will you be as a client? It can be frustrating to be a small fish, but on the other hand …
Scalability. The other side of the size coin is this: Can the SMM grow with you as your social media program gains momentum? I suppose the best advice is to be toward the top, but not at the top, of your partner’s client list.
Can you be a happy cookie? Some organizations are eager to customize a program entirely around your needs; others offer fairly regimented, cookie-cutter programs; many more are in between. Make sure your SMM partner has a process that suits your taste.
Are their resources in-house? Bringing in an agency or freelancer who then has to farm out parts of the assignment is a little too fuzzy and wobbly for my taste. Communication breakdowns and discontinuity can cause things to go haywire in a hurry.
Communication. Speaking of communication … unless you have a zero-engagement strategy (and they exist), it’s a horrible idea to totally outsource your program: somebody (preferably somebodies) within your organization needs to interact with your community and guide strategy in order for you to attain any level of authenticity. With this in mind, you and your SMM partner will need to communicate on many levels, very often. Chemistry is key.
Expertise. Anybody can (and seemingly everybody does) claim to be a SMM expert. Don’t take such claims at face value; instead, ask for work samples, case studies, credentials.
Relevant experience. Once you’ve established expertise, next find out if the agency/freelancer has achieved results in your niche or in a related niche. Get specifics: you don’t want to be an unsuspecting guinea pig.
Documented process. Any SMM expert should have a documented workflow process. If this is absent, you will have constant trouble understanding what you’re getting for your money.

Over to You: What factors would you consider most strongly when selecting a SMM partner?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content and Social Media for Straight North, an Internet marketing, Chicago based agency. They work with B2B firms in industries such as military fire resistant clothes and food contract manufacturing.

[ How to Hire Your Social Media Marketing Partner is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011

Tamar Weinberg — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:19:57 +0000

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 R esearch: …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.

How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies

Guest Author — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:50:49 +0000

This is a guest post by Andy Havard.

Internet marketing strategies vary depending on the nature of the blog, brand, or business and alter with accordance to their physical and digital size and their particular niche. When it comes to marketing any organization, product, or service on the web, there tends to be three essential ways of doing so:

Dominating social media platforms
Utilizing Internet video
Driving traffic to websites

This three-fold plan appears to be a timeless marketing approach on the net, but how do you know you’re succeeding in these areas? How do you know your campaign is ticking all the right boxes?

The following article addresses the best practices for measuring and monitoring your marketing campaign in these three areas, and provides an easy to digest guide to some of the best tools for the job.

Broad Social Media Monitoring

Depending on how social your Internet presence is, you might only be interested in certain aspects of social media data. Let’s imagine your blog, brand, or business operates a wide variety of social media from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to StumbleUpon and Instagram. The time it would take to collect such a wide variety of data could eat up a good chunk of your day. When you’re operating in this way, the most time- efficient data to gather is a broad overview of how your overall approach is going down on the ‘net.

A great tool to collect this kind of data is a site called Klout. Klout allows you to sign in and link up a variety of social media platforms. It takes in your activity and data from all of these platforms to give you an overall social ranking – the higher the better.

This kind of information is incredibly powerful as it updates you on how much influence you’re having on your audience and your network, while giving you a tangible indication of how big your online presence is in your niche.

Oh, and it’s completely free.

In Depth Social Media Monitoring

Klout is a great way of measuring overall influence in your niche and on your social media sites as a whole, but overviews still aren’t quite as valuable as the actual facts. Obtaining the true facts and figures surrounding your social media networks are the crucial pieces of information that alert you when your approaches are soaring like an eagle or rapidly plummeting back down to earth.

HootSuite is your essential tool for monitoring in depth social media analytics. Here’s a quick glance at the data it can provide.

You can add custom reports for a whole host of your social media profiles and even incorporate essential pieces of Google Analytics data. This information is incredible valuable as it indicates the actual impact of any new approaches you take to your social media profiles, be it daily updates, frequent photo and video uploads, or competition giveaways.

