The good news about inbound marketing is that it can help you attract high volumes of leads. The challenge then becomes, how do you separate the good, quality leads from the people who are just starting to look around? That’s where lead management, and specifically, lead scoring comes in. With lead scoring, you can attach values to each of your leads based on their professional information and the behavior they’ve exhibited on your website.

For example, you would likely rank a vice president-level lead who has spent time on both your products and pricing page higher than an intern- or coordinator-level lead with the same behavior. You might also rank one VP over another if the first VP has demonstrated a higher level of engagement on your site.

Each of these scores go into a profile of your lead to help you determine when they’re
ready to talk with a sales person. The more time quality leads spend with your content and the better informed they become, the more likely they’ll be interested in hearing from your sales team. Lead scoring takes thought, knowledge of your business operations, and lead management software to set up, but once it’s set, it shouldn’t take much day-to-day management. If you’re considering setting up a lead scoring program, here’s what you need to know to get started and set up a scoring system that benefits your business. – How to Score Your Leads So Sales Works the Hottest Prospects by Pamela Vaughan

In many ways, the advent of social selling has changed how we do business.

Gone are the days of faceless organizations.

Now, businesses rely on getting and maintaining the good will of their customers in order to make a sale.

How do businesses do this?

By harnessing the power of social selling and driving sales from the inside out. That is, entering its customers’ social circles in order to become a trusted brand for goods and services.

Let’s take a look at social selling and how you can ethically increase sales and engage with your customers.

What Is Social Selling?

To know you’re doing social selling ethically, you first need to understand what the term means.

Social selling, or social commerce, is using online social networks and tools to reach customers and engage them in a sale.

It’s a bit of a balancing act: Get it right and you’ve earned yourself a pleased customer who is likely to share his positive experience. Get it wrong and you’ve invaded someone’s personal network and abused his or her trust in a way they are not likely to forget. – Social Selling: How to Ethically Reach your Followers and Drive Sales by  Kieran Flanagan

Content creation is central to your inbound marketing success, but as your volume of written content increases, inconsistencies are also bound to arise. Whether due to lack of clarity in your own head about the style with which you want to write, or disjointed communication across the content creators in your organization, failure to decide upon and document accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging and an incoherent brand experience.

That’s why most companies that rely on content as a central part of their marketing strategy develop an editorial style guide. When creating an editorial style guide, you’re not discussing the operations of content creation — like editorial calendaring or search engine optimization of content — nor are you going into the detail of a brand style guide like the nitty gritty on visual style and use of your logo. Rather, your editorial style guide will guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website, eliminating confusion, guess work, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks. – The Simple Template for a Thorough Content Style Guide by Corey Eridon

As bloggers, each of us has to deal with criticism. Blogging is a very public activity—almost all of us has the goal of gaining readers to our blogs—and the more people you reach, the more likely it is that you’ll hear criticisms.

“You’re wrong…”
“How can you say that? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I couldn’t disagree more…”
“This is the last time I read this blog!”

These are just some of the criticisms bloggers regularly face—I’ve received versions of all of these many times over the years, and if you’ve been blogging for any length of time, they’re probably fairly familiar to you, too.

Criticism can be deeply painful. As I explained here, the difficulty in dealing with criticism caused Elizabeth Taylor to ignore everything the press said about her. The discomfort of being criticised has led more than one blogger to shut down their blog, so it’s an issue that bloggers really do need to think about.

How can we manage criticism, not get dragged down by it, and maybe even benefit from it?

Embrace criticism?!

That probably sounds a little odd, but the first thing you need to do is accept—even embrace—the fact that your blog has attracted criticism.

I know that can be difficult to do, but think of it this way: you’re a blogger, and you’re tackling the tough job of putting yourself, your work, and your opinions on the line every week.

Not everyone will agree with you all of the time, but negative feedback is a sign that you’re making people think. After all, that’s one of the most common reasons why many start blogging in the first place. – How to Handle Criticism: a Practical Guide by Darren Rowse

Certainly, few bloggers are ever going to gleefully greet negative emails and comments the way we do positive feedback, but the first step in using that information positively is to accept it as a natural part of blogging.

