Internet Marketing Tips door Leads to Like

20 Marketing Tricks to Get Your Kids to Simmer Down

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 21:23:00 +0000

Are you all pumped up for the 4th of July holiday? The sun's shining (here, at least), your work week is punctuated by a much needed respite, and ... oh yeah, the kids are loose.

By now you might be starting to rediscover the stress of having those little rugrats around when all you want is some peace and quiet. When does school start up again? Should you have shelled out for summer camp? Can't you just enjoy one day off of work already? Don't they ever just calm down?

You've got this, guys. You're a marketer. Believe it or not, that experience is transferable to parenting, too. Here's how you can use the marketing tactics you use every day to get yourself some much needed relaxation this 4th of July.

Note: This post's photo and many of the tips are courtesy of HubSpot Inbound Marketing Specialist and father of 4, "though it feels like 8," Dan Sally.

20 Marketing Tactics to Get Your Kids to Simmer Down Now

1) Create an offer. When you create lead gen offers, you don't just give them away for free. No, you need something in exchange -- lead intelligence! Or what your prospects know as filling out a form. Use that tactic with your kids, too; you give them something they want, and in exchange, they'll give you some peace and quiet.

2) Newsjack. Take something that's going on -- seemingly unrelated to children's activities -- and find a spin on it that would interest them! Talking about your 401(k) at your friend's barbecue? Tell your kids to go around the lawn and look for loose change. Hey, that's good financial planning.

3) Distract them with a puppy. We've written all about shameless marketing tactics that work on leads (and us). And one of the timeless classics is using cute animals to make your audience oooh and aaah. If you're stuck with a kid that's bugging you (or heck, an adult), just throw the puppy their way. It'll probably work.

4) Engage with promoters of your brand. Part of effective word-of-mouth marketing is identifying and engaging with your promoters. Who are the good influences on your kids? Find them, and segment out the bad influencers so your children model good behavior on July 4th, rather than get into trouble.

5) Throw an awesome event. We throw live events like INBOUND 2012 to meet new leads, forge new relationships with the community, and strengthen customer relationships. Take a cue from the networking superpower of in-person events, and stage a kid-friendly event for other kids to attend to so they can keep each other company.

6) Make your content reader-friendly. You know, use short chunks of text, bold headings, bulleted lists, remove navigation on your landing pages -- all the things that distract visitors instead of draw them in. Well, make your 4th of July kid-friendly, too, and give them content that's appropriate for their age and aligns with their interests so they don't get bored and click -- ahem, wander -- away looking for trouble.

7) Give them a game. Gamification's all the rage with marketers and consumers alike, because it gives people a purpose that's directly related to the action marketers are trying to drive. For example, when we want to trend on Twitter for a live webinar, we create a hashtag, and incentivize attendee use of that hashtag by giving away a prize, like tickets to INBOUND 2012. Apply that principle to your kids, and give them a little distraction from the adults with a game to keep them entertained. First prize? Ice cream!

8) Share other people's content. Run out of ideas to keep the kids entertained? If you're boring them, do what you do with your social media following -- share someone else's content! A little variety is good for everyone.

9) Throw money at the problem. You've probably leaned on PPC for a quick lead-gen boost, or invested in top-notch marketing talent to solve a huge marketing problem. Why not hire a babysitter or an experienced nanny to give you a break?

10) Use visual content. Kids love pretty pictures. So do adults. That's why we keep talking about investing in visual content and visual social networks, like Pinterest and Instagram! Use coloring books, picture books, sidewalk chalk, or anything else visual to keep them entertained.

11) Invest in multimedia content. Plop them in front of the TV. Or YouTube. Who doesn't love a good YouTube video or hilarious podcast? We don't record HubSpot TV every Friday for nothing.

12) Yell at them. We've talked about how berating your audience actually helps drive traffic -- our blog posts with headlines like, "10 Sloppy Social Media Mistakes to Fix NOW" have received well over 10,000 views, in fact. Don't berate, of course, but don't be afraid of a little discipline, either!

13) Leverage scarcity. There's nothing like scarcity to drive a hard bargain. Need your kids to do something? Find something they want, and tell them it's almost gone. They'll hop to it in a jiffy. Now that's how you create an effective call-to-action.

14) Establish authority as a thought leader. Your kids might not think of you as a "thought leader" per se, but they certainly know who's boss. Just like your stellar content creation establishes you as an industry thought leader -- why else would leads download your offers? -- your reputation most likely precedes you with your children. So remind them who's boss when you need them to behave more responsibly!

15) Engage in the conversation. You engage with your social media fans so they know you're listening, and that you care what they have to say. Similarly, sometimes kids just need a little dose of attention to keep them satiated.

16) Forge a partnership with a related business. Just like you lean on your partners for help with content creation, co-marketing, and lead generation, you need an ally to help shoulder some of the burden of taking care of kids. See if grandma wants some time with her grandchildren, or if there's an expectant mom that would like some quality time with a few kids.

17) Schedule content in advance. Just like you schedule your social media content in advance, your day will go much more smoothly if you schedule all of your kid-friendly activities in advance so you don't find yourself hurting for supplies, ideas, or entertainment.

18) Monitor social activity. But just because your content -- or activities -- are all set up, doesn't mean you should turn a blind eye! Keep an eye on what's going on to ensure there are no disasters. And when there are disasters -- Timmy is not sharing his toys like you told him to -- you'll be able to respond quickly before anything gets out of hand and really ruins the day.

19) Reward good behavior. You give referral bonuses and implement loyalty programs with your customers. Incentivize good behavior with your kids, too! The other children will take notice and start to mimic that positive behavior, and make your day much easier.

20) Just give them what they want. You spend your whole day trying to figure out what your customers want based on lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Use all that historical intel you have on your kids to give them the content that you know calms them down, entertains them, and distracts them so you can enjoy your day off. You know your kids better than anyone (probably better than they know themselves) ;-)

Obviously, this post is a bit of fun before the mid-week holiday, so share your silly suggestions (don't forget the marketing tie-in!) in the comments below. Or better yet, let us know if any of these actually worked!

Social Media Advertising: Should Bloggers Bother?

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 20:21:00 +0000

This guest post is written by Lior Levin.

Social media has proven its worth as a networking tool and a means of raising brand awareness, but the future of sites like Facebook and Twitter depend on convincing brands that that it’s worthwhile to invest in advertising on their sites in addition to interacting with customers.

Ads on Facebook usually appear in the right column, though Facebook has been experimenting with more socially-based ads that show up in the streams of users. With its simpler interface, Twitter relies on promoting tweets that show up in the tops of users’ update streams.

No one has any doubts about the value of social media marketing through engaging customers, running promotions, and creating company pages. The majority of doubts surround the ROI and overall value of paying to advertise on social networks.

Many brands are still engaged in social media advertising, and the data available changes from year to year. However, for bloggers, it can be difficult to decide whether social media advertising is worth it.

Here are a few of the current advantages and disadvantages of using social media sites for your advertising campaigns.

Advantages of social media advertising

Social helps campaigns go viral

According to Kelsey Jones of the Social Robot, “Companies and organizations can experience a large swell of website visitors, new customers, or Facebook fans all within a single day, depending on the effectiveness of their ads. This type of viral activity can be great for events and product launches.”

Brands are satisfied with the level of engagement

There’s no doubt that the right campaign can make a huge difference in driving visitors to a website. This spike in traffic for some major brands makes social media advertising worth considering.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “Companies that have bought Twitter ads generally say they are happy with the percentage of people who click on their ads or circulate them to other Twitter users. But marketers also say these ads haven’t proven they can convert people into paying customers.”

Disadvantages of social media advertising

The cost for national advertising campaigns is prohibitive

Kelsey Jones writes at Performancing, “For some targeted campaigns, competition can be very high, leading to high rates for clicks on social media ads or sponsored tweet impressions (views). For certain industries, the cost to run a viral campaign of this magnitude can be significant, up to thousands of dollars per day.”

While the cost of social media advertising can be quite steep for national campaigns, running an effective social media campaign through a free account on social media can produce similar results if managed properly. The opportunity to engage users through a free account may make it hard to justify the cost of Facebook or Twitter ads.

Social advertising can be perceived negatively

Unlike ads in magazines or on television, ads on social networks may prove to be ineffective or even a liability for brands, as customers may view them as an unwelcome intrusion.

One Forrester analyst mentioned to Bloomberg that injecting ads into a social platform is like interrupting a conversation among friends in order to attempt a sales pitch.

In fact, ads on a social network may be perceived as completely counter to what users are trying to accomplish. Some suggest that the success of social advertising hinges on whether brands can identify the purchasing intent of users and find the perfect point to introduce an ad into their social experience.

The ROI is difficult to measure on social media

Sean Jackson, the CFO of CopyBlogger, suggests that for all of the talk about being unable to measure the ROI of social media marketing in general, businesses should not be dismayed. Jackson says, “An investment is an asset that you purchase and place on your Balance Sheet. Like an office building or a computer system. It’s something you could sell later if you didn’t need it any more. Marketing is an expense, and goes on the Profit and Loss statement.”

Whether or not you agree with Jackson’s statement, the constant challenge of all marketing efforts over the years has been determining their ROI.

Is it worth it?

Social media advertising will undoubtedly produce greater brand awareness and user engagement with your brand, but the real risk is that brands may need to designate significant funds to their marketing efforts without necessarily receiving a guarantee that they’ll work.

That is a significant risk to take, but as brands seek to reach customers, we’ll see ongoing innovation among advertisers on social media platforms.

What do you think of social advertising? Have you tried it—or seen it? Let us know your take on these new ad media in the comments.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for pre shipment inspection companies located in China and Latin America, and who also consults for a psd to html conversion company.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Social Media Advertising: Should Bloggers Bother?

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/FvzpGSKKZCo/

Everything You Need to Run a Successful Social Media Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 17:08:00 +0000

So you want to run a contest on social media, eh? Not sure where to start? Which social network is the most appropriate choice? If you're even allowed to run a contest there?

There are so many rules and guidelines, so much planning and preparation involved, that we thought a blog post was really required to explain how to run a contest that delivers a solid return on investment. Who knows -- it could be the best tactic you’ve ever introduced to grow your reach, drive site traffic, and generate leads! Here's how you can set yourself up for success with contests on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

How to Run a Contest on Facebook

Follow the Rules

Before you start your Facebook contest, make sure you can actually run it legally. Facebook has cracked down on contests due to liability issues, so read through their strict rules ahead of time. For example, did you know that you can’t use liking or commenting on a post, checking in, connecting to your app, or uploading a photo to your Timeline as a contest entry mechanism? Did you know that you can’t notify winners of your contest through Facebook -- whether through messages, chat, or posts on their profile? Did you know that you can't even use Facebook features as a voting mechanism?

What I'm trying to say is read their contest rules before you get started -- but in general, you can assume you're responsible for the legal and logistical portions of your contest; Facebook just provides the people. To learn more about Facebook’s contest rules, visit their Page Guidelines.

Make Use of Third Party Apps

The most common and effective way for getting around Facebook’s contest rules is by using third party apps -- some good ones are ShortStack, Woobox, and Offerpop. You might remember the days before Facebook Timeline, when brands had welcome pages and like-gating mechanisms. Well, technically these features still exist; they’re just buried within likes, photos, videos, and events. With this said, make sure you’re properly promoting your contest so people can actually find it! I highly suggest posting about your contest (including the link for where to find it) and pinning that post to the top of your Timeline. Just take a look at how Dunkin' Donuts is doing it on their Timeline:

Include CTAs to Drive Traffic to Your Website

If you’re using a third party app for your contest, including calls-to-action is a piece of cake! In this example with Dunkin' Donuts' Get SanDDwich’d contest, you can see two very obvious CTAs -- “Enter Now” and “View Gallery.” If you want to achieve something similar, simply come up with the design, upload it using your third party app, and drag and drop your links over the correct piece of the image. Really, it’s not hard. I promise. Just remember to use contest-specific tracking tokens for your links so you know who’s clicking. If you don’t have access to a designer and need help with your CTAs, take a look at our free ebook: Mastering the Design & Copy of Calls-to-Action.

Include a Form on the App Page to Generate Leads

If your goal is to generate leads from your contest, you might want to include a form directly on your third party app. This will make the process much easier for people trying to register for the contest. Avoid making your entrants dig through mountains of rules or a maze of landing pages to get to where they want to go. Include your Official Rules in the form of a link in the body of your contest explanation. Which brings me to my next topic ...

Create Your Own Terms & Conditions / Official Rules Page

Facebook makes it very clear that you must provide the official terms, rules, and eligibility requirements for your contest. You need to “include a complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant and include acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.” In addition, it is important to provide disclosure information -- that if the participant is filling out a form and giving you personal information, that information is going to you and not to Facebook.

Notify the Winner Via Your Website

Since you’re not allowed to notify your winner via Facebook, why not use this as an opportunity to drive traffic to your website? Explain in the rules for your contest that the winner will be announced on such and such a day on a specific location on your website. If you include relevant calls-to-action for compelling offers around the announcement, you’re bound to generate some leads.

Give Away Something Awesome

If you’re going through the trouble of creating a third party app and getting lawyers involved, you better be giving away something really good. If you’re making people fill out a form, tell a story about their first experience with your brand, or explain why they love your product, you’re not going to get many entrants if you’re giving away a lousy keychain. If you have an amazing prize, people are more likely to put some serious effort into your contest. Just look at Dunkin' Donuts -- they're giving away a beach vacation! Yeah, I'd upload a picture for that.

Remember Your Goals and Measure Your Results

You can create the most impressive contest in the world, but if it doesn't align with your goals or if you didn’t measure it correctly, who really cares? If you want to generate leads from your contest, for example, you know you need to include a form and calls-to-action on your contest page. If you're looking to build reach and brand awareness, make entrants share your brand or contest page on their Facebook Timeline. And how will you know if you generated leads or grew your reach? Well, Facebook Insights can let you know how much your reach has grown, or you can invest in closed-loop marketing software to track the number of leads generated and the growth of your reach.

How to Run a Contest on Twitter

Follow the Rules

When you’re running a contest, just like any day on Twitter, make sure you’re following The Twitter Rules. Discourage dishonest behavior such as the creation of multiple accounts or posting the same tweet repeatedly. However, do encourage good behavior such as topic relevance and creativity! Your entrants must also comply with applicable laws and regulations -- Twitter makes it clear that this portion is your responsibility. In other words, you write the official rules, and any legal backlash will be your problem, not Twitter’s. I highly suggest you consult with an attorney if you have any questions or concerns with this.

Set Your Goals

If you don't know what you’re looking to achieve with the contest, how will you know if you’ve achieved it? Plus, your goals will help you figure out how to run the contest. If you’re looking to promote a specific event or offer, for example, have your entrants tweet a link to it; just make sure you’re using tracking tokens to measure your leads and clicks to see exactly how successful the contest was. If you are trying to improve reach, on the other hand, have entrants retweet the original tweet you sent out about the contest. And if you’re looking to build awareness of your brand, require your entrants to follow you in order to be eligible.

Hey Word Nerds! RT to win a $50 Game Card! One winner a week, winner chosen on Fridays, contest ends 7/1 #ZyngaLove50
— Words With Friends (@WordsWFriends) June 26, 2012

Iron Out the Details

Do you want to run a sweepstakes-style contest? How about a caption or creative answer contest? Or perhaps a photo contest would make the most sense. There are several types of contests you could choose from, so make sure you pick one that aligns with (all together now) your goals. You also need to figure out when the contest will take place, for how long it will run, and then the announcement of the contest will take place -- will it be days before via your blog and other social media networks, or just minutes before the contest? But once you have your goals set, details like these are the easy part!

Find a Way to Filter

It’s impossible to honestly select a winner for a contest if you can’t find and weed through all the submissions. Make sure you set yourself up for success by creating streams specifically dedicated to the contest. When tweeting the announcement that you’re having a contest, ask users to include either an @mention to you in their tweet, or a specific hashtag dedicated to the contest or campaign you’re running at the time. This way you can clearly see all the entrants, making your life much easier when time comes to select a winner.

Measure Your Results

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know how important measurement is to, well, anything you do. It's how you know how successful you are, after all! Track your contest hashtag over time using a third party app, use a contest-specific bit.ly link, drive traffic to your landing page, and view the source of that traffic (all that Twitter traffic!) using an analytics platform or your marketing software.