As you can see, HootSuite is also great for monitoring brand awareness amongst varying genders and age groups, which will be able to affect the approach you take to upcoming marketing strategies on your social platforms.

Internet Video Tracking

The only thing rivalling the popularity of social media on the Internet today is Internet video. Sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and On Demand Television Channels are enjoying staggeringly large online viewershipsevery day. Online marketers have gotten wise to this popularity and as a result of this there has been a huge spike in video uploads and new and exciting uses of video on the Internet.

These videos are all well and good, but they offer little value to bloggers, brands, and businesses if they can’t track the actual statistics of these videos. YouTube offers a great free tool to track these kinds of facts and figures through its YouTube Insight feature.

YouTube Insights can inform Internet marketers where their video strategies are being found, the demographics watching them, which videos are the most popular, and their Channel’s overall viewership. These pieces of data are fantastic ways to monitor the implementation of video approaches to new products, services, and the building of online brand awareness through video. By being able to assess the sheer popularity of specific video content, marketers can track what styles of video benefit their brand, business, or blog the best.

A great feature along these lines is YouTube’s Hot Spot feature:

Being able to spot what parts of your video content are boring your viewers and what parts are being re-watched again and again is crucial information when it comes to planning your next Internet video marketing strategy.

Precise Website Analytics

The uses of social media platforms and Internet video are all ultimately about driving audiences to one final website destination. Conversely, some organizations actually use their website as their home-hub for all of this activity by creating forums for social interaction, and embedding videos onto their website, doing away with any other website platform but their own.

Regardless of which approach is being used, a designated website is usually the final destination for any marketing strategy. With that being the case, the analytics of online users interacting and visiting such websites are imperative. This is where Google Analytics comes into play:

Google Analytics offers a huge array of monitoring tools for free users and even more for users willing to pay for their (rather pricey) Premium package. Above, you can (somewhat) see the array of free tools on the left and the very informative Visitor Overview in the middle.

Not only does this tool easily display the traffic generated in a certain time period, but it also informs the users where in the world these users are visiting the site from. In-depth tools within Analytics can also indicate if users came to your site through your other video and social media campaigns.

It’s crucial to notice areas like Page Visits and Bounce Rates as it clearly shows whether users are interacting with your website, taking in your message, and fulfilling the criteria your strategies had intended to achieve.

Not bad for a completely free tool, right?

Summary

By using these affordable online tools to track your Internet marketing strategies, you can ensure all of your approaches in the online world are ticking all the right boxes. Being aware of rises and falls in your content, online presence, and Internet influence will be exceptionally valuable when planning your next online marketing campaign.

Have you got any extra handy tools to share? Be sure to drop a comment and share your knowledge.

Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

[ How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies 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.

Why Hiring a Marketing Department Has Changed—5 Subjects a Business Owner Must Now Consider in Every Interview

Guest Author — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:40:34 +0000

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. ]

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Is Your Business Worth An Extra Hour Per Week? 5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Blog

Guest Author — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:35:36 +0000

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. ]

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.

Why Most Social Media Departments Fail

Tamar Weinberg — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:45:31 +0000

A few years ago, a colleague of mine was given a tremendous responsibility to oversee the social media department at a prestigious well known NYC-based public relations firm. Less than a year later, she was sent packing up her desk, a casualty of a company that jumped into that shiny toy syndrome that people call social media.

As more companies jump into social media, they, too, hear that “social media departments don’t execute” which results in the failure of a social media department that was never meant to be. I’ll be exploring some of those reasons below.