• Infographic: How To Get More Twitter Traffic (Digital Buzz Blog)
• Launching a Social Command Center (Without The Center)(Future Lab)
• 7 steps for business success with big data (GigaOM)
• Four Tips for Generating Leads With Email (MarketingProfs)
• Blogs Top List of Social Media Investments for 2012(MarketingProfs)
• Students Turn Social Media Skills into Social Business Strategy (CIO.com)
• The Rockstar You Need to Hire to Manage Your Blog(HubSpot)
• Frustrated by Blogger’s Block? Try this Exercise! (ProBlogger)
• Benchmarking Your Social Performance (Social Media Explorer)
• An Insider’s Secret to Avoiding Marketing Content Shortages(HubSpot)
• Why Blogging Isn’t Growing Your Business (and What to Do About It)(Marketing Trenches)
• Affiliate Marketing: Segmenting Your Affiliates (Practical eCommerce)
• Measure Your Social Media ROI with Google Analytics Part 2: Advanced Segments (eMagine)
• Getting The Most Out of Great Content in Social Media (Social Media Explorer)
• Don’t Be Authentic: Real Social Media Marketing Advice(Spin Sucks)
• The Super Simple Guide to Using and Marketing Through Pinterest – Part One (Search Engine Guide)
• Perception is Worth 1,001 Words(Search Engine Guide)
• Three Ways to Make Your Content Search-Friendly (Marketing Profs)
• 6 Ways To Get More B2B Leads From Social Media (Social Fresh)
• Why You Want To Be the Last Blog Standing(Outspoken Media)
• Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy & Viral?! (SEOmoz)
• SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital?(Small Business Search Marketing)
• Changes and challenges for email marketers in 2012: report (eConsultancy)
• 9 Elements for a Successful Marketing Program Mix (Marketo)
• 10 Pro Tips for Writers Using Social Media(Mashable!)

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

Relevant web pages. Relevant title tags. Relevant meta descriptions. Relevant copywriting. You’ve heard it a million times, right? I’m guilty of talking about relevance to pretty much every SEO client I’ve ever had.

No more. Relevancy is overrated. Anybody can be relevant; just throw a keyword on the web page a few times and BAM! You’re relevant.

You want to do better than that. And what’s better than being relevant?

Being vital.

SEO Quality Scale

If you think about an SEO quality scale, there’s nothing better than being vital.

I’d never suggest that a small business owner take everything Google says about SEO as the gospel truth, but I think it’s wise to look at and think about how Google classifies web pages. – SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital? by Matt McGee

In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer!

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!- Perception is Worth 1,001 Words by Stoney deGeyter

I joined a couple other B2B Marketers for a meal a few weeks ago, and the topic of content marketing and blogging came up.  This came as no surprise – I know they occasionally read our blog and can see that we are passionate on the topic.  They recounted some of their challenges with blogging, including some common challenges:

• Getting content from subject matter experts, when these experts are also required to focus their energy on billable hours
• Occasional missed deadlines and the need to build a backlog of content before this happens
• Varying levels of commitment from different authors

While I’ve seen many companies experience some or all of these challenges at one point or another, as I listened and started to ask questions I realized what was happening to them – blogging had become hard because they weren’t getting anything back from it.  The above challenges really were just addressable symptoms presenting themselves from the larger malady – they hadn’t established a content strategy that showed them direct return on investment from their blogging efforts.

They needed Better Content, Not Just More Content—this broke down in to three main areas:

We Don’t Know What They Want to Know About

Simply put, my colleagues didn’t know what their audience was looking for anymore.  I think each of us at one time or another has hit a temporary wall when it comes to content ideas, but in this case they were really stuck.  Initially they turned to their Analytics, but there was no clear indication of the types of posts that performed better than others.  The solution here was easy – go back to the basics of why you are ultimately blogging for your business. – Why Blogging Isn’t Growing Your Business (and What to Do About It) by Will Davis

At this stage in the game, you know blogging is a crucial element to the success of your inbound marketing. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing it consistently like you know you should.

Why don’t marketers and business owners find time to blog even when they know how important it is to meeting their marketing goals? Because blogging takes time you don’t have; you don’t fancy yourself a great writer; you can’t think of good topics on a regular basis; or any of the other myriad reasons people don’t blog when they know they should.

That’s why more and more marketers are turning to hiring an employee dedicated solely to blogging in order to keep their blog fed with top-notch content on a consistent basis. The problem is, the job title “Blogger” is relatively new, and as such, it’s hard to know what exactly you should be looking for when hiring someone to blog for you. Luckily, we’ve hired more than one blogger in our day. So we thought it would be helpful to share the qualities to look for when hiring a blogger for your company — whether freelance, part time, contract, or full time.

Writing Ability

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way. A blogger should obviously be a great writer, but blogging is very different than writing a book, a grant, or even marketing copy. Your blogger must excel at explaining complex concepts through short form content, and be clear and concise so your audience finds the content helpful. While applicants who excel in other forms of content creation may also be fantastic bloggers, those qualifications don’t necessarily mean they can also blog. – The Rockstar You Need to Hire to Manage Your Blog by Corey Eridon

“Social command centers” are all the rage today and it’s not without some merit. Many organizations now find themselves in a real-time business environment where news travels faster than sound, and information is set free. As a result, some forward thinking companies have put “monitoring” in place either in-house or in combination with partners. This isn’t enough.

And to make matters worse, I’ve seen companies make the classic mistake of buying a tool BEFORE putting any thought into the design that goes into effective monitoring and response, forgetting the 3P’s (People, Process, Platforms). Tech platforms are only one third of the problem.

The media hasn’t helped. “Social Command Centers” as physical spaces ripped from the playbook of NASA have been documented via Dell, Gatorade and most recently, the Super Bowl. Now, to be clear—a physical space can make listening, engaging and responding in real time effective—but it’s not a requirement. In fact, for the organization who wishes to be able to function in real time for the long haul, it’s the wrong place to focus on. So, how does any organization who wishes to be better equipped for real-time business move forward? Based on some of the work I’ve been doing with our analytics teams at Edelman Digital—below are some high level recommendations for setting up your social command center, without the center. – Launching a Social Command Center (Without The Center) by David Armano

• Social Media Trends With Benefits in 2012 (Marketing Profs)
• Blogging, feedback and improving  (Internet Marketing)
• StumbleUpon: 10 Tips and Tricks for Power Users (Mashable!)
• Social Survival for Bloggers: a Peek from the Inside(ProBlogger)
• The Power of Slow Thinking(Brass Tack Thinking)
• Consumers Want Online Video Ads No More Than 15 Seconds Long (Mashable!)
• Don’t Waste Time Looking at Web Data Until You Do This (Search Engine Guide)
• How to Write Irresistible Blog Intros(ProBlogger)
• 9 Best Practices for Social Networking in the Workplace (Mashable!)
• Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers: The Idea in Practice(Harvard Business Review)
• Why Social Media Needs to Get More Personal(Mashable!)
• Everything Marketers Need to Measure and Prove Content ROI (HubSpot)
• Is Your Site Mobile Friendly? Google Can Tell You (SmallBizTrends)
• 9 Ways to Dramatically Reduce Email Unsubscribe Rates (HubSpot)
• 3 Signs Your Facebook Marketing Needs To Get Serious(All Facebook)
• Customers Do Care About Data Collection (Social Harbor)
• The Ultimate Checklist for Integrated Marketing(HubSpot)
• How To Deliver Exceptional Client Service (Smashing Magazine)
• 10 Ways Multi-blog Authors Can Stay Creative and Generate Great Posts (ProBlogger)
• Measure Your Social Media ROI with Google Analytics Part 1: Campaign Tagging(eMagine)
• 31 Fluffy Buzzwords Marketers Overuse and Abuse (HubSpot)
• 7 Key Tips for Leveraging Big Data (Mashable!)
• 2 Different Tales of Blog Growth(ProBlogger)
• Increasing Conversions by Referring Consumers Elsewhere (Practical eCommerce)
• 10 Clever Ways Your Email Signature Can Support Your Marketing(HubSpot)

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

“What was ‘the tipping point’ for your blog?”

This question is one that I’m regularly asked in interviews, and it is one that is challenging to answer. The assumption behind the question is that there is often some kind of event that pushes a blog into the limelight. The reality is that it’s not always this way.

Let me illustrate this by telling the stories of my two main blogs—ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.

ProBlogger’s tipping point: dramatic growth

Here on ProBlogger, the only real tipping point-type event that I can identify is when I mentioned in an interview I did on another blog that I was earning six figures a year from my blogging. Back then (it was 2005), nobody was making money from blogs (or if they were, they weren’t talking about it) so it was news that quickly got passed around.

It was picked up by quite a few other bloggers but also went viral on Slashdot, which was the closest thing that there was to social bookmarking back then.

While I didn’t really consider that there would be much effect from saying I was a six figure blogger in that interview, the impact was pretty significant (in terms of traffic but, more importantly, in terms of profile/brand) for a few reasons:

• The statement was somewhat controversial (the idea of monetizing the “pure” medium of blogging was something that some were dead against) and that caused some buzz. But being the first to announce I was a full-time blogger also created a desire for others to do likewise.
• The idea of blogging for money was sown in the minds of many. As I was not only making a living from blogging, but also writing about that journey here on ProBlogger, