Domesticating IT's Internet Marketing Blog

To Tweet or Not to Tweet [Inbound Marketing Inquirer]

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 12:29:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers.

You may or may not know that I am located in New Hampshire, less than an hour's drive from all of the carnage in Boston this week. I was far enough away to be safe but close enough to feel connected. I had a number of friends and colleagues directly involved - some just a couple of miles from the surreal lockdown in Watertown. I wanted to discuss my personal actions on social media and examine some hot topics that emerged in the aftermath of the marathon bombing on Monday and the bizarre manhunt on Friday.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media To Grow Their Visibility

Social Media is a great way that small business owners can grow their visibility online. Case in point, in a recent survey by Manta of 600 small business owners across the United States: 90% of them said that they are actively engaged in social networking sites and 74% felt that social networking online was very valuable and that it was starting to out-weigh networking in-person.

Why Citibank Eliminated Its Digital Marketing Department

"Why? Because everyone in a company's marketing department needs to be fluent in digital strategy." BINGO! Simply put, they get it!

Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be

Stephen Pressfield is a wonderful source of advice and inspiration for bloggers. This short and simple article provides some advice for following through on those tasks you MUST do but keep putting off. Like blogging, for example.

Form a Brute Squad [Inbound Marketing Inquirer]

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 12:11:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Form a Brute Squad

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers.

WordPress sites are currently under assault from massive brute force attacks from malware-infected servers. This week's Tip Jar provides details about the attach and how to protect your site.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

How Creating Crawlable Landing Pages Increased Quality Score

Quality Score is an important metric that helps determine how expensive your Google AdWords clicks will be. A lower score means you'll spend more. This article helps decode some of the mystery around this score and can help lower your average CPC.

13 Unconventional Landing Page Strategies To Increase Conversions

"Similar to the banner blindness phenomenon, sticking to the traditional methods (like linking to your homepage from your Twitter bio) is extremely predictable from a new visitor’s perspective, and leads to what I call brand blindness. What follows are 13 unconventional landing page strategies that, if used well, will break your visitors expectations on first visit making them more receptive to what they find on the page and lead them into a flow through your site."

Email Optimization: A single word change results in a 90% lift in sign-ups

One of the most testing-oriented sessions at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, recently held in Las Vegas, was a presentation by Michael Aagaard, Copywriter and self-described test junkie, ContentVerve. Michael offered the audience 12 test case studies in 30 minutes in a talk titled, “How to Optimize and Test: Calls-to-Action for Maximum Conversions.”

I Got Lazy [Inbound Marketing Inquirer]

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:07:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: I Got Lazy

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers.

I got lazy with one of my recent blog posts. The headline was pure crap and my brother-in-law subtly and whitily called me out on it. It was a valuable lesson that I shared with my subscribers this week.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Inbound Marketing is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Being successful with inbound marketing requires setting proper expectations. Good things come to those who wait!

James Altucher and Why You Should Quit Your Job

Chris Brogan interviews one of my favorite bloggers, James Altucher. He is the Woody Allen of Wall Street - brilliant, neurotic, vulnerable. James has some very unique views on the world and I believe he has an important message for everyone about the direction that corporations and the economy are headed.

Why the Blog Post Is the New Ad Unit

With some disillusionment starting to set in with social media as an advertising platform, businesses are turning their eye back to the blog. This has renewed interest in blogging and the development of content as a form of advertising and marketing

Inbound Marketing Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:58:00 GMT

As an inbound marketing consultant, the most difficult job I have is managing client expectations. To be honest, the concept of inbound marketing always makes sense to people when they hear it. It sounds very logical and they can't wait to get started. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, they look past the hard work and only see the new leads raining down on them like so many pennies from heaven.

When that happens, I take responsibility because it's my job to make sure that my clients are well informed and properly prepared. Unfortunately, I don't have a perfect track record with that. And so I have two goals for this post. First, it’s another attempt at clarifying the process and its benefits. Second, it’s also a cautionary tale about any other consultants who might be trying to sell you on a quick fix.

Developing Content

If you know anything about inbound marketing, then you understand that content is its cornerstone. This is one exception to the marathon vs. sprint metaphor. Content is definitely something that can be fast-tracked. And while you can’t buy your way to the top of organic search results or build a quality social media audience, you can spend money to build quality content more quickly.

However, creating the content and promoting it are two different things. Inbound marketing is a way of life, not a one-time campaign. If you create gobs of content and then release it all at once, the benefits will decay quickly and you’ll never tap all of its value. The idea is to create a content conveyor belt that is always running and always delivering value to people. This is what builds a reputation, attracts links and amasses audiences.

Establishing SEO Credibility

This is where so many businesses get themselves into hot water! There simply are no shortcuts to climbing the organic SEO rankings – anymore. There used to be many techniques that worked and could get websites at the top of the rankings for competitive keywords in just a few weeks. But Google has caught up with those cheaters.

If you or your SEO consultant have been getting results from these shortcuts, then the best case scenario is that they stop working someday and your rankings fall. The worst case is that Google slaps you with a penalty or – worse yet – a one-year stint on the black list.

Building true SEO credibility requires links and social signals (shares, likes, plus-ones, pins). These are all assets that take time to build and grow. They can be rushed to some extent but building a high quality footprint takes time, mostly because it takes time to build an audience.

Speaking of which…

Building an Audience

Yes, you can purchase Twitter followers. Yes, you can purchase Facebook ads for your fan page to build its likes. And sometimes those are effective tactics. But for the most part, a quality, highly engaged audience simply has to be built organically. And unless you are fortunate enough to release a viral video or start an Internet meme, this does not happen quickly. People need to discover you. Word needs to spread.

And even if you do manage to build an audience quickly, it serves as a red flag to many people. One of the first metrics I look at when someone follows me on Twitter is the ratio of their Tweets to followers. If they have 200 Tweets and 10,000 followers, then I know they’ve purchased those followers and have not built their audience organically. There is a high likelihood that they’re a spammer and only care about their numbers.

People want to follow accounts that care about their audience, not the scoreboard.

Compound Interest

Finally, one of the main reasons why inbound marketing can’t be rushed is that its biggest benefits come from the phenomenon of compounding. When you spend time or money on advertising campaigns, the benefit usually ends as soon as you stop spending that time and money. But when you create a blog post or eBook, the benefits live on.

It’s the difference between an expense and an investment. When you invest money, (ideally) it will gain interest over time. But the real magic of investment is compound interest. The benefits grow over time because they build on top of one another. The same is true with content marketing and link building. A link begets another link, which begets another. And a new fan shares your content, which leads to 2 more fans, and so on.

Where advertising is linear, inbound marketing is geometric! But just like investing money, the serious gains are usually made over the long haul. Sure, some people will catch a stock at just the right moment and make a fortune but those are the exceptions. Most successful investing is done carefully over a long period of time.

So if you’re at the starting blocks, my advice is to pace yourself and make sure you’re in it for the long run. Don’t burn yourself out or set false expectations of being able to sprint all the way to the finish line. And if you’re well into the race and still not seeing the benefit, stay at it and keep plugging toward that finish line.

Social Media Marketing Just Took a Body Blow

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 13:21:00 GMT

Each Sunday, I publish the Inbound Marketing Inquirer - my weekly newsletter. It contains the Tip Jar, which is content that is a subscriber-only benefit that I don't usually publish. This week is an exception for two reasons. First, I like to give a periodic preview of what I include in my newsletter. Second, the subject matter is important to me as an inbound marketing professional and concerned digital citizen.

Welcome to this week's Inbound Marketing Inquirer. The Tip Jar disects a court decision last week in the copyright battle between the Associated Press and Meltwater U.S. Most of my newsletters contain objective, tutorial-style advice. This week's is basically an opinion piece about copyright law and fair use (with a connection to social media marketing).

The Court Case

On 21-March, a U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York) sided with the Associated Press and the New York Times in a closely-watched case involving a company that scraped news content from the internet without paying for it. If you're not familiar with Meltwater, one of the products they offer is Meltwater News - a service that "keeps track of breaking news about your company, competitors and industry with online media monitoring." They scrape news stories and notify clients when their brand name is mentioned. The notifications include the headline, lede paragraph and sentence that includes the brand mention.

The Associated Press wants Meltwater to pay a license for this content. They allege that Meltwater is violating copyright law by scraping and repurposing their content. Meltwater argues that what they are doing is perfectly consistent with fair use. This week, the judge agreed with the Associated Press.

My Analysis (and Opinion)

Sigh. You’d think after all of these years the publishing industry would start to get it. They remind me of the Japanese holdouts who continued to fight World War II three decades after it was over.

The problem here is that judges still don’t understand the big picture and are not properly evaluating the fourth test; the effect on the work’s value. I would argue that Meltwater’s service INCREASES the work’s value because it increases its discoverability and, therefore, the likelihood that the work will be read and possibly licensed. The companies using Meltwater’s service would never and will never pay the AP for a license to access its content. They frankly don’t care about the creative genius of the lede or any of the nuanced opinion or value-add from its author. They really only care about one thing – sentiment. And sentiment usually boils down to a binary disposition of positive or negative. That’s what Meltwater’s customers are interested in. They want to know the quantity and disposition of brand mentions.

The fact that the article mentions comparing click-through rates to search engines is a dead giveaway of their ignorance. It shows that AP is still fixated on eyeballs instead of mindshare. Frankly, if AP had enough guts and vision, they would have created the Meltwater News product themselves many years ago. Instead, they were afraid of cannibalizing their golden goose. But as Steve Jobs said, “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”

As someone in the content marketing business, I am not unsympathetic to having your work ripped off. I understand there is a balance that needs to be struck between protecting people’s work and lubricating the free speech machine. However, at the moment the content creators (the RIAA in particular) hold way too much of the power.

One last thing that bothered me was the judge’s decision that the AP performs an “essential function of democracy.” Who has done more for democracy over the past two years? The AP or Twitter? In my mind it’s debatable.

Stay Informed

The audience for this newsletter is comprised mostly of other Internet marketers. My hope is that you all (especially those in the U.S.) become more aware of the assualt on fair use and Internet freedom being waged by the Recording Industry Association of America. If you are concerned, as I am, about protecting free speech and Internet freedom - which are both essential elements of inbound marketing - please visit and subscribe to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course, you can also follow my Twitter and Facebook feeds where I share important news and developments on this front!

Reading List

New Girard at Large Inbound Marketing Preview

I was on the Girard at Large radio program Monday morning to preview the work we're doing to upgrade their web presence with an inbound marketing makeover.

CISPA is Back: Protect Internet Freedom and Join the Protest on Your WordPress Blog

We defeated CISPA once before but it’s back and internet freedom is under attack again. The Internet Defense League is an online activist group that has organized to help defend internet freedoms and make people aware of bills that threaten your right to privacy. They’ve put together a “Cat Signal“, which coordinates a large number of websites to simultaneously display a notice to their users. This is done by embedding a bit of javascript on your site. When the Cat Signal goes out, your site is ready to join in the protest.

Facebook changes cover photo policy: 20% text rule in effect but content less regulated

This is a huge development! Facebook used to preclude us from putting calls to action in our cover photos but now we can. As you can see, I jumped on this and updated the Domesticating IT fan page to include a call to action for my inbound marketing self-assessment. The result? Two downloads in the following 90 minutes.

New Girard at Large Inbound Marketing Preview

Jon DiPietro — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:44:00 GMT

I was on the Girard at Large radio program this morning to preview the work we're doing to upgrade their web presence with an inbound marketing makeover.

Click to download in MP3 format (6.84MB)

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-03-17

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 12:43:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: The Price of a Free Lunch

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers.

Earlier this week, Google announced that it will shut down its Google Reader product. This is a painful body blow to yours truly. I'm subscribed to 250 RSS feeds and scan thousands of headlines every week. These stories keep me up to speed on the latest Internet marketing developments and provide ideas and inspiration for blog posts and other content.

The Tip Jar examined the risks and rewards of using free services as part of your inbound marketing strategy.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Binary Marketing

95% of visitors to your website are researching. Binary marketing means you're only paying attention to the 5% who are ready to make a decision. Does this sound like an effective strategy?

The Social Resume [Web Savvy Segment]

This week's radio segment on the Girard at Large program discussed the demise of Google Reader and the emergence of the social resume. Did you know that some companies are using Klout scores as part of their job requirements?

Why Google Analytics Tagging Matters - Whiteboard Friday

Rachael Gerson sheds some light on "dark social" and explains why tagging in Google Analytics improves the accuracy of your referrals. Take credit for the work that you're doing, and tag your links!

Binary Marketing

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:30:00 GMT

When I was in college pursuing my electrical engineering degree, I had to take a digital logic course. This course taught us how to speak fluently in the only language computers truly understand; binary. Even though I had to build a computer from scratch in this class, I still find it fascinating that flipping a bunch of zeros and ones around can accomplish everything that computers do for us today.

While binary works great for computers, it's not so great as a marketing strategy. But that's the way many websites are designed these days.

The Wizard Says, "Go Away!"

When Dorothy finally reaches the Emerald City in the movie The Wizard of Oz, she's initially told that the wizard says, "Go away" and then has the door slammed in her face. This is not the way you want to treat website visitors, is it?

Then ask yourself this question: "What happens if a visitor is interested in my products or services but isn't ready to buy right now?" Do you tell them to go away? Or is there another way to stay in touch? Is there middle ground?

If a visitor has only two options - buy or don't buy - then you're practicing binary marketing. The only options are for that visitor to become a customer or leave. This means that you could be turning away future customers who aren't ready to commit today but might be in another week or month or year.

So how do you fix this?

Lead Nurturing

The typical buyer goes through six steps:

Need recognition
Information search
Evaluation
Choice
Purchase
Loyalty

Binary marketing assumes that everyone is already at stage #5. But what if the visitor isn't at that stage yet? Without a way to capture their interest, you force yourself out of the loop. Implementing a lead nurturing strategy allows you to be present throughout those first four stages and help persuade them to purchase your product or service.

In order to have any hope of executing a lead nurturing program, you'll need to persuade the visitor to opt into receiving updates from you. Seth Godin believes that:

"Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either. Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went."

You'll need to determine the timing that makes the most sense for buying cycles in your industry. If you're selling an ebook or online course, the cycle might be as short as a few days. If you're selling multi-million dollar enterprise software systems, it's probably measured in years. So be aware of the length of the buying cycle and adjust your content and touch points accordingly.

Follow up with introductory emails and then offer additional information in the form of ebooks, white papers, videos, etc. Eventually, a personal email or telephone follow up may be in order. Always be sure you're providing value, otherwise the process will instantly devolve from nurturing to pestering and it will be game over.

Lead nurturing is all about establishing and maintaining a relationship with qualified prospects until they are ready to buy. Keep in mind that 95% of the visitors on your website are performing research and don't want to engage until the last third of the purchasing process. So make sure you're not falling into the trap of binary marketing.

The Social Resume [Web Savvy Segment]

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:07:00 GMT

This week's radio segment on the Girard at Large program dealth with the demise of Google Reader and the rise of the social resume.

Click to download in MP3 format (7.22MB)

Landing Pages: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:24:00 GMT

I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.” The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride.

When I speak with prospects and clients, I find that there's a lot of confusion around the term "landing pages." It's not their fault for two reasons. First, the term itself is a little misleading. It's perfectly reasonable to think that a landing page would be a page you land on from somewhere else. Which leads to the second reason for this confusion: Many web analytics programs use the term in exactly this way.

This standard Google Analytics report is showing a list of pages on which people landed from the outside world. They may have been direct visits, keyword searches, social media referrals, etc. It makes sense that we'd call them landing pages, so where's the confusion?

Conversion Pages

When you hear marketers use the term landing page, they are talking about something a little different. I think that a better term for them would be conversion page, because that is the sole mission of a landing page; to persuade someone to take a particular action. Some examples of these actions include:

Adding a product to a shopping cart
Registering to attend an event
Downloading a free ebook
Subscribing to a newsletter
Requesting a free demonstration

Do you see something common about the bullet list above? Every one of them begins with a verb. One analogy I used to describe landing pages is that they are your website assassins. They are hyper focused and single-minded in their mission to secure these conversions.

Here are a few very basic best practices for landing pages that differentiate them from others on your website:

Distraction-free: Landing pages should be free of distractions like menus, widgets or any other opportunity for a visitor to do anything other than take the action you want them to take. You do want to leave an escape hatch for them to get back to your main website, but nothing more!
Powerful Headline: Research has shown that your headline is responsible for at least 30% of the conversion rate. Be sure you're using emotional triggers to be as persuasive as possible!
Build Trust: Acquiring conversions is all about the value of the offer overcoming the friction of commitment. One way to do this is to use trust symbols (certifications, accreditations, money back guarantees). Another is to increase credibility with testimonials.
Clear Call to Action: The call to action (i.e. the verb) must be very clear, obvious and above the fold. Use graphical buttons with contrasting colors and guidance techniques like arrows to draw the eye of the visitor.

Landing Page Optimization

WiderFunnel Marketing is a full-service marketing company and the developer of the industry-first Kaizen Method™ for continuously improving online conversion rates on landing pages, microsites and web sites. They plan, design, and deliver website Action Pages™ that are statistically proven through A/B split testing and Multivariate testing to persuade more prospects to become leads and customers.

They've developed a model for identifying and testing landing page opportunities that they call the L.I.F.T. Model for conversion optimization.

They have a great set of free downloads that I recommend you grab. I love this graphic and its simplicity. It illustrates all of the forces at play in one simple, memorable image.

Bottom Line

When putting together your website strategy, the first step is to create a prioritized list of outcomes you want to happen when people visit your website. Each of these outcomes then has a corresponding landing page and the success of your website is based on how well those pages perform. It sounds simple, I know, and there are a lot of factors that go into determining those outcomes and building the offers for the landing pages. But this is the very essence of inbound marketing and if you're not building landing pages and measuring their performance, you're not doing inbound marketing!

Google AuthorRank [Web Savvy Segment]

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:30:00 GMT

This week's radio segment on the Girard at Large program focused on Google AuthorRank and its effect on search engine optimization.

Click to download in MP3 format (8.59MB)

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-03-03

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 13:41:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Emotion's the Notion

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's concludes last week's topic of marketing with logic and emotion.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Social Media Marketing Metrics - Let's Play Rock, Paper, Scissors

LinkedIn is "best!" Facebook "wins!" Twitter "beats" Facebook! What's a marketer to believe with all of these (seemingly) conflicting headlines?

5 Conversion Experts Scrutinize a Universal Orlando Landing Page

These conversion experts completely shred this landing page from Universal Orlando. OK, let's admit it: There's a little bit of schadenfreude when you can see a big company with loads of money fail so badly. But there's much more to this article than that. There is much to be learned from their mistakes.

Is Social Media Worthwhile For Local Businesses?

While it’s true that many businesses may not see as direct of a return on social media development work, there are a number of significant indirect benefits that make it worthwhile. This does not mean that a company needs to be involved with every large and small social media platform, and it doesn’t mean that large quantities of time must be spent on social media activities.

Social Media Marketing Metrics - Let's Play Rock, Paper, Scissors

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:18:00 GMT

Here are two article headlines I've seen in the past 24 hours:

LinkedIn Replaces Facebook as Top Social Tool

Facebook Wins In Social Media Time-Spend

Twitter Beats Facebook for B2B Lead Generation

OK, so you're telling me that LinkedIn is the "top" social tool, but Facebook wins over LinkedIn and Twitter while Twitter beats Facebook. Sounds like a game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" right? How's a marketer supposed to know which is best?

Before we can address that, we need to [gasp] read beyond the headlines. Let's examine each article and the underlying data.

LinkedIn Replaces Facebook as Top Social Tool

This article comes via MarketingProfs and takes a look at how the fastest growing private companies are using social media. Their headline is based on the fact that the number of companies using LinkedIn (81%) has eclipsed the number using Facebook (67%).

So what does this data tell us? Not too much, unless your marketing plan is to follow what everyone else is doing. Based on the inbound marketing evaluations I've been doing for the past few years, businesses are getting worse at social media, not better! So I'd be cautious about following the crowd.

Facebook Wins In Social Media Time-Spend

This article came courtesy of Business Insider. They cite data from comScore, which shows that based on share of time spent on social media, Facebook is the undisputed king, Big Kahuna and 800 pound gorilla all rolled into one.

This is one of the more lop-sided graphs you'll ever see! So why are companies putting fewer resources into Facebook? Well, ostensibly they've tried it and did not see great results. So it must be because LinkedIn is better than Facebook, right? It couldn't possibly be because the companies sucked at Facebook marketing, right?

Twitter Beats Facebook for B2B Lead Generation - or Does It?

This article from Graham Jones is finally looking under the right rocks and asking intelligent questions about the data. He's talking about data from eMarketer that suggests Twitter is the king of lead generation for B2B:

Graham smartly points out that this is based on a small set of data and that it doesn't provide conversion rates. Bingo! "What we do not know – and which is much more important – is the conversion rate of those leads. It may well be that none of the 82% of the leads generated by Twitter actually converted into customers, whereas it may be that, say, 10% of the leads from LinkedIn converted."

So what's the best social network based on these metrics?

I Hate to Say It, But...

"It depends." Seriously, I hate to say that because it's not an answer. So let me elaborate.

The "best" social network is the one that helps you meet your goals. If your goal is brand awareness, then you're looking for exposure. If your goal is selling a good or service, then you're looking for customers. Since the latter goal is the most common, let's take a look at that.

Landing customers is a function of three variables; volume, conversion rate and quality:

Volume is the quantity of visits you receive from your social media activities.
Conversion rate is the percentage of those visits that convert to leads.
Quality is the degree to which those leads conform to your target marketing personae.

In my experience, each of these social media networks has different value to offer in all three of these areas. Here's a very crude representation of what I've seen from dozens of campaigns I've run for my own projects and clients:

Some important caveats need to be mentioned:

This assumes that each channel is being used well and according to its strengths! Just robo-posting the exact same content on all three networks is exactly the wrong thing to do in most cases.
Most (but not all) of this qualitative assessment comes from B2B marketing, which is the lion's share of my experience.
This is at odds with the chart from eMarketer, which showed a higher volume from Facebook than Twitter. But in my experience, that's because companies do a slightly better job with Facebook than Twitter.
Conspicuously absent is the sleeping giant, Google+. Ignore at your own peril!

So based on this chart, which social network is the "best?" You could just as accurately answer "all" as you could "none." The final - and most important - caveat here is that your mileage may vary. There are many, many moving parts that will affect each of these variables and you need to use the proper strategies and techniques in each network.

But the key is not to rely too heavily on others' data. Try your own experiments and find out what works for you!

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-02-24

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 13:35:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Are you selling to Vulcans?

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's examines the balance between logic and emotion when it comes to decision making.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

A Close Look at a Google Penalty [SEO] (Updated)

British flower vendor Interflora was assessed a Google death penalty this week. Matt Cutts has responded on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog and offers a warning against using paid links like "advertorials," which appear to be the main culprit here.

Study Reveals Brand Marketers Mostly Clueless And Inept At Localization

Most national marketers emerge as inept regarding the task of leading consumers from brand advertising to stores where their products can be purchased. This has always been the promise of localized digital marketing. And, 15 years into the Internet era, national brands and agencies are still basically . . . clueless.

STUDY: Facebook Accounted For 8.48% Of All Web Searches During 4Q Of 2012

Five websites accounted for 20 percent of all search activity during the fourth quarter of 2012, and Facebook sat atop that list, as the subject of 8.48 percent of all searches during the period, according to the latest research from Experian Marketing Services.

A Close Look at a Google Penalty [SEO] (Updated)

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:21:00 GMT

British flower vendor Interflora was assessed a Google death penalty this week. Google hasn't commented publicly about the reason but there has been some good sleuthing done that provides some good insight and likely causes. From all appearances, it does not seem like Interflora was trying to deliberately game the system. Many are arguing that this is an overreaction by Google, which seems to suggest that they are trying to make an example of the florist.

Here's the shocking picture of what a Google penalty looks like:

Image courtesy of David Naylor.

That cliff shows a jaw-dropping 95% decrease in search visibility. One of the disturbing aspects of this story is that it does not appear that Interflora engaged in cut and dry black hat SEO tactics. In a superb bit of detective work, Anthony Shapely concludes that their aggressive buying of advertorials is what led to their demise.

This is somewhat controversial because, although it is technically a violation of Google's quality guidelines (i.e. thou shalt not pay for links), it's a very widely employed practice. If the article is clearly labeled as an advertorial, it seems fair that Google should simply discount the link rather than assessing a penalty. Indeed, it seems like Interflora may have collateral damage in a massive bombing raid by Google on British newspaper sites who are overtly selling these links. Shapely offers the following thoughts:

"We are confident after analysis these links are the cause of Interflora’s current situation and in addition the recent flurry of Webmaster Tools messages reported across our industry in various open and closed forums...

The biggest indicator (other than matching lots of links in common with newly penalised sites) is the huge PageRank drop that occured late last week across virtually all Regional and some National Newspaper websites..."

Update: Matt Cutts has responded on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog. He uses the word "advertorial" which seems to confirm the assumptions.

"Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or "advertorial" pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google's search results, as well as reduction of the site's visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google's search results."

Closing Thoughts

Interflora may not have know it, but they were involved in some high stakes Internet marketing risk and reward tactics. This story illustrates how critical it is for all of the marketing disciplines to be working together. So how can you avoid getting a Google smack-down?

First, be sure that someone on your marketing team is familiar with Google's webmaster guidelines. Here are Google's four basic quality principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
Don't deceive your users.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

The third bullet is a very broad category and is (presumably) where Interflora got themselves into trouble. It's obvious that Google considered the mass-purchasing of those advertorials as a link scheme.

If you're employing an outside SEO consultant or firm, there's no guarantee that you're safe. Many SEOs, unfortunately, take shortcuts that get their clients short term results and then skip out of town before the penalty hits the fan. And others are simply ignorant of the latest changes on the web. Be sure to ask your consultant specific questions about how they're optimizing your site and how risky their techniques are. Ask them if there's any chance that an Interflora or J.C. Penny situation could happen to you. If they don't know what you're talking about, it's an indication that they are not paying attention to the latest trends in SEO and would be warning sign that you may want to start shopping around for a new consultant.

Be careful out there!

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-02-17

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 11:34:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Robots Acting Human or Humans Acting Robotic?

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's deconstructs a social media #fail by American Airlines.

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Reading List

The Social Media Doppler Effect

I had the honor of delivering a presentation and serving on the Social Technologies for Industry panel at the Seventeenth Annual ARC World Industry Forum in Orlando. The topic was The Social Media Doppler Effect. It examines the accelerating pace of social media innovation and the general failure of organizations to keep up.

Bare Minimum Content Marketing: 3 Things You Have to Do

Neil Patel is one of my favorite marketing bloggers and this is a typically dense, instructional post. "You know content marketing is essential for you business, so why don’t you do it? If you are like me, you probably don’t have enough time in day to focus all of your energy on content marketing. So what should you do?"

How To Create A Google Places Listing In 10 Steps

It’s a no brainer that customers search online for local businesses, and if you’re not easily found you’re missing out on customers. If you’re a local business, you can get a head start on your local SEO efforts by creating a Google Places page in 10 easy steps.

The Social Media Doppler Effect

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:09:00 GMT

For those unfamiliar with the Doppler effect, if you’re standing still and an object is coming towards you, the sound it emits has a higher pitch when moving toward you than when it’s moving away. Well, if social media made a noise, for most organizations it would sound like it’s moving away.

I’ve been doing inbound marketing evaluations for various companies for several years now. I take a look at their overall web presence and grade it against 26 different criteria that provide a rough indication of how well they are or are not they are implementing the principals of inbound marketing.

In the process of performing these evaluations, I noticed a trend. The thing that I noticed is that although most of these companies are beginning to take a stab at inbound marketing, their grades were getting worse. If they’re finally beginning to drink the Kook Aid, why is this happening?

Well, it turns out that at least in this case, slow and steady is not winning the race. They’re simply not moving fast enough. The size, shape and contents of the Internet in general – and social media in particular – are all changing at faster pace than the companies who are using them. Not only are they changing faster, that change is accelerating and the situation is getting worse by the day. That low pitched hum you hear is the sound of the Social Media Doppler Effect.

So how does an organization get in front of the train rather than behind it?

Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said it best when asked how he became such a prolific scorer. His answer was that he always would skate to where the puck was going to be, not where it has been.

It sounds simple and obviously it takes a combination of incredible instincts and phenomenal talent in order to pull this off. In this presentation I provide some answers to this by providing a massive case study and then examining how you might apply some of the lessons from that example in your own businesses.

Social Media Innovation is Accelerating

Think about how business was conducted in the 80s and 90s. How often did a true game-changing technology come around? Fax machines, personal computers, mobile phones, the Internet… these things happened maybe every couple of years. Thanks to Moore’s Law and social media, we’re seeing game-changers every couple of months now.

I've identified three reasons why I think this is happening:

Fast growth begets FASTER growth. Reason number one for the innovation acceleration is the breathtaking adoption rates for new social media platforms. Google likes to brag about how quickly its Google+ platform grew its user base, but as far as I’m concerned it’s because they stood on the shoulders of giants. Social media is making discovery of new social media faster and more viral than ever before.
The second phenomenon that’s fueling accelerating innovation is mobile influence. Surveys show that mobile browsing is not happening instead of desktop browsing. Rather, it's happening in addition to it. If you look at industry surveys that dive into how and where people are using their smartphones, you discover they’re not just using them MORE, they’re using them DIFFERENTLY.
You can see this acceleration in a number of areas. I put together a chart of the number of "major" Google algorithm updates over the last six years. As you can see, this chart is nowhere near linear. It’s geometric. As a practical matter, this means that at least half of the search engine optimization tactics you used three years ago are completely useless now. It also means that reviewing your SEO strategy once a year was probably fine as recently as 2009 but in 2013 you better be tearing up your old strategy once a year and revisiting it quarterly.

To see a case study of a digital marketing campaign that figured this out and see a few suggestions about how to get in front of the social media train, check out the full presentation:

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-02-10

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:00:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: You're So Vain (I Bet You Think This Site Is About You)

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's asks if your website is suffering from vanity. Is it speaking about you and your company, or is it speaking to your customers and their problems?

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Reading List

Website Design: Less Is More [With TED Video Goodness]

This post is a good companion to this week's tip jar, as it delves into simplicity and why it's really bad to provide too many choices on your website. The bottom line is that the more choices a person has, the less likely they will be to choose any of them!

64 Google+ Content Strategies [Infographic]

Google+ isn’t only a social network. It’s the very backbone (and future) of Google itself. Specifically, Author Rank is going to be a big deal for content creators and this post provides a number of tips for building your presence on G+.

Foursquare For Business App Launched

Foursquare has just released a new mobile app, Foursquare for Business, to serve as an extension to the existing merchant dashboard, giving businesses the ability to manage specials and view recent activity and analytics from their mobile devices.

Website Design: Less Is More [With TED Video Goodness]

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:30:00 GMT

Recently, I wrote an article about when it is and isn't a good idea to redesign your website. But let's say that you have solid, strategic reasons for doing so and it's time to start taking a look at a new website design. The first - and arguably most important - bit of advice I have is that "less is more."

I spend a lot of time with clients working to convince them that the more information and more calls to action they have on their website, the less likely it is that a visitor will choose any of them. And so I'd like to share with you three TED talks that provide theory, studies and details about how our misunderstanding of choice can often times make it harder - not easier - on people's ability to choose.

Malcolm Gladwell: Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce

This was the first and most inflential talk I've seen on the topic of having too many choices. "Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

Sheena Iyengar: The art of choosing

Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices -- and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.

Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

And finally, even if your visitor can navigate through the gauntlet of choices put before them, there is every reason to believe that they will feel badly about it after. Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

So where you're considering how many buttons to put on your home page or building out that navigation menu, remember that more choices are generally bad, that massive cultural differences in cultural perceptions of choice exist, and that the very act itself can be dissatisfying.

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-02-03

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 15:02:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: The Death of SEO Redux

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's takes a look at mobile-friendly website design.

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Reading List

Outrunning the SEO Bear

There's an old joke about two hikers and bear that also applies to outrunning your competition in the SEO world. Do you need to outrun the bear or just the other hikers?

Moving to a New Location? Don't Forget about Local Search

Many local businesses get frustrated with outdated and/or inaccurate local search results. Here's a really good, detailed guide to diagnosing and fixing this type of situation.

Pixar's Marketing For 'Monsters University' Is Very Impressive

This is just too fun and awesome not to share! Pixar didn't just think outside the box here - they blew it into a thousand pieces and reassembled it into something completely new.

Outrunning the SEO Bear

Jon DiPietro — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:36:00 GMT

You've probably heard this joke before: Two hikers walking through the woods come across a hungry bear. One of the hikers immediately drops to his knees and pulls a pair of sneakers out of his backpack. As he quickly removes his hiking boots in favor of the running shoes, his companion says, “There is no way you’re going to outrun that bear!” The hiker responds, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you.”

That’s not unlike how it works with search engine optimization (SEO). You don’t necessarily need to outrank Wikipedia for a particular search term. You only need to outrank your competition.

This, of course begs the question, “Who is your competition?”

Defining SEO Competition

We need to define the word “competition” because it has dual meanings in the context of SEO. There are business competitors and there are keyword competitors. Business competitors are obvious. They’re the ones you’re fighting against to gain customers. But keyword competitors might also be business competitors, but they may also be partners or even your own customers!

The whole goal of SEO is to show up at the top of the organic search results for certain keywords. Therefore, any other website that ranks above yours is technically a competitor. If you are a manufacturer who uses distributors to sell your products, then you will be in competition with them for many of the same keywords, including your own brand name.

Measuring SEO Competition

The next step in escaping the bear is to find out who your fellow hikers are. To do this, your best bet is to use a keyword difficulty tool like the one from SEOMoz. It’s currently not available to the public, so the next best thing is to just go ahead and perform a Google search. However! Be sure that you do it in a private browser session like Chrome’s incognito mode or Firefox’s private browsing mode. The reason for this is that it will minimize the amount of personalization that Google applies to your search results.

In the screen shot below, I tested “Manchester nh electricians” using SEOMoz’s keyword difficulty tool. It returns the top ten list of ranking sites and you can see that only three of them appear to be electrical contractors. I’ve blurred out the names so that I’m not either promoting or embarrassing them (even though you can just as easily do this yourself). The rest of them are directories and review sites.

If you’re one of these three contractors, you don’t necessarily need to beat the Better Business Bureau (the bear), but you sure do want to beat the other two guys (the hikers). The next step is to see how fast we need to run in order to outrun them.

Outrunning the SEO Competition

Once you’ve identified your competition, you can use a tool like Open Site Explorer to find out how you stack up. Using the three electricians from our previous example, we can find out how they rank against one another:

This picture shows us a common scenario for small, local businesses: There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that your site sucks at SEO. The good news is that so does everyone else. In our example, all three electricians have very low domain authority. The top dog is ranking best among them likely because they have the most number of external links and C blocks.

Having said that, the bar is set very low for this keyword! Any decent back linking effort should be able to obtain links from 12 domains in just a few hours’ work. Just think how much distance could be created by a sustained content marketing and social media campaign.

Image credit: "Drawing a picture of me punching a bear" courtesy of Slapperfish on deviantART

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-01-27

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:39:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: The Death of SEO Redux

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's takes a look at the repeated predictions of the death of search engine optimization, this time at the hands of Facebook's Graph Search.

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Reading List

Announcing the Web Savvy Weekly Radio Segment

I'm very excited to announce that I'll be joining the Girard at Large radio show every Thursday morning at 6:40am for a new segment titled Web Savvy. We'll be discussing all things web as they pertain to your family, career and business.

YES, GOOGLE+ IS STILL RELEVANT

The short answer to "Why is Google+ relevant?" is, "Because Google says so." In addition to the raw numbers cited in this article regarding its eye popping growth, Google is ~~forcing us~~ providing incentives to join and use its service.

Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization - 91 Point Checklist and Infographic

This should be an ebook and not a blog post! This article will take you away from usual Search Engine Optimization stuff to where the real money lies - Conversion Rate Optimization. What you do with the visitors you bring to your website?

Announcing the Web Savvy Weekly Radio Segment

Jon DiPietro — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:04:00 GMT

Girard at Large's mission is simple; to connect local people, places and things. If there's an issue important to greater Manchester, Rich Girard will be talking about the "news from our back yard."

My segment is going to address the growing role of the Internet and social media in our lives. I'll be crossing over between different aspects and cover the ways it affects us personally and professionally.

What are your kids doing on social media? What are some of the risks and how can you help teach them to be responsible?
The job market has changed drastically and permanently. The way we find work and develop our careers is relying more and more on social media but are you taking full advantage? Or are you at a competitive disadvantage?
If you're a business owner, the Internet marketing landscape has lots of moving parts and is constantly changing. We'll demystify it and provide some advice about how to make sure you're making the most of your web presence.

