Group items tagged

At the 2010 Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, Bernie Borges was a panelist on the topic of "Driving More Qualified Leads into your Funnel." One of the questions from the audience was from a marketer who shifted his 2010 online marketing budget from paid to organic inbound marketing. He said that his lead performance had declined and asked for input on how to address it. He didn't give any other details, so Bernie gave his input from both a B2B and B2C perspective. Read more...

Great insight on changes coming to Google's algorithm. This has the potential to have huge impacts on your SEO and overall Web Strategy

Google's about to make search engine optimization (SEO) into marketing, for good. How? They've been slowly adding user behavior to their ranking algorithm. Bet on far bigger changes after January 1st.

Great local SEO tip

This is a Showcase Lawn Map on the web site of WiseGrass, a small lawncare service provider in central Pennsylvania. It's an embedded Google Map with user-created content for each of the showcase lawns. Here's a list of reasons why this is great:

Great tips from the aWeber blog on what personalization means when it comes to email marketing..

Personalization isn't a bad thing in and of itself. But when it gets misused for the sake of an extra open or click, it becomes a bad thing. It also becomes less effective over time. And it allows us to think that we're creating "personal" emails just by merging a name into the message. A truly personal email addresses the subscriber's needs, desires, fears, preferences and other aspects of their personality.

SEO and analytics tools you may not use - and are priced very well... FREE!

If you've done much publishing on the web, you're probaly already familiar with Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. However, many web workers stick with the same small handful of SEO tools. There are quite a lot of them available online for free, and testing keywords and looking at analytics across multiple tools can make a lot of sense, especially since optimizing them is an inexact science.

wow

In this article I'll use the SEO filter, made by Andé Scholten, to make some new interesting SEO reports in Google Analytics. I realized that the data, provided by the filter, had given me some new opportunities. It wasn't possible in Google Analytics to get good SEO related reports. The reports I did get were these: * An overview of keywords during a specific period and (after clicking) the landings page on which visitors landed after clicking on the Google result. * An overview of the 'Entrance Keywords' of a specific page.

Great post on content strategy

I encourage clients, associates and even friends to create content-rich sites for whatever they specialize in with the purpose of building an audience and forging relationships. The type of content aside, the way to create a popular web property is to slowly grow larger over time in an organized, attractive layout with uniquely useful material focused on your niche.

Bloggers like numbers. Big numbers. Yes, we want a lot of traffic. But, we also want the usual status indicators: (1) Big RSS count, (2) Big Email List, etc. So, how do you go about converting a random visitor to your blog into a subscriber who will continue to come back? Here are some simple tips that you should probably execute.

Great way of turning advertising copy into a great content strategy...

This spot is such good advertising, it's become… content. Which connected a couple of dots for me.

Barry makes two great points in this post you should look at if you are looking to develop a web strategy for your business.. He makes two great points that are very important for businesses to realize when crafting a social media or community building strategy. If you can engage an audience around your brand by providing them content where and how they want it - you will succeed online and see real conversions - whether it is leads or sales.

With more and more people flocking to social media sites, it is important that your audience can engage with your brand through as many channels as possible.

Goes to show that online video marketing definitely works - as if you hadn't guessed it yet.

The vast majority of those surveyed (95%) for the report, who have utilized online video as a marketing tool, were satisfied with online video marketing and expect to use it in the future.

According to a report on search engine results from Forrester Research: "on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index." Not only is video invaluable to getting your web presence better exposure in search engines, but video is the most compelling way to tell your story and inspire potential visitors.

Bounce rate has these attributes: 1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click! 2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics. 3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

Great tips from Google on reducing your website bounce rates

In it's simplest form Word of Mouth (WoM) Marketing is tapping into the conversations that occur between people to sell your product. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WoMMA) defines it as: Word of mouth marketing: Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. Effective WoM strategies cultivate and amplify these conversations, understanding that they are the most powerful way to convince a consumer to buy your product.

With floods of e-mail arriving every hour, most people are ruthless about deleting anything they even suspect won't interest them. Not only that, they're also just as likely to report unwanted e-mails as spam as they are to delete them. So if you're not writing compelling subject lines that get the e-mails opened, all your hard work is lost. Here are five tips for writing effective e-mail subject lines that can easily double the open (and click-through) rates on your next e-mail.

How Wal-Mart got social media wrong and how they fixed it

Rather than forcing the message with their own branded community, fake blogs, and corporate blogs, Walmart gets it right by creating a platform for customers and pundits to tell their story

Andy, you may want to add the tag "groundswell" to your bookmark.

Great way to use animated gifs for video representation in your email campaign. Use this for 360 product views, slideshows, etc... Only problem is no sound - but works in all major email clients (including web based clients like GMail)

Recently, someone took the idea of video email a step further and created an email marketing campaign that used video in a way that I hadn't thought feasible - and it displayed properly in nearly all major email programs!

Great post from Michael Fruchter on getting started in Social Media... Everything from personal branding to blogging to Twitter

Getting started with social media, whether for personal or professional use, requires learning the basic fundamentals. Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account. The tools are great and give us big advantages, but they are simply extensions of how we engage and participate in social media, they are not the answers. The social in social media is all about the human element. This post touches upon 40 key elements to aid your success.

As I mentioned last year - as well as on many posts since - analytics is a critical facet of your web strategy not only because it provides measurement, but it is one of the most valuable research tools you have at your disposal. Most people install analytics on their website and never look at the data again. There are many reasons for this. Some people don't have time and most just don't know what the data means.