How to Run a Contest on Pinterest

Follow Proper Pin Etiquette

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest doesn’t provide any official rules or guidelines for running contests. They do, however, provide suggestions for respectfully using the site with their Pin Etiquette Guide. If you’re looking for a more in-depth guide on the rules of Pinterest, take a look at their Terms & Privacy page, but in a nutshell: be respectful, authentic, and create contest rules that reflect that. This contest from Garnet Hill, for example, falls right in line with what pinners love to do!

Make an Announcement

Leverage those social networks! Don’t just announce that you’re having a contest on Pinterest, tell your followers on Twitter, your fans on Facebook, and your circles on Google+, too! Depending on the length of the contest, you should make social promotion of it a regular part of your social media updating to encourage participation.

Clearly Articulate the Rules of the Contest

What should be included in your photo/description to tell users what is required to enter the contest? Do you want people to create a whole new board for your contest, like Garnet Hill? Should they simply repin one image? Let participants know so they can follow your rules properly. Include a bullet point list of the rules right on a repinnable image. Behind the image, include a link to more details about your contest using a landing page on your website. And hey, guys, did you remember the tracking token? How else will you know the number of leads your contest generates, or the all-mighty click-through rate? And don't forget, as with any other social media contest, you have to ...

Remember Your Goals and Measure Your Results

What are you trying to achieve with this contest? Do you want more leads? Awareness that your brand does, in fact, have a Pinterest account? Tailor your contest to suit your goals and measure your results accordingly. For example, if you are looking to generate leads and you could care less about engagement, why are you measuring reach? If you align your goals and metrics with your contest, you'll be much more successful in the long-run.

Find a Way to Filter

Use a hashtag so people can follow the contest entries on Pinterest. This will help spread the word about your contest, and it can also help you find participants. If you’re requiring entrants to create a board for your contest, have them use a pre-defined hashtag on their images so it's easy to find. Or are they simply repinning the original contest image? That’s easy -- just click on the pin to see who repinned it!

Have a Prize Your Audience Will Love

If participants are creating an entire board on their Pinterest account dedicated to your company, you’ll need to give away something really awesome. The more effort your participants need to put in, the better the prize should be. You will get fewer participants with a contest giving away a koozie than a contest giving away an entire bedroom set. Plus, a prize like a beautiful new bedroom set plays right into the interests of Pinterest users -- beautiful, visual items.

Announce the Winner Via Your Website

Unlike Facebook, there is no problem with you contacting a user on Pinterest to let them know they’ve won your contest. However, it might be beneficial to you if you announce the winner on your website if you're looking to generate leads. This way you get more eyes on awesome website content that can convert into leads for your business, instead of just notifying one person. But you should certainly publicize the winner and their board on your website and your Pinterest account for some great PR!

How to Run a Contest on Instagram

Follow Best Practices

Much like Pinterest, Instagram doesn’t have any official contest rules on their site. They do, however, suggest best practices for “How to Host a Photo Contest on Instagram” in their company blog. Notes include posting frequently, giving the contest time, spreading the word about the contest, using the Instagram API, and giving away prizes.

Set Your Goals and Clearly Articulate the Rules

Your goals should be directly correlated with how you run your contest. Want to drive traffic to your website? Make participants go there! Want to boost engagement? Make them leave a comment! You are the owner of your contest, so only you get to decide what is required for entry. Use this power to your advantage!

Make an Announcement

Photos on Instagram fly through the feed so quickly, you might have trouble being successful with only one contest announcement. But you have fans and followers on other networks, right? Promote the contest on your website and other social networks to get as many participants as possible! You can certainly post about the contest multiple times if you keep it creative and always craft unique updates.

Follow a Theme

Are you currently running a campaign that you want your contest to run alongside of? Follow the same theme! Your Instagram followers are certainly a creative bunch, so even if you’re a B2B company, they will find a way to add excitement to your brand. Trust me. For example, GE ran a contest on Instagram using the hashtag #geinspiredme. After the contest, they featured the top photos as a board on their Pinterest account.

Find a Way to Filter

Using a hashtag, like GE did, is a great way to filter your contest. However, if you get thousands of submissions, it might be tough to weed through them all. So in addition to the hashtag, try filtering with an RSS feed. Webstagram allows you to search a hashtag, and you can view every Instagram photo using this tag with the original caption and comments. Take a look at how it works with GE as an example.

Measure Your Results

Statigram is a great site for management, measurement, and promotion on Instagram. And lucky for you, it even has a "Contest" section with a toolkit for running photo contests. Does it get any more convenient than that? Now that you have all the tools working for you, match your measurement tactics with your goals and rules and you should be a breeze!

Announce the Winner Via Your Website

Instagram isn’t exactly a broadcast platform, so it’s a bit more difficult for contacting and announcing a winner for your contest. Instead, try creating a landing page showcasing those fun, creative photo submissions with the winner clearly set apart from the rest. You should also make sure to have calls-to-action on your landing page that are relevant to your contest -- with a relevant offer to back it up and generate some serious leads. Of course, only do this if it’s a part of your goals. ;-)

Now that you know the nitty gritty of social media contests, what are some of the most creative contests you've seen on social media? Let's get our creative juices flowing!

Is Your Blog Over-optimized?

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:05:00 +0000

This guest post is by AJ Kumar of Single Grain.

The current hot topic in the search engine optimization world is Google’s recent Penguin update—a move the search giant claims is intended to help reduce the presence of over-optimized web pages in the natural search results.

In fact, the possibility of a forthcoming over-optimization penalty was alluded to as early as this year’s SXSW festival in March, where Google spokesperson Matt Cutts made the comment:

“[T]he idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.”

Well, that “level playing ground” is here with the April 24^th release of the Penguin algorithm update, which has affected an estimated 3% of all search queries. If you saw your blog traffic dip unexpectedly on this date, it’s possible you’ve been “pecked” by the Google Penguin—an indication that your blog is considered to be over-optimized in the eyes of the search giant.

Of course, knowing that you’ve been affected and taking remedial actions to recover from a Penguin penalty are two different things. Because of Google’s natural reticence when it comes to revealing the exact parameters that cause a site to be flagged for over-optimization, it’s impossible to know exactly which factors led to your site’s penalty.

The key to determining how to move forward following a Penguin attack lies in identifying potential over-optimization flags that can be quantified and measured by the search engines. Remember, the Googlebot can’t manually assess the quality of every website online. Instead, it must rely on measurable signals that can be used to infer objective value.

Based on these criteria, there are a few possible areas that every post-Penguin recovery plan should address:

On-site over-optimization

The first potential avenue through which Google could quantify metrics and assess over-optimization penalties is through the abuse of well-known on-page SEO best practices. The following are a few of the specific indicators you’ll want to pay attention to:

Title tags: Because your pages’ title tags play a big role in your on-site SEO, this keyword stuffing opportunity has long been abused by web spammers. If you’ve ever seen a title tag that reads something like, “Lose weight, fast weight loss, lose weight now with these tips,” you’ve seen an example of on-site over-optimization that could easily be detected and penalized by the search engines.
Instead, a far better solution is to structure your title tags as follows:
- Incorporate your target keyword only once, in a way that sounds natural and accurately describes the content of your page.
- Add your brand’s name to your title tags, as there’s some indication that Google is giving increased weight to websites with established brands.
- Limit your title tags to 60-70 characters for maximum search engine consideration.
Internal links: Another on-site website element that’s easily manipulated from an SEO standpoint is its internal link structure. “PageRank sculpting” or “link sculpting” devotees claim that by manipulating the anchor text distribution and flow of Google PageRank from one blog post to another, they can control how each page on their site is valued by the search engines.
Well, guess what? Because the search engine spiders navigate the web using links, they’ve gotten pretty good at understanding what natural internal link distribution looks like—as well as what it looks like when bloggers and other webmasters build internal links in an intentionally manipulative fashion!

For best results, link to other pages using internal links only when it makes sense for your readers. Build your site’s navigation structure and architecture in a way that helps visitors access different areas of your site effectively, and add links between blog posts only when the information is relevant and provides value for your readers.
Footer links: This on-site over-optimization element is so obviously detectable by the search engines that it’s not even funny! I’ll keep this one brief: don’t pack the footer section of your blog full of unnecessary links for the sole purpose of manipulating anchor text, link relevance or internal PageRank flow. Seriously, just don’t do it!
Scraped or stuffed content: Again, manipulated content is an over-optimization red flag that should be an obvious “no go,” yet it’s amazing how many websites still make use of content that’s either copied and pasted from other sites or so packed full of keywords that it’s nearly illegible to human readers.
If you have either of these two types of content on your blog, get them off as soon as possible! While scraped and stuffed content may have helped your site to rank well in the natural search results pages in the past, it’s an obvious red flag to a search engine that’s indicated its desire to go after web spammers. Even if your site survived the Penguin update unscathed, chances are you won’t be so safe in the future!

Off-site over-optimization

In addition to the specific optimization activities you undertake on your website, your off-site actions can be treated as red flags by the Penguin penalty and future updates as well. Here are a few of the specific elements you’ll want to pay attention to:

Link velocity: Although having external links pointing back at your site is an important part of optimizing your website effectively for the search engines, the rate at which you acquire these links (a.k.a. your “link velocity”) should be treated with the utmost caution.
Ideally, your blog’s backlink profile should look as natural as possible—even if you’re following SEO backlinking best practices. If your blog is well-established and well-regarded within your industry, it may be able to handle receiving dozens of new backlinks a day. On the other hand, if your site is new, you can bet the search engines realize that it doesn’t look natural to have a young site earning handfuls of new links every day!

Although there’s no hard and fast rule about how many links are too many links, it’s best to focus on obtaining a few high-value backlinks than to spam your site with dozens or hundreds of low quality links. Be especially cautious in the few six months of your site’s life, and hold off on any major link building campaigns until your site is indexed appropriately by the search engines.
Anchor text distribution: As you undertake your link building campaigns, steer clear of the dated advice to incorporate only your target keyword and a few closely related variations as anchor text within your new links. Google Penguin has changed the way anchor text is valued, so having too high of a concentration of exact match anchor text backlinks could set your site up for future penalties.
In addition, if you’ve used targeted anchor text links in the past, it might be worthwhile to remove as many as possible or to dilute their strength with untargeted links. For more information on how to evaluate your existing link building profile for anchor text distribution, check out SEOMoz’s article titled, How to Survive Google’s Unnatural Links Warnings & Avoid Over-Optimisation.
Sitewide links: One final indicator of over-optimization you’ll want to be aware of is a high density of “sitewide links.”
Sitewide links are those that appear in areas of a website that are displayed on every single page of that site—for example, in the sidebar or footer area of a blog. Because these types of links can be used to quickly increase the number of backlinks pointing at a blog for the sole purpose of manipulating the search results, they’re an easy target for Google Penguin and similar future updates.

To find instances of sitewide links, use the “Links to your site” feature found in Google’s Webmaster Tools or other paid link research programs like Ahrefs or the Open Site Explorer. Then, as you encounter instances of sitewide links, you can either request their removal from the offending sites or increase your other link building activities in order to diminish their impact on your site.

Were you pecked by the Penguin?

Did you see a decrease in traffic following the Google Penguin update? Are you concerned about future over-optimization penalties and how they’ll be assessed? Share any other specific actions you’ve taken to improve your site’s optimization in the comments below.

AJ Kumar is co-founder of Single Grain, a digital marketing agency< based in San Francisco. Single Grain specializes in helping startups and larger companies with search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media, and various other marketing strategies.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Is Your Blog Over-optimized?

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/q8dT3zs5xtM/

8 Top-Notch Industry Conferences No Marketer Should Miss

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 13:38:00 +0000

ZZZzzzzz. We have all been to some seriously yawn-inducing marketing conferences. But that's not how marketing conferences need to be! They can be (and should be) exciting, intellectually stimulating, motivating, networking goldmines, and everything but a waste of time. Problem is, it's hard to sort through the clutter; how do you know whether the conference you're signing up for is a total dud?

Well, we've been to a lot of marketing conferences here at HubSpot, so I asked around for recommendations for the industry conferences that stood out the most to our employees. Here are the best conferences they've attended, and why we think they are so totally fabulous!

1) PubCon

This event, recommended by HubSpot's resident Social Media Scientist @DanZarrella, is for those of you who are entrepreneurial, result-driven types who care about the future of technology. The conference isn't at all suity, and is full of motivated, get-down-to-business marketers. Leading businesses, exhibitors, and sponsors involved in social media, online advertising, and internet marketing will be at this event with over 200 speakers and 100 .sessions. This event takes place October 15-18th, 2012 in Las Vegas.

Insider Tip: Get a good night sleep the day before the conference; you might find yourself up late exploring the Vegas scene with other attendees after your jam-packed marketing days.

2) MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum

@Ellieeille and @kippbodnar recommend this conference, which is known for its awesome content. This isn't an event for people who follow yesterday's best practices and trends. Come to this conference if you're ready to push the envelope to move your business and industry forward. The opening day keynote will be given by Baratunde Thurston, comedian and director of digital for The Onion, speaking on creativity in the digital world. This event takes place October 3rd-5th, 2012 in Boston.

Insider Tip: Be prepared to put on your creative hat for the keynote. Start thinking about how you can make your content more unique to generate those leads you're looking for.

3) Sirius Decisions Summit

@Pamelump suggests the Sirius Decisions Summit, especially for those of you working at larger companies. This one day gathering of analysts and top sales and marketing leaders from Global 1000 companies is focused on the integration between B2B sales and marketing. A key part of the conference is a vendor showcase where attendees can speak with suppliers about their solutions to improve sales and marketing alignment and increase revenue. This is a fabulous opportunity for enterprise marketers to network with other bigwigs. This event takes place November 15, 2012 in London.

Insider Tip: Do some LinkedIn research (check out LinkedIn Events, too!) before the conference so you're fully prepared for all the networking opportunities -- enterprise marketers are all over the LinkedIn network!

4) Mirren New Business Conference

@pc4media attended this conference with "celebrity personalities and rockstar CEOs" and highly recommends it. The Mirren New Business Conference is a yearly event for CEOs and business development professionals at marketing, ad, and PR agencies. Both industry heavyweights as well as up-and-comers get together to talk about the future of the industry and the state of client acquisition. This year, a special track on technology stirred great conversation about how marketing software, social media, and inbound marketing are changing the way agencies generate new business, and the services they offer to clients. This event takes place May 1-3rd, 2012 in NYC.

Insider Tip: Bring business cards with your Twitter handle on them for those after-hours networking opportunities; this crowd will appreciate it.

5) LinkLove

If you're looking for a great event with amazing speakers and tons of killer link building and SEO tips, @sarahbethgo says this is the event for you. This year, Colby Almond totally crushed it with a presentation called "Going Viral on Pinterest." Wil Reynolds gave an equally wonderful presentation about stalking your big influencers online to build connections with them, using HubSpot's very own co-founder Dharmesh Shah as his example of the big influencer he was targeting. This conference offers useful link building tips together with a humorous tone and a laid-back attitude. This event takes place April 2, 2012 in Boston.

Insider Tip: Bring your smile and positive attitude, and be prepared to laugh and have fun while you're learning!

6) SMX East

Looking to increase your website traffic, conversions, and sales? Hah, who isn't? @DanSlagen recommends this conference because of its solid content. There's a balance of both the client side and agency side, so there are plenty of opportunities for everyone to learn a lot. You can choose from 60 sessions ranging from search engine optimization (SEO), to paid search advertising, to social media marketing on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This event takes place October 2-4, 2012 in NYC.

Insider Tip: Because of the sheer volume of sessions, research which ones you'd like to attend beforehand so you can make the most of your time and the content available.

7) Business Marketing Association National Conference

@kippbodnar recommends this conference for anyone who wants their company to grow. The conference is for both marketers and their colleagues in sales, sales enablement, and CRM management who are looking to grow their company fast, efficiently, and profitably. The 2012 international conference was the single largest annual B2B marketing event in the world, with people from 300 companies, 35 states, and 12 countries. This event takes place May 30th-June 1st, 2012 in Chicago.

Insider Tip: Chat with some of your coworkers who aren't going to the conference to see if they have some people they would like you to meet that can help you accelerate your company's growth goals.

8) INBOUND 2012

Finally, a little shameless self-promotion courtesy of a recommendation by, well, @HubSpot. Our INBOUND 2012 conference is perfect for veteran inbound marketers and newbies alike. With 60+ breakout sessions and speakers like SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin, bestselling authors David Meerman Scott, Susan Cain, and Gary Vaynerchuk, there's no way to leave this event without learning about the mind-blowing future of inbound marketing. Oh, and did we mention there are some killer parties? This event takes place August 27th-30th in Boston.