If you're local, you can listen in on WLMW 90.7FM. If you're not local, you can listen live or catch up on the show archives. A podcast is coming soon!

We're also teaming up on some exciting web projects so be sure to stay tuned!

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2013-01-20

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:31:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Meeting vs. Creating Demand

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip jar discusses the difference between meeting and creating demand and how it should influence your marketing strategies and tactics.

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Reading List

Business Blogging 101: How to Promote

This is the sixth in a series on business blogging. John D. Rockefeller said, “Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.”

The Growing Social Media Marketing Gap

At a time when businesses were already struggling with the social media marketing gap, Facebook just blew it wide open.

Triple Your Traffic by Guest Blogging for Backlinks [Case Study]

Guest blogging is all the rage now; it’s easily the #1 marketing technique used by both individual bloggers and online corporations. Unfortunately, most people are seeing guest blogging to be different from what it was originally painted to be.

Business Blogging 101: How to Promote

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:07:00 GMT

This is the sixth in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.

John D. Rockefeller said, “Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.” It’s not going to be particularly helpful for you to write about the right subjects and do it well if nobody reads it. This also happens to be the question I’m asked most frequently.

How do people find my blog?

Property You Own

The most valuable marketing assets are those that you own. These give you the highest amount of flexibility and allow you to post your content in a way that maximizes its value. This means assigning a specific purpose for each blog post, ebook, video etc... What is the associated call to action? Are you looking to gain more subscribers? Sign up customers? Register attendees?

Here are some examples of properties you may own or want to establish for content promotion:

Email newsletter
Website pages
Offline assets (business cards, brochures, signs, etc...)
Email signature

Property You Rent

Social media is a tremendous resource but it's important to remember that you don't own your Twitter profile or Facebook page. You rent them! It just so happens that the rent is free, but look no further than the recent flap over Instagram's change to its terms of service as an example of how quickly your digital landlords can pull the rug out from under you.

With that caveat in mind, the power of these channels is still vast and worth harnessing. But they each have their own strengths and knowing where your customer segments roam and which content works best will maximize their benefits.

Twitter - The half-life of a Tweet is around 3 hours, so it's a near-real-time medium where sharing URLs is most effective.
Facebook - Posts on Facebook are similarly ephemeral and pictures work particularly well.
LinkedIn - Status updates and group discussions on LinkedIn can last for longer than other social media channels and also reach different audiences. Long-term discussions of issues and topics work better on LinkedIn than other channels.
Google+ - This property is still not as ubiquitous as the others but Google is making sure that it becomes an indispensable part of your marketing by incorporating local search and author rank.
Pinterest - With its recent launch of business pages, don't ignore this visual medium!

Property Others Own

A critical aspect of inbound marketing is getting links and shares from other influencers. Think about partnering with other bloggers, industry publications and thought leaders in some of the following ways:

Guest Posts – Write articles for other blogs to create back links and expand your audience.
Previews - Give them sneak peaks at new eBooks or videos.
Announcements - Ask them to announce new publications.
Reviews - Get them to provide reviews of your content.
Resources - Provide them with tools like image thumbnails, abstracts, transcripts, etc. Make their job easier.

Property You Purchase

Paid advertising isn't always considered part of inbound marketing but it's an indispensible (and effective) means for generating top of the funnel traffic and spreading awareness. There are lots of options available and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each is important.

Google AdWords - The most powerful benefit of Google is the intent of the user. If they're searching for something, it's a strong indication of a need. It works very well for meeting demand. However, it doesn't typically do as well for creating awareness or demand.
Facebook - Advertising on Facebook can be very effective for spreading awareness and creating demand. With its detailed demographics, it can also be laser-focused when Google is more like carpet-bombing.
LinkedIn - Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn lets marketers take advantage of detailed demographic information to create highly targeted ad campaigns. However, the information on LinkedIn is more professional than personal/cultural as on Facebook.
Banner - This relic of bygone Internet ages is still around. It can be effective with the right ad on the right site at the right price.

Check out the previous post in this series, Business Blogging 101: How to Write

The Growing Social Media Marketing Gap

Jon DiPietro — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:40:00 GMT

I've been doing inbound marketing evalutations for three years now. I have a few clients who ask me to reassess them annually and compare their scores to their competitors. In many of these cases, the scores have been falling even as these companies implement more and more inbound marketing tactics.

What gives? Shouldn't their scores be going up?

You would think so. But the reason is that the goal posts keep moving and they're moving faster than businesses are. As a result, they're falling further behind instead of catching up. This is really bad news, considering that the overwhelming majority of businesses suck at social media already.

The Performance Gap

Every aspect of inbound marketing is changing rapidly. New channels and technologies are causing content marketing to evolve. Blogs, eBooks, videos, presentations, webcasts, infographics, microblogs, etc. Google makes over 8,000 algorithm changes per year, and a few of those are major updates like Penguin and Panda.

But no aspect of inbound marketing is changing faster than social media marketing. And it's changing faster than businesses are, creating a growing social media marketing gap.

Yesterday, we saw yet another example of why this is happening.

Facebook Graph Search

Despite speculation that Facebook's big announcement yesterday was going to be a phone, it turns out that they unveiled a new search engine they're calling Graph Search. But it's not simply a new search engine. It's a new search paradigm. We've known for a while that something like this would come along, so it isn't a major shock. It's here and it's just one more thing that will keep marketing VPs awake at night.

It will work like this: You can search for things like "Boston restaurants my married friends with children like." You can search for people, photos, places and interests. The results will be based on many factors, no doubt, but likes and shares will certainly be strong signals.

As Elise Ackerman said in a Forbes article titled Why Facebook's Graph Search Is a Very Big Deal, "In the not too distant future, sales people will be able to search for doctors who are interested in a new diabetic drug, small businesses who are interested in sales enablement software, or nonprofits who would like a new phone system, in the same way that they search for restaurants on Facebook."

While Graph Search won't challenge Google for dominance any time soon, sites like Yelp and Foursquare should certainly be worried. Small, local businesses are among the worst prepared for these sorts of developments. They tend to be the furthest behind. The good news is that it creates a huge opportunity for the ones that "get it" and close the social media marketing gap.

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-01-06

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 15:02:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Best of 2012

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip jar is the final post in a four-part series on how to buld an inbound marketing strategy. It covers promotion.

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Reading List

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

It’s that time of year where we make resolutions to change our behavior and achieve new goals. There are probably lots of businesses who are resolving to update their website design at some point this year. However, as someone who builds websites for a living it may surprise you to know how frequently I talk people out of wholesale changes to their sites.

AllState Used This Sandy-Destroyed House In An Ad But Won't Pay The Claim

With every tragedy comes at least one high profile social media and/or advertising #fail. When will these companies learn that they can't get away with this stuff any more?

Your headline must be the story in 55 characters or less

In this two-part series, Christopher Penn illustrates the power of headlines using analytics and then describes how to write them in his second post.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt [Website Design]

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:15:00 GMT

There are right reasons and wrong reasons for a redesign. Here are some bad reasons:

“We have a new corporate look and feel”
“It’s been two years since our last refresh”
“Our CEO wants to do it” are all wrong reasons.

And here are some good reasons to think about a website redesign:

“We want to increase qualified visits”
“We want to improve our conversion rates” are the right reasons.

Misguided reasons for redesigning your website are driven by the thought that the freshness and “wow factor” of a new website will increase excitement over your brand. The main motivations behind website renovations should be to improve the performance of your website. A beautiful website, although intriguing and aesthetically pleasing, is secondary to a functional traffic and lead generating website.

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-12-30

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 15:40:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Best of 2012

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip jar is a list of the top 5 articles of 2012.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Business Blogging 101: How to Write

The fifth entry in my Business Blogging series reveals my three-step process for getting people to read your blog posts. When it comes to content marketing, how you write is at least as important as what you write.

An Updated Guide to Google Webmaster Tools

(via SEOMoz) Google Webmaster Tools was once Google Webmaster Wasteland. But the past year has been a fruitful one as Webmaster Tools has rolled out improvements faster than Facebook does new privacy statements.

Only 5% Of News Publishers Use The Google News Keywords Meta Tag

(via Search Engine Land) Just over three months ago, Google launched the news keyword meta tag designed to let news publishers have a better chance of ranking for words they might not have included in their headlines. Adoption rate so far? Only about 5% of the sources within Google News use the tag, according to new data provided by Blekko.

Business Blogging 101: How to Write

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 18:47:00 GMT

This is the fifth in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.

Many people will tell you that what you say is not nearly as important as how you say it. For the sake of argument, let’s say that you have a great, compelling, remarkable blog post you’ve written. If nobody reads it, it’s the proverbial tree falling in the forest that doesn’t make a sound because nobody was there to hear it. Maybe they didn’t read it because the headline wasn’t interesting enough to attract their attention. Or perhaps they took one look at it and thought “TLDR” (too long, didn’t read). Or else they began reading it and gave up after the first couple of paragraphs.

How can you avoid some of these problems?

If you want to reel in an audience, you need to hook them first. And if you want to hook an audience, you need them to bite the hook first. And if you want them to bite the hook, you need the right bait. This three-step process is critical for getting your ideas to spread.

Draw Attention With Compelling Headlines

In content terms, you “bait the hook” using titles. Crafting great titles is a tricky balancing act between brevity and persuasiveness. This is where an understanding of simplicity and restraint pays big dividends.

Creating a simple title means choosing the singular idea that will stimulate curiosity. This curiosity can take many forms. Sometimes, the audience wants to know how the story ends. I wrote a blog post about the nightmarish process that the “Coding Horror” blog lived through when their website was lost and their backup system failed. I chose the title, “Backup Horror,” which is not only a play on words but uses just two words to set the scene; something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong and there was a problem with the backup. The reader wants to know how the story ends.

Sometimes, the title can cause the reader to wonder how the story began. One example is a recent blog post I wrote titled, “Grumpy Old Marketers.” It’s another play on familiar words; grumpy old men. Readers are curious to find out who these folks are and what they did to deserve my admonition.

One other powerful means of creating curiosity through titles is to cause fear. In this regard, I’m talking about a very subtle and often subconscious fear. The most common implementation of this technique is to offer a solution or solutions to a hypothetical problem. The reason this engenders fear is that people immediately worry about what would happen if they didn’t have the information to solve that particular problem if and when they encountered it. I once wrote a blog post titled, “Facebook for Business Demystified.” This taps into fear in a couple of ways. First, if a business isn’t use Facebook they might start to wonder if they should. If they do, they might be fearful that they’ve missed something important want to make sure they haven’t made a mistake in the way they’re using it.

Finally, another technique I employ for titled is juxtaposition. Placing two ideas together that don’t seem to be related drives people nuts. In a way, it’s still about wanting to know the story behind something. When two seemingly unrelated ideas are placed together, we assume there’s a story there that explains how they came together. Another recent blog post I wrote was titled, “The Kakapo Parrot and Business Death Spirals.” This spurs curiosity because readers will wonder how a parrot could possibly have anything to with business death spirals.

The key to a good title is creating a gap. Gaps between expected and observed outcomes cause our brains to release dopamine, which helps create memories and provides a pleasure sensation. Notice how an effective title taps into this reaction by offering the tantalizing possibility of a dopamine response. The larger the gap presented by the title, the greater the potential dopamine reward there is to be collected.

But all the title can really do is hint at the payoff. Once the reader decides to take the bait based on the title, they need to be hooked. How does one do that?

Keep Attention by Not Burying the Lead

Living as we do in an age of information overload, people are faced with many choices for content and lots of demand for their time and attention. As a result, whether we realize it or not we are all constantly performing risk/benefit analyses. “If I risk spending the next five minutes of my life reading this article, what’s the potential benefit I’ll receive?”

“Burying the Lead” means beginning a story with secondary details while postponing the more essential points until deeper into the article. In terms of the risk/benefit, it means that you’re not giving the reader the raw materials they need in order to conduct a proper analysis. They don’t know where you’re going with the article or what the potential payoff is.

Let’s take a look at this article as a case study. Right off the bat, I provide a problem statement. This allows the readers to immediately assess the relevance of the topic to their own situation. Next, it provides a strong hint to what the article’s payoff will be by asking, “How can you avoid some of these problems?” Finally, it makes a promise to deliver three techniques that will help avoid the problem.

Heighten Attention With Storytelling

‘Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.’

- Ed Sabol

There is an old saying in journalism that goes, “If you have a story, tell it. If you don’t, write it.” Storytelling is how you reel in a reader after they’ve been hooked.

I’ve developed a storytelling methodology that was deconstructed from Robert McKee’s book, “Story.” McKee is a former Fulbright scholar who has written numerous television and feature films and also serves as a consultant to major production companies such as Tri-Star and Golden Harvest Films. His Story Seminars are regularly taught to sold-out audiences in film capitals around the world. “Story” is a massive tome that explains the “substance, structure, style, and principals of screenwriting.” The book turned out to be a powerful resource for me and has proven invaluable in blogging and the authoring of my book, Social Media for Engineers and Scientists.

“Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back. Boy and girl live happily ever after.” That’s a winning formula for many of the movies we’ve seen. “Boy dates girl, boy marries girl, boy and girl live happily ever after,” isn’t so much of a winning formula. Why not? Because there’s no struggle. No conflict. No quest. Ergo, no story. But before the struggle can start, before the conflict arises, and before the quest can begin there needs to be a catalyst. Something needs to happen that sets the wheels of a story in motion. That catalyst is what McKee refers to as an inciting incident. In his words, “the inciting incident radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.” The rest of the story is about restoring that balance. The protagonist must struggle against conflict during this quest to restore balance.

Once the inciting incident is established, it’s time to move the story along by creating “acts.” I’ve developed a template based on his techniques that I’ve actually turned into a worksheet that is proving to be very effective for crafting book chapters and blog posts. I think if Mr. McKee ever saw it he would either think it was a clever adaptation of his teachings or else lose his lunch – I’m not sure which.

In a nutshell, the template begins with an inciting incident, then contains a series of action/reaction complications centered around a controlling idea that inevitably reach a climax, at which point the closing value of the story (relative to the opening value) is revealed. McKee wrote an entire book on this subject, so this one sentence hardly does it justice. However, keeping this structure in mind can go a very long way towards making your non-fiction writing more compelling and memorable. Find the inciting incident for your subject, and then take the reader on a journey from a life disrupted to some sort of salvation.

If we compare this approach against the traditional, exposition-style of writing that permeates most non-fiction writing, it looks something like this:

Remember that all stories are character driven. Your challenge is to identify the conflict in your story and personalize it for your reader by attaching it to an emotion. The frustration of knowing a control valve PID loop can perform better. The accomplishment of achieving a software certification. The friendships that are formed at your non-profit group’s meetings.

Summary

The success of your content marketing isn’t simply based on what you say. In large part, it is based on how you say it. If you’re mindful of the bait, hook and reel analogy, it will go a long way toward making your content worth remarking about.

Read the previous post in this series - Business Blogging 101: What to Write

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-12-23

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 12:38:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Website Strategy

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip jar is the third in a four-part discussion of how to put together a complete Internet marketing strategy; developing a content strategy.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Search Engine Optimization in Real Life

Google's marketing team has tried (and succeeded pretty well in my opinion) to translate its Analytics product into terms we can all understand. They released a series of humerous videos that illustrate some of the outrageous hoops website owners expect their customers to jump through.

Fewer Than One Quarter of Small Businesses Have Social Media Strategies

Small businesses are getting better at using social media to meet marketing and customer goals. However, they struggle with figuring out a strategy and deploying social media in that strategy.

21st-Century Automation Marketing

Each year, control magazine publishes its list of top 50 automation companies. This year, I was invited to write an accompanying cover story article on 21st-Century Automation Marketing. It examines the state of inbound marketing within the industry.

Search Engine Optimization In Real Life

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 12:18:00 GMT

Site Search

In this first video, we see the anguish a shopper can go through in order to find the product they want.

Landing Page Optimization

The lesson here? Borrowing from Yoda, "Try not. Do or do not. There is no try." If you're going to attempt to upsell and/or cross-sell, you may be doing more harm than good if done poorly.

Online Checkout

This one combines nearly every pain point that every online shopper has experienced. Account login, terms of service, bait-and-switch pricing, session timeout, etc...

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-12-16

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 16:03:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Website Strategy

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip jar is the second in a four-part discussion of how to put together a complete Internet marketing strategy; developing a keyword strategy.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Kmart Is Getting Slammed For A Tweet About The Newtown Shooting

Some companies will never get it. If you want another example much more egregious (and sick) than this one, check out this photographer's Facebook post.

Online Channels – Led by Email – to Capture More Marketing Dollars Next Year

45% of business leaders expect to increase their marketing budgets in 2013, according to [pdf] survey results from StrongMail. Email marketing and social media are top of the spending agenda, with a majority 55.5% and 51.8% of those respondents expecting to increase spending on those channels.

An Introduction to Evolutionary Site Redesign with WiderFunnel’s Blog

When an expert in conversion rate optimization redesigns its own site for better conversion rates, it's probably worth taking a look!

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-12-09

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:36:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Website Strategy

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip jar begins a four-part discussion of how to put together a complete Internet marketing strategy. The first is website strategy.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Partner With HR to Create an Inbound Marketing Brand Force

This past week I co-presented "Inbound HR" with Brent Skinner at SocialHRCamp in Cambridge, MA. If I'm a business owner or marketing director at a company, then I'm becoming BFFs with the HR department because the ubiquity of social media means that every single employee at your company is a brand ambassador - for better or worse!

Not Another Junky Blog

Are you wondering how you're going to turn your boring product or industry into a compelling blog? What if I told you that one company is doing a bang-up job blogging about junk?

The 5 Most Persuasive Words in the English Language

Copyblogger has provided me with lots of advice that has shaped the way I write. This is a short but powerful article about writing compelling marketing copy.

2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update

A great analyst report not only showers you in compelling data, it helps you understand the impact that data. This report from KPCB is as thought provoking as it gets and goes well beyond marketing strategy. It will make you rethink your entire business strategy.

Partner With HR to Create an Inbound Marketing Brand Force

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 13:36:00 GMT

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting "Inbound HR" at the SocialHRCamp conference in Boston with my #CareerGravity partner, Brent Skinner. The premise of the presentation was that there are many inbound marketing principals the human resource departments can borrow in order to help them achieve their goals of finding and retaining talent. But there was one more aspect that we covered, which I think is important for inbound marketing folks to think about.