Goal Setting

You could be the biggest and most well-paid social media consultant out there, but if you don’t know what the specific goals are for the client project, you should never sign an agreement with the prospective company. A recent statement of work I encountered read just like this:

Manage and grow the our following on Twitter
Manage and grow our fan base on Facebook
Manage and grow our fan base on LinkedIn
Possibly manage the presence on other platforms

The social media consultant could follow every single one of these directives to an absolute tee, doing everything they were asked and even going above and beyond to build bridges with prospective customers via direct relationships, phone calls, and face to face interaction. But the bigger question goes to the client: why do you want someone to manage your social media presence? What are you trying to get out of it? If your client has to hesitate and cannot answer this question in a few sentences, and worse, doesn’t even give you a reply at all, any social media promotion you engage in will ultimately fail. As hired help, it won’t be your fault, but if you’re trying your best to understand the goals without any feedback from your client, it will hurt.

For your sake, consultants, don’t even bother with that relationship. It won’t end well even if there are “no hard feelings,” especially if you’ve made the effort to understand the goals of the engagement.

One thing that needs to be defined from the beginning is the target audience. As a client, you must be able to give your consultant information about your target audience via an audience profile that can be found with survey tools and market research. Keep in mind that this audience profile may be broadened through exposure to social media, giving you as a business even greater reach than thought possible.

However, clients, no, it is not the consultant’s responsibility to determine your goals and it’s highly offensive to suggest that “we hired you to tell us!” A new employee or consultant, especially someone who is new to the company culture, would not possibly be able to know your company goals, your mission statement, and your objectives from the offset. It’s your job to guide them, to give them the insights needed to truly shine in their role. And a list of “here’s what you should do” which is motivated by the latest and greatest social networks just isn’t enough. That’s why we call it shiny toy syndrome.

Do you truly want to succeed? Before you even consider a social media engagement and hiring an employee to take on this engagement, you need to set SMART goals. Any job descriptions and statements of work do not have a place without an itemized list of desired outcomes that benefit the company line.

What are SMART goals? To those unfamiliar with the phrase, these are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Perhaps it would make sense to see a 10% increase in sales over a 6 month period or an increase of 5,000 visitors to your website for the month. For your social initiatives, a brand new Twitter account may aim to seek 50 qualified followers by the end of November versus 50,000 followers with no end in sight.

Let’s talk about qualified followers for a moment. Anyone can buy Twitter followers and artificially inflate the numbers on your account, thereby making your social media consultant look like a true social media rockstar, but once the money is invested, in all likelihood, how many people will actually buy your product or use your service? None. Similarly, you would never want to buy Facebook fans; Facebook employs an algorithm known as EdgeRank which makes your content prominent if and only if people actually engage with it. If you’re buying followers and they’re not interested, that content won’t show up in their news feeds or in the feeds of people who truly do have an interest in your product. You’ve just wasted your money and gained nothing but short term satisfaction that the numbers are up — but are they sustainable?

No, if you want to be successful in social media, you need to understand from the get-go that it’s a relationship building process which takes time. You’ll see growth and followers, but will you really see growth and followers at an exponential rate? Realistically? It’s 2011.

The Early Bird Gets the Worm

That brings me to my next point: if you joined the party late, you’re not going to be as popular as the people who already have established presences on social networks. It’s the sad truth of a saturated marketplace. Those who joined the social media party in 2007 are thriving; those who join in 2011 often find themselves at a complete loss. When finding new companies to follow for a client of mine, I was shocked at how many companies whose social profiles were featured so prominently on their websites weren’t engaged at all, seemingly because they have given up social media engagement because their efforts (almost totally of a broadcast nature in the examples I’d seen) were being made almost entirely in vain.

If you’re aiming to join the social media space with the primary goal that you’re going to make a real difference on Twitter and Facebook, I have news for you: you’re going to be working very very hard. Millions of businesses have done the same exact thing before you, and consumers (and even businesses you’re trying to attract the attention of) are savvy enough that they’re less trusting from the get-go, which is why you have to work hard not to just get their attention but to keep them attuned to your news and updates.