Insider Tip: Establish your digital networking footprint before arriving -- on Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, wherever -- as this crowd is likely to be keeping in touch socially after the event.

Whew! You'll be a busy bee if you go to all of these marketing conferences -- but you sure won't be bored. For the conferences on this list that have passed in 2012, be sure to mark off your calendars for next year's date. Happy networking!

What marketing conferences aren't listed here that you absolutely love? Share what makes them so awesome in the comments!

Image credit: FindYourSearch

5 Simple Steps to Marketing your Blog’s Content with Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 23:03:00 +0000

A blogger needs to develop the skills of a drug dealer, a teacher and a chef .

The drug dealers make their product so good that after giving away their first free sample, their customers come back with the cash. They are savvy businessman, they know that if they give away something for free that they will develop loyal customers. Give away samples of your content for free.

A blogger also needs to act like a teacher and show people how to do things. Bigger brands don’t want to reveal their secrets in their articles. So as a blogger, if you can teach you will create a fan following and people will start showing up. One of the fastest growing segments on the web are “how to” articles, videos and blogs. So teach.

So why should a blogger be like a chef? Which chefs are famous? The ones who share everything they know. They write cookbooks that reveal exactly how they make that apple pie. They go on television and make a dish for all to see so everyone can copy it. So be prepared to reveal your recipes.

This blog is my cookbook.

Publishing is just the Start

Blogging involves many things but first have to create the content. It could be photos, videos or articles, but if you don’t tell the world you will continue to remain a secret. That is fine if that is what you want.

If you want to garner some attention and traffic then you have to market your blog. Don’t assume that readers and viewers will turn up by magic.

So what are some simple steps that many bloggers just forget or can’t be bothered to do?

Just about all of us have friends and followers on social networks. Some are only are on Facebook, but most have multiple social network accounts.

Dont be afraid to use those social media platforms to tell people that you have published your content on your blog.

#1. Facebook

As a blogger you will need to create a Facebook page for your blog. It doesn’t need to be complicated. If you haven’t got a Facebook page do it today. If you haven’t then tell your friends that you have published on your article by posting it to your personal page. Copy the blog article link and drop it into your “What’s on your mind?” status update box. Don’t be shy.

More reading: 20 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Likes

#2. Twitter

Twitter has been my most efficient platform for promoting my content. If you don’t have a Twitter account go and set one up now. It is not difficult, include a photo, a link to your blog and a short description of what your blog is about. Drop in your headline, your link and hit publish. There is one tool that I use to manage Twitter called Hootsuite which allows you to use the micro blogging platform very efficiently and is worth checking out once you have created a Twitter account.

More reading: 12 Keys to Success on Twitter

#3. Google+

Publish your article on Google+. Google+ is Google’s social network that is now one year old. If you haven’t registered on Google+ yet, I would strongly recommend you do. This social media account is now an important part of the social web (with over 250 million registered users) and should be included in your blog post article promotion process. It is not just a copy of Facebook and has its own customs and tribes. Google is also using Google+ to collect social signals on what people like and don’t like online and including this in its search results. This will become more important as time goes by for having your articles found in search.

More reading: Why you Shouldn’t Ignore Google+ Anymore

#4. Pinterest

For visual bloggers this is vital. Pinterest burst onto the screen about a year ago after flying below the radar. Pin you videos and images on your blog to your Pinterest account after publishing. It will help you make your content get shared which will then also link back to your blog from wherever it has been pinned.

More reading: 10 Creative Ways to Market on Pinterest

#5. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is very often ignored as a source to publish your content. It is especially powerful in the B2B market segments. If you have a look at the number of LinkedIn shares on this blog on various articles you will realize that it should be part of your marketing tactics. It is as simple as a Facebook update.

More reading: How to Harness the Power of LinkedI – Plus Infographic

Final Tips

Despite the popularity of social media and its shiny new toy attraction, I would strongly recommend that you do not forget two essential tactics. Firstly include an RSS subscription button on your blog so people can receive automatic notifications that your article has been published in their reader subscription platforms such as “Google Reader”

Lastly and most importantly making it easy for people to subscribe to your blog with an email subscription is still the most important blogger promotion platform today. Email may seem passe to some but building an email subscriber list and “list building” is a core asset that you should include from day one.

What about You ?

What tactics do you find useful to market and promote your blog. Is there anything you have forgotten. We can all do better.

Look forward to hearing your successes and stories.

from Jeffbullas's Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JeffbullassBlog/~3/P8tsZvDFito/

Separate Your Blog Needs from Your Blog Wants

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 20:35:00 +0000

This guest post is by Nicola Ibberson of Little House In Town.

We’re always told in life that we should distinguish between those things we “want” and those things we “need.” The general idea of this is that we need to prioritise the things we do and things we buy according to their necessity.

Generally speaking, this is a pretty sound piece of advice—it ensures we don’t end up sitting on a mountain of chocolate when we have no toilet paper, for example. It ensures we have a roof over our heads before we go out and buy a two-seater soft-top. It ensures we don’t head off on our holidays before we’ve turned off all the lights, switched off the fridge, and put the cats in the cattery.

But I think I’ve found a flaw in this sound advice. I think that sometimes you have to put the “wants” up front. Sometimes, doing something because you need to do it, or buying something because you need to buy it, kind of takes the sparkle out of whatever that thing is. It makes the doing or the purchasing of that thing into a chore. And nobody likes chores.

I’m an extra-curricular blogger. I work full-time hours (sometimes more) and have several out-of-work commitments aside from my blog, as do many of you. At some point in time, I set myself a mental target to write two blog posts a week, minimum. It’s an amount that kept my blog looking up-to-date when people stumbled across it, it ensured my readers didn’t think I’d fallen off the face of the planet, and it made me feel that I was not wasting all the efforts I’d put into building up the small web presence I have.

Setting myself that target was, in many ways, a big error. It made every blog post I did into a “need.”

“I need to write a blog post tonight; I haven’t posted anything since last Friday” was a phrase my partner heard with alarming regularity.

Sometimes, I wrote a post and made a promise to my readers that I would be featuring a certain something the week after. Most of the time, when I made that promise, the “certain something” wasn’t even written yet. So then I needed to write it, because I said I would.

Mass panic ensued when, five days later, that post still hadn’t been written. So I would write it one night after work, when I was tired, fed-up, hungry, distracted, and my brain had all but turned to mush. I can’t imagine that writing in this state showcased the best of my abilities.

Sound familiar? Perhaps it’s time to make a change.

Changing the “needs” into “wants”

It’s difficult to try and juggle life with blogging, especially with other commitments taking up our time, such as full-time jobs or children. It can be easy to lose track of the reason we started writing in the first place and we can begin to view updating our blogs as a chore.

This is how I felt. For a while, I wallowed in pity and despair, complaining of lack of time and inspiration. Then I got a grip, and decided to actually do something constructive towards reclaiming my blogging pizzazz.

I mined the internet and other blogs looking for inspiration and advice, and have collated my tried and tested favourites here for you:

Write a blog manifesto: Sometimes we need a reminder of what our blog is all about, and why we started it in the first place. It can help to focus us when we deviate from the intended path, and provide inspiration when our brains are flagging. Write a business plan for your blog. Done properly, it will help you recapture all it is that you love about your blog, and fill you with enthusiasm on every read.
Give yourself designated blogging time: Most extra-curricular activities take place at designated times. Your pilates class may run from 7-8pm on a Wednesday, for example. You would be frowned upon if you took the kids and dog along with you, and you wouldn’t break away to sort out the washing half way through. Why should your blog be any different? Give your blog some respect, and set aside some designated “blog time.” Even if just for an hour a week, it could be the boost your writing needs.
Keep a notebook: If you don’t do this already, this is the one thing you really must try. If, like me, you can’t just leap onto a computer and type away whenever inspiration strikes, then please, please, please carry a notebook. Superglue it to your torso if you have to. And for goodness sake, don’t forget a pen. Whenever you have a light-bulb idea, you can scribble it down, and whenever you find yourself with a spare ten minutes, you can do a bit of blog scheduling. Then, when you’re staring gormlessly at your screen without a scrap of inspiration, you can delve into your notebook and pull out a gem of a post.
Stop worrying: Yes, social media is important. Yes, regular content on your blog is important. No, it isn’t so important that you should panic about it. Posting ill-thought-out content on your blog or your social media sites just so there’s something there could be just as damaging as not saying anything at all. So don’t sweat it.
Re-evaluate the depth and length of your posts: If you find that you are never able to finish writing a post in the time you have set aside, perhaps you really need to consider altering the length of your posts. I personally have this problem. I waffle. A lot. By capping the length of my posts I feel much more gratified by my writing, as now I can actually write whole posts in one sitting!
Lose the day job: An extreme solution? Perhaps, but if your blog is generating interest that you just can’t keep up with, and you can see potential for making revenue if only you had time to set up that affliate marketing scheme/write that sponsored post/put some ad spaces on your homepage, then maybe you should seriously look at whether you can make your blog more than just a hobby. Talk to your boss: they may be able to reduce your hours or offer more flexible working patterns. If you’re unsure of how things will turn out, look into career break options or extended holiday to trial the pro blogger life.

What are your blogging needs—and what are your wants? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

Nicola Ibberson is about to give up the day-job, move to the seaside and embark on a freelance career as a writer, proofreader and whatever-else-comes-her-way-er. Her personal blog, Little House In Town, is a place for all things ethical, sustainable, handmade and seaside-y.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Separate Your Blog Needs from Your Blog Wants

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/O-_X0_eXgGw/

How to Promote Your Old Lead Gen Offers So They Feel Brand New

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:23:00 +0000

So you've successfully created an amazing offer that you think will boost your lead generation like whoa. You've launched it on your blog, via social media, and in your email marketing -- and you're watching those conversions climb and climb ... until they eventually plateau.

Wait. That wasn't supposed to happen. Was all that hard work creating your offer for naught? Do the lead generation benefits have to end so soon? They certainly don't, so you figure you need to launch another few rounds of promotion for your offer to get those conversions climbing again -- but how are you supposed to do that without seeming like you're recycling old gifts?

Fear not, readers! There's a way to repromote your offers so the content is still fresh for your audience ... and this post will teach you how.

Repackaging Your Offer Content

Before we get into how to repromote your offer content via various marketing channels, let's talk about how to do a quick rework of your offer content itself. When you can apply little tip, it will help you keep your offer promotion even fresher, you'll likely see better results because you're creating more targeted content, and it amount of work required is pretty minimal.

If you've created an offer -- let's say it's about how to write SEO content -- that could apply to lots of different people. That's great! But, have you ever considered how you could tweak that offer to address the problems of specific segments within your database? For example, ecommerce companies, B2B organizations, franchises, and international organizations might require slightly different approaches to writing SEO content. Not so radically different that you need to start from scratch! But different enough that if you put a little time into tweaking your original offer, you could actually end up with 5 distinct offers to promote to different segments of your audience!

You could apply this concept to content formats, too. Let's take that offer about how to write SEO content as our example again. Let's say you wrote an ebook about that originally, but some of your audience doesn't take well to long form content of that nature. You could distill the information therein and create a cheat sheet or checklist that appeals to the short-form content junkie. Boom! You just reformatted your offer so you now have two pieces of lead generation content in your arsenal!

This repackaging won't be applicable to every offer you create -- but it's something to keep in mind to help you keep your offer content fresh, and allow you to re-promote those offers without boring your audience with the same old stuff.

How to Re-promote Your Offers on Social Media

Your social media channels are going to be one of your biggest weapons in the continued promotion of your offers. According to bitly, the average shelf life of a tweet is only 2.8 hours. For a Facebook update, that number rises ... but only to a measly 3.2 hours. And while some links can defy the statistics and stay relevant in the social world for a bit longer, you certainly shouldn't bank on it. You'll need to periodically unleash your offers onto your social media networks in ways that don't make your fans and followers think you're just hammering them with the same content over and over. So what rules of thumb should you be following?

First, get used to changing up your language. That incredibly clever tweet you wrote to announce your offer is only clever once. Find a new angle -- and a new value proposition -- to re-promote your offer and grab audiences that weren't compelled to click on your link in previous social updates. Check out these tweets from @HubSpot, for example; they're all promoting the same offer, but in different ways:

Each of those tweets could appeal to a different audience -- those that are interested in Instagram might click the last tweet, but gloss right over the first two. Your offer is likely valuable for many reasons, so find what those angles are and compose your social media updates based on those multiple value propositions.

You should also experiment with different timing in order to reach a wider audience. If you share your offer at the same time each day, chances are you're hitting a relatively similar audience with each update. So start posting at different time of day, and days of the week (and track the data, of course) to see what works well for your audience. If you're looking for more in-depth information on social media experiments, check out our free webinar about the science of social media.

While doing all this, however, you need to ensure you're keeping a nice content balance. If you're only promoting one offer, no matter how creative you phrase your updates, your audience will start tuning out when they receive that same old link again and again. In addition to the offer you're trying to promote, promote other offers in your arsenal, blog posts, visual content, industry news, other people's content -- you know, all the great content we always encourage you to post! The point of social media is to keep your networks engaged with you, and that's not going to happen if you bombard them with just one type of content, let alone one singular offer over and over again.

How to Re-promote Your Offers on Your Blog

Your blog is a goldmine for offer re-promotion! Let me explain.

Every blog post you publish includes a call-to-action, right? Right. So the more blog content you publish, the more visibility your offers receive! Your readers expect to see a call-to-action that's relevant to the subject of the blog post, so if you're trying to get more visibility for a particular offer, all you need to do is write more blog posts about that subject matter. Approach it from different angles, too, to tap into what makes different segments of your audience tick.

You should also be linking to your offer through every blog post you write -- even if it isn't directly related to the subject matter of the post. For example, this post is about re-promoting old offers ... but that doesn't mean I won't talk about other concepts tangentially throughout the post! You might remember this little ecommerce lead generation link from earlier in the post, for example:

Internal linking not only helps the SEO of the landing page your offer lives behind, but it helps drive traffic from that blog post to your landing page. So as long as your internal link is contextual, there's no reason you can't encourage blog readers to learn more about a particular topic right within the copy of your post!

Finally, you can take excerpts from your offer and use them as blog posts for some serious promotional real estate. This works best for long-form offer content that has several nuggets of information contained within it that can stand on their own as pieces of blog content. For example, you might notice many of our ebooks contain a table of contents that break up the information into more digestible chunks. If you take this same approach to your long form content, grabbing a chapter of that content and repurposing it as a blog post, then explicitly saying the blog post is excerpted from your ebook (with a link to the landing page in that copy, of course!), is a fantastic way to not only promote your ebook, but to get some quick blog content, too!

How to Re-promote Your Offers in Email Marketing

Email is one of the most direct ways you can reach people who care about your content. And that's great ... when your offer is brand new and you're sending it for the first time. But did you know that, according to Experian, over 80% of email marketers send the same content to all subscribers? Yikes. That's a surefire way to make your offers stale in a jiffy. When repromoting offers during email sends, there are a few tips to keep in mind (and yes, we do plan to hard on segmentation here so you're not part of that 80% metric!).

First, don't send the exact same email twice. Think about it, if you send out the same email to your mailing list twice, you're sending it to exactly two groups of people: people who already read your email and don't care, and people who already chose not to read or click through the offer in your email. The answer, of course, is segmentation.

Instead of sending out a general email to everyone and hoping your subject line will hook the segment of people who actually want this offer, segment your email list and include your offer as a component in a segmented campaign. That's where the lead intelligence you've gathered on your list will come in handy. Have the contacts you're emailing this offer to shown an interest in this type of content in the past? Alternately, have you repackaged your offer content like we discussed in the beginning of this post, letting you align your offer to segments of your list based on business type, industry, or another identifying factor? When you approach emailing your offer in this manner, it's much more likely your emails will reach people who actually care about the content.

You don't have to rely on email sends dedicated exclusively to your offer for email marketing promotions. Consider alternate email formats to resurface your offers, like email digests or newsletters. If your company sends out a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly digest or newsletter, you could include a section that highlights the offer you wish to re-promote. It's a simple way to land the offer in the inboxes of your subscribers another time, without bombarding them with another email dedicated to the offer. I bet there are some people on your list who have only subscribed to this type of email, too, so including your offers in your newsletter is imperative for reaching those particular subscribers.

If You Remember Nothing Else ...