How can marketing and HR work together to build an inbound marketing brand force? And why should they even think about doing so?

I think there are three reasons.

Visibility

The graph below shows that the time people are spending on social media is continuing to grow at a substantial rate – especially on mobile devices. What does this mean for Inbound HR? In a word; visibility. My offensive, loud-mouthed cousin isn’t just my Facebook friend, he’s my offensive, loud-mouth Facebook friend who’s the customer service manager at Acme Software. But compare that to my aunt, who is a VP at the Bank of NH. She periodically but consistently posts about how much she loves her job and all of the great things her employer does for her personally. Those posts have created a tremendous amount of good will and brand awareness on my part.

Data source: Nielsen NetView (July 2012), Nielsen Smartphone Analytics (July 2012)

Your employees have a residual effect on your company’s consumer brand, not just it’s employer brand. You can either hope that by treating them well it turns out in your favor or you can take an active role by providing training to make your employees more effective with social media and resources to align them with your organization’s marketing goals and strategies.

Influence

The consumer decision journey is increasingly less influenced by brands’ outbound messages and more by the opinions, tastes and preferences of their pool of friends, peers and influencers. This chart shows the percentage of regular social media users who participate in various brand-related activities. By deputizing your employees as brand ambassadors, you’re able to put significantly more boots on the ground than you otherwise could. And their influence with their peers is greater than any influence the company itself could ever wield.

Data Source: Nielson Social Media Survey 2012

This doesn’t mean simply providing a one hour workshop to employees and letting them loose on the world. Rather, they need to be engaged in a way that is aligned with their individual responsibilities, capabilities and local business objectives. Their roles in social media should compliment their work purpose such as marketing, sales, engineering, customer service, public relations, etc… The employer needs to provide guidelines and set boundaries before empowering them.

Google AuthorRank

For those who aren't aware, Google has introduced something called AuthorRank that is going to become an increasingly important factor in their algorithm.

Before we talk about how Inbound HR will affect this, let’s talk very briefly about what’s involved in SEO. The web marketing team will decide on a list of keywords that they want to rank highly for. They will then employ on-page techniques that involve designing the page a certain way to tell the crawlers which words are important on the page. Then they’ll employ off-page techniques that result in links on other websites pointing back to their pages. Google’s algorithm uses hundreds of different signals to assign a rank to the page for those keywords. The pages with the highest rank get shown higher in the search results.

One of the new signals they’re using is the reputation of the author of a given blog post or video or ebook. The higher the author’s rank in Google’s eyes, the better that page’s search rank will be. This means that a company blog with a dozen social media rock stars that have a high AuthorRank will have a tremendous advantage over its competitors’ blogs. Since they’re already including social sharing metrics in their algorithm as well, it stands to reason that AuthorRank will impact those as well. In other words, not all Tweets and Likes are created equal. If your employees have a high aggregate AuthorRank and are actively sharing and promoting your company’s content, it will help improve its search engine rankings.

Put another way, a rising tide lifts all the boats. Your employees’ online reputation can be a search engine optimization asset to the marketing team.

Conclusion

If I'm the VP of Marketing or CMO for a company, I'm laying awake at night thinking about how my company's employees are affecting my consumer brand through their social interactions. And if you're thinking about how you can take control over this, stop right there. It's not something can or should even try to control. Instead, my advice is to think about how you can influence and harness it to build an inbound marketing brand force.

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-12-02

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 15:15:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Set It and Forget It?

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip covers four reasons why search engine optimization is not a "set it and forget it" solution.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Business Blogging 101: What to Write

The epic series on business blogging continues with some guidelines and advice on how to figure out what to write about.

Do You Read Your Kid's Report Card?

We check our kids' report cards because we understand that an education is a critical factor in their future success. It would be borderline negligent for us to ignore these report cards, right? So why do so many businesses not check their website grades?

The 16 Most Important Social Media Updates of 2012

I'm not a huge fan of annual "best of" lists and it's a bit early to be seeing them but this is a good wrap-up of social media marketing changes in 2012.

Twitter Mentions And Facebook Likes Have No Impact On Sales

This headline should probably have read "Twitter Mentions and Facebook Likes Have No Direct Impact On Sales."

Do You Read Your Kid's Report Card?

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:22:00 GMT

If you don't have any kids that are school age, humor me for a minute and pretend that you do. Now, answer me this question:

How many times did they bring home a report card and you simply tossed it in the trash without looking at it?

Hopefully the answer is, "Never." It almost sounds like a ridiculous question to even ask, right? Let's examine that for just a minute. Why, exactly, is it a ridiculous question? Here are some reasons you may give:

It may not be perfect, but it's the best tool we have for monitoring the progress of my child.
There are other indicators like absences, tardies and teacher comments that can be early warning signs of problems.
I want all of the information I can get my hands on in order to guide my child's education in a positive direction.

We all do this because we understand that an education is a critical factor in their future success. It would be borderline negligent for us to ignore these report cards. Are we good so far?

So why is it that so many business owners either don't check their own grades (website analytics) or - worse yet - don't even issue report cards?

You've all heard it said before: You can't manage what you aren't measuring. So how can you manage your website's effectiveness if you aren't measuring it? But sadly, even those businesses who are measuring are frequently watching the wrong numbers.

The Wrong Web Analytics

The most common numbers that businesses watch are the ones that show up on the summary dashboard of Google Analytics; visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc... But these are really metrics and not analytics. They describe what's happening but don't really explain why it's happening or how well the site is performing against strategic goals. Unless you're making huge money off of ad impressions, visits don't pay the bills. Customers do. So how well is your site doing at securing more customers? How many did you convert? Where did they come from? How much did they cost?

The Right Web Analytics

There's no single list of "right" analytics for every business. However, conversion rates are a great place to start. Every website should have a list of goals it's trying to achieve. And every goal should have an associated landing page. You'll learn more about your marketing tactics by tracking the segmented visits to those pages and the corresponding conversion rates than any other analytics. These will tell you how many found you, how they found you and how they responded. Then, if you know how much it cost you to drive that traffic and what those conversions are worth to your business, you can perform the Holy Grail of marketing calculations: ROI.

Business Blogging 101: What to Write

Jon DiPietro — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:00:00 GMT

This is the fourth in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.

Without question, the most intimidating thing that holds people back from blogging is not knowing what they’re going to write about. It gets particularly daunting in the B2B space. As discussed earlier, it’s very important to consume lots and lots of raw materials in order to help feed your creativity. However, those raw materials will be much more effective when they can be applied to a framework for different content types that you’ve already defined.

Understand Your Audience

“Who is going to read a bunch of articles about my boring widget?”

Well, the answer is “Probably no one.” And that’s a mistake many companies make when considering starting a blog. They think that they need to write specifically about their products and/or services. In the majority of instances, that’s a much too narrow scope. Instead, think about your target marketing personas and come up with ideas that will be of interest to them.

Rather than writing blog posts about your widget, write posts about subjects that would be interesting to the people who are most likely to buy your widgets. Here are some specific examples:

Statistical Software – A statistics blog may be something that could generate a decent readership, but opening up the scope to include (for example) quality assurance specialists might be even more effective.
Homeowner’s Insurance – There are a limited number of insurance topics that would hold homeowners’ attention. Creating a blog for homeowners and providing tips about home improvement and security would be more interesting.
Control Valves – This is a fairly specialized industrial product and would be a pretty narrow topic. But writing about process control and focusing on the engineers who specify, purchase and install those valves has a much wider appeal.

Content Topic Ideas

When it comes to blog content, there are two general categories; original and curated. Original content is stuff you develop yourself. Curated content is stuff that other people wrote, which you share with your audience.

Original content is the heart and soul of any business blog. It’s what will differentiate you from everyone else and provide the most value to your audience. The curated content will keep people engaged and interested in between those high value, original posts. Here are some ideas and tips for generating original content:

Blog to eBook and Vice Versa – Downloadable content is the engine that drives inbound marketing and eBooks are the most common form of downloadable content. There are two different approaches that you can use eBooks and blog posts together. One is to create a series of blog posts that – when completed – will become an eBook. This post you’re reading is one such example. I am writing a “Business Blogging 101” eBook, one blog post at a time. Once the series is complete, I will take all of the posts, reformat them, add a little additional content and publish them as an eBook. But you can also go in the opposite direction by creating an eBook and then breaking it up into multiple blog posts and publishing them over a period of time.
Case Studies – This is one is something every company can employ. It’s particularly useful because it provides two important components in one: By definition, it’s a story and stories are powerful marketing devices. They also provide social proof, especially if you can throw in some customer quotes.
“101” and “Dummies” – Every company has subject matter experts who can put together introductory and instructional posts about how to configure, install, design, select, specify, hack, replicate, update, reconfigure, repurpose, etc. The trick is that it’s frequently difficult for experts to know what they know. In other words, they take much of their knowledge for granted.
Top X Lists – Lists are great posts for a number of reasons. First, they’re frequently pretty easy to create. Many companies will have the information already lying around and it simply needs to be dusted off and published. Other times, a small amount of research is all that’s needed. The other reason these make great posts is that they work really well for back links.
Presentations – Presentations are also a great source of blog posts. Once again, this series of blogging posts come from a training presentation I use for clients. Each blog post equates to anywhere from one to a half-dozen slides.

Content curation is something that is becoming more and more familiar to content marketers. It involves sharing other original content with your own audience. It’s been getting a bit of a bad rap recently because, as Gary Vaynerchuck is fond of saying, marketers ruin everything. There are lots of people doing it because it can be highly automated. But done properly, it’s something that your audience will appreciate and value. Here are a couple of tips for doing it well.

Blog Hacking – This is a technique that I adapted from Lifehacker. Their blog creates a relatively low percentage of original content. Instead, they find helpful, insightful and innovative content from around the web and then post it to their website. This is a technique that can work really well as a blogging strategy. It works like this… Set up Google searches so that you can be notified of new content. When an article strikes you as something that is a match for your audience, craft a post that follows this general template: Start with an introductory paragraph that summarizes the article. Include a relevant quote from the article and then write up a summary that tells your audience why the article matters to them and wrap up with a link to the original publication.
Weekly Roundups – If you’re spending time each week consuming and sharing social media content (and you should be), this is a really simple technique that works for blog posts and newsletters alike. Simply review your social media streams once a week and put together a wrap-up of your favorites.

Editorial Calendar

This is a tool that’s very for all bloggers and if you’re part of a team, then it’s indispensible. It helps with planning and organizing your posts in a way that makes sure they’re aligned with your business goals and marketing strategies. Here are the components I include in my clients’ editorial calendars:

Title – This doesn’t need to be the final, published title. It just needs to convey the subject matter.
Focus Keyword – Your keyword research should already have identified foundation and long tail keywords and this column identifies which of those is used for the post. It will affect the title, heading tags, meta keywords and content of the post.
Persona – Your marketing strategy should include the marketing personae you’re targeting and each blog post should be matched against one of them.
Date – The date you plan to publish the post. It’s important to consider holidays and other timing factors like marketing events or product releases.
Offer – Each blog post should be linked to a particular goal. This column indicates which call to action will be matched with the blog post.
Author – If you’re working with a team of content creators, this is obviously important.

Read the previous post in this series - Business Blogging 101: Preparation

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-11-25

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 13:58:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Landing Pages

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip covers marketing jargon associated with keyword matching.

This week, I answered a question about AdWords optimization and keyword matching. The person was asking about how and/or whether to combine broad and phrase/exact keyword matching.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

The Content Marketing Clock Is Ticking

This week, I read that tvguide.com is for sale and that Yahoo! is hoping to fetch $20M for a site that enjoys 24M visits per month. It illustrates what happens to an industry that becomes saturated with content. The lesson is that it is only a matter of when, not if, this happens in your industry.

Domesticating IT Is on Pinterest

Pinterest recently announced its support for business pages. Be sure to head there and follow Domesticating IT!

Facebook makes it official - an external ad network is coming soon

Included in the changes that Facebook recently announced to its privacy and governance policies was an admission that it aggregates and shares data on user activity with advertisers — and Facebook says it plans do so not just inside the network but on external websites as well.

Leader Thougtship

Mike Boudreaux is an interesting guy with experience in product management, marketing and sales. He recently launched a new blog and I'm looking forward to reading his thoughts.

The Content Marketing Clock Is Ticking

Jon DiPietro — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:03:00 GMT

If you're a marketer, you may very well be getting tired of hearing about content marketing. My friend Shari Worthington recently reminded us that there is nothing new under the sun, even when it comes to inbound marketing, choice-based impressions and content marketing. While that debate can (and probably will) rage on about whether or not these are new concepts, one thing is pretty certain:

The content marketing tsunami is coming to an industry near you.

Soon.

Content, Content Everywhere

I'm involved in many B2B industries that have not caught on to either the inbound marketing or content marketing movement yet. That's good news and bad news at the same time. The good news is that not only is the playing field open, there's barely even anyone warming up. The bad news is that if you aren't the first or second team on that field, it's going to be really difficult to get into the game.

If you aren't in the game yet, here's a glimpse at your future. Business Insider observed today that The Shockingly Low Price Of TVGuide.com Goes To Show How Little Content Is Worth Online. Their site enjoys 24 million visits per month, but Yahoo! is reportedly considering a relatively paltry bid of $20M. The basic laws of supply and demand tell us that as the quantity of content increases, its value decreases. It also means that it becomes that much harder for people to find yours.

Many executives and marketing managers aren't diving into content marketing because it's a lot of work and they have a hard time envisioning the ROI. That's another way of saying "Nobody else is doing it, so I'm not going to be the first one."

But that's precisely the right time to take the field.

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-11-18

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 14:34:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Landing Pages

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip covers marketing jargon associated with landing pages.

The term “landing page” is frequently misused. Many folks use it a bit too literally, referring to any page that someone lands on. For that reason, I’ve actually started using a different phrase; conversion pages. Their job is to convince a visitor to complete a particular action. Here are some other terms associated with landing pages.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Business Blogging 101: Preparation

The third post in my business blogging series provides a laundry list of tips for getting prepared to be a blogger. It covers getting into the right mindset, how to find sources of inspiration and raw materials and recommends some tools for managing it all.

Internet Marketing Risk and Reward

Risk-taking is cherished American pastime. We admire the entrepreneurs and test pilots who push the envelope for great gain. But there’s a big difference between living to play another day and paying with your life. This article takes a look at three high-risk behaviors and their potential consequences.

Anchor Text is Dying

Whiteboard Friday from SEOMoz is appointment viewing for anyone interested in Internet marketing (in my humble opinion). This week’s episode is no exception and it provides some insight into the future of link building.

Mark Cuban: Facebook is Driving Away Fans – Starting With Mine

Mark Cuban knows a thing or two about building an Internet business and he says that Facebook is destroying theirs. He’s upset about their recent algorithm changes and feels like they’ve moved the goal posts on brands in a way that is unfair and bad for business.

Business Blogging 101: Preparation

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:00:00 GMT

This is the third in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.

Creativity is a hungry beast. It needs food; lots of food. If you’re going to crank out one or two (or five) blog posts each and every week, you need to need to have a very healthy and steady flow of raw materials from which you can build those posts. In this article, we’ll talk about how to prepare yourself for becoming a blogger.

ABC

Getting started with blogging and social media is intimidating to many. It took me time to develop the confidence, skills, and habits that make it possible to deliver content on a regular basis. More than anything, it requires a 24/7 mindset that I call “ABC: Always Be Collecting,” which is a take on the fantastic movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

If you’ve never seen the movie, you can get a good sense of the plot from this seven minute clip of Baldwin’s passionate, insulting and obscenity-laced motivational speech. Warning – there is some strong language in this scene.

“Always Be Collecting” means establishing a commitment and habit to always be thinking about collecting content for your blog, Tweets, and Facebook updates. This mindset will only have limited effectiveness without a support structure. Here are 4 tips to help you get going.

Intelligence: Gathering intelligence means performing reconnaissance on your topic areas. Read books, subscribe to RSS feeds, follow thought leaders on social media, etc.
Raw Materials: Creating compelling blog content requires visuals. You can get many of them from stock photos and creative commons but using original material really puts the icing on your content. I am always snapping pictures with my smartphone when I see pictures that could end up in a future blog post. A good screen capture tool is also important.
Total Consciousness: As a blogger, you need to get yourself into a content creator’s frame of mind. It must become a habit and something that is always on your mind.
Be Prepared: Ideas are fleeting – especially for the attention-deficit afflicted like me! You need to be prepared to jot down an idea the very second it occurs to you.

Intelligence

Sow how exactly can you gather all of this intelligence needed for business blogging? My number one Weapon of Mass Construction is Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS is a technology that allows publishers to send new articles to you so you don’t have to keep going back to their site to see if there’s anything new. At last count, I subscribe to 254 feeds using Google Reader. I scan over 1,000 articles every day, skimming about 100 and reading a dozen or so. This makes sure I stay informed about my topics and also gives me ideas for blog posts. Most email clients like Outlook or Mac Mail can also subscribe to RSS feeds.

Another source of information is question and answer features on social media sites. Two of the best in this regard are LinkedIn and Quora. Depending upon your blog topic and industry, there are certainly many, many others as well. One of my favorite blogging tricks is to find questions that I can answer and then repurpose that answer into a blog post. Most of these question sites provide RSS feeds so you can be notified when new questions are posted.

Another tremendous source of intelligence is Google Alerts. This is a free tool that allows you to configure Google searches that will be mailed to you daily or weekly. You can also set up RSS feeds for them if you prefer. This is a powerful tool that can keep you up to date on the latest content on the web for a given set of keywords.

Tools

The whole idea of tools is to make your work easier and/or more efficient. There are some indispensible tools I use for my blogging but the mother of them all is Evernote. If you’re not familiar with this free product, their tagline is “Remember everything.” It is an extraordinarily easy way to collect, tag, organize and retrieve information that you will need at a later time. As discussed at length, capturing your ideas and raw data are critical to blogging success.

I use Evernote to trap ideas and content sources for my blog posts. Many of my ideas come from other blog posts. Evernote has a web clipper that can be installed in any browser, making it quick and easy to grab a web page. When a note is created it gets tagged with a keyword that I use as a filter later on to go back and review.

Once again, my smartphone comes to the rescue here. I have Evernote installed on it and all of my blog ideas end up there. I can snap photos or even use the voice recorder. The important thing is to trap those ideas in a repository before they’re gone.

Internet Marketing Risk and Reward

Jon DiPietro — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:10:00 GMT

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
No pain, no gain.
To win without risk is to triumph without glory.
You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.

Bang! You’re dead.

Risk-taking is cherished American pastime. We admire the entrepreneurs and test pilots who push the envelope for great gain. I think one of the reasons our country has been as successful and economically prosperous as it has is that we don’t stigmatize failure.

But there are degrees of failure. There’s a big difference between living to play another day and paying with your life. I am seeing a disturbing number of clients and potential clients playing Russian roulette with their Internet marketing.

Here are three high-risk behaviors with matching cautionary tales to help you weigh the risks against rewards for any of these.

Pay to Play

The technology blog TechCrunch has never been shy about publicly embarrassing folks who offend them. A recent article blasted PR firm name PRServe for overtly offering a service to startup companies that would get them a post on an “A-level blog” like TechCrunch for the bargain price of $750. They found this sort of a la carte pricing to be objectionable on two levels. First, they feel that is crosses an editorial/ethical line that makes them uncomfortable. Second, they care about the startup community and don’t want to see them focusing on parlor tricks and black hat practices to be successful. In their words, “you shouldn’t be paying for TC articles, or any press coverage for that matter, you should be paying for the help with your message and communications, which, if you have a good and/or compelling product, might result in more coverage.”

So what did TechCrunch do about it? They called out the company for this behavior but they didn’t stop there:

Because of these principles, we will be banning PRServe or anyone who we catch doing this from pitching us moving forward. As of today, we’ve told our writers to ignore all pitches from this firm (and its director Chris Barrett), and advise his clients to reach out to them directly if they indeed have a worthwhile story. And, if you spent $750 to get your startup on TechCrunch, you should ask PRServe for a refund. If they don’t give it to you, I will personally give it to you, out of my own pockets, not Aol’s.

Social Media #FAILS

There is a high level of Schadenfreude when we see companies make questionable decisions on social media. We either get outraged or have a good laugh over it but the damage can be substantial. Influence in social media cannot be bought with money: It is paid for with social capital. Building a solid online reputation takes months or years to build and one Tweet to destroy.

In July of this year, online boutique Celeb Boutique sent out the following Tweet shortly after the horrendous mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado:

To this day, when you Google them, most of the top results are negative articles about this gaff. Kenneth Cole made a similar mistake in 2011, sending out a questionable Tweet attempting to newsjack the Egyptian riots:

Ironically, Hubspot wrote a blog post about 8 of the Biggest Marketing Faux Pas of All Time in which they cited the Kenneth Cole incident, saying “The lesson social media marketers can learn from this awful mistake is that humor doesn’t work if you're newsjacking something contentious.” And then they got caught in their own contentious newsjacking when they published a blog article titled 5 Hurricane Sandy Newsjacks from Marketers. While people in New Jersey were still suffering and even dying from the effects of the hurricane, Hubspot outraged many people by seemingly praising companies for their newsjacking efforts. They ended up modifying the post, apologizing and making a $5,000 donation to the American Red Cross.

Search Engine Death Penalty

This last issue is of greatest concern to me. I’ve talked with two different prospective clients in the past few months who were paying a SEO consulting company (one in the U.S. and the other from India) to get them ranking for particular keywords. After doing some investigating I found that these consultants were employing black hat techniques that violate Google’s quality guidelines. The good news is that they were working. Both of these companies were ranking #1 for some highly competitive keywords. The bad news is that if Google catches them (and they probably will at some point), the result could be the death penalty.

In April, 2011 Overstock.com was penalized by Google because they were offering discounts to students and faculty in exchange for links on coveted .edu sites. The toll of the Google penalty on Overstock.com: a 5 percent drop in sales and 32 percent loss of organic traffic. A month later, JCPenny experienced a similar fate because their SEO firm was purchasing thousands of low quality links in an effort to rank higher for very general and competitive terms.

These companies lost millions as a result, but what would happen to your company if it completely disappeared from Google for a year? Most organizations don’t have the resources to recover as quickly as these did. If this happened to one of the prospective clients I mentioned, they would both be out of business forever.

Bang – you’re dead. So please be careful out there.

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-11-11

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:03:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Web Analytics

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip covers marketing jargon associated with web analytics.

Web analytics is a wide-ranging topic on which entire series of books have been written. I can't do more than provide very basic introduction that shed a little more light on any conversations you have with a marketing or SEO consultant.

The terms I'm going to cover in this part of the series are based on Google Analytics. There may be slight differences with other tools in terminology and/or definition but most of them are reasonably universal. One other caveat is that most web analytics tools work by placing tracking codes into cookies on the browser of the visitor. Many people block these cookies and so these analytics will always be somewhat inaccurate. Therefore, it's more about watching for changes, ratios and percentages than it is the numbers themselves.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Business Blogging 101: Planning

This second post in the series discusses the concepts of quantity, consistency and variety. It helps answer many of the most common questions I get about blogging, which tend to be "How much, how often and how long?"

How Not to Fail At Social Media

This YouTube video was recorded at the ARC 2012 World Industry Forum in Orlando. It's a 20-minute presentation that covers the 10 most common mistakes companies make in social media.

News Feed, EdgeRank and page posts: what’s really going on with Facebook?

Many people don’t realize that you don’t see every update from every friend and every fan page. Facebook has an algorithm that decides which of those updates you will see. There have been many claims that Facebook is manipulating this algorithm in order to increase their advertising revenue.

Survey Reveals That Digital, Social and Mobile Advertising Appearing as Content Can Be Damaging to Brand Trust

New research from MediaBrix finds that a majority of adults perceives that they have experienced misleading digital advertising in the past year. In the words of Gary Vaynerchuk, “Marketers ruin everything.”

Business Blogging 101: Planning

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:47:00 GMT

This is the second in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.

Planning

After figuring out your blogging goals and how you’re going to measure them, it’s time to start planning out your posts. The number one question I’m asked by people is, “How often should I blog?” The answer is this: As often as you can realistically commit to doing consistently. It’s really important to be realistic about this and not underestimate the amount of time this will take.

For planning purposes, you can probably figure on around an hour per blog post. Some people are really proficient writers and can easily crank out a 600-word post in 30 minutes. Others might take 90 minutes or more. If you’re unsure, it probably wouldn’t hurt to test this out and time yourself before settling on a figure.

Quantity

The more you blog, the more traffic and leads you will get. It’s as simple as that. Hubspot’s marketing benchmark report also showed the impact that the number of monthly blog articles can have on inbound leads. Companies with 51 to 100 pages on their websites generated 48% more traffic than companies with 1 to 50 pages.

Image courtesy of Hubspot's "Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000+ Businesses"

Cranking out a blog post every day is a great goal and would really super-charge almost any inbound marketing effort. However, that’s an awful lot of work and requires a tremendous amount of discipline. It’s important to note that writing the posts isn’t the only time-sink. You need to be doing research and collecting the raw materials for your posts. This takes time, too. Be sure to take this all into account before setting a target.

Consistency

One of the first bits of advice I give anyone considering starting a blog is that “It is more important to be consistent than prolific.” I can’t tell you how many blogs I visit that had three posts per week for two months and then nothing for another year. What impression does that give you about the company? The best case is that you think that they didn’t plan carefully enough and either didn’t have the right resources in place or else eliminated the job position that was managing their content. But the worst case is that they’re in some sort of trouble and can’t dedicate those resources anymore. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well.

It’s important to set expectations and then try – as much as possible – to meet those expectations. After a careful assessment of your resources, commit to a realistic blogging schedule. Those companies I mentioned would have been better off posting one blog per week for six months and using that cushion to keep filling the hopper with new content so they’re not under the gun.

So how do you set expectations? When you launch a blog, make sure that you have enough posts “in the can” to establish a pattern. For example, if you’re going to post monthly, go live with three months’ worth of backdated posts. If you’re going post weekly, have three or four weeks’ worth. If you’re going to post daily, have at least five days’ worth. This way, when people visit your blog they will have an intuitive expectation of future posting based on the history.

Variety

Another question I get frequently is, “How long should my blog posts be?” My answer to this question is similar to the one you’d receive if you asked your doctor what kinds of foods you should eat; a healthy variety. Some years ago, I read a blog post that used a great analogy but I can’t recall who wrote it. They compared blog posts to meals. You have breakfasts that are your designed to wake up your blog and create energy. There are between-meals snacks that can be quickly digested but very satisfying. Then there are the lunches that are frequently social events where you sit down with a group of your colleagues. And finally, there’s dinner; the meat and potatoes of your blog.

When talk about variety, I’m referring to two different aspects. One is the length of the post. In some cases, a post may be just a couple of sentences with an embedded video or infographic. Others may be much longer; 1,000 words or more. Another aspect is the tone of the post. Some may be serious and informative while others are whimsical or thought provoking. If all of your blog posts are 600 words and serious in tone, people may get bored. Changing things up keeps it interesting.

Read the next post in the series: Preparation

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-11-04

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 17:16:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Picture This

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip covers marketing jargon associated with online advertising.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

Businss Blogging 101: Introduction
I'm kicking off an educational series on blogging for businesses. This first post looks at the goals and benefits blogging can have on your online marketing efforts.

5 Killer SEO Insights from Analyzing a Bilion Dollars in AdWords Spend
Larry Kim analyzed a ton of data from AdWords spending and shares a whole bunch of fascinating insights that can help when developing a CPC campaign.

When newsjacking is in poor form and can damage your brand
This week, Hubspot committed a social media faux pas by somewhat clumsily blogging about hurricane Sandy and how marketers were using it for newsjacking. This was published the day of the storm as people in the northeast were dying and suffering. As you can imagine, it caused quite a backlash and David Meerman Scott (a Hubspot fan and advisor) chastised them in this blog post.

Business Blogging 101: Introduction

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:05:00 GMT

This is the first in a series of articles about business blogging. The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is remarkable content. It’s the reason why people will pay attention to you and the motivation to hand over their email address and opt into your messages. Downloadable content is certainly an important part of a content marketing strategy but blogging is its lifeblood. The data is irrefutable; more blogging equals more quality traffic and higher conversion rates.

Overview

I think of blogs as the perfect food for a content marketing program. In order to be successful at inbound marketing, you need to establish yourself as a “benevolent thought leader.” This is the polar opposite of traditional marketing, which tended to rely on finding channels where they could corner prospects and attempt to force, coerce or otherwise trick them into listening to a marketing message. This doesn’t necessarily make outbound marketers malevolent but it certainly doesn’t put them at the top of anyone’s list. In fact, I recently read about a survey that indicated people trust bankers and politicians more than they do marketers!

This is the reason I’m so passionate about inbound marketing. It has the opportunity to change that perception and be viewed as a profession that is raising the bar instead of lowering it. For a whole basket full of reasons, blogging is the most versatile and effective tool in accomplishing this goal. Before we talk about those specific benefits, I want to spend a little time talking about a very important word.

Remarkable

This is the one word that will determine whether or not your blog is successful. Is it remarkable? Will people read your blog and find it valuable enough to share it with others? To be truly remarkable, your content must be audience-focused and “gifty.”

How many times have you gone to the “News” page on a website and scanned down the list of articles and noticed that nearly every one of them starts with the name of the company. “Acme Software announces a new and wonderful version of its paradigm-shifting, industry-leading, butt-kicking product.” Or “Acme Software completes implementation of awesome software solution for impressive Fortune 500 client.” Is that remarkable? Does it make you want to email your friends or share on your Facebook wall? Probably not. That’s primarily because those posts are internally focused on telling everyone how wonderful they are instead of audience-focused on things their prospective customers do care about.

Neither are those sorts of posts “gifty.” By that I mean, does it provide some sort of value to the reader? Are they smarter after having read it? Did it inspire them to do something that will improve their career or their life? Did it make them laugh or cry? Bottom line; are they better off after having read it? If not, it’s not remarkable.

Blogging Goals

The reason blogging is the perfect content marketing food is because of all the benefits is brings to your overall marketing efforts and website. These benefits should all be considered goals for your blogging efforts and monitored as such.

Thought Leadership

One of the more subjective goals (and most difficult to measure) is thought leadership. There are some indirect metrics you can look at in terms of audience size and engagement levels. If you have access to more sophisticated tools, you can measure brand sentiment through social media.

If you’re creating remarkable content, the thought leadership should come along for the ride. Many businesses find it difficult to understand how they can become thought leaders because they can’t think of enough interesting ideas that are connected with their products or services. But that’s because they’re usually thinking too narrowly. Instead of blogging about your products and/or services, blog about things your prospective customers would be interesting in reading. For example, a homeowner’s insurance business can certainly educate its readership about important aspects of properly insuring their home. However, they would find more success by expanding the scope of their blog to be subjects that any homeowner would find valuable like home improvement, landscaping, mortgage refinancing, etc… If you don’t have the expertise on staff to write about some of these subjects, you can reach out to guest bloggers who could provide that expertise and benefit from the back links.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love websites with lots of pages that change frequently. If you have a 10-page website that hasn’t been updated in two years, Google thinks you’re boring and won’t take you as seriously as a website this is adding pages all of the time. This is one reason why blogging is so beneficial to search engine optimization efforts. Every time you publish a new post, you create a new page on your website and the search engines see that.

Marketing software company Hubspot analyzed over 7,000 of its customers and published a report of marketing benchmarks. The following chart shows the rather dramatic effect that the number of pages on a website has on inbound traffic.

Image courtesy of Hubspot's "Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000+ Businesses"

In order to be most effective, you should conduct some formal keyword research and determine which phrases you want to rank for. These keywords should then feed an editorial calendar that drives your content topics. When crafting the individual blog posts, it’s important to observe good on-page optimization practices:

Use the keyword phrase in the title of the article. For example, let’s say our focus keyword phrase for the article is “hydraulic piston.” Your article title might be something like “The 10 Most Important Specs When Purchasing a Hydraulic Piston.”
Use the keyword in the URL of the page. If you’re using a modern blogging platform like WordPress, it will default to using your page title for the URL. Using the previous example, your URL might be, www.yoursite.com/the-10-most-important-specs-when-purchasing-a-hydraulic-pistion.
Use the keyword a few times in the body of the post. Keyword density – the percentage of words on a page comprised of keywords – used to be an important (if not controversial) SEO tactic. Its importance had been largely diminished but it’s still important to mention your focus keywords in the body of your page.
Create hub pages for important keywords. Not all keywords are created equal. Some will be more important to you than others. You should create hub pages for those that are most important. A hub page is one that is optimized for a particular keyword and then has multiple other pages pointing to it from around your website. Extending our hydraulic piston example, if you sold and serviced them you’d likely have a hub page that’s optimized for hydraulic pistons. Therefore, in your blog article you’d want to create a hyperlink to that page any time you mention “hydraulic pistons.”

Create Links

All of the SEO tactics I just mentioned are “on page” techniques. Another, more important aspect of SEO involved “off page” techniques. This primarily involves something called “link building,” which means getting other websites to create links to yours. There are lots of unethical tactics for doing this, and Google has really been trying to crack down on these practices that violate their webmaster guidelines. If you’re creating truly remarkable content and working hard to promote it via social media, then the link building will largely take care of itself. People will share your content on social media channels and other websites and blogs will point back to your content because of its awesomeness.

Drive Conversions

The bottom line for businesses is that they need their marketing efforts to lead to additional customers and additional sales. Blogging may seem like a roundabout way to do this, but that could be because you’re not seeing the conversion connection. In order to maximize the value of your posts, they need to contain calls to action that will drive readers to landing pages that offer something; free ebooks, webinars, newsletters, etc… This will provide you with a steady stream of new leads for your business.

As you can see, there are lots of considerations before you begin blogging. You need to perform your keyword research and use that to drive a content strategy. You’ll also want to know what your conversion goals are so that you can craft articles that will drive readers to corresponding landing pages.

Read the next article in the series: Business Blogging 101: Planning

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-10-28

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:01:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Picture This

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip provides some insight into why images are so important to content marketing.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

A Huge Content Marketing Opportunity Most Businesses Are Missing
If you work for a company that sells physical goods, that copyright notice on your website might be costing you some free advertising.

Professional Services Firm Grows 50% by Mastering Inbound Marketing
Marketing guru David Meerman Scott begins a three part series with this post about a company names Sales Benchmark Index who dramatically increased their business by implementing an inbound marketing strategy.

Email Marketing Results by Hours
I'm not a big fan of ingfographics but this one from SEO.com is really useful. It contains some great information about how timing affects their response rates.

5 Ways to Get More Out of Google Analytics
Rae Hoffman is a very successful affiliate marketer who knows an awful lot about SEO and pay per click advertising. This guest post on her blog is from another person who really knows his stuff; Ian Lurie of Portent. He provides some great tips in this article for leveraging Google Analytics.

A Huge Content Marketing Opportunity Businesses Are Missing

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:02:00 GMT

I create a LOT of content marketing for myself and my clients; blog posts, ebooks, presentations, webinars, infographics, charts, etc... All of these require an enormous amount one particular resource; images. There are lots of sources for images and here are my top three in decreasing order:

By far, the most common source is Creative Commons licensed images on Google, Flickr and Wikipedia. The license for most of these allows for their use as long as the owner is given proper attribution. This probably accounts for at least 75% of the images I use in my blog posts, ebooks and presentations.
The other source is Shutterstock. This is an expensive option and so I use far fewer of them. I'll typically purchase them for presentations and ebooks, then reuse them for blog posts where appropriate.
Finally, copyrighted images can be used if permission is granted from the owner. I rarely use this option and only do so in presentations or ebooks - never blog posts. The reason is that ISPs and other hosting companies are shooting first and asking questions later when it comes to copyright infringement and I just don't want to risk that. The vast majority of sites on the web are covered by blanket copyrights and so their images can't simply be copied and reused in your content.

Therein lies the challenge and opportunity. Earlier this week, I was developing an ebook for one of my inbound marketing clients. They're a B2B company that provides optical alignment services to industrial clients. There were a number of instances in the book that lended themselves to incorporating an image of a particular instrument. Per my typical process, I went to the Creative Commons search engine and typed in the name of some names of tools and instruments.

Nothing! Not one single result. Zip. Zero. Nada. Bupkis. The big donut hole.

And so I went to a few manufacturers' websites to confirm what I knew would probably be the case. They had heaps of beautiful, high-resolution pictures of their products. However, since the site was copyrighted I could not use them. How silly is that? I was trying to give them free advertising and they were telling me I couldn't.

So what should these companies do instead?

Creative Commons Catalog

The solution - and opportunity - is incredibly quick and easy to implement. Grab all of your product images and upload them to a Flickr album under a Creative Commons license. Then, any time a blogger or ebook editor needs a picture of your particular device they can grab it and attribute it to you. That's it!

Content marketing is hard work. The payoff is worth it, but it takes a lot of time and resources to do well. But here's a case of a content marketing opportunity staring you in the face that will only cost you a few minutes of your time and deliver a number of benefits:

You'll be increasing brand awareness by getting your logo and company name seen.
You'll be generating more inbound links as many of these posts will include links to your website. This is a great way to increase your SEO.
Qualified traffic to your website will increase because these are people searching for the product you offer.

So go ahead and jump on Flickr, Google, Photopedia, YouTube and any other Creative Commons outlet that makes sense for you. You've got nothing to lose and much to gain.

Image Credits:
"Problems are Opportunities" courtesy of DonnaGrayson on Flickr.

Inbound Marketing Inquirer - 2012-10-21

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 17:35:00 GMT

The Inbound Marketing Inquirer is the weekly newsletter from Domesticating IT.

Tip Jar: Moneyball Marketing

The Tip Jar is a weekly inbound marketing tip that is only available to subscribers. This week's tip takes a look at what the movie Moneyball has to do with inbound marketing.

Click here to subscribe to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer and receive weekly inbound marketing goodness in your inbox.

Reading List

10 Inbound Marketing Questions to Ask Your Web Designer
Every web design firm, public relations consultant and advertising agency now say that they offer inbound marketing services. Some of them really have adapted and expanded their talent and approaches but most have simply slapped a new label on an old methodology. Here are 10 questions than can help you peel back some of the layers and uncover any missing elements.

The Death of Link-Building and the Rebirth of Link-Earning
This is a great 20 minute video from Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz. I've spent a number of blog posts and tip jars talking about the dangers of low quality link building. In this video, Rand not only explains the dangers but offers high quality, safe alternatives.

How Can Pages Respond to Facebook's EdgeRank Changes?
In the past week, I've received four emails asking me about the updates many pages are posting, asking fans to like and share their updates because Facebook is hiding them. The truth is that this has always been the case. Recently, they've updated their algorithm such that fewer fans are now seeing page updates. This article explains how to deal with the situation. Hint: How about earning instead of begging?

10 Inbound Marketing Questions to Ask Your Web Designer

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:32:00 GMT

So you've decided to get cracking on your internet marketing and the first step was to contact a web design company and get a quote. The first thing I would say is that if you're getting a quote for just a website redesign, you should consider whether you're pursuing partial inbound marketing. And if you're comparing a website redesign quote versus an inbound marketing proposal, you may be trying to compare apples and oranges. Here is a list of ten questions you can ask the web design company in order to check on their level of inbound marketing knowledge.

1) Can you describe how you perform your keyword research and how they will apply to the design of my website, the structure of my content marketing and any advertising I may do?

Most reputable web designers understand how to perform keyword research and apply it to the architecture of the website. However, that's only one part of a comprehensive keyword strategy. Inbound marketers employ a three-tier stragtegy:

Foundation Keywords are a short list of keyword phrases that will form the skeletal structure of a website. Achieving top ranking for these keywords is a key performance indicator.
Long Tail Keywords form a longer list of keyword phrases that will be incorporated into the site’s pages. This list will form the skeletal structure of the content marketing strategy.
Opportunity Keywords are narrow search phrases that are highly targeted but typically have low search volume. These phrases can frequently be both easy to dominate and also deliver very high conversion rates. They will be incorporated into paid search and the content marketing strategy.

2) What off-page SEO services do you offer?

There are two parts to SEO; on-page and off-page. The on-page optimization means designing the menus, pages and titles and other components correctly, which most designers know how to do. But the off-page stuff is where the hard work gets done and if your designer hasn't mentioned the word "blog" or "content" then I would be very concerned. A well-designed website by itself will not get you ranking well on search engines. You need quality links pointing to your site and strong social signals in order to get their attention.

3) What CMS technology do you use?

No business should be shackled to a static, HTML website that can't be easily updated. There are a number of open source and commercial content management systems available. Be sure to choose one that has a feature-rich, easy to use blogging feature. I've found that WordPress is a great choice for many businesses large and small but there are always situations that warrant other choices.

4) Does this quote include a mobile-friendly design?

The future is getting smaller and smaller every day. Tablets and smart phones comprise more and more web traffic every day. It's critical that your website feature a design that reads well on mobile devices.

5) How many landing pages does this include?

This is kind of a trick question because most web designers don't really know what a landing page is. These are the most important pages on any website. They are where you turn visitors into leads and the entire strategy needs to be built around driving conversions. If your designer never mentioned the word conversions, I'd be concerned.

6) How will you measure my conversion rate?

The answer here should be "Google Analytics Goals" or some other equivalent feature from a web analytics package. If you're not measuring the conversion rate on your landing pages, it's like driving a car without a speedometer. Goals allow you to tell Google Analytics when a conversion has occurred, like a download of an eBook or newsletter signup.

7) How will you measure the effectiveness of my calls to action?

Once you've created some great landing pages, you need to place calls to action (CTAs) on your web pages and at the bottom of your blog posts. The web design project should include both design time for these CTAs as well as a module or plugin that will provide you with the analytics you'll need in order to keep track of impressions and click-through rates. This is critical functionality for inbound marketing but rarely included in website proposals.

8) How will you measure the ROI of paid campaigns and social media channels?

The answer here should be that you can calculate this using the goal values set up in Google Analytics using a custom report by referral source. When you configure goals, you can assign a conversion value. For example, an eBook download is worth $50 because you think you can convert 2% of those leads to customers and your average customer value is $2,500. Then it's a simple calculation to compare what you're spending on each channel against the conversions you've obtained.

9) What are the components of your content strategy?

This probably isn't included in most web design quotes, but without a content marketing strategy, you aren't doing inbound marketing. I'm not saying that you necessarily want this to be part of the proposal but it must be on the table. As mentioned already, the keyword strategy must take into account the website design, your content strategy and paid promotion strategy. Your content strategy will also impact the design of the site itself. Having a site that is heavily focused on video content would likely be designed differently from one with just a single, high-value eBook download, for example.

10) Do you manage Google Adwords campaigns? If so, are you a certified Google Agency?

This is a bonus question. Some would argue about whether or not paid ads qualify as inbound marketing, but either way they should be part of most website launches. If the web design company isn't going to handle this, then someone should.

So what am I missing? Have you had an experience recently that led to wish you had asked a different question up front?

Spoken Like a True Internet Marketing Consultant

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:06:00 GMT

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of presenting How Not to Fail at Social Media at the 2012 ARC World Industry Forum. During the question and answer period following the presentation, one of the audience members asked me, "This all sounds great. How do I get started?"

My answer went something like this: "Well, it's a really hard answer to give in 30 or 60 seconds. A proper approach requires the development of several different strategies, including business strategy, keyword strategy, content strategy, promotion strategy, etc..."

His good-natured retort was "Spoken like a true consultant."

I understand why he said that and it made me chuckle. As a consultant, it's logical for people to assume that I would try to make something more complicated than it needs to be. I get that. But I'm a stickler for proper planning, especially when it comes to inbound marketing. Without good planning and making sure all of the I's are dotted and T's are crossed, you end up with partial inbound marketing.

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Let's think about some other conversations that may go similarly:

"How do I put an addition on my house?"
"Well, it requires an architectural design, city permits, heavy equipment, etc…"
"Spoken like a true contractor."

"Should I represent myself in court?"
"Well, there are real dangers and risks involved with that."
"Spoken like a true lawyer."

I think that the roots of these kinds of responses are a feeling that someone is trying to tell you that you're not capable of doing something. In most cases, that's not what the consultant or contractor or lawyer are telling you. Really, they're saying "Sure you could figure this out on your own and I could probably give you a few tips to get you pointed in the right direction. But very few things in life go exactly according to plan and there's simply no way to anticipate every situation. I'd feel badly if I gave you advice not knowing the whole picture and having it turn out to lead you to a bad result."

Other factors include the ramp-up time and learning on the job. Any new endeavor takes time to learn. Including someone with experience obviously accelerates that process. And then there are the inevitable bumps and scrapes that come along with trying something new. These tend to add even more time and cost to the process.

Ode to My Former Boss

Early in my career I had the good fortune to work for a family friend and mentor (Louis Tacito) who taught me many valuable lessons that I still use today. One of his favorite allegories involved an old bull and a young bull sitting on the top of a hill. They were looking down at a herd of cows and the young bull said, "Hey, let's run down there and grab us one of them cows!" The old bull looked at him and said, "Let's walk down and get them all."

I think the role of a good internet marketing consultant is to make sure you get all of the cows.

SEO for Startups

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:51:00 GMT

Google published a really good video titled "SEO for startups in 10 minutes." It provides a great review of what a company needs to do when launching a new website. However, it's also a nice checklist anyone can use in order to audit their own search engine optimization efforts.

Here are the steps outlined in the video:

Select the www version or non-www version and 301 the other. Otherwise, you're creating two different versions of your website and splitting your SEO (not to mention creating possible duplicate content penalties).
Verify ownership of your website in Google webmaster tools and sign up for email forwarding. Note that since publishing this video, Google has changed its practice and automatically emails warnings to webmasters. This is a good thing and it's free.
Perform a background check on your domain. Make sure you're not inheriting anyone else's bad mojo.
Include analytics tracking code - even if you're not going to use it right away. It's important to have historical data to look back upon.
Follow these important strategies for quality site design:

Utility - Does the site design meet needs of your targeted personas?
Navigation - Can users figure out where they are and easily get to where they want to be?
Focus - Keep pages short and concise.

Define conversions! This is the number one deficiency I find on websites. Figure out what your top conversions are (e.g. newsletter signup, webinar registration, free consultation, etc...) and make sure they are on every page.
Include keywords naturally in your text. Don't try to stuff your page full of keywords.
Every page should include:

Unique topic (i.e. focus keyword)
Unique title
Unique meta description (these are not used for search ranking but do influence click-through rates)
Keywords in URL
Descriptive anchor text for each link (e.g. not "click here")

Pitfalls to avoid violating Google's quality guidelines:

No rogue or shady SEO consultants
No link schemes or buying links
Don't focus on fanciness over index-ability
Keep an eye on page load times

Check that you rank for your company name
Get involved, which is to say, promote your content marketing efforts.

Watch the full video here:

Image "Babies" courtesy of iluvcocacola on Flickr.

Partial Inbound Marketing Tradeoffs

Jon DiPietro — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:41:00 GMT

As I speak with prospective inbound marketing clients and onboard new ones, I am constantly warning against comparing apples to oranges. Frequently, this means comparing an inbound marketing proposal to a website redesign or a search engine optimization campaign or a social media marketing proposal.

It's understandable that companies have limited budgets and are looking to stretch their marketing dollars as much as possible. And I'm not saying that inbound marketing should be an "all or nothing" proposition. However, it is important to understand the tradeoffs when you decide to implement partial inbound marketing. As such, I thought I would create a chart that showed what you're giving up when you implement one aspect of inbound marketing without one or more of the others.

Here's an explanation of the categories:

Website: This refers to making sure you have a well designed website that is architected in a way that drives visitors to specific business-related outcomes that will convert them into leads and/or customers.
SEO: Proper search engine optimization is not just about ranking #1 for given keywords. It involves solid keyword research that leads to the identification of foundation, long tail and opportunity keywords (subscribers to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer will be familiar with these terms).
Promotion: In this case, we're talking primarily about social media promotion but paid advertising is also on the table.
Conversion: This involves creating compelling calls to action on multiple pages on your website that drive traffic to carefully crafted landing pages containing an offer and a conversion form.
Analytics: This particular case is different from the others. It's the one tactic that is always a good idea regardless of which other tactics and strategies you're employing. DOOO EEET NOWW!

And so here is your chart of partial inbound marketing tradeoffs (click on image to download PDF version):

The Tip Jar - Inbound Marketing Goodness for Insiders

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:09:00 GMT

Two weeks ago, subscribers to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer - my weekly email newsletter - started receiving insider tips as part of their subscription. They're essentially an extra blog post each week that gets delivered to just my email subscribers.

I'm sharing a couple of previews (but not the full post) so you can get an idea of what kind of tips you can expect.

Optimizing for Search and Clicks

I had the same basic question come up this week in three different places. Two were from clients but the other was an acquaintance asking my advice on his LinkedIn profile. All of them were coining service descriptions that were not in the mainstream and, therefore, wouldn't get much search traffic. They were concerned about whether or not this was a good idea.

It's important to think about marketing as a two-step process: First, people need to find you, then they need to be converted. Many people think search engine optimization is finding the right keywords so that you appear at the top of a search engine results page (regardless of whether those results are on Google or LinkedIn). That's true enough but appearing is just the first step. You also need people to click on your result if you have any hope of converting them. That's where it comes in handy to have an intriguing or remarkable headline or title that will make people want to learn more.

But can you have your cake and eat it too? Yes, you can. The trick is to make sure that you use other tools at your disposal to make sure that your remarkable headline is associated with those other keywords. Here's how: [bonus content]

Calculating Keyword Value

The foundation of any online marketing program should be a keyword strategy. This goal of this strategy is to generate as much targeted traffic to the website as possible from both organic and paid search sources. As such, the strategy must be based on a combination of the following three factors:

Products and Services: What keywords are associated with the products and services offered by your company? These keywords will closely – but not necessarily identically – match the company’s offerings.
Search Volume: How often are people searching for these keywords? You may be able to easily rank for a given keyword, but if nobody ever searches for it then it is worthless.
Competition: How tall is the hill that must be climbed in order to rank well for a given keyword? This is a measurement of organic competition as well as paid search competition.

The best keywords are those that closely match your products and/or services, have high search volume and low competition. As with most things in life, there are always trade offs and so all three of these factors must be weighed accordingly. Here's my method for calculating value that helps separate the wheat from the chaff. [bonus content]

Interpreting Keyword Values

This week's newsletter will pick up from last week's. Once a keyword value spreadsheet is compiled, it's time to slice and dice the data to identify the three pillars of a keyword strategy; foundation keywords, long tail keywords and opportunity keywords. I'll talk about how to spot each of them and then what to do with them.

If you are interested in receiving my weekly newsletter, just click below and sign up. It's free and I don't share your email with anyone else.

Google Expands Search Engine Marketing Quality Guidelines

Jon DiPietro — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:13:00 GMT

Over the past couple of months, I've been speaking with a business owner who has outsourced her search engine optimization. The good news is that they earned her several number one rankings for some important keywords. The bad news is that they broke almost every rule in the book in doing so.

"So what?" you may ask. The answer is that eventually, Google will catch you. And when they do, you'll be lucky if all they do is discount all of those links that were created on your behalf. This means that your rankings will plummet and so will your search referrals. If you're not lucky, they will blacklist you, which means that you will not appear in their search results at all for exactly one year.

This begs two questions. Why am I bringing this up today and what can business owners do to protect themselves?

Rich Snippets Guidelines

As to why I'm bringing this up today, Google has updated their Webmaster Guidelines to cover the implementation of rich snippets. If you're not familiar with rich snippets, they are "the few lines of text that appear under every search result—designed to give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query."

What Google announced today were quality guidelines designed to warn webmasters against trying to game the system. Specifically, they said to avoid:

Marking up content that is in no way visible to users.
Marking up irrelevant or misleading content, such as fake reviews or content unrelated to the focus of a page.

Google goes on to add, "These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative rich snippet behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It's not safe to assume that Google approves of a specific deceptive technique just because it isn't included on this page. We strongly advise that webmasters focus on providing a great user experience rather than on looking for loopholes."

These aren't really any different from their overall quality guidelines for websites. Which brings me to my second point for this post...

Webmaster Guidelines

If you're not someone who does search engine marketing for a living, you're probably not intimately familiar with Google's guidelines or their Panda update. Their service is only as valuable as the quality of their search results. Therefore, Google is always trying to improve. Their results have become increasingly spammy and manipulated over the years and they're trying to fight back by modifying their algorithms to recognize low quality sites and manipulative practices.

Here are Google's four basic quality principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
Don't deceive your users.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Now back to the beginning of my post and the business owner who's SEO consultant had been breaking all of these rules. What specifically did they do? Here's a partial list:

They had created pages on the website containing automatically generated content. I can't provide too many details here because I don't want to "out" the website or its owner, but there were pages created on the website with garbage content that didn't have any user value whatsoever.
The biggest violation was their participation in link schemes. As I examined the back-links to this site, I discovered hundreds of pages of links from directories that were obviously created and managed by this company for the sole purpose of creating link farms. The listings for this person's site were right along side some completely unrelated - and downright offensive - links to other websites.
They employed another link scheme tactic by adding blog comments with keywords in their signature to articles that have nothing to do with their business.

There were a few others, but you get the point. So how do you protect yourself from harm if you're outsourcing search engine optimization? Here are some suggestions:

First, ask them what they will deliver. If their answer is keyword rankings, run away. If they talk about delivering organic traffic and quality metrics like time on site, you're on the right track. Also, if they guarantee results you're in big trouble.
Next, ask they how they will achieve those results. Some scary phrases that should give you pause include proprietary strategies, directory submission, link density, link buying or any overly complicated explanations. Good SEO practices include plain, old-fashioned hard work like creating content, building engaged social media audiences, earned media and organic back-linking.
Finally, ask when they will deliver these results. Anything shorter than a 3 to 6 month horizon means they are either misleading you or intending on using some of the "black hat" strategies that could eventually get you penalized.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And outsourcing your SEO is definitely one instance in which ignorance may be bliss, but it could cost you everything some day. Be careful out there!

How to Gain Traction From Your Content Marketing Efforts

Jon DiPietro — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:00:00 GMT

In August, I delivered a webinar titled "Better, Cheaper, Faster: Grow Your Business With Inbound Marketing" for the Control System Integrators Association.

In the attendee surveys, one person asked the following question: “I understand the importance of blogs from a content standpoint and from a SEO stand point. How do we get the word out that we have started a blog. How do we get anyone to read it? In other words, how do we market a blog?” This is a great question and it boils down to promotion and there are two general categories; free and paid.

Paid Promotion

Among the paid options, advertising is the most obvious. Organizations can purchase ads on search engines like Google and Bing or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. A good way to get started with this approach and to get the most bang for the buck is to direct people to blog articles with calls to action to download an eBook or white paper.