Relationship building is harder and a longer process in an already established community. You’re lucky to be there when it’s just being started; everyone is still trying to find their way and everyone helps each other. When you come 3-5 years after it’s already well known simply because everyone else is doing it, do you really think it will be a walk in the park? You and 4 (40? 400?) million other people are trying to do the same exact thing. It comes across as self-serving, even if you’re sharing valuable content. That’s why you need to put forth a tremendous amount of effort.

Social media alone doesn’t cut it anymore. In fact, it’s been predicted for years now that social media marketing will merge into public relations or some other marketing discipline. Are you really just a “social media expert,” and if so, are you prepared?

Social Media Marketing Coexists with Other Integrated Marketing Programs

While I get pitches all the time to offer “social media services” to clients, I rarely, if ever, exclusively offer social media marketing. Social media is here to stay, but it’s not something you can do in isolation of other marketing initiatives. I’ve been offering services in the full realm of digital marketing, from SEO to PPC to video marketing to blogger outreach to action plans to public relations, and of course, social media. But social media alone should never be treated as a standalone marketing method; it must coexist with other marketing strategies. An integrated digital marketing approach is the best way to see success online for any business.

If you’re just hired to handle social media, have no fear! The best client-contractor relationship is one where the consultant is fully aware of every single marketing initiative and is able to weigh in on these campaigns while they’re happening, ensuring that your responsibilities for outreach go in tandem with these other marketing tactics. That means that as a social media consultant, you should know if Facebook PPC is in play. You should know what SEO phrases are being targeted. You should know if your client is running a deal on a daily deals site. You should get a heads up about an infographic that your graphic design team is launching, and you should know the specific date of launch so that you can collaborate and ensure it reaches the social media audience as well.

And if you’re not being made abreast of these developments in your company? It comes down to them not valuing social media… and them not valuing you.

But don’t worry! They’re also setting themselves up for failure. You’re just going to be coming along for the ride.

I have news for you, social media experts: if social media alone is what you’re selling, I hope you start getting other skills under your belt.

[ Why Most Social Media Departments Fail is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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How Social Media is a Lot Like Dating

Guest Author — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:19:29 +0000

This is a guest post by Shannon Evans Suetos.

Social media, like many things in life, is about relationships. If you don’t build a great relationship (online or offline), you won’t accomplish much. That said, how is social media like dating? You can apply “proper dating etiquette” to just about every aspect of social media.

Don’t Just Talk About Yourself

Ever been on a first date and realize you couldn’t get one word in? I think most of us have. Even if you started the conversation, some people can always make it about them. It’s not fun on a date, and it certainly isn’t fun to listen to someone on Twitter only talk about themselves.

This is where many social media newbies can miss the boat. Using Twitter and Facebook to promote a blog post is great, but make sure to mix it up with other news and topics as well. Using social media as a tool to position yourself or company as an expert is how you are going to gain your followers’ trust.

Tweet industry news as well as your company’s current events. It’s okay to not talk about yourself — your followers will thank you. You might even get a re-tweet or share for doing so.

Relationships Take Time

When you start dating someone, it’s fun and exciting. Once the honeymoon phase is over, this is when you really see how you two deal with each other. Sometimes it works, and other times it becomes a complete disaster.

Have you ever followed someone who you thought was a great marketer, PR pro, or other industry “expert,” only to find out they may not be the person you thought? Relationships take time and need nurturing. Sometimes someone who seems really awesome turns out to be a jerk — in dating and in social media.

Remember to take your time and really build up your online community. It takes awhile to get followers who engage with you. It’s not a numbers game, it’s a matter of finding people who want to talk to you and find you interesting as you find them. That is when the real engagement happens.

Don’t Overdo It

Have you ever gone on a date and then as soon as you get home, your date calls you? Then in the morning, you get another call or text, and so on and so on. If you don’t have anything important to say, don’t say it. You don’t want to annoy the people in your Twitter stream or Facebook news feed.

If you talk nonsense most of the day, how do you expect anyone to filter out the important updates? Make sure whatever you are sharing is compelling. It doesn’t have to be the great American novel you’re sharing, but make sure your followers will find value in it.

Don’t Under Do It

On that same note, make sure you aren’t waiting a week before calling your date back. Humans are creatures of habit, so make sure you update on a constant basis. This doesn’t mean tweet every ten minutes, but make sure you’re online around the same time everyday. Eventually, your followers will know when to expect your updates and even start looking forward to them. Don’t disappoint them by only updating here and there.

Be Yourself

I know on a first date, I’m going to make sure I look my best (who doesn’t?), but as time goes by, you start to let the “real you” shine through. I’m not saying I look like a bag lady everyday, but I also don’t dress to the nines either. When I first start dating someone, I try and be myself. If not, who is this person think they are dating? I don’t
want to give them the wrong impression.

This is the same in social media. You don’t want to be giving updates on one subject when you are really an expert in another area. Trying to be someone you aren’t is exhausting and misleading to your followers. Be up front with who you are and what you do. If you tweet for your company or any public figure, let your followers know there is more than one person running the account.

President Obama is a great example of this. Obviously, the President of the United States doesn’t have time to update his Twitter account on a regular basis, but when he does, he signs his tweets “BO”. This lets all of us who follow him know when he is actually tweeting.

It’s OK to be Funny

When you are new to social media, you sometimes don’t know what to say. Or better yet, what not to say. You can still be funny and be professional at the same time. The same is in dating. There is a difference between being funny and being annoying. There is a fine line, but you’re smart and can figure it out.

Don’t Diss Anyone

Who wants to be on a date with someone who only talks negatively about someone or multiple people? I know I sure don’t. Negativity is a downer wherever you are— in a bar or on Twitter. So just don’t do it.

It’s okay to like another person’s blog or article. Going back to my point of not just talking about yourself, it’s okay to retweet an industry colleague’s blog post. This can
actually help your relationship with that person, and you probably will get a retweet of your own when you share a blog post.

Dating is difficult. It’s a lot of give and take, and until you are comfortable with someone, it’s usually awkward. The same can be said for social media. When you first start a Twitter account, you probably are going to feel like you are talking to no one. Give it some time, remember these tips and you should end up creating a great community of followers.

Do you think dating is a lot like social media? If so, let me know what I missed in the comments below.

Shannon Evans Suetos is an online marketer living in San Diego, and the owner of What’s Your Two Cents? WYTC is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest trending news topics to spark a conversation among readers. You can also follow Shannon on Twitter @ShannonEvansSM.

[ How Social Media is a Lot Like Dating is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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How to Show the World the True Rock Star You Are: 3 Social Media Bragging Techniques

Guest Author — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:10:24 +0000

This is a guest post by Amy Porterfield.

Selling yourself is hard.

But it’s next to impossible to thrive in a world that’s hyper-engaged if you refuse to bust out of your shell and, well—brag a little.

That’s right: brag.

Bragging is a way to prove you know your stuff. As a good friend of mine says, “If you don’t brag with specificity, authenticity and passion, no one will ever know what a true rock star you are.”

Social media is an ideal platform to carve out a niche and own your territory. But there’s a very fine line between bragging with “specificity, authenticity and passion” and coming off like a self-absorbed egomaniac (or a used car salesman).

Below are three steps to bragging better—so you can stand out, inspire and build deeper relationships online.

#1: True Rock Stars Show—They Don’t Tell

People who brag well online lead with their expertise, not with a sales pitch.

Or like your English teacher used to say, they practice “show, don’t tell.”

In a very noisy online world, your goal is to inspire your market to sit up and take notice of you. You want them to connect, deeply, with your value proposition. But words only go so far.

Showing your expertise—via advice in a Facebook post, a content-rich webinar or a helpful blog article—can foster the kind of sincere connections “telling” alone cannot.

One of the most powerful ways to “show” is with video. Video allows you to:

Invite strangers in for a coffee. Video invites your users into your home, earning their trust by reminding them there’s a real person (with real expertise) behind that laptop screen.
Make fuzzy ideas tangible. If you’re talking about a book you think is great, why not jump on video, show the book, turn to the page you think is valuable and read a short excerpt? This is more accessible and persuasive than a traditional written review.
Teach vs. tell. Use simple screen capture software to show your viewers how to do something. Make a video tutorial with Screenflow or Camtasia so you can give readers something really valuable: new knowledge or skills.

There are also plenty of creative ways to show your expertise without the webcam. Try these:

Use a tool like Jing to capture something on your computer screen. You can then mark up the image to prove a point or highlight information.
Use images—lots of ‘em. Photos are still worth a thousand words. Images underline a point, help people visualize an idea and when they’re good, they’re memorable.

#2: True Rock Stars Let Social Proof Do the Heavy Lifting

The term “social proof” refers to the psychological phenomenon of people being motivated to do things that they see other people doing. Interactions on social media sites, such as Facebook, have increased the influence and reach of social proof because it’s easier to instantly see what your friends are doing all the time.

Translation?

When your audience (a.k.a. fans or followers) talks about you, interacts with you, and shares your content, they’re showing their own friends and families that they like and trust you. And their friends are more likely to check you out because someone they trust endorsed you.

This chain reaction is social proof at its best. And the implications for rock stars like you are huge.

When people start sharing your content, they’re building your reputation for you—and your social reach grows exponentially.

But incredibly, a lot of people miss out on word-of-mouth bragging opportunities simply because they don’t make it easy for the user. If your website visitors like what you’re saying, they will spread the word—but only if you pave the way first.

Here a few useful tools to make sharing easy and fast:

Tweetstimonials: This plugin for your website allows you to showcase testimonials and shout outs that your fans and followers post about you on Twitter.
The Facebook Like Box: When non-fans visit your website, they can see the faces of all their friends who have already liked your Facebook Page. Social proof, in action!
Social Sharing Buttons that let your visitors click and share your content with their own network are a must. SexyBookmarks for WordPress offers a row of different social bookmarks and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Your reader can place his cursor over any of the icons to see it pop up on his screen and click to share. Similarly, DiggDigg provides multiple ways for visitors to share your content. There are two versions. The first is a static one and one that floats to stay in view, even as your reader scrolls down your post. The floating version is cool because it’s always visible, making it easy for your reader to share your content at any time.

#3: True Rock Stars Make It Personal

Rock stars know that the raw emotional power of a personal story can help them make meaningful contact.

Let your back-story do the bragging for you. The story of how you got where you are can be a powerful selling point—but only if you take the time to craft your story well and weave it into the foundation of your business.

More than a simple mission statement, a story encourages customers and potential clients to identify with your core values.

Telling your back-story will:

Humanize your business. Engaging stories remind your market you’re human, not just a typing robot in this vast online universe.
Effect change. If you want to change how people perceive your worth or value, just tell them a better story about who you really are.
Make a memorable first impression. Your bio is a big deal. Even that tiny Twitter bio counts! Bios are not just a collection of facts. The story you tell to strangers can make or break your relationship with someone new.
Resonate. My friend Michael Margolis says it best. “With all the noise, people look to your story for resonance. In other words, do they vibe and trust what you’re all about? Can they believe in your message? The more you can align your back-story with your product, service, or idea — the more audiences will embrace your message. Storytelling is all about connecting these dots.”

Next time you want to spotlight your accomplishments and skills, remember that bragging authentically isn’t a science—it’s an art. Show, don’t tell. Create opportunities for your audience to sing your praises. And build your foundation on a back-story that will resonate with the people you serve.

Amy is a social media strategist and co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies. Get her free video course on how to create a stress-free social media strategy and check out her blog.

[ How to Show the World the True Rock Star You Are: 3 Social Media Bragging Techniques is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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