Regardless of how you choose to re-promote your offer content, there are two takeaways you should always keep in mind to ensure your audience doesn't feel bombarded by the same content over, and over, and over.

1) Don't repeat yourself. The audience backlash isn't worth the time saved by sending out duplicate emails, tweets, and other content. Those who chose not to interact with your content the first time obviously had a reason -- that's why its critical to find the other angles that make your offer content valuable, and match those value propositions up with the proper segments of your audience in a repositioning of your content. Even though you're not sharing a brand new offer, your copy and context should always be new, so you're giving everyone who sees it a new decision to make!

2) Cross-promote, but not simultaneously. If you send out an email, a tweet, a Facebook update, and a blog post (with links and a CTA!) all at once, people are going to 1) not see everything you sent out, and 2) be incredibly annoyed with you. So don't do that. Use marketing software, spreadsheets, a Google doc -- whatever works best for you -- to schedule your updates in advance and ensure promotion from all of your channels isn't all happening on the same day at the same time, so you don't flood your audience all at once.

How have you found success repromoting your older lead generation offers?

Image credit: asenat29

Build a Quality Resource List for Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 14:20:00 +0000

When was the last time you compiled a resource list for your readers?

Tom Ewer recently wrote up his own ultimate resource list for readers of his blog, titled 100 Blogs You Need in Your Life. (And ProBlogger came in at number 2! Thanks, Tom!)

If you look at the response from his readers, you’ll note the sense of excitement that this post generated. Words like love, awesome, absolutely amazing, and cool come up again and again in the comments. Readers are bookmarking the list and immediately (it seems) going to check out the recommended sites.

Resource lists like this really are valuable for readers. But if you’re putting together a resource list, you’ll want to think hard about how you do it. To my mind, there are five key factors that make or break a resource list.

1. Size

This post is a whopper—100 resources is a lot. It does make the list epic, and link-worthy, but it also works because the links aren’t time-limited. These resources will be as good in eight months as they are today, so readers can bookmark the list and come back to it again and again.

A list of 100 daily deals, for example, is probably less bookmarkable, since it’ll be useless by tomorrow. In deciding on a length for your resource list, look at the longevity of the content as well as its sharability. The greater the longevity of your resource, the more repeat traffic it’ll generate from those who do bookmark it.

2. Quality

At the beginning of the post, Tom explains that the list is “a labor of love”. Your resource list should reflect the same degree of care for your readers.

Many lists are put together simply for the sake of links, but they’ll gain fewer initial links—and less repeat visits—if the quality isn’t up to scratch. I often find the best resource lists are those that list “plugins that have saved my site” or “sites that helped me make my first online paycheque”—tools and services that the author has used herself, and can speak intelligently on.

Don’t just jam well-regarded resources together into a post. If you can give your own personal take on the resources you’re listing, your readers will relate, and appreciate the list all the more.

3. Layout

Tom’s presented his list in an easy-to-use, completely sortable table. This makes it really easy for readers to use the content, and undoubtedly encourages readers to use the post more than if he’d just provided an unsortable bullet list.

It’s the little things like this that really make your resource extra-valuable for readers. Think about the usability of your list, from the perspective of your readers, as you’re preparing it for publication.

4. Extras

You’ll notice that Tom asks readers to mention any other sites they feel he should have added. This tactic helps to make the resource even more valuable. Once dedicated readers have checked out every link in the table, they can start scouring the comments for good resources that didn’t make the cut.

This technique also ensures Tom has additional resources to consider for next year, gives him insight into the other information his readers access and value on a regular basis, and may help him to shape things like his content strategy or brand position going forward. Asking readers to contribute their own links is a great way to provide—and gain—extra value from your resource post.

5. Iteration

This post is a repeat of a resource list that was compiled almost six months before. This is a great advantage to these kinds of posts—especially if they’re as epic as Tom’s list.

We do the same thing with Jade Craven’s Bloggers to Watch posts, which she compiles every year for ProBlogger. Run your updated resource post regularly—at an appropriate interval—and your readers will likely refer to the previous ones as well as bookmarking the most recent one. They may even come to look forward to your new resource post each quarter, six months, or year.

Have you created resource posts for your blog’s readers? What’s worked for you—and what hasn’t? Add tips from your own experience in the comments—we’d love to learn how you make resource posts work.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Build a Quality Resource List for Your Blog

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/fm-FxyuAuUo/

10 Marketing Pairings That Go Together Like a Steamy Summer Romance

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 13:38:00 +0000

Danny and Sandy. Johnny and Baby. Noah and Allie. Who can resist a good summer romance? And now that summer is here, it got me thinking -- there are a lot of things that work best in pairs, whether you're referring to the ones you find in cheesy romance novels or summer blockbusters like Grease, Dirty Dancing, or The Notebook -- or everyday pairings like toothbrushes and toothpaste, washcloths and soap, or sneakers and socks. They just, well, "go together."

And, doesn't the same thing hold true for marketing? The best marketing efforts integrate channels, tactics, and techniques, and all for the better. Don't believe me? Check out these 10 marketing components that are only enhanced when joined by a compatible marketing counterpart. Even better news? Just like most of the summer "flings" you see in the movies, these romances usually turn into long-term, lasting relationships.

10 Marketing Pairings That Go Together Like a Summer Romance

1) Events and Hashtags

Whether you're hosting an in-person event or an online one like a webinar, one of the best ways to create buzz before, during, and after an event is to establish a hashtag that aggregates the conversations of both attendees and followers who aren't able to attend.

When planning your event, start using the hashtag early on in your marketing promotions so it catches on early and people can connect in the months and days leading up to the event. Use it on the event's website or landing page, in tweets about the event, and in email promotions. During the event, make your hashtag visible in collateral like agendas, signage, and on the slides of your speaker's presentations. Ask your speaker(s) to verbally remind attendees of the hashtag they should use when tweeting about the presentation. Following the event, keep the conversation going by making speakers' slides available for download, using the hashtag in your promotion of them. For some best practices to follow when choosing a hashtag for your event, check out this handy guide.

2) Landing Pages and CTAs

Landing pages are an indispensable part of inbound lead generation. But even though a lot of marketers are using landing pages to convert their visitors into business leads, many fail to put the promotional muscle behind driving traffic to them. And if your landing page isn't attracting visitors, what traffic will it have to convert into leads?

Enter calls-to-action, the perfect mates for all your lonely little landing pages. Calls-to-action, whether in text or button form, are powerful tools for generating traffic to your conversion-optimized landing pages. If you're not creating them for every single landing page you create, your landing pages will suffer more than just loneliness; they'll also be poor lead generators. Once you create CTAs for your landing pages, use them -- on appropriate website pages, blog articles, in social media, email marketing, etc. Get started creating effective calls-to-action by downloading our free ebook on the subject.

3) Visual Content and Social Media

Have you noticed all the buzz about visual content on the web lately? There's just no stopping it, and it's taking the internet by storm. Why? Because people love consuming content visually, whether it's through a chart or graph, an infographic, a visualization, cartoon, or just a striking image. So if you've decided to jump on the visual content bandwagon and invest in visual content creation to enhance your marketing, don't forget about visual content's right-hand man: social media.

Not only should you be using visual content on your website, blog, or downloadable content -- you should also be sharing them (and making it easy for others to do so themselves) on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+, where visuals thrive and spread like crazy. And if you need some visual inspiration, here are 55 examples of brands rocking social media with visual content.

4) Email and Segmentation

For many marketers, email is the single most powerful lever at their disposal. This is usually owed to the sheer size of their email list, which most marketers have built up over time into a massive database of contacts. It makes sense, but when it comes to using that list for email marketing, email marketers can be classified into one of two categories: those who segment, and those who do not.

It's marketers of the former variety that have happy, healthy, and long-lasting relationships with their email marketing. According to data from the Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report, when asked to indicate their top three results, 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates, 28% experienced lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% experienced better deliverability and greater revenue. Considering those stats, there's no question about it -- email marketing's better half is segmentation. To start sending better email marketing with segmentation, here are 27 great ways to slice and dice your email list.

5) Tweets and Bitly

If you have a company Twitter presence, chances are you've needed to shorten a link or two ... or 200. Including links in your tweets is critical for driving traffic (and leads) from Twitter to your website, but with that pesky 140-character limit holding you back, your lengthy URLs will always need some slimming down.

That's why tweets and bitly are a match made in heaven. Bitly enables you to shorten any URL, customize links so they're easy to remember and share, and provide you analytics so you can track clicks on your links to evaluate what types of content resonate with your Twitter followers -- and what doesn't.

6) Print Collateral and QR Codes

While most inbound marketers do the majority of their marketing on the web, that doesn't mean there isn't room for traditional printed marketing collateral. But the difference between savvy use of print marketing and, well, not savvy use, is that it connects your offline efforts to your online ones. That's why QR codes are such a great marketing tool. They enable you to link your offline print collateral with your online presence through people's mobile devices.

You can use QR codes to send people to a relevant landing page, social presence, or other piece of web content, and generate leads as a result. Your printed marketing materials now have a much higher ROI -- that you can track! To learn what you should about using QR codes in your marketing, check out this helpful blog post.

7) Lead Management and Marketing Automation

Marketers all over are starting to understand that their job doesn't stop once the visitor converts into a lead. In fact, according to Gleanster Research, 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. That means marketers still have some work to do if they want the leads they generate to be sales-ready, and that's why the top marketers are investing time and effort into lead nurturing campaigns that help push leads further down the sales funnel, to a point where contact from Sales makes better sense.

So how do you make your lead nurturing efforts more efficient? Through marketing automation! And while marketing automation often gets a bad rap, it's not all bad when done well; and when you use it to nurture leads who aren't yet ready for a conversation with Sales, it can actually be the perfect partner for your lead management efforts. The key is to set up campaigns that trigger the right messages, at the right time, at the right frequency, and to the right leads. To get started with marketing automation the right way, you can download our free guide here.

8) Content and SEO

Inbound marketers depend on content to fuel their inbound marketing. In fact, all of the channels marketers have at their disposal rely on content in order to be effective. But content needs some help, too, if it wants to rise to its fullest potential.

While content will organically help boost your business' presence in search with little effort, top marketers know that paying careful attention to SEO will help their content be even more successful. They conduct keyword research to identify the right keywords they want to rank for, and they conscientiously use those keywords in their content creation so their blog articles, landing pages, and other web pages get found in search by the prospects they want to attract. So if you're not doing optimizing your content to increase your company's search engine rankings, it might be time to commit.

9) Blog Posts and Social Sharing Buttons

Speaking of content, let's zone in on one of the most common and effective content creation tools marketers can use -- business blogging. Business blogging is a great way to consistently create new content that can power your SEO and other marketing channels. But besides your own promotional efforts to get your prospects finding and reading your awesome blog content, you should also be making it easy for your audience to share and evangelize your content so you can reach a whole new audience -- their networks.

For this, there's nothing more compatible than social sharing buttons. You know -- those buttons that enable your blog readers to easily share your blog posts on popular social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Adding these buttons to your blog (and other content for that matter), will help you expand the reach of your content. And even if that reach extends to people who may never buy from you, the benefits still abound.

10) Link Building and Guest Blogging

We talked about SEO in number 9, but if you really want to dominate the search results for your industry and keywords, you'll have to do much more than on-page SEO. Off-page SEO, to which link building (getting other websites to link to your website/content) is central, is much more influential in determining how your website and its content rank in search. That being said, it's also a bit trickier, considering you have less control over it.

Well would you look at that! Here comes guest blogging, link building's knight in shining armor! Guest blogging enables you to steadily build up the inbound links into your website in a legitimate, white hat way. While guest blogging does take time and commitment, the long-term benefits will do wonders for your organic search rankings. For a guest blogging for link building how-to, check out this comprehensive guide.

Who knew marketing could be so romantic? In fact, we're in the mood for some summer love ourselves. Whaddya say to a 30-day fling with our inbound marketing software? We'd really like to get to know you better. Will you go on a date with us?

How to Create a WordPress Blog in 5 Minutes

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 11:18:00 +0000

I started my blog using the WordPress platform and I have found it a great technology to publish your content online.

A WordPress theme provides flexibility and customisation features that Facebook could never provide.

It is the foundation to the success of this blog which currently receives over 300,000 hits per month.

If you’re looking for an easy way to create a web presence and start sharing your ideas online, the best way to do this is to create a blog. Millions of users around the world already express themselves and share their thoughts by means of their personal blogs.

The advantage of having your own WordPress blog that is self-hosted with your own domain name, is that you “own” it.

It is good to have a Facebook “page” or a Tumblr blog but they are owned by someone else and you can have a web presence there but under their “terms and conditions”

They are a rental. You never know when they will change the rules, ask you to leave or even demolish your house.

Build and Own your Online Assets

To build an online asset that you control and is fully flexible and can customise as you want then you need to own your domain with your own blog (website) and host it yourself.

If you are a writer, photographer, designer or just someone who wants to write about something personal and to hear opinions of others – a personal blog is something you can find new and exciting. Cheap and efficient, too. In the modern day, no special knowledge is required to create and maintain your own website. Actually there is a simple way of creating a WordPress blog in a matter of minutes.

In order to start a website, regardless of its nature and purpose, you need two things: a domain name and hosting.

WebHostingBuzz are a hosting company that can provide both. Most of WebHosting Buzz’s hosting plans come with free domain name registration, so that you don’t have to worry about one or another and get everything in one place, and at an excellent price.

Why WordPress?

The WordPress blogging platform is the most popular software in the world with Wikipedia reporting

WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites
It manages 22% of all new websites
WordPress is currently the most popular CMS (Content Management System) in use on the Internet
It was first released on May 27, 2003
By December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times

It is also one of the easiest to use due to its flexibility and user-friendliness.

So how do you install it in less than 5 minutes and start blogging?

Let’s go!

Step One

Step Two

Just click on the login link provided in the email and use the supplied credentials to login to cPanel.

Step Three

Once you are logged in, you will see the cPanel home page; just scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and you will see WordPress available for installation right from the control panel. Click on the icon.

Installing WordPress

Step Four

The screen below will now appear and you only need to click “Install”.

Step Five

Although not necessary, you may want to specify some settings of your blog, such as its name, the site or the folder of your site to which it will be installed and the admin username and password. If you wish the WordPress blog to be the main page of your website, make sure the ‘In Directory’ field is empty.

Take note of the admin login credentials, you will need them later. Also, make sure the admin email is valid and you have access to it. In case you forget the password, the link to reset the password will be sent to this address.

Step Six

When you are ready, click ‘Install’. The installation process is quick and takes under 60 seconds in most cases. Once it’s complete, your new blog is ready to use and you may visit it right away.

You will be greeted with the default WordPress page.

Now, let’s create your first blog post.

Step Seven

Scroll down and click on the ‘Log in’ in the right menu bar to access the admin area. The dashboard should look like this:

Hover over “New” and click on “Post” in the drop down menu that appears.

Step Eight

Enter the title for the article/post and then enter the text below that headline. You may already have an article you have written in “Word” or a text editor which you can paste (insert) using the . When happy with what you have written then it is time to publish.

Click ‘Publish’ in order for your post to appear on the site.

Your blog is now “live” and visible for all to see.

Step Nine

Customising the appearance of your WordPress blog can be done to suit your personal tastes.This is not necessary but I am sure that eventually you will want to make it suit the topic you will be blogging about whether it is photography, food or sport.

This can be done in ‘Appearance’ section of the admin menu. Hundreds of free themes and widgets are available there which will allow you to make your site look completely different and unique. Browse through them and you will surely find something useful.

Get Started Now!

The journey starts with doing, not thinking or over planning.

Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring filmmakers: “Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”* The most important thing is to just “do it”.

So start your blog and create your online masterpiece now.

I look forward to hearing about your blogging success. You can get started today from only $4.95 per month.

Note: This blog is sponsored by WebHostingBuzz.com and powers jeffbullas.com

from Jeffbullas's Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JeffbullassBlog/~3/Tc6aG-02oSo/

How to Setup a WordPress Blog in 5 Minutes

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 21:34:00 +0000

I started my blog using WordPress and I have found it a platform that makes it easy to own and publish your own content online.

It is the foundation to the success of this blog which currently receives over 300,000 hits per month.

The advantage of having your own WordPress blog that is self-hosted is that you own it.

It is good to have a Facebook “page” or a Tumblr blog but they are owned by someone else and you can have a web presence there but under their “Terms and Conditions” It is basically a rental.

Build and Own your Online Assets

To build an online asset that you control and is fully flexible and can customise as you want then you need to own your domain with your own blog (website) and host it yourself.