Free Promotion

When it comes to free options, social media is the place to be. LinkedIn can be particularly effective for blog promotion. There are many opportunities to jump into discussions in the Groups and Answers sections of LinkedIn. You can frequently respond to questions by directing people to a blog article you wrote. It’s also a great place to generate ideas for posts. Twitter is another great channel for syndicating content. It takes time to generate an audience but can pay big dividends through viral sharing.

Learn to grade your own inbound marketing efforts! Download this free self-assessment guide. hub.am/UumCou
— Jon DiPietro (@JonDiPietro) October 1, 2012

Leverage

One of the many great advantages of digital marketing is the ability to leverage other channels. In investment terms, leverage means the "use of various financial instruments or borrowed capital, such as margin, to increase the potential return of an investment" (viaInvestopedia). There are a couple of ways you can do this.

The first leveraging instrument is making use of influencers. First, you need to identify them by searching Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc... Look for individuals and organizations who talk about the topics you're covering. Next, get on their radar by following them on these media and commenting on their blogs. Eventually, attempt to get them involved by sharing your content with them or even involving them at the front end by asking for their feedback or a quote.

The second leveraging instrument is syndication. Republishing your content in multiple places is a great way to "borrow" traffic from other properties and gain from viral sharing. Here's an example: Take an ebook and create a PowerPoint presentation. Upload the presentation to Slideshare and Scribd. Then narrate and record the presentation and upload it to YouTube and Vimeo. Keep repurposing the same chunk of content in as many forms and as many places as possible.

Social Media Marketing with Twitter: Start Here

Jon DiPietro — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:13:00 GMT

I give lots of social media marketing presentations to individuals and organizations. Many of them are perplexed about Twitter. It's understandable. I often compare getting started on Twitter to untangling a ball of string. You keep turning and rotating, looking for a good spot to get started. Twitter is a similar enigma. It's hard to build an audience without a good understand of the medium. But it's hard to gain an understanding of the medium without an audience.

Yesterday morning, Twitter went on the Today show to announce their new design. I didn't find anything particularly compelling about the announcement because, for the most part, they're simply playing catch-up with Facebook and Google+. However, what I did find interesting and very well done was a short video they produced titled Twitter: Yours to Discover. I think that it does a good job of concisely presenting Twitter n00bs with two important things:

I think it does a good job of showing people what Twitter is all about; discovering and connecting. The most common thing you hear from people who don't use or like Twitter is, "I don't care what you had for breakfast." My response to that is, "If that's what you see in your stream then you're following the wrong people." The video illustrates this well.
It also introduces some of the nuts and bolts that hold it together, like hashtags, replies, favorites and search. It's not a two minute tutorial but gives users a quick glimpse at how it all works.

I'm going to make this video a regular part of my social media marketing training from now on:

Professional Football Team Faces Social Media Marketing #fail

Jon DiPietro — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:00:00 GMT

"It takes years to build trust, seconds to break and forever to rebuild."
- Anonymous

I'm a little hesitant to post this story because it's almost every company's nightmare and the excuse I hear most frequently for not embracing social media marketing. Last week, Kansas City Chiefs football team fan Travis Wright was "not impressed" that his team lost 40 - 24 to the Falcons. And he let all of his Twitter followers know about it.

When he accused team owner Clark Hunt of being cheap, a team employee with the keys to their Twitter account sent Wright a private message saying, "Would help if you had your facts straight. Your choice to be a fan. cc get a clue" But here's the problem with the Internet (which I tell my own kids almost every week): There is no such thing as a private message!

If Wright was not impressed with the Chiefs' performance, he was even less impressed with the direct message. He grabbed a screen shot and posted it to Reddit:

And, as you probably guessed by now, Twitter exploded. The @kcchiefs account lit up like a Christmas tree with vicariously offended fans. The chatter became so loud, he was even interviewed by KSHB in Kansas City. Not content to simply light themselves on fire, the Chiefs felt inclined to add some gasoline. He told them, “The funny thing about [the apology] is that I personally didn’t see it,” Wright said. “They didn’t apologize to me, they apologized to everyone else because of the backlash.”

I apologize to the fans for my response to a tweet sent to me earlier. No excuse for my actions. I am truly sorry and it won't happen again.
— Kansas City Chiefs (@kcchiefs) September 11, 2012

The Internet is written in ink, folks. But rather thank give you the obvious, worn-out advice you would normally read from someone like me, I'll share one of my favorite public relation wins on Twitter.

I was on a social media panel at the annual American Water Works Association show last year, where I had the pleasure of listening to Alan Heymann who is the Chief of Public Affairs for DC Water. He gave a fantastic presentation on how they were using Facebook and Twitter to engage with customers and improve customer service. One such "engagement" with a ratepayer illustrates how organizations can transform critics into fans:

If I’m not mistaken, DC Water is giving out water bottles at this ANC training. Your ratepayer dollars at work.

@meitweet We believe encouraging the public, including elected officials, to choose tap over bottled is a great use of ratepayer dollars.

Civic engagement win. RT @mydcwater: @meitweet We believe encouraging the public to choose tap over bottled is great use of ratepayer $.

Rather than lashing out, DC Water explained their reasoning. As you can see, they were not only able change the person's mind but to convert them to a fan and gain additional exposure.

Too bad the Chiefs' PR department didn't see Allan's presentation.

Social Media Marketing Trends in Small Business

Jon DiPietro — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 12:00:00 GMT

A recent study by Vocus in cooperation with Duct Tape Marketing reveals some interesting statistics regarding small and medium businesses' use of social media in their marketing.

"One of the most fascinating findings of the study was the divergent views of online influence. For example, 40% of SMBs prefer a smaller but highly engaged audience, while 27% would prefer a huge following with little engagement. What’s important to note is the 27% that prefer a large following are also more likely to report social media has been very helpful to their efforts. "

The picture painted by this data is one that includes success, optimism, frustration and rookie mistakes. It's clear that one of the things they learned is that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Success

87% of small businesses surveyed said that social media has been somewhat (58%) helpful or helped a great deal (29%). The three platforms with the highest levels of use (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) also ranked highest in their reported helpfulness. Interestingly, the platform with the highest reported helpfulness was Google+.

Optimism

With that sort of success rate, it's not surprising that 84% of them report that they will be increasing their spending on social media marketing in the future. This is an important signal. 39% said that they would increase their use of social media marketing "a lot." Only 1% said they would use it less. The top platforms businesses planned for expansion were Google+, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr.

Frustration

The top four barriers reported really broke down into two categories; resources and (lack of) control. It seems that many of these businesses underestimated the costs of social media marketing, as 43% of them reported the misperception that "People think social media is free, but it really costs a great deal." Many also reported frustration with customers publicly voicing complaints or not being able to reach the right audience.

Rookie Mistakes

The report demonstrates that many of these businesses are making the mistake of implementing "tactics without strategy." The metrics businesses were using to measure success were disappointing for me to see. The number one choice was increased traffic to the website. As I frequently tell businesses, unless you're selling advertising impressions, traffic doesn't pay the bills. Customers do. This is why it's critical to link everything to marketing outcomes that support your business goals. Unfortunately, the metric that was dead last was conversions.

Path to Influence

Here's the entire presentation from Vocus - Path to Influence: An Industry Study of SMBs and Social Media.

Marketing Psychology Lessons from the iPhone 5 [Video]

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:30:00 GMT

The world was swept up in Applemania yesterday as they unveiled the iPhone 5. As is usually the case, responses range from "yawn" to "life-altering!" But most of us will need to wait another week before we can get our hands on one to decide for ourselves.

But what would happen if you handed an iPhone 4S to people on the street but told them it was a new iPhone? Jimmy Kimmel thought it would fun and it's solid gold:

Notice that one guy is even holding an identical iPhone 4S in his hand and still insists that it's lighter and faster! Why is this happening?

Longing for Belonging

Part of it is our inherent need to belong. We humans hate to stand out. One can experience this first hand in the moments just before they are introduced to speak in front of a crowd. This fear makes a great deal of evolutionary sense, when you consider that laggards who fell behind a group could find themselves on the wrong end of a saber tooth tiger meal. As a result, we find comfort in the acceptance and endorsement of our peers.

This is the whole concept behind celebrity endorsements. Although we may not think of Madonna or Michael Jordan as peers, the reality is that our brains evolved in such a way that any familiar face “feels” like a friend to us – regardless of whether it’s because we see them in person or on TV. “The brain simply doesn’t realize that it’s being fooled by TV and movies, says sociologist Satoshi Kanazawa, lecturer at the London School of Economics. ‘Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was impossible for someone not to know you if you knew them. And if they didn’t kill you, they were probably your friend.’”

Evolutionary biologist S.L. Washburn wrote:

Most of human evolution took place before the advent of agriculture when men lived in small groups, on a face-to-face bases. As a result human biology has evolved as an adaptive mechanism to conditions that have largely ceased to exist. Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.

Great Expectations

Perhaps even more powerful than peer pressure is the power expectations have to actually shape our experiences. In his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely says "When we believe beforehand that something will be good, it generally will be good - and when we think it will be bad, it will be bad."

This was his conclusion following a series of experiments on the effect of expectations. In one experiement, he offered free beer to MIT students. He offered them two flavors, one of which was regular Budweiser and the other was Budweiser with two drops of balsamic vinegar. One group of students was given the samples without any introduction. This group showed a strong preference for the beer + vinegar combination. However, when the second group was told before tasting that the second beer had vinegar added to it, they much preferred the plain version.

In a similar experiment, Ariely offered students free coffee. Over a series of days, he switched up the containers that held the condiments. For one group, they used beautiful glass-and-metal containers on fancy brushed metal trays. Another group was given styrofoam cups with hand-written labels in a red felt pen. The students who were given the condiments using the fancy serving ware gave much higher ratings for the coffee's flavor than those who were served using the styrofoam cups.

As a company, Apple is fanatical about setting expectations. Look at the way they package their products. The packaging sets an expectation about what's inside. And their product launch spectacles set expectations, too. They're so powerful, in fact, that people can hold identical phones in each hand and be utterly convinced that one is lighter, faster and shinier than the other.

Sun Tzu and the Art of Internet Marketing (Part 3)

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:30:00 GMT

This post is Part Three in a series. Read Part Two.

At peace negotiations in Hanoi between US Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, Summers quipped, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield." Tu replied, "Well, that's true. But it's also irrelevant." The point of this exchange is to recognize that war is always a means to an end. It's one example of an army ignoring Sun Tzu's Art of War to its own peril.

The lesson for marketers is that we always need to be mindful of strategies and tactics. This blog post is not an allegory about combat, domination or conquering. I'm not going to talk about destroying your enemies or taking prisoners. Instead, I'm going to focus on the pure strategic value of some of his principals.

Those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle. They are not brought by him.

Sun Tzu clarifies this by saying, "Generally, he who occupies the field of battle first and awaits his enemy is at ease, and he who comes later to the scene and rushes into the fight is weary."

It is exceedingly difficult to play catch-up on the field of Internet marketing. The companies who start creating remarkable content first end up dominating the keyword search engine results and generating all of the back-links. The bar is much higher when the content already exists and you're trying to be more remarkable than the other stuff that's out there. It's much like saving for retirement. The earlier you begin saving, the more interest you earn and the more it compounds.

Move only when you see an advantage and there is something to gain. Only fight if a position is critical.

The battle of Gettysburg in the U.S. Civil War was won and lost on this principal. As the Union forces retreated to Gettysburg, they took up positions on Cemetery Ridge, which was - in the words of General Winfield Scott Hancock - the best natural position he had ever seen. Conversely, General Lee sent his cavalry off to harass the Federals in order to score political, rather than tactical, advantage. This mistake was compounded when, against advice from fellow Confederate General Longstreet, Lee decided to attack the heavily fortified ridge.

Inbound marketing is not free. It takes time and resources to create content and promote it through social media. These resources need to be deployed a) only when there is something to gain and b) in the positions where they will be most beneficial. This means choosing the best media forms (ebooks, webinars, videos, etc...) and channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc...) for your goals.

If your orders are unclear, it is the fault of the general.

Another reason for Lee's defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg was unclear orders. Lee ordered Confederate General R.S. Ewell to seize the high ground "if practicable." Ewell hesitated to attack thereby giving the Union troops a chance to dig in along Cemetery Ridge and bring in reinforcements with artillery. By the time Lee realized Ewell had not attacked, the opportunity had vanished.

Sun Tzu would lay the blame for this at Lee's feet. Inbound marketing strategies and tactics must be clearly defined and communicated to all team members. If they are misinterpreted (as opposed to disobeyed), then it is the fault of management.

There are some armies that should not be fought - some ground that should not be contested.

At Gettysburg, Lee should have withdrawn to Washington D.C. in order to coerce the Union troops to move off of Cemetery Ridge. Instead, Lee falls victim to loss aversion and wants to make sure his sacrifices were not in vain.

When it comes to inbound marketing, never throw good money after bad. If your tactics are not meeting business goals, withdraw and double down on successful ones. Fail quickly and cheaply.

War is a matter of vital importance to the state - it is a matter of life and death, survival or ruin.

War can sometimes lead to disaster for the initiator. Sometimes, the way to win is not to fight at all. The WOPPER computer in the 80's movie Wargames learned this lesson:

If the overall cost of the strategy is not worth the benefit, don't undertake it to begin with. This requires serious and honest planning and estimating up front. It's one thing to say that employees should be able to set aside 5 hours per week for content creation and social engagement. It's another for that to actually happen.

The angry can be made happy again, but the dead cannot be brought back to life.

Be sure that your inbound marketing strategies are aimed at generating revenue and measure them carefully and faithfully. Ineffective campaigns can always be tweaked and improved but a company without revenue won't be a company for very long.

Sun Tzu and the Art of Internet Marketing (Part 2)

Jon DiPietro — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:30:00 GMT

This post is Part Two in a series. Read Part One.

Put the army in the face of death where there is no escape, and they will not flee or be afraid - there is nothing they cannot achieve.

In 1521, Hernán Cortés was facing mutiny during his conquest of the Aztecs. Two ring leaders were condemned to be hanged; two were lashed, and one had his foot mutilated. To make sure such a mutiny did not happen again, he decided to scuttle his ships. As a result, his men had no choice but to push forward. Similarly, soldiers landing on the beach at Normandy in World War II had two choices: They could remain on the beach and die from the maelstrom of German machine guns and mortars or they could push forward and fight their way off of the beach.

When it comes to inbound marketing, it requires an entirely new way of thinking and new sets of behaviors. Furthermore, results are typically not immediate. This can cause folks to become discouraged and long for the good old days of outbound marketing. Burning the ships and making it clear that there's no turning back will give them no choice but to move forward instead of looking back.

It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have spy against you, and bribe them to serve you.

In the months leading up to D-Day in June 1944, British intelligence turned a team of double agents into a powerful secret weapon. This was the “Double Cross” system, operated by the Twenty Committee and so-called because 20 in Roman numerals, XX, forms a double cross. At the heart of system was a team of five spies feeding false information to their German spymasters. Together they changed the course of the war by successfully fooling their German handlers, and therefore Hitler, into believing that the main D-Day landings would take place at Calais, rather than Normandy, where the Allies eventually stormed ashore on June 6^th 1944.

When it comes to Internet marketing, you have a powerful double-agent at your disposal as well. You can use back-link research tools to see how your competitors are out-ranking you for certain keywords. These become your own double-agents who can expose your competitors' tactics, using this information to serve you.

When a falcon's strike breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing. When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of momentum.

Even the most well executed attack can be ruined if momentum is lost. The D-Day invasion saw multiple cases of lost momentum, leading to long delays and additional casualties. The landing on Omaha beach was plagued by navigational difficulties and stronger than anticipated defenses that cascaded upon one another. Once they fought their way off of the beaches, the hedgerows were a major tactical problem for the Americans, resulting in them only reaching day 5 objectives after 40 days.

Timing and momentum are two crucial aspects of social media marketing. Striking quickly can lead to successful newsjacking. Building momentum creates a dedicated, sustainable following.

It is essential for victory that generals are unconstrained by their leaders.

Eisenhower had supreme authority with four commanders under him with well-defined responsibilities. The German chain of command was a confusing system of overlapping authority, ensuring that only Hitler knew the true picture. He was constantly interfering with the decisions of subordinates and, as one example, made especially poor tactical decisions with his Panzer tanks on D-Day (he put most of them too far from any candidate for Allied invasion).

Inbound marketing requires a decentralized approach that depends on a complete cultural shift. Employees need to think of themselves and content creators (blogs, ebooks, presentations, etc...) and brand ambassadors on social media. Authenticity is the currency of social media and it does not lend itself very well to authoritarian constraint.

The winning army realizes the conditions for victory first, then fights. The losing army fights first, then seeks victory.

Before deciding on tactics, you need to have a sound strategy. And before developing a strategy, you need to set clear goals. What will victory (success) look like? For most websites, success will look like new customers, subscribers, sign-ups, downloads, etc... Each of the inbound marketing strategies (content, keyword, advertising, promotion, conversion) should support the accomplishment of those goals. And obviously, tactics must be employed in support of the strategies.

Think of it like solving a chemistry problem: Start with the answer and work your way backward. Inbound marketing should both begin and end with these outcomes. Defining them sets the table for developing the strategies and tactics. Once implemented, their effectiveness is measured by tracking the conversion rates and cost per conversion for these outcomes.

Sun Tzu and the Art of Internet Marketing (Part 1)

Jon DiPietro — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:30:00 GMT

This post is Part One in a series.

In war, numbers alone confer no advantage.
Do not advance relying on sheer military power.

In Vietnam, the US measured success in units of dead bodies while the North Vietnamese valued territory. War is supposed to be a means to an end but often becomes the end itself.

In marketing, it's easy to look at website visits, Twitter followers, Facebook fans or email subscribers as a measure of success. But those are merely means to an end. Selling your products and/or services is the end game. Instead, establish a set of desired outcomes you want when someone visits your website. Then create landing pages for each desired outcome and measure your success rate for those conversions.

Also, inbound marketing is not a pursuit that lends itself to quantity over quality. Your audience won't tolerate a low signal to noise ratio. You can't carpet-bomb your way to success.

Let your plans be as dark as night -
then strike like a thunderbolt.

When it comes to Internet marketing, consistency is the name of the game. I've seen countless examples of companies who create a blog and then charge out the gates with 20 posts in two months. Of course, that was a year and a half ago with no posts since. The lesson here is to make sure your plan is well thought out and your resources allocated before revealing your plan. It means making sure that your content, keyword, promotional, social media and analytical strategies are all complete before you pull the trigger.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.

While it's important to have sound strategies in place, by themselves they don't accomplish your goals. Sound tactics and practiced skills are also necessary. Here are some examples:

Content Marketing: Creating remarkable content requires a long list of sound tactics. In my opinion, the most important of them is storytelling. I don't mean telling stories in the sense of making things up. Rather, it's understanding how to arrange your ideas to create conflict and mystery, then resolve the tension. Another critical tactic is visual design. Understanding the basics of design like contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity and restraing will help your content stand out.
Social Media Marketing: I have an acronym I use to describe the tactics I recommend in a social media strategy; BARE. This stands for "Be Authentic, Relentless and Everywhere."

Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Here is another frequent mistake companies make. They know social media is important, so they jump into creating accounts, following people and polluting their walls and streams with self-promoting sewage. There is no accompanying web strategy and no plan to drive the audience to well crafted landing pages.

Setting goals is also important. And by goals, I don't mean benchmarks like followers or engagement. I mean goals like getting customers or signing up members. As always, use tactics like social media promotion to drive conversions and measure their success rate.

There are five fundamental factors for success in war; weather, terrain, leadership, military doctrine and most-importantly - moral influence.

A leader must have the will of the people behind him. Business leaders must support the efforts in action as well as words. Massacres by the North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive caused fragmentation and disillusionment.

What does moral influence have to do with social media marketing? When building an online audience, you are executing a campaign of ideas. In order for people to join your campaign, you need to build up social capital with them. You do this by creating remarkable content for them that delivers value. Seth Godin would call this "creating art." It's an act of generosity with no expectation of immediate reciprocity. The more art you create, the more moral influence you'll have with your audience.

Confession of an Engineer (Turned Inbound Marketing Consultant)

Jon DiPietro — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:00:00 GMT

I have a confession to make. I hope it can serve as warning or lesson to you. My confession is that although I am a Hubspot VAR (value added reseller), I've been considering not renewing my contract and reverting back to WordPress plus a suite of supporting tools.

Why? Because I had a relapse of Engineer's Disease.

This is an affliction of the technically inclined, left-brained individual. The symptoms are a sensitivity to cool stuff and a fixation on features and technology. In my case, it was my love for WordPress that had me longing for the elegant user interface and snazzy plugins. But I took my eye off the prize - attracting visitors and converting them to leads.

Fortunately, I attended Hubspot's Inbound 2012 conference two weeks ago. Gary Vaynerchuk delivered his typically inspiring - and obscenity-laden - message. But it did the job and got my head screwed on straight again.

The first point he made, which hit very close to home, was that Hubspot was just a tool and that without the expertise to use it correctly, you won't be successful. It immediately became clear that I was concerned about which vehicle I was driving instead of paying attention to where I was going. I was fixating on all of the whizbang features and plugins I could be using on a different platform. But that was just my inner geek grabbing control of me again. Gary reminded me that what's truly important is getting results. I quickly realized that I was longing for those features because of the coolness factor and not becaues they would get me results.

His second point was that everybody else has these same cool tools, too. There's no shortage of cool software and technologies available to all of us. The difference, he says, is in hustle and execution. He pointed at the audience and said, "Not one of you mother-<expletives> is gonna outwork me." That's his secret weapon; hustle and execution.

Hopefully this has been at least a little inspiring to you as well. If not, I have two more shots to take. The first is short and sweet. It's the two minute welcome video from Inbound 2012:

The second is much longer but paints a great picture of where inbound marketing is headed. It's the 90 minute keynote address from Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot:

New Inbound Marketing Self-Assessment Guide

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Domesticating IT has been performing inbound marketing evaluations for years. And now we're happy to announce that we've created a self-guided version you can use on your own. It's a 20-page document that walks you throught the process of grading your online marketing against 26 criteria. You'll end up with a composite score, but the result isn't as important as the journey!

Here's an outline of what's contained in the guide:

Content marketing

Blog structure
Readability
Quantity
Applicability
Consistency
Aesthetics

Search engine marketing

Inbound links
URL structure
Page titles
Page headings
Images
Anchor text
Meta tags

Social media marketing

Content portability
Content shareability
Content accessibility
Social media presence
Activity level

Conversion

Calls to action
Landing pages
Conversion forms
Generosity

Web analytics

Analytics tool
Webmaster tool
Utilization
Integration

Download your copy today and get started!

Updated Inbound Marketing Presentation

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 12:45:00 GMT

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting an Introduction to Inbound Marketing to the Control System Integrators Association. The annotated presentation can be viewed and downloaded from Slideshare:

Inbound Marketing from Domesticating IT

How Not to SUCK at Social Media

Jon DiPietro — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 14:10:00 GMT

Let's face it, we're a good four years into this social media thing and most companies still suck at it. The fundamental reason why companies fail at social media is mixed norms - applying economic norms when social norms are required. But there are lots of other reasons and this webinar done in conjunction with the ISA Marketing and Sales Summit lists my top ten reasons.

This presentation is a sneak peak at a half-day workshop I'll be doing at this year's Summit. I'll got into glorious detail with each of these ten mistakes and describe how to prevent and/or fix them.

Please take a moment to rate this presentation:

How Not to SUCK at Social Media

View more presentations from Domesticating IT

Power Nazi Misses a Golden Marketing Opportunity?

Jon DiPietro — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 19:09:00 GMT

I am frequently critical of the print publishing industry. Sigh. Here we go again! Here's a Tweet I just saw:

Via my wife: the Barnes & Noble in Gaithersburg MD is refusing to allow people w/o power at home from recharging devices there. cc @BN_care
— Andy Carvin (@acarvin) July 2, 2012

Who can blame the store manager, right? I mean, with all of the power outages down there most of those folks probably haven't showered in a few days. Besides, we all know that business is going just swimmingly in the brick and mortar book selling industry so who needs good will?

Community Inbound Marketing

This made me think... A typical U.S. electrical outlet can support about 1440 watts of load. An iPhone charger is rated at 10 watts but it draws much less than that. This means you could safely plug 144 iPhones into a single outlet (theoretically). At $0.07 per kilowatt hour, it would cost them about five cents per outlet per hour (assuming around a 5 watt load).

But what would those 144 people do for an hour while they waited for their phones to charge? It's pretty warm down there so I'm guessing they're thirsty and may get a lemonade or ice coffee from the cafe. They might even kill a tree or two and buy a book or magazine. But those are just the obvious benefits.

The whole idea of inbound marketing on the Internet is to be generous and give away great content that helps other people, positions you as a thought leader and attracts new leads. If I were this store manager, I would run to Home Depot and grab as many extension cords and power strips as I could. Then I'd put up a big old sign outside that said, "Free Gadget Charging!" And when my store was jammed to the limit of the local fire codes, I'd start Tweeting pictures.

Do you think that would create some good will, not to mention some foot traffic? Sheesh.

Photo credit: Free Hugs by Patrick Haney on Flickr.

The Critical Question Business Owners Should Ask Their SEO Consultant

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:56:00 GMT

(or any other marketing consultant for that matter)

Over the past few weeks, I've had an unusually high number of incidences with clients and/or prospects who have had negative experiences with SEO consultants. In one case, a new client had spent a significant amount of money on worthless efforts. In another case, a client sent an unsolicited proposal from an SEO consultant. In all cases, asking one simple question would save everyone a little consternation and a lot of money:

So what?

That's it. When a marketing consultant makes a pitch or provides you with a report, keep asking, "So what?" until you get an answer that begins with one or more of the following:

"You increased revenue because..."
"You saved money because..."

SEO consultants are particularly notorious for bathing their clients in data that seems impressive but is utterly meaningless. It's their job to provide you with a service that does at least one of the two things above. If they can't explain it to you, they're either deceptive or less than competent. Either way you should find yourself a new consultant.

Here are some specific examples of the misdirection I frequently see.

We Can/Did Get You Ranked #1 for...

Wow! That must be great if I'm ranking #1 in Google, right? Well, maybe. That all depends on whether or not anyone ever searches for that particular keyword. In the case of one client, their previous SEO firm was charging monthly to optimize a list of 142 keywords. They submitted regular reports showing that many of them had a #1 ranking but there was just one problem. There were zero monthly searches for 101 of them.

If the client had used my critical question, the conversation may have gone something like this:

SEO: Here's your latest monthly report. You are now ranking #1 for 95 of these keywords!
Company: So what? How does that help me?
SEO: So when people search for those terms you're the first listing to show up.
Company: So what? How much money did that bring in last month?
SEO: Actually, none because nobody searched for it.

We Increased Your PageRank

If you're not familiar with the term, PageRank is a grade that Google gives to pages that ranks them on a scale from 0 to 10 for a given keyword. In the early days of SEO, this was considered to be the end all, be all of search engine optimization. Today, PageRank is one of more than 200 signals Google looks at when ordering websites. It's a factor, but just one of many, many factors that will determine how well you perform in search results.

If the client had used my critical question, the conversation may have gone something like this:

SEO: We increased the PageRank of your landing page to a 7!
Company: So what? How does that help me?
SEO: It means that Google thinks your page is important for that keyword.
Company: So what? How much money did that bring in last month?
SEO: Actually, none because despite the PageRank you were on the 5th page of results.

We Increased Your Site Traffic

Unless you're selling ad impressions, website traffic doesn't pay the bills. Leads do (eventually). Customers do (immediately). Increased traffic is good only if it's quality traffic. Increased crappy traffic is not good. It costs you time and money. If SEO is not done properly, it can actually increase the amount of bad traffic to your site.

If the client had used my critical question, the conversation may have gone something like this:

SEO: Your site traffic was up 20% last month!
Company: So what? How does that help me?
SEO: You had 500 more visitors last month than the month before.
Company: So what? How much money did that bring in last month?
SEO: Actually, none because they're not our target demographic.

Bottom Line

I'll be writing another blog post about basic keyword research and strategy but in the mean time, asking the simple question "So what?" will teach you an awful lot about what is or isn't working with your SEO. The only thing that matters is how these efforts impact your bottom line. This means that you have to be measuring how well your SEO efforts are impacting your web marketing goals.

Which, in turn, means that you need to have web marketing goals in the first place. More about that in a future blog post...

Hey Marketers - Stop Blaming Your Clubs

Jon DiPietro — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:14:00 GMT

"It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools." But that never stops golfers from upgrading their clubs every other year, right? They have a 20 handicap and think that adding 10 yards to their drives is going to make all of the difference.

In the carnage following the Facebook IPO, I'm hearing a lot of marketers who are complaining about thier clubs. You hear me, GM? There's lots of talk about the efficacy of its advertising platform and marketers are taking sides. Let me be clear about something: This article is not about whether or not Facebook will be a successful company. That depends on way too many variables. This is about taking responsibility for trying to hammer a screw.

You're Doing It Wrong

Lesson number one is that you're doing it wrong. Marketers need to recognize the advertising on Facebook is different from traditional outbound advertising media. You can't simply copy and paste an advertising campaign from television or magazine print into Facebook and expect it to work.

Why not? Because this is social media and there are different rules at play. Social norms rule, not economic norms. This means that you need to up your game and change your expectations. Perhaps more imporantly, you need to experiment. Here's a look at a recent Facebook ad campaign I ran:

The "boing" came in on the fourth ad campaign that I tried. It would have been easy to stop after the third ad and declare Facebook as useless. This particular campaign was for fan acquisition. The composite cost among all of the ads (including the craptastic ones) came out to $0.72 per fan. However, the fourth campaign came in at $0.65 per fan and the fifth settled in at $0.48 per fan. In case you're unfamiliar with benchmarks for fan acquisition, $2 is the upper acceptable threshold and $1 is the average. Anything under $0.75 is good and under $0.50 is great.

But don't take my word for it. Jon Steinberg, CEO of Buzzfeed, was interviewed on CNBC regarding Facebook's potential, particularly in the mobile space. He predicted that brands will be "...moving to the sponsored stories. It will take more time for agencies and brands to come around to them." He goes on to say that banners don't work and the top brands are recognizing that social is where it's at. However, they must "...put up content there that educates and provides interest to people. That's the format that the sponsored story does." Watch the full interview below:

You're Looking At the Wrong Numbers

I recently read a blog article titled, "Why Facebook won't survive the decade" and got into some blog comment banter about the value of Facebook. One anonymous commenter protested:

When I can see a direct correlation between "likes" and additional cash in the bottom line I will say Facebook works.

To which I responded:

That's like saying, "When I can see a direct correlation between impressions and additional cash in the bottom line I will say Google Ads work." Just because likes aren't translating to the bottom line doesn't mean it's the platform's fault. Just like lousy click-through rates on Google ads aren't the platform's fault.

Trying to correlate likes to customers is an exercise in futility, just like ad impressions are going to be meaningless. Rather, you need to give those fans reasons to visit your site and then convert them when they get there. Here is a table of conversion rates for the same business in the previous example:

You can see that Facebook referrals are converting better than Google AdWords. I'll take a 6.5% conversion rate all day long and I bet GM would too!

You're Herding Cats

This concept is easier to illustrate than to explain, so here's an example I just uncovered on Facebook from the British Beer Company:

Problem #1 with this ad: It doesn't tell me what they want me to do. Should I like their page? Should I visit their website? Should I print a coupon? Should I attend a grand opening? Sigh. I guess I have to click on this boring, uncompelling ad to find out. And here's my reward:

A Facebook page with no content, no offers, no information that's of any use to me. Pfft. This, my friends, is what herding cats looks like. Creating an ad with no compelling message and no call to action and then sending people to a bland, ambiguous page that has zero payoff for them and for me. What's their goal for this campaign? If it's fans, they don't even ask me to like their page. They probably just paid $1.50 for the privilege of my click and got nothing out of it.

Time for them to buy a new set of clubs, I suppose.

If you've seen some good Facebook advertising successes, let us know in the comments. Epic fails are also welcome.

Inbound Marketing Lessons from the PitchMen

Jon DiPietro — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:21:00 GMT

You've seen those commericals before. "Hi, Billy Mays here for Oxi Clean, the stain specialist; powered by the air we breathe, activated by the water that you and I drink." Many people called him annoying. Others thought he was a fool. Some thought he was just plain crazy.

I say he was crazy like a fox.

If you've never seen the television series "PitchMen" on the Discovery channel and you're a marketer, do yourself a favor and buy the DVD. This series goes behind the scenes with super-successful pitchmen (the late) Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan. It shows how they research, select, price, market and pitch their products. The more episodes you watch, the more you learn that there was a formula to their success that can be applied to any area of marketing.

When it comes to inbound marketing, landing pages are your pitch. So let's see which PitchMen lessons can be applied to create killer converting machines.

Start With the Problem

Every one of their commercials begins by defining the problem they're solving within the first few seconds. They are instantly pre-qualifying their audience by showing and telling everyone why they should continue watching. Examples:

Oxi Clean: The stain specialist, powered by the air you breathe and the water we drink.
Quick Chop: The fastest, easiest, safest way to chop, mince or dice any vegetable - guaranteed.
Mighty Putty: The easy way to fix, fill and seal virtually anything fast and make it last.
Handy Switch: The new wireless light switch that lets you control any lamp from anywhere.

Did you notice anything else about those opening lines? They'd fit pretty neatly into 140 characters, wouldn't they? But most of those commercials were shot long before Twitter existed. They knew that words are precious and the series shows how they obsess over every single word used in a product description.

Inbound marketing takeaway: Get to the point quickly and succinctly. Describe the problem you're solving.

The Power of Demonstration

Another non-negotiable tactic of the PitchMen is demonstration. The key element of every one of their commercials is a compelling and dramatic product demonstration. Throughout the series, Billy and Anthony pass on hundreds of products. Often, it's a great product but they pass because they can't think of an effective way to demonstrate it on television.

And the ways that they demonstrate these products is impactful. Using the same examples cited previously:

Oxi Clean: A carpet stain magically disappears when Oxi Clean is squirted on it. A huge tub of swirling, filthy clothes instantly changes from nasty brown to pure white in a matter of seconds.
Quick Chop: Obviously, the product is shown chopping a variety of foods. But they also demonstrate its power by chopping a pile of ice. They show the product up close to illustrate how it works and why it's different. Another shot illustrates how easy it is to clean the Quick Chop.
Mighty Putty: Like the other products, there are many shots of practical uses for the product. In addition, they show negative demonstrations of competitive products not working. But the money shot for this product is a demonstration of Mighty Putty able to tow a fully-loaded, 80,000 pound tractor trailor.
Handy Switch: This product pitch doesn't have quite the dramatic scenes that other have, but nonetheless it effectively demonstrates a very simple solution to a very common problem (more about that later).

Inbound marketing takeway: You may or may not be using video on your landing pages, but you can still use demonstrations in the form of pictures, downloads, or even customer testimonials. The key is to use as many of the PitchMen techniques as possible; illustrative solutions, over-the-top proof, testimonials and competitor discreditation (not particular brands, but inferior technology).

Now How Much Would You Pay?

This is a technique that has become the butt of jokes in our lexicon, but there's a reason why it is consistently used: It works. The psychological term for this approach is called "anchoring." It has to do with the way our brains calculate probabilities. As we watch a commercial or read a landing page, our brains are constantly trying to conduct a cost/benefit analysis. How much will this thing cost? Is it worth it?

Anchoring occurs when we are given our first data point. In most cases, it's the price. Our brains start clicking away trying to determine whether or not we'll open our wallets. Scientific studies have shown that our brains are frightfully suceptible to the power of suggestion. When we're given a number, it "anchors" our thought process and we tend to use it as a reference point. Here's how it works in our examples:

Oxi Clean: "We've sold millions of our 2.5 pound tubs for $40, but if you call now we'll cut the price in half." They set the anchor at $40 and then make you think you're getting twice the value.
Quick Chop: "As a special bonus, we'll also include our quick-grater, free."
Mighty Putty: "Through this exclusive TV offer, we'll double it and send you two more sticks, free!"
Handy Switch: "You'll also receive our handy stick-up light, absolutely free."

But wait, there's more! Of course you've heard this line too. It's still the anchoring effect but the informercial pros always take it to a third level. All four of the pitches above have another, final bonus thrown in to maximize the anchoring effect.

Inbound marketing takeaway: Use anchoring in your landing pages to show how much alternate solutions might cost or else throw in a bonus item or price cut.

Here's How to Order

Inbound marketers understand the importance of a strong call to action. Don't leave it to the visitor to figure out what you want them to do - tell them! Every one of the PitchMen's commercials ends with the same call to action: "Here's how to order..."

Inbound marketing takeway: Always provide a clear call to action in your marketing pitch.