If you are a writer, photographer, designer or just someone who wants to write about something personal and to hear opinions of others – a personal blog is something you can find new and exciting. Cheap and efficient, too. In the modern day, no special knowledge is required to create and maintain your own website. Actually, we want to offer you a simple way of creating a WordPress blog in a matter of minutes.

In order to start a website, regardless of its nature and purpose, you need two things: a domain name and hosting.

Why WordPress?

The WordPress blogging platform is the most popular software in the world with Wikipedia reporting

WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites
It manages 22% of all new websites
WordPress is currently the most popular CMS (Content Management System) in use on the Internet
It was first released on May 27, 2003
By December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times

It is also one of the easiest to use due to its flexibility and user-friendliness.

So how do you install it in less than 5 minutes and start blogging?

Let’s go!

Step One

Step Two

Just click on the login link provided in the email and use the supplied credentials to login to cPanel.

Step Three

Installing WordPress

Step Four

The screen below will now appear and you only need to click “Install”.

Step Five

Step Six

You will be greeted with the default WordPress page.

Now, let’s create your first blog post.

Step Seven

Scroll down and click on the ‘Log in’ in the right menu bar to access the admin area. The dashboard should look like this:

Hover over “New” and click on “Post” in the drop down menu that appears.

Step Eight

Click ‘Publish’ in order for your post to appear on the site.

Your blog is now “live” and visible for all to see.

Step Nine

Get Started Now!

The journey starts with doing, not thinking or over planning.

Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring filmmakers: “Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”* The most important thing is to just “do it”.

So start your blog and create your online masterpiece now.

I look forward to hearing about your blogging success. You can get started today from only $4.95 per month.

Note: This blog is sponsored by WebHostingBuzz.com and powers jeffbullas.com

from Jeffbullas's Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JeffbullassBlog/~3/2Thn_G9NeKU/

From Blog to Profitable Business in Four Steps

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 20:20:00 +0000

This guest post is by Michael Chibuzor of Content Marketing Up.

Let’s face it: updating your blog on a daily basis doesn’t necessarily make you smart. It might be helpful, but there is more to blogging than writing.

How about doing this online “thing” as if it’s a real business? A brick and mortar business?

I strongly believe you could turn a profit easily if you change your mindset and style.

Of course, you’ll continuously write quality content—after all, that’s what your readers need. But turning your blog into a real-life business would help you connect, share, and breathe life into your blog.

It’s about productivity that leads to profit.

You need confidence to win

There are good reasons why you need confidence in your business. Confidence electrifies you and your readers, and prompts action. Entrepreneurs are risk-takers, yet many bloggers may decide to hang on to outdated principles instead of challenging the status quo.

But we can change that.

With all the noise in the blogosphere, it takes extra wit to attract targeted readers and build a tribe. Without confidence, you won’t be able to organize and manage your business.

You need to challenge yourself to take responsibility.

If you want to build a profitable blog, you must run it like an offline business. You need to master:

organization and management
customer service
social etiquette
profit

Those are the four essential factors in building a successful offline business—but they’re extremely beneficial to blogging, too. Are you ready to explore?

1. Organization and management

Jesus picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.—Bruce Barton

“How do I get more people to trust me?” many bloggers ask.

Trust isn’t a one-off decision. You need to be consistent and build trust over time. As you interact with the target audience and provide valuable information, your readers will start to take your words to heart.

That is why you need to organize and manage your blog. A well organized and managed blog will soon become the go-to resource for your target prospects and readers.

First, you need to organize and manage your time. Use your time wisely. Your blog attracts people who have needs. They want answers. Use the limited time at your disposal to focus on answering your readers’ questions, and outsource the other tasks to professionals.

The easiest and most lucrative way to stay organized is to outsource. Before I launched my first ebook, I didn’t understand outsourcing one bit. I had to do the entire task myself—market research, keyword research, cover design, writing, and marketing. As a result, my blog suffered, and my engagement with my audience was broken. I also observed a drop in daily traffic and comments.

Like offline businesses, on your blog, the management (that’s you) is responsible for delegation. Use outsourcing as a corporation uses its departments, and your blog will grow and produce better results. Identify your greatest strengths. Outsource the other tasks (find freelancers at Odesk and Elance).

You don’t have to be a jack-of-all-trades to succeed online.

2. Customer service

We’re so used to customers in the offline business, but bloggers often don’t recognize who our customers are online.

Your readers are your customers, and how you treat them is important to your success.

It’s your responsibility to respect your readers and visitors. Address them by name and reply to their comments with the proper salutation. When someone comes to your site, they should feel that you care. They don’t have to be strangers—at least, not any more.

Create an environment of warmth with prospects and readers. When you give away valuable ebooks or software, or something that will make readers remember you, you’re building a solid relationship.When you send a quote to a prospect, send a gift, too. No matter how small it looks, it’ll create a bond between you and your target audience.

Also, your readers need to know what’s happening at your blog. If you’ll be making changes, you should notify them beforehand. Surprises are good, but not at the detriment of your business. And when there’s a complaint, accept it peacefully and with good humor. See your readers as your friends.

Good customer service can boost your online business and expose you to a world of opportunities.

3. Social etiquette

You can’t help it—you’ve achieved so much in life, and feel a bit fulfilled. Perhaps you have a slight tendency to brag when you blog. But is this healthy for your audience? I don’t think so.

Social etiquette is an attitude. It requires you to look at your personal life, and consider how you bring it to the table as a blogger. Those who don’t share, communicate, and help others have problems with their lives. The problem isn’t the blog or the business—it’s their personal life.

If you focus on helping people, there won’t be a room for bragging. Your level of blogging success today is directly proportional to the value you create. So change your approach and focus on readers, their problems, and how you can help.

That’s how you can use etiquette to make your blog a profitable business.

4. Profit from your blog

As your blog grows into a business and you build its uniqueness, you’ll begin to attract high-paying prospects and outstanding offers. Are you prepared for the opportunities your blogging business could create?

Blogging offers different opportunities to profit. When you visit my content marketing blog, you won’t find an affiliate banner or link. I sell my writing services and generate enough income to pay my bills. And guess what? I didn’t apply for any writing job; I was contacted directly by entrepreneurs because they discovered I was business-minded.

Land a job

Perhaps you’d like a secure, and well-paid job. If that’s the case, running your blog like a real business can be of help. I’ve worked with a human resource firm prior to running my online business. Employers were looking for hard working, passionate, confident go-getters who could help reach the organization’s goals.

Most bloggers don’t have these qualities. They see a blog as a tool, rather than the true business that it is. Are you confident to put your blog’s URL on your resume? If not, consider running it more like a business that you can be proud of.

You’ve seen blogs featured at CNN, Fox News, and so forth. Those are no half-baked blogs—they’re manned by savvy entrepreneurs. If they can do it, why shouldn’t you?

Monetize your blog

Most blogs have no product to sell, but they’re updated regularly. I once asked a blogger friend of mine, “Why don’t you monetize your blog?”

“I don’t want to chase my readers away,” he replied.

Who says selling chases readers away? Monetizing a blog is as important as setting up and updating the blog. Without this, people won’t take you seriously. You’ll be regarded as a newbie at worst, and an amateur at best.

Sell a product

Selling a product or offering a service via your blog won’t annoy readers, provided it’s valuable and offers practical solutions to their problems.

If you decide to monetize with affiliate offers, be honest in your reviews. Let readers know you’ll earn commissions when they buy via your affiliate link. This helps to build credibility and shows that you genuinely want to help them.

If you decide to create your own product, spend time with your audience so that you can understand what they need, and build a product that truly delivers.

Do you see your blog as a real business … or “just a blog”? Is it time you changed your philosophy? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Michael Chibuzor is an entrepreneur, a freelance writer and the founder of Make Money Hi. Are you looking for a creative writer to help grow your site/blog’s traffic and increase sales? Hire Michael to write for you. He loves the color Red. He’s 23 years old and likes to meet new people.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

From Blog to Profitable Business in Four Steps

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/lEEUoRZBSws/

4 Simple Growth Strategies Any Breakthrough Blog Can Learn From Pinterest

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 14:20:00 +0000

This guest post is by Mike Holmes of Biblical Startup for Business Owners.

You don’t need me to tell you about Pinterest do you? I’m pretty sure you’ve heard all the media outlets singing its praise:

the fastest growing site
its user base is mostly female
its breakthrough rise from obscurity
how marketers are using it
how marketers CAN use it
how its a step forward in the evolution of social media
…and etc.

I mean we’ve talked about it over here too, haven’t we?

But what else can we as bloggers and businesspeople learn from this recent phenom? Namely:

1. Have a greater purpose

When CEO Ben Silbermann created Pinterest, he did so with the purpose of making something “timeless.” Like most great entrepreneurs, he created the company out of his own interests, passions, and purpose.

Throughout history, truly great companies answer these question: Who are we? And what are we about?

Glen Allsop of Viperchill believes in an internal mission statement.
Chris Guillebeau believes in a 140-character mission statement.
Devin Hughes of Upstart Nation believes a personal mission statement becomes a necessity in one’s personal brand portfolio.

In fact, purpose is the catalyst for all great companies and organizations.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he came back to a mess: little to no market share, declining revenue, and a business almost on the verge of bankruptcy. He turned the company around simply by focusing on what the company had long overlooked: its core purpose.

According to Jobs:

“Apple was in serious trouble. Apple had to remember who Apple was because they’d forgotten who Apple was.”

We all know how that ended up!

Companies like Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines, Charles Schwab, and BMW are all purpose-driven. In fact, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, repeatedly stresses the importance of companies having a core purpose. These entrepreneurs make money (in fact, they make a ton) but they set out to “change the world” in some way or other.

I know this sounds like some touchy-feely-cry-me-a-river-nonsense! I understand that.

But purpose is anything but nonsense. It’s a viable business strategy—an immutable law. And those companies, entrepreneurs, and bloggers that practice it always rise above the crowd!

2. Have a great product

Not an okay, good, or not-too-bad product. But a great product!

From the very few interviews there are with Silbermann, you can feel his obsession with the quality of the site:

He and his team spent a lot of time agonizing over the site’s five-column layout, producing almost a dozen fully-coded versions before settling on the one that is live today.
According to him, he’d rather spend time working on the site than giving interviews. The site is incredibly addictive because he obsessed over every detail.

For the blogger, this boils down to writing epic content (thanks again, Corbett Barr!).

But maybe that’s not for you. I mean, you could just follow the crowd, make an okay product, and write ok content.

You could do that. You won’t get noticed that way, but you could do it. It’s totally up to you!

3. Forget the mainstream: go after those who want it!

Pete Cashmore noted early on that Pinterest didn’t take the mainstream route to success:

“The web-based pinboard, which launched almost two years ago, barely got a mention on Silicon Valley news sites until six months ago, when early adopters suddenly realized that a site with millions of monthly users had sprung up almost unnoticed by the tech press. That’s because Pinterest didn’t take the usual route of Web-based startups: romancing early adopters and technology journalists before attempting to cross the chasm to mainstream adoption. Instead, Pinterest grew a devoted base of users—most of them female—who enjoy ‘pinning’ items they find around the Web.”

That was totally unheard of. And yet this strategy produced better results than a thousand press releases.

It was the strategy used by early hymn writers. While the majority of church attendees didn’t see the value of the songs, the hymn writers focused all their attention on those that did. Ultimately the majority came around.

It’s the strategy used by great salespeople, startups, and game changers. For instance:

When an unknown author named Tim Ferriss decided to promote his book, he focused his efforts. He called successful authors and asked them how they promoted their books. They gave him two answers: radios and bloggers. Since radio was losing its influence he decided to rely on bloggers. He went to a blogger event, met the ones he wanted to meet, established relationships, and then asked them to do a review. They did. And with the book becoming the #1 New York Times, the #1 Wall Street Journal, and the #1 Businessweek bestseller, the rest is history.
When Mel Gibson decided to market The Passion of the Christ, he focused his efforts. When he approached movie executives about producing the movie nobody wanted to go near it. So Gibson decided to fund it himself using $30 million of his own money. Not having much money left to marketing (it usually costs $40 million for marketing, he only had $15 million) he tried an unconventional approach: letting pastors see it for free. They started small–showing only a few pastors, but it grew exponentially. One of the final screenings was at Willow Creek Church. After the showing, Bill Hybels took the stage and spoke for the 5,000 pastors in attendance: “All right, what do you need us to do?” And with $611,899,420 in gross sales, the rest is history.
When a Baptist preacher named Rick Warren decided to market his book, Purpose-Driven Life, he focused his efforts. Years before he wrote his first book, Purpose Driven Church and followed it up with a website: Pastors.Com. The membership of the website grew to 85,000 pastors who saw Warren as trusted advisor. He enlisted their help with the PDL book–asking them to conduct the “40 day campaign” in their churches. And 1200 agreed to it. He gave away copies of the $20 book for $7 to churches and congregations that agreed. Within two months, those spokespeople pushed sales to $2 million, then to 30 million copies by 2007 … and the rest is history.
When an pop artist by the name of Lady Gaga found success it was through focus. She did everything she could to break through: schmoozed the music execs, performed wherever she could, had doors slammed in her face, begged to have her music played on the radio, was cut from a label, and was told she wouldn’t make it. But the turning point for her was her acceptance by the gay community. Once they accepted her, they championed for her, and she championed for them. And the rest is history.

Why do we spend the bulk of our time trying to get people who don’t like us to like? And in the meantime turn our backs to those that love us?

Rick Warren didn’t market to atheists.
Mel Gibson only showed screenings to conservative Christian and religious groups (even refusing to include those that initially criticized the film).
Timothy Ferriss didn’t go after those interested in a nine-to-five lifestyle.
Not once did Lady Gaga try to win over those who adamantly opposed her. She focused all her attention on her “monsters.”

It doesn’t make any sense does it?

Well, with 20 million users and a $1.5 billion valuation, it’s evident Silbermann understood the power of fans.

4. Remember: service is the best form of marketing

In the beginning, Silbermann said he personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, gave them his cell phone number, and even met many of them for coffee. He asked them questions, listened to their concerns, and went above and beyond for them.

Whoa!

Sometimes in the middle of our social media, SEO, and direct marketing efforts we forget that great service is still the best form of marketing.

There are six primary reasons people stop doing business with a company:

1% die.
3% move away.
5% develop other relationships.
9% leave for competitive reasons.
14% are dissatisfied with the product.
68% percent go elsewhere because of the poor way they were treated by employees of the company.
Case in point: when Patton Gleason went live with his online startup, the Natural Running Store, he outhustled his competitors in terms of service:
- He created personalized videos that thanked customers for their purchase.
- He created videos that told customers their shoes were on the way.
- He put handwritten notes in the shoe boxes.
- He sent follow-up emails asking about his or her training plans.
- Instead of having an FAQ page, he sends out a two-minute video answering the customer’s questions.
Because of this, Natural Running Store receives a ton of organic traffic, customer referrals, and endless praise.

And this is with Gleason admitting he doesn’t know how to sell.

You’ve all heard the story of how the Blog Tyrant became a true fan of Darren? You didn’t? For shame! “What happened?” you ask. Well, I’ll just let the Tyrant tell you:

“I once sent Darren Rowse an email telling him that I was having problems leaving a comment on his site. I told him not to worry about it too much as it was obviously working fine for everyone else. He replied in about ten minutes telling me that every single one of his readers were important to him and then tried to problem solve the issue with me. Instant fan for life.”

My friends, we’ve entered a new paradigm: marketing is the new selling and relationship building, engagement, and delivering new and innovative content is the new marketing.

High five for Silbermann!

What can we learn?

Right now we don’t know what’s in store for Pinterest. Right now, they’re flying as high as a Facebook IPO. They’re on top right now.

But if history has been any kind of teacher we’ll find more lessons in their story as the days go on. Good or bad.

What do you think? Are there any other lessons we can learn from Pinterest, or other startups like them?

Mike Holmes is an author, speaker, and serial entrepreneur teaching Biblical Startup for Business Owners. You can also pick up his book What Pinterest Could Teach Christian Business Owners.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

4 Simple Growth Strategies Any Breakthrough Blog Can Learn From Pinterest

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/doegdtq63s4/

Catch Up on the Latest Google Updates and Other Marketing Stories of the Week

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 13:38:00 +0000

Just because you're on summer vacation (or dreaming about it) doesn't mean the internet marketing world is slowing down any. Nope! Bloggers are blogging, Google's making announcements left and right, and Twitter's working on raking in the big bucks.

Not sure what I'm talking about? Well, good thing you're here -- this post will point you towards those stories and more, all from the internet marketing world this past week. Happy reading, and as always, share your favorite stories from this past week in the comments!

Google+ For Tablets, Google+ Events, and Google Now Roll Out

We reported on the updates that came out of the Google I/O Conference on June 27. Two of the updates involved Google+, which of course had some marketers already rolling their eyes. But don't write them off as insignificant yet! Google+ for tablets indicates that Google+ is becoming more and more accessible, and Google+ Events indicates that Google does, in fact, understand one of the primary uses of its rival social network. Both of these updates mean that people could migrate towards spending more of their minutes on Google+. The third update, Google Now, will allow Google to make suggestions based on mobile and search history. Creepy? Maybe. Useful? Definitely.

Twitter Generating the Majority of Its Ad Revenue From Mobile

Speaking of mobile, this story comes to us from MarketingLand, who reported that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter's mobile ad revenue is off the charts. The platform only launched mobile ads in April, but in three short months, the change has been huge. Let's not forget that 60% of Twitter's users are using it on a mobile device.

Make Your Story 22 Times More Memorable

This story comes to us from MarketingProfs, who suggest that storytelling is key to making your facts more memorable. They cite a quote from cognitive psychologist Jonah Butler, who says that a fact wrapped in a story is 22 times more memorable than a pronouncement of a fact. This should reinforce a statement that's been pronounced to death by marketers, including us: content is king. Content tells stories. Content is memorable.

How to Infuse Your Writing With Nostalgia

The folks over at Copyblogger whipped up an excellent piece on a strategy to ensure the content you produce isn't catering only to the present moment. Timeless writing, or writing that'll envoke feelings of nostalgia or other emotion, lasts longer and is more memorable. As inbound marketers, we talk all the time about the importance of content, but it's rare we delve further in and talk about the quality of the writing within the content.

SEO, Digital Marketing and the World of Indie Films

This story from MarketingPilgrim brings together two things you might not imagine go together: search engine optimization and independent filmmaking. The piece transcribes an interview with One World Studios founder Zack Coffman, who knows a thing or two about both. We think this piece is well worth the read as an interesting case study, and should serve as a gentle reminder that there's no industry exempt from the necessity of utilizing inbound marketing techniques in their digital strategy.

What inbound marketing tales did you stumble upon this week?

Image credit: anda (:

Resources for Selling Consulting Through Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 20:27:00 +0000

As Ash explained in her post today, using blogging as a platform from which to sell consulting services can be effective and lucrative.

Blogging has long been respected as a method for supporting offline businesses, but as the potential of blogging in general has evolved, so too have the options for those using blogs to sell services.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this business model, have a look at these articles:

9 Critical Tasks Before Launching Your Small Business Blog, by Mark Hayward, takes those creating their first business blog through the essentials. He asks the crucial questions business bloggers will need to answer if their blog is to be a success—and helps them find the answers.
From hobby blog to business blog: a plan of attack is a post I wrote to help those who want to turn their hobby into a business smooth that process.
How I got two job offers and a $200 an hour consulting gig from blogging explains how blogger Joe Bunting landed two job offers, consulting gigs and other paid projects from his blog. The strategy he sets out here is a solid blueprint for those who want to do similar things with their blogging.
How to find readers for a business blog is a post I wrote specifically to help those just starting out building an online presence for their offline business. If that’s you, you might find this post a good starting point.
How to use LinkedIn to create unique opportunities for your blog business, by Farnoosh Brock, provides targeted social media advice to those supporting a professional services business with their blog.
Build brand awareness and business with creative video blogging, by Ryan Chritchett, gives plenty of advice to help you harness services like YouTube and Vimeo to help establish a strong presence for your offline business, online.
7 Ways to rescue your business blog from the blahs, by Jennifer Brown Banks, talks about content creation for business blogs, with tips and advice that she’s used herself.
5 ways your blog is undermining your business, by Georgina Laidlaw, points to some of the common errors that reduce the impact of business blogs—they’re important tips to improve your blog’s quality and your business’s perception within your audience.

Also, don’t forget our series, Build Blog Products that Sell, and ProBlogger’s Guide to Blogging for Your Business—these resources are detailed practical guides that will really help those looking to sell consulting and other services through a business blog.

What other resources and articles do you know of that can help those trying to sell consulting services through their blog? Share them with us in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Resources for Selling Consulting Through Your Blog

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/P0eFDE33U7g/

Blog Business Model 6: Sell Consulting Services

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 14:20:00 +0000

This post is by Ash Ambirge of The Middle Finger Project.

It’s the sixth and final post in our series on Blog Business Models.

I’m well-mannered, I like pearls, intelligent opinions, and fine French cheeses. (Ditto fine French wine.) (And fine French men.*)

A promotion for Ash's copyrwiting service

I also happen to run a six-figure blog and business called The Middle Finger Project.

As in the bad finger. The vulgar one. The one that angry New York drivers, hormone-laden teenagers and Roseanne Barr use regularly.

And, apparently, me. The overly polite one with the master’s degree who considers herself educated and knows when to use which stupid little fork when.

I won’t attempt to explain this blaring contradiction, but what I will tell you is this: success online comes with confidence accompanied by an opinion you’re willing to fight for, and having a business named like I do implies both.

Certainly those aren’t the only factors, but they’re two of the most important—you can try to be as “useful” as possible, as the standard advice goes, but if you’re lacking confidence—or an authoritative spine—no one will care about you.

And if no one cares about you, you don’t have a blog—or a business.

Right there—there’s an opinion of mine. You can take it or leave it, but one thing’s for sure—you’re listening.

And really that’s the first step in building a successful blog that sells your consulting business—wrangling some attention. And then learning how to keep it. And then learning how to leverage it.

The Middle Finger Project started as just that—a platform for attention. It wasn’t developed as a business first, and a blog later—the platform began as a blog, and quite deliberately. And the reason is because you need attention first and foremost: if no one’s listening, no one’s buying. Particularly in the online space.

I should know; I’ve tried both. In 2006 I opened my first copywriting business, sans blog. Blogging wasn’t even on my radar at the time, quite unfortunately, and that business quickly plummeted to a gory, bloody, bone-shattering demise. Closed-casket style.

It failed because no one knew about me.

But realistically, it failed because I didn’t make anyone know about me.

I had if-you-build-it-they-will-come syndrome, and I still see a lot of that around these days, too. It’s not intentional, of course, but we all get so excited about our businesses, and think the world will share our excitement as soon as we open our doors.

Little do we realize that we have to give them a reason to get excited. Just like hanging your swankiest panties out on the line won’t cause Prince Charming to show up at your door (trust me, I’ve tried), hanging your swankiest web design on the internet won’t cause your customers to magically show up, either.

You’ve got to give ‘em a reason to care about you

Blogs help that process along. Blogs give you a way to make that happen. Blogs give you a chance to prove yourself. And blogs give you a chance to snag their attention long enough to hook, line and swoosh ‘em into your world for the long term. ‘Til dentures do us part.

These days, things are different. My blog is entirely responsible for my success in the copywriting industry. That’s not an exaggeration, or a feeble attempt at sounding like I know what I’m talking about. That’s fact.

Typically I post around two to three times a week, but I have a dirty little secret to share: While the bread and butter of my business is copywriting, I don’t blog about copywriting.

I don’t blog about copywriting for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that my clients don’t care about copywriting. And honestly? Your clients don’t care about what you do, either.

It’s a mistake I see often made—well-meaning businesses trying to blog about their business. The reason it’s a mistake is because, again, your clients don’t care about your business; they don’t even care about what you can do for them, per se.

What they care about is feeling better any time they interact with you and your content. While it may sound oversimplified, this is key.

Whether feeling better translates into them having more confidence in themselves, having more confidence that you’ll be the solution to their problem, or just feeling inspired by your message, this really is the key to running a successful blog and, by extension, consulting business.

One thing I can promise you is this: the blogger who makes his reader feel less alone and more understood wins this game—and wins the business. Because it’s that blogger who will create excitement, and it’s that blogger who will ultimately give the world a reason to actually care about his message.

And didn’t I mention that was step one? Wink.

So how do I pull it off at The Middle Finger Project?

I’ll tell you how.

The Middle Finger Project isn’t just a blog; it’s its own movement, so to speak. It isn’t the blog itself—it’s what the blog represents for my readers and customers. Hope. Hope there is more out there, and it isn’t too late to come alive and be the person you were meant to be. It has nothing to do with copywriting; it’s about having fun in this one racy little speck of life we’re given, and doing what our anxiety-bent insides are mercilessly clawing at us to do.

For one set of my customers, this often means starting their own businesses—then, at that point, my copywriting services are there to support them in making that leap. Another set of customers—for example, my tech start ups—hire me because they, too, tend to be forward-thinking companies led by entrepreneurs who can relate to the core message of TMFproject as well.

The take away here?

Don’t just blog

Think about what your blog represents, and how you can connect it to the underlying beliefs and values of your target readers or customers—and how this can help them get excited and care about you.

If you’re a divorce lawyer, don’t blog about divorce. Blog about the inspirational stories that come out of divorce. Blog about the client who found herself again. Blog about the client who reawakened his love for bowling. Blog about the client who re-married her husband for a second time. Blog about the client who found his real soul mate the second time around.

Give your clients a reason to get excited—and feel better. Give ‘em a reason to want to read. And once they want to read, they’ll naturally want you.

And only when they want you, are you then in a position to successfully sell them your services.

Then, it’s just a matter of aligning your service offerings with the things that you know will make your customers feel better—about their lives, about their futures, about their businesses, or about their decision to choose you over the next guy.

Making it work

For example, one of my most successful offerings at The Middle Finger Project has been the One Night Stand—a rapid-fire copywriting service for those who need hot web copy that sells, at a price that won’t send them hurtling into debt with no pants on. (We like to, ahem, save our debt for things like Victoria’s Secret and The Cheesecake Factory.)

The reason it’s been so successful is two-fold. First, clients feel better because they’re gaining confidence that their business or website is going to be successful, since mouth-watering copy is one of the most important pillars of any online space. But second, this offering has been a success because I deliberately have made it fun—and fun always wins over not fun, as any kindergartener will confirm. And who wouldn’t want to go with the service provider that’s guaranteed to make a more pleasant—and exciting—experience for their client?

For example, I could have just called this, “Copywriting service,” but I didn’t, and deliberately so. I named it the One Night Stand, and furthermore went on to label each part of the service as:

Innocent Flirting, AKA Pre-Session Jamming
Intimate Discussion: 1-hour call on the day of our session
Down + Dirty Sweat Sesh: Up to five pages of cunningly cool copy
Nightcap + Pillow Talk: Your Feedback
Oops, You Forgot Your Panties: One round of final edits

While the simple act of naming of a product or service might seem trivial—and is often an afterthought—it isn’t just about naming. It’s about the anticipated experience. I know my customers intimately (look who’s got puns!), and I knew that this type of offering would be something they’d not only get a kick out of, but would be racing to purchase particularly because of the element of fun that The Middle Finger Project brand has become known for. And a fresh start, with fun at the helm, is what many of my clients are so desperately craving.

Moving forward, The Middle Finger Project will continue to stand for having more fun than everyone else, in both life and business.

Registration has just closed for a six-week online copywriting workshop I’ll be hosting, and before the year is out, The Middle Finger Project (the book) will be released: because life is short and vodka tastes better abroad.

Selling consulting through your blog

I’m beyond honored to have the opportunity to make a living doing what I do—the (mostly) prim and proper chick rocking the hell out of a rebel’s brand. Yet, it all started that fall afternoon in 2009 when I began the blog as a way to build a platform, connect like-minded folks, and really give the world a run for its money.

It’s about standing up for what you believe in—and rallying others to do the same.
It’s about reaching for your megaphone—and not just expecting attention, but going out and grabbing it.
It’s about helping people care—first about themselves, and then about you.
It’s about generating excitement—from your message to your brand to every single thing you sell.
It’s about remembering that every single one of us is human—and most of us just really want to feel understood.
And above all, it’s about getting off your backside, and making it happen already.

You got this. Roseanne Barr and I believe in you.

*I’ve never actually dated a French man, therefore that statement was partially false. Okay, entirely false. However, I do imagine that I would thoroughly enjoy one.

Ashley Ambirge is the sassiest freelance writer, entrepreneur and digital strategist on the block. She authors books on leveraging the internet to make a business out of your passions, runs her semi-insane but lovable blog (click here to subscribe), and does one on one strategy sessions with new bloggers, entrepreneurs & small businesses looking to rock their online space with the brilliance of a diamond (and finally make some damn money). She’ll also kill you at beer pong without batting an eyelash. Just the facts, Jack.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Blog Business Model 6: Sell Consulting Services

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/-M72Amopxzg/

Twitter & LinkedIn Break Up, Disabling Automatic Posting of Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 13:38:00 +0000

Yesterday, two of the world's largest social networks, LinkedIn and Twitter, announced an end to their partnership that allowed users to sync updates from the two sites. According to Twitter, the site is increasingly focused on "proving the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools." This essentially means that LinkedIn doesn't make the cut for that consistent set of tools, and LinkedIn users can no longer automatically sync their tweets to publish on LinkedIn.

How Does This Affect Your LinkedIn-Twitter Posting?

Even though all users do not set their Twitter updates to automatically appear on LinkedIn, many use the hashtags LinkedIn provides to post selected tweets. Previously, LinkedIn users could connect their Twitter account, and then select the option that reads, "Share only tweets that contain #in or #li in your status updates." This way, Twitter users could carefully select which tweets they wanted published to their professional profile without ever having to go on LinkedIn itself. Users have now been ripped of that ability, and must go straight to LinkedIn to post an update.

After running a report for keyword use in HootSuite, we discovered that between January first of this year until now, hashtag #in has been tweeted 1,746,618 times while hashtag #li has been tweeted 192,873 times. While it's plausible that the former hashtag has been used for other messages (such as "Got a new job! #in), the latter is LinkedIn specific. Regardless, hashtag #in on average is tweeted 9,650 times a day, while hashtag #li on average is tweeted 1,065 times a day. The following graph shows each hashtag's use over time from January 1st 2012 to June 28, 2012.

Clearly, a large audience automatically updates LinkedIn through Twitter. These users will now be forced to post their LinkedIn updates seperately. Or, how LinkedIn positions it, "Simply compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click 'Share.' This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as you’ve been able to do previously."

Basically, users can post from LinkedIn and have that message go out to its Twitter following, but not vice versa.

How Does This Change Your Marketing?

With the previous LinkedIn-Twitter partnernship, any post that was uploaded to LinkedIn (whether on your personal profile or company page) automatically hyperlinked Twitter handles and hashtags. When users clicked on that Twitter handle or hashtag in LinkedIn, they were automatically sent to that Twitter profile or Twitter search with tweets using that hashtag.

For example, in the LinkedIn post below to the HubSpot company page, users could previously be directed to HubSpot's Twitter account, or see all the users tweeting with #HubSpot. When you click on these links now, Twitter does a search in "LinkedIn Updates."

This takes away marketers' ability to easily link their campaigns together. For example, when HubSpot hosts a webinar with a hashtag for questions, we update our LinkedIn company status with the hashtag so viewers can easily go from LinkedIn to the stream of tweets for the webinar.

Does this new breakup impact your social media strategy? How so?

21 Internet Marketing Stats That Will Blow Your Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 21:08:00 +0000

Sick of hearing the same "the internet is changing marketing" speeches? Want hard data to reference so that you can properly forecast and adjust future marketing plans and budgets? Just want to sound smart in board meetings? Look no further; this post will show you some current data about the state of the internet marketing world that are both helpful, and frankly kind of shocking. Take a gander!

21 Internet Marketing Statistics That May Surprise You

1) The more posts per day, the less engagement -- when a brand posts twice a day, those posts only receive 57% of the likes and 78% of the comments per post. (Source: Track Social) Be mindful of your publishing frequency on Facebook, and start testing with your own page to see what frequency is right for your community. Tweet This Stat!

2) The click-through rate on triggered messages is 119% higher than “Business as Usual” messages. (Source: Epsilon and DMA) Using personalized and timely lead nurturing with marketing automation is an important strategy for improving the overall performance of your email marketing and customer generation. Tweet This Stat!

3) On average, companies respond to only 30% of social media fans' feedback. (Source: Factbrowser) Engagement is rare. Stand out from your competition by caring and engaging with your social media community. Tweet This Stat!

4) The average tablet user spends 13.9 hours per week with the device. (Source: OPA) The tablet is quickly becoming the new laptop. Survey your customers and leads to understand how they are using tablets, and let that data influence future marketing strategies targeted at tablet users. Tweet This Stat!

5) Text messaging users send or receive an average of 35 messages per day. (Source: Forrester Research) Peer-to-peer communication through text messaging has become of core part of society's communication infrastructure. Is there is any possible communication that your customers and prospects would like to receive via text message? Tweet This Stat!

6) Email opens on smartphones and tablets have increased 80% over the last six months. (Source: Litmus) Mobile devices have become a major source of email usage. Make sure that your email marketing message displays properly on mobile devices to maximize the results of your sends. Tweet This Stat!

7) 27% of TV sets shipped worldwide in Q1 of 2012 had internet connectivity. (Source: Display Search) Internet connectivity is becoming standard for all devices. With the internet becoming a bigger part of the living room, plan for how this change might disrupt your current broadcast marketing tactics. Tweet This Stat!

8) By 2016, more than half of the dollars spent in US retail will be influenced by the web. (Source: Forrester Research) Commerce is shifting more and more online. Make sure that you have a method to easily sell your product or service online. Tweet This Stat!

9) In any given week, less than 0.5% of Facebook fans engage with the brand they are fans of. (Source: Marketing Science) Brands aren't providing the right kind of content and experience to engage their fans. Ask your Facebook fans what type of content they want to see, and then give it to them! Tweet This Stat!

10) 45% of the world's 2 billion internet users live in Asia. (Source: Ecommerce Europe) If you actively sell and market to Asian markets, the internet is a channel that can't be ignored. Understand how internet usage and habits differ in Asia compared to the United States. Tweet This Stat!

11) 61% of emails received at professional email accounts are non-essential. (Source: Mimecast) Inboxes are overflowing with marketing email. Use personalization, proper timing, and offers valuable to the recipient to break through the clutter and be seen. Tweet This Stat!

12) 20% of Facebook users have purchased something because of ads or comments they saw there. (Source: Ipsos) People are influenced by, well, other people. Use paid and organic marketing on Facebook to influence the conversion actions that drive your business. Tweet This Stat!

13) 17% of the top 1000 search terms on Twitter "churn over" on an hourly basis. (Source: Twitter) Twitter is all about novelty and news. Publish more frequently and focus on timely content to appeal to Twitter's hungry users. Tweet This Stat!

14) U.S. consumers send 2.304 trillion text messages per year, up from 2.052 trillion in 2010. (Source: CTIA) Wow! That is a ton of text messages. If you are marketing to heavy texting demographics, consider incorporating a text message opt-in as part of your campaign. Tweet This Stat!

15) 40% of the accounts and 8% of the messages on social media sites are spam. (Source: Businessweek) Email isn't the online platform with a spam problem. Take the time to customize your social media account and content so you stand out from the spam bots. Tweet This Stat!

16) 88% of adults in the US have a cell phone, 57% have a laptop, 19% own an e-reader, and 19% have a tablet. (Source: Pew Internet) The cell phone is the dominant communication tool in the United States, but information consumption is fragmented. Optimize your digital marketing for all of the screens and devices used by your target audience. Tweet This Stat!

17) 64% of smartphone owners are use their mobile devices to shop online. (Source: eDigitalResearch) The smartphone is ripe with impulse shopping revenue. If you sell goods online, target specific campaigns to smartphone users. Tweet This Stat!

18) YouTube users watch more than 3B hours of video per month. (Source: YouTube) Video is a major part of the online experience, but it's different from traditional broadcast productions. When integrating online video into your inbound marketing strategy be sure to consider not only production value, but length. Most successful online videos are less than two minutes long. Tweet This Stat!

19) About 1 in 3 bloggers are moms. (Source: Nielsen) When looking for blogging expertise, look no further than the mommy bloggers. Everyone has influence and expertise you can learn from and leverage. Tweet This Stat!

20) 73% of smartphone owners access social networks through apps at least once per day. (Source: Lightspeed Research) Social is mobile. Make sure that content you're sharing on social networks -- like your blog articles and landing pages -- are optimized for mobile devices. Tweet This Stat!

21) 91% of online adults use social media regularly. (Source: Experian) Social media is fully integrated into communication culture. Make sure it is an integrated part of your marketing strategy, too. Tweet This Stat!

Which of these internet marketing statistics was the most surprising to you?

Photo Credit: stevendepolo

Tips and Techniques for Selling Training on Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:15:00 +0000

Training and electronic courses are common product offerings for bloggers, and as the range of tools and services available to help us create and market engaging courses has grown, so has the competition in this space.

Jules Clancy talked earlier today about offering classes and training as a blog business model.

Still wondering why you’d choose ecourses over other models? Have a look at 8 Great reasons to add an ecourse to your blog. This post explains the not-so-obvious advantages of this business model.

What does it take to create an online course? Peep Laja explains the basics in Creating Online Courses 101. It’s a great guide for those who are considering dipping their toes into the training waters—but want to know what they’re in for ahead of time.

What about the launch? How to launch a product on your blog (and sell out in 12 hours!) is Danny Iny’s story of the wildly successful launch of his first online course. Also see his post Make money locally—and globally—through your blog—there are more than a few tips in here to help you make the most of your own launch when the time comes.

Finally, Ramit Sethi’s advice on products, focused mainly on the launch of his course, has many tidbits to get you on the road to a great course launch. Even seasoned course sellers would do well to read this one!

Do you sell courses through your blog? What tips or resources can you add to the list?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Tips and Techniques for Selling Training on Your Blog

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/-P2wwMRR27c/

Blog Business Model 5: Sell Training and Courses

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:42:00 +0000

This is the fifth post in our series on Blog Business Models.

When you think of online training as a blogging business model, cookery classes may not be the first topic that springs to mind.

The Stone Soup course homepage

But Jules Clancy of The Stone Soup has created a successful cooking class business around her food blog.

Hi Jules. First up, can you share a bit of your history with us? How did you get into blogging?
My background is in food science. I used design chocolate biscuits for a living—for Australia’s largest biscuit manufacturer.

I love everything to do with food, so it was only natural that after getting addicted to reading food blogs, I took the leap to starting my own.

Your blog supports online training product offerings. Did you develop the blog first, and then adopt that business model, or develop the business first, then build the blog?

It was blog first for me. I had no idea where blogging would lead me, or that it was even possible to use a blog to make money online. It wasn’t until I’d been blogging for a few years that I came across the idea of turning a blog into a business.

And at what point did online cooking classes appear as an ideal product idea? Did you always think that that might be the way to go, or did you need to be convinced of the model’s viability first?

It wasn’t until I saw a class on the A-List Blogging Bootcamps called something like “Create Courses that Sell” that I even had the idea. But as soon as I had that “a-ha” moment, I decided to give it a shot.

Cooking is something that works really well on TV and video, so I figured it would translate well into a class format. (Although if we could get someone to invent ‘scratch and sniff’ video that would be even better!)

Ultimately, it was an organic evolution of my blog—that was just how it happened. There was no grand (or evil!) master plan.

Great. So in what ways does blogging support your training offerings?

Primarily, my blog attracts customers to buy my ebooks and my online cooking classes. It’s a way of developing a relationship with my readers to turn them into buyers.

That being said, my blog also works as an online business card. I have a book coming out next year because of my blog—my publisher discovered Stonesoup and contacted me about doing a book. It also works for speaking gigs, and I’ve done a bit of freelance writing based on contacts from my blogging.

What kinds of challenges do you face in using your blog to build your business?

At the moment, my biggest challenge is moving away from making most of my money when I launch a new cooking class to a more continuous (and sustainable) model. I haven’t figured out how I’m going to do it, but I think building a process with email marketing at the centre will be part of the solution.

I’m also struggling with conversions. For the amount of readers and traffic I get, I don’t think I’m doing a good job of turning them into paying customers.

So what converts best for you: your ebook or your courses? Do you think the blog reading marketplace is saturated with certain format offerings?

In terms of overall revenue, about 50% of my income comes from ebooks and 50% from courses. So even though ebooks are cheaper and convert better, the total income is about the same as the higher priced classes.

In terms of saturation, I think there’s always a market for high-quality products that solve real problems for people, regardless of the offering format.

You mention price. How did you work out how to price your classes?

Pricing is something I’m still experimenting with. At the beginning, I thought about what other classes cost, then considered what I thought I’d be prepared to pay for a course, and took it from there.

What are the key elements that have helped you get to where you are with your blog?

Passion! It’s a bit of a cliche, but in my case it’s totally true. I love cooking, writing about food, and taking photographs of what I cook. I can’t imagine doing anything else and enjoying it as much as I love working on my blog and my business.

Consistency has also been key. I promised myself when I started I would publish at least once every week and I’ve been doing that right from the beginning.

The quest for continuous improvement is also important. I’m not a perfectionist by any standards but I’m always thinking of how I can do things better.

That’s interesting. How do you continuously improve your courses? What’s involved in that process—from a content perspective, but also from product integrity and delivery viewpoints?

I ask my students for feedback. After I run a major class I do a short survey using Survey Monkey to collect testimonials and also get feedback on what worked and what needs improvement.

I’ve also started running a Poll Daddy quiz on my cooking school site so my students actually vote for the topic of the next class. Actually, you’ve just reminded me I’ve been meaning to set up a feedback option on the site using something like uservoice.com so it’s really easy for my students to give feedback, get help, and make suggestions.

Cooking’s a very cluttered niche. What’s unique about the way you’ve developed your offering?

I’m all about simplicity. All my recipes have only five ingredients and deliver big when it comes to flavour and healthiness.

And have you carried that philosophy through to your cooking classes?

Absolutely! Simplicity is really a core philosophy of my life, so even if I wanted to do a “fancy” or “complicated” cooking class, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Right. So you mentioned Survey Monkey and uservoice, but what other tools or services do you rely on as you develop your business?

I’m using:

Aweber for email list management
Clickbank for selling products and their affiliate network
Visual Website Optimizer for split testing (although I’ve had a few issues recently with them).

What tools do you use specifically in developing and delivering your courses?

At first I had a little flip video camera for making my videos but I’ve since upgraded to a Nikon D7000 for recording video. And I just use imovie for editing videos. And then in terms of my membership site management, it’s a WordPress blog using the plugin Wishlist Member.

And how did you go about researching and sourcing those tools?

I’m very lazy when it comes to researching things like that, and I’m pretty sure the flip cam and Wishlist Member were what was recommended in the “Create Courses that Sell” class I took.

What advice, tips, and insider secrets would you give to someone who was just starting out with a blog business model based around selling training?

Get your own product out there sooner rather than later. I made the mistake of quitting my job and then not launching my first product for seven months, so there was no income coming in.

That was fine, but I would have been much better off to get something out there and start learning how to market etc. sooner rather than later. It’s definitely one of those things that you can only get really great at if you keep trying different things.

Interesting! So what does the future hold for Stonesoup and your course offering?

Hopefully lots more sales! And I’d like to have things more automated so I can step back a bit and spend more time in my veggie garden and less time in front of a computer screen.

Thanks to Jules for her time and advice. To find out more about Jules’s business, visit The Stone Soup, and check out the article she wrote for ProBlogger.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Blog Business Model 5: Sell Training and Courses

from @ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/MdTHFDGIJMs/

Is Marketing Getting Too Creepy?

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 13:53:00 +0000

All the world's a stage.

Tell me about it. If only Willy Shakespeare (we're on a nickname basis) could see us now. What was once private is now broadcast over Twitter. Indexed by Google. Tagged unbeknownst to you by a well-meaning friend on Facebook. Privacy-shmivacy.

Users are constantly chiming in -- many with irate comments -- about how the lack of privacy on the internet is going too far. Too much personal data is being collected, they're going to stop using this platform or that search engine, and then recede into internet oblivion!

But does that ever actually happen? Or does "The Internet" just keep learning more and more about us, storing that data, and using it for good or evil (depending on where you fall on this debate)? Well, an interesting case study appeared this week that isn't really "new" news, but it spotlights this debate really well. That case study is Orbitz's behavioral targeting, and it could definitely rub some people the wrong way. Read on to find out what's going on. As a marketer and a consumer, do you think it's taking marketing in a creepy direction?

Orbitz's Behavioral Targeting Tactics

The Wall Street Journal reported that, as a result of some customer research, Orbitz found out that Mac users tend to pay more for hotels purchased on their website than PC users. In fact, Mac users spend about 30% more and average $20-$30 more spend per night than PC users. They're also 40% more likely to book a 5-star hotel. As a result, Orbitz started adjusting the search results it displayed for users based on whether they were a Mac or PC user. How did the search results change? Well, Orbitz started delivering more expensive results on page one for people on a Mac. Hey, they're high rollers, them Mac users. Orbitz wanted to capitalize!

The WSJ tested this phenomenon themselves by looking for a 2-night hotel stay in Miami Beach on a Mac, and found that the results Orbitz delivered on page one did indeed end up being more expensive than the results delivered on a PC -- 11% more expensive, in fact.

What Orbitz didn't do, however, is show the same room at different prices. And Orbitz does let users sort by price, so Mac users could have switched to a view that sorted hotels from lowest price to highest price. But still, does this seem a little sneaky to anyone? Or is it just smart marketing? After all, Orbitz found that statistically, when Mac and PC users book at the same hotel, Mac users tend to book a more expensive room than PC users. Isn't this just delivering the results that Mac users tend to want based on past buying behavior?

It also appears that Orbitz may be using more sophisticated targeting than just "expensive = mac," "cheap = PC." Orbitz's statisticians found that there were some types of hotels that were far more likely to be booked by Mac users than PC users. Almost half of the bookings for the Public Chicago, for example, come from Mac visitors -- and it might have to do with features of the hotel, like the fact that it's a high end hotel that offers "lobby socializing." Hey, maybe high end hotels with social lobbies just strike a Mac user's fancy, and Orbitz knows it. Thus, the targeting is based on price, as well as qualities of the hotels that align with characteristics Mac users tend to appreciate. The case for this more robust behavioral targeting (somehow, making it more robust than just price seems less sleazy, no?) has some support based on the fact that Orbitz admitted to considering other information like a user's location, site history, and the hotel's popularity when delivering search results.

Does Anyone Really Care?

Well, does anyone care? I don't know; how would you feel knowing you were targeted this way? I have a feeling the results will run the gamut. But what this all comes down to is just really advanced behavioral targeting -- something marketers do all the time. So who cares?

To answer that, I think we have to take off our marketer hat, and put on not just our consumer hat ... but also our non-marketing savvy consumer hat. A little over two years ago, we published a post about Google Analytics releasing the ability for people to opt out of having their behaviors tracked. Many marketers who rely on Google Analytics were concerned about widespread adoption of this feature, making it difficult for them to do their jobs. The implications for site owners and marketers were dire, indeed. Anecdotally, however, it seems that most people don't even realize the extent to which they're being tracked -- and the rollout of a feature like this strikes fear in the hearts of some, and goes unnoticed by almost everyone else who isn't immersed in this internet marketing world of ours. Anecdotal case in point:

I was at an email marketing conference in New York City just a few months ago, and participating in a round table about behavioral targeting in email marketing. When we started talking about list segmentation based on past website behavior, one of the roundtable participants -- a professional email marketer -- looked at us jaw agape, eyes bulging out of her head. Upon hearing about site tracking and data storage capabilities many marketers have at their disposal, she took off her marketer hat and went into consumer mode ... an unhappy consumer at that. She couldn't believe such capabilities existed, and asked me if I felt my privacy was being invaded by having my online activities tracked so meticulously. My response? It's not really a surprise to me, and presumably it helps me get more relevant content from marketers ... but personally, I get why it would creep some people out.

And there are more widespread strides in the direction of, "Back off, Marketers!", too. Just look at the EU privacy laws that prohibit the usage of tracking cookies without the explicit consent of browsers, and the demise of SOPA earlier this year. On the other end of the spectrum, however, is Google Now that combines your search history and information from your mobile device to deliver information to you; and the newly released Facebook Exchange, which lets you serve ads based on browsing activity in real time. So, what do you think ...

... Is Marketing Getting Too Creepy?

For me (and probably some of my fellow marketers) the jury's still out. As marketers, we're used to this stuff, so our perspective could be a little warped. What do our customers expect? After all, these recommendations can be seen as really helpful -- I know I love the targeted recommendations I get when I shop on Amazon.com, for instance.

But if I found out those recommendations were being shown not because I would like them more, but because Amazon could squeeze more money out of me, I might feel a little differently. Yes, ultimately, that's what they're there for ... but presumably, this consumer exchange can be mutually beneficial: I voluntarily give you my money, because I want what you have, and you want my money. We both walk away happy.

So what do you think? Do most consumers know this is going on, or would most people be shocked and appalled at this level of segmentation and behavioral targeting? Is Orbitz walking a fine line, or is it no different than what most marketers do, anyway? In fact, would marketers be foolish not to use the data available to them to make better targeting decisions? Share how you feel -- as a marketer, and as a consumer -- in the comments!

Image credit: jeff_golden

Five Ways Small Marketing Teams Can Take Advantage of Big Data

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:53:00 +0000

If you’re like most marketers who don’t work at gigantic global corporations, you look at big data like a glamous garment in a window: enviously.

You look at what Facebook, Amazon, Target and your credit card company do with your data -- the personalized services, the product suggestions and targeted marketing -- and you wonder why you can’t do the same thing for your business.

As a Columbia Business School report last spring showed, marketers believe in the value of big data, but aren't confindent in their ability to capture it.

That's crazy. Marketers need to get over their envy, get over their fear, and dive in.

No, not everybody needs to hire the armies of Ph.D staticians that companies like Target and Facebook employ. But marketing software has evolved to the point where you don't need Ph.D staticians to do optimized, personalized marketing at scale.

What’s the Big Deal With Big Data?

What value do marketers see in big data?

Big data promises to make everybody -- buyers and marketers -- better off. It enables optimized and personalized marketing, which means marketing that's more useful to the buyers and more productive for the marketer.

And it's increasingly clear that the promise will be fufillled. You can see the improvements for buyers and marketers in the stories of the companies like Tufts Medicare Preferred or Thermo Fischer Scientific where increased personalization and optimization of the marketing process lead to significant lead growth.

Why is this happening? A generation ago -- when we had three tv stations, we read one newspaper and we used a phone plugged into the wall -- Tufts and Thermo Fisher would have bought access to a broad audience and broadcast a general message. For companies, that was an expensive approach that didn’t produce good results. For buyers, it was just annoying.

Today, not only do we have endless channels, apps and websites, but they increasingly give companies and customers the opportunity to collect data about each other. Companies know their customers and prospects better, so instead of sending annoying general messages, they can provide useful targeted messages, and they can optimize the whole process.

Five Ways to Take Advantage of Big Data

How can you start taking advantage of this change in your business?

Turns out you don't need to dive into sprawling enterprise consulting project that will cost you hundrends of thousands of dollars. If you're using a marketing software tool like HubSpot, you can build an optimized, personalized marketing process on your own.

Here are five specific steps you should begin with:

(1) Make A/B Testing a Part of Your Weekly Routine -- Everybody’s heard of A/B testing, and everybody knows it’s a good thing, but who does it on a regular basis? If you aren’t doing A/B testing -- you aren’t optimizing your basic marketing processes like email sends and calls to action -- how can you expect to do more sophisticated data gymnastics. (Here's an article that explains how HubSpot customers can get started A/B testing calls to action.)

(2) Personalize Your Emails -- In this day and age there’s no excuse for avoiding personalization where it’s appropriate. Setup a form to collect data from your prospects, then use the data you’ve collected to populate the appropriate values in your emails. Even if it’s just the saluation, it changes the email from a blasted billboard, to a personalized message. And if personalization is too much of struggle, you should look for different email marketing software. (Here's an article that explains how you can personalize your emails sent from HubSpot.)

(3) Get Sophisticated About Segmentation -- If your marketing process involves sending email, it should involve segmentation. Sending a single blast email to your whole list is like running an ad on the nighly news circa 1965. You reach a broad audience with a general message and marginal returns, and the message isn’t that useful to the recipients. Instead, improve your returns by customizing the message and the offer for specific groups. (Here's an article that explains how to segment your contacts in HubSpot's new email tool.)

(4) Create Content Informed by Keyword Research -- SEO is still a critical piece of a robust sales and marketing funnel. Don't simply guess whcih keywords will be most effective and drive the most traffic. Instead, collect data and use it to optimize your content decisions. Do you know which keywords drive the highest value traffic to your site? Do you know how you (and your competitors) rank for those keywords? If you want an optimized, personalized marketing process, you need to find out. (Here's an article that explains how to use keyword research in HubSpot.)

(5) Optimize Your Funnel With Closed Loop Reporting -- Many marketers pick their marketing mix (how much paid, how much social, et) by pure intuition. Don't do that. Setup a closed-loop marketing process, then use it to determine which channels are most productive for your business and optimize your marketing mix. (Here's a series of lessions that will teach you how to setup closed-loop reporting in HubSpot.)

All these steps are fairly straight forward -- but that’s exactly the point. You don't need to get too fancy to begin seeing some of the benefits of big data. You just have to have the right process.

5 Tips for Terrific Power Tweeting

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:03:00 +0000

Twitter has been my blogs content distribution powerhouse.

It allows me to tweet information to the world in real time with no fuss and simplicity.

All you need is good headline, a shortened link and some hashtags (if you don’t know what a hashtag is I will fill you in soon)

When I started on Twitter I was like a mad monk, tweeting here and chirping there. Chasing followers who didn’t care about social media just becasue they had a lot of follwers. Finally, I learned how to build an online tribe.

Connect to Global Tribes

One of social media’s real strengths is to connect global tribes who are passionate about their interests. It could be photography, gaming or gummy bears.

In the past “Tribes” met in town halls and coffee shops. Now we create virtual communities online that can use social media platforms and technology to hangout (hence the term applied by Google+ to its groups feature “Hangouts”) and talk about their “stuff” in words that are often incomprehensible to an outsider.

The opportunities are now about abundance rather than scarcity.

The Tyranny of Distance

Years ago tribes were localized. Finding people with similar interests was restricted by time and place.

200 years ago it took a donkey to get you to the next village for a meetup. Today we are leaping on planes to catch up with our global colleagues who share our passion at a conference or expo. The internet and social networks allow us to connect to our tribes with video, sound and images with the high speed web links whenever the whim arises.

5 Twitter Tips for Efficient Tweeting

We all want to be more efficient and find the best tools and tactics to obtain maximum results. Buddy Media have just released some research findings that reveal what works well well on Twitter.

Tip #1. Tweet When People are Busy

People at work, with or without their bosses permission often have their Twitter account open. People use Twitter for finding out about real time news about brands and events. The study showed that Tweets during the hours of 8am to 7pm received 30% higher engagement.

Tip #2. Keep Your Tweets Short and Snappy

On Twitter you have 140 characters. Some people try and fill it up (as humans we tend to do that a bit). If you keep it short then you give people room to add their comments and own hashtags and their friends Twitter handles.

The Buddy Media research revealed that “Tweets that contain less than 100 characters receive 17% higher engagement than longer tweets.

Tip #3. Tweet Content

Don’t waste a Tweet (still have conversations of course) by not including a link. Tweets with links are retweeted 86% more than ones without. Want to amplify your brand message and make your content spread. Include links for the best results!

Tip #4. Hashtag to Win

Hash Tags are the use of this sign, #, that puts your tweets into the communities that you want to reach, For example, using the “hashtag” for reaching social media focused groups, looks like this, #social media.

The study revealed that Tweets with hashtags receive 200% more engagement than those without hashtags.

Tip #5. Ask Followers to Retweet

Sometimes it just helps to ask. Tweets that specifically ask followers to “Retweet” receive 1200% more retweet rates than if you don’t ask. So start becoming assertive.

What About You?

Twitter has its own rituals, so learning to fit into the tribe can be worth it. Taking a bit of time to apply these findings and tips will help your blog find more traffic and get you some more attention.

How are your tweeting habits. Could you “tweet” better?

Have you been using hash tags? Do you tweet with links. Look forward to hearing your stories.

More Reading:

Image by rgddesigns

from Jeffbullas's Blog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JeffbullassBlog/~3/jdsWrcshRJM/

13 Little Landing Page Tweaks That Can Make a BIG Difference

noreply@blogger.com (Lodewijk Tromp) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 21:08:00 +0000

It's no news flash that inbound marketers have to produce a lot of content and offers. After all, without these valuable assets -- and plenty of 'em -- inbound lead generation would be quite a challenge. And with every new offer, marketers must also spin out a new landing page to go with it.

But because landing page creation has become such a regular practice, and considering that many tools make it so quick and easy to create a new landing page in minutes, attention to landing page optimization can also easily fly out the window. So if you've been guilty of launching landing pages left and right all willy nilly, you may be overlooking some little details that can take the performance of your landing pages from good, to great. Got 15 extra minutes on your hands? Audit one of your landing pages, and see if you can make any of the following little tweaks that can make a BIG difference in your lead-gen results.

13 Little Tweaks That Can Make a BIG Difference in Landing Page Performance

1) Punch Up Your Headline

Every landing page should have an attention-grabbing headline that clearly indicates what the offer its featuring is about. If your landing page visitor read nothing else on the page but the headline, would she know exactly what she'd receive by completing and submitting the form? If it's not clear, make it so.

In addition to clarity, punch up the prominence and language of the headline. Does it stand out? Make it bold, and use a header tag. Is it compelling? Use strong verbs, adjectives, and keywords (for SEO!) like you would in a blog post title. Your headline is probably the first thing your visitors' eyes will gravitate toward when they reach your page, so you need to make it count. For example, just take a look at HubSpot's landing page for one of our ebooks, pictured below. The headline is bold, it clearly states what the visitor will receive ("Free Guide"), and it uses compelling language ("Mastering").

2) Shorten Your Copy

If your landing page looks more like a blog post than, well, a landing page, it's probably a good indication that you need to shorten your copy. A landing page with lots and lots of explanatory text is not only initially daunting to the reader, but it also buries the value of your offer. Shoot for around 100 words of copy or fewer in your landing page description so your visitors can quickly read and understand what your offer is about -- and be enticed to convert.

3) Make the Value Clearer

Speaking of value, does your landing page make it totally obvious what your prospects will get out of redeeming your offer? It's not just enough to tell them that they'll receive, say, an ebook on creating calls-to-action; you need to emphasize the value in it. Remember, you're trying to convince your landing page visitors that filling out a form and providing their personal information is worth what they'll get in return.

In our landing page example above, for example, the copy on our page clearly indicates that our CTA ebook will teach you how to "improve your calls-to-action and optimize them for maximum conversions." In other words, as a potential ebook downloader, you 'get' that after you've read our ebook, you'll know how to get more conversions out of your CTAs. When visitors clearly understand the value of downloading the ebook, and they're more inclined to fill out the form to obtain that valuable information.

4) Break Up Text

A final point about landing page copy to piggyback off the last two. You may only have 80 words of copy on your page, and it may clearly emphasize the value of your offer, but if it's all in one big chunk of unformatted text, it might also be all for naught.

Separate your landing page text into bite-size chunks that are easily scannable. As I said earlier, your landing page visitors don't want to waste their precious time trying to understand why they should redeem your offer. And if at any point, they feel like it's not worth determining, they'll leave -- offerless. Consider using bullet points to help describe your offer and highlight the value it provides, as we've done in our previous landing page example above.

5) Move That Form Up 'Above the Fold'

Do your visitors have to scroll down on the page or search high and low to find where or how they can redeem your offer? No bueno. If your form is below the fold (in other words, your visitors have to scroll down on the page in order to find it), move it up so it's more prominently visible. Worse -- if they don't understand that they need to fill out the form to redeem the offer in the first place, make it clear. There should be no guesswork involved in offer redemption from your prospects' perspective.

6) Shorten (or Lengthen) Your Form

"(Or Lengthen)"? Stay with us folks. First of all, understand that the more form fields you have, the less likely it is people will want to fill them out. Therefore, the length of your form needs to align with your lead generation goals.

So if your sales team has too many leads on their hands and they don't have the time to qualify them all, you might want to make your forms longer so they gather more information about your leads, enabling your sales team to better qualify them up front. If you're not generating enough leads, on the other hand, it might make sense to shorten your forms. The fewer fields you require, the less friction you'll create, and the more people will be willing to complete the form. Get it? Got it? Good.

7) Improve Your Form's Submit Button Text

What does the text on your landing page's submit button read? It it reads, "Submit," you might want to make a little tweak. According to research conducted for the Science of Lead Generation, landing pages with submit buttons actually labeled "Submit" tended to have lower conversion rates than those that used other wording. Why? We think it's because of the level of commitment the word "submit" implies, compared to other words like "Click Here" or "Go."

Use this data as a starting off point, and test different button text to see what works with your pages and your audience.

8) Add a Link to Your Privacy Policy

Try this quick and simple trick for reducing visitors' landing page form anxiety. You have a privacy policy that explains how you'll use your leads' information, right? (If not, add this to your general to-do list.) You know how to create a link, yes? Great.

Add a link to your landing page -- preferably right on the form itself -- that directs form-wary visitors to a page that outlines your privacy. This will help quell any fears they might have about how you plan to use their information, and make them more likely to complete the form. It will also make you seem transparent, trustworthy, and credible (because you are!).

9) Add Social Sharing Buttons

Want to easily extend the reach of your offers? Put your visitors to work! Your landing page visitors have their own networks of contacts, and many of them are likely not in yours, so if they share your landing page in social media, you'll be expanding your reach beyond your direct network.

But really, you don't want to actually make it work for them to share your offers with their networks, so how about you just make it as easy as possible for them to do so? Add social media and email sharing buttons to your landing page and its thank-you page! Just be sure that the URL you include in these pre-populated updates links to your offers' landing page, not the thank-you page where leads can access the offer (remember, you want to capture that conversion first!). If you're not sure how to create these handy little buttons, check out our guide to creating social media sharing links and buttons here.

10) Add a Visual (or a More Compelling One)

We humans are visual creatures, so it's no wonder we've seen an increasing emphasis on visuals in marketing lately. (Think about all those infographics, memes, and the rise in visual-centric social networks like Pinterest.) Hey, they don't say "a picture is worth a thousand words" for nothing. So if your landing page doesn't include some kind of visual -- or a compelling one, for that matter -- adding one is an easy upgrade. Even though you've explained what the offer is and the value they'll get from it through your copy, it can still seem like a mystery to your visitors. Thus, we recommend including a visual that more tangibly shows the visitor what they're actually going to get.

At HubSpot, for example, you'll notice that the majority of our ebook landing pages feature an image of the ebook's cover page. This gives potential downloaders a very tangible idea of what they're going to receive when they fill out the form. Remember: Surprises are fun when it's your birthday, not when you're providing a random company with your personal deets.

11) Remove Distractions

Think of your landing page visitors like kids in a candy store. If you put a lot of bells, whistles, and different choices in front of them, you'll never be able to corral them. That's why it's critical to limit as many potential distractions as possible on your landing pages. You want your visitors to focus on one thing and one thing only -- completing the form to redeem the offer. So don't include anything on your page that might prevent them from doing just that.

Remove any website navigation so visitors aren't tempted to visit another part of your website, and get rid of any other calls-to-action for other offers you might have on the page.

12) Conduct an A/B Test

A/B tests are great for tweaking and optimizing your landing pages, especially because sometimes even the simplest A/B test can yield really powerful results. Another great thing about A/B tests is, there are so many possible variables you can test -- and you don't even have to limit these tests to your landing pages.

But since landing pages are the topic at hand today, let's focus there. Some simple landing page variables you can try A/B testing include page layout, design, copy, images, and number of form fields. Be sure to pay close attention to your analytics so you know how your A/B test performed. To learn more about how to conduct A/B tests the right way, you can download our complete guide here.

13) Promote It!

While promoting your landing pages may not exactly be a "tweak," it's important not to overlook. After all, if you don't promote your landing pages, all of the above tweaks won't really make much of a difference! Be sure that along with every offer's landing page, you create CTA buttons that you can use in blog posts (just check the bottom of this blog post for an example) and on other website pages. Furthermore, promote links to your landing pages in your website's resource center, social media updates, email marketing sends, and lead nurturing campaigns. You put all that work into creating the offer and optimizing the landing page, so make sure you squeeze the most ROI out of it as possible!

Speaking of ROI, let your landing page analytics be your guide as you make tweaks and optimize your landing pages. If you notice a tweak has actually hurt, not helped your page, you'll be able to track that, and switch it back!

What other little landing page tweaks have you noticed made a BIG difference in the performance of your landing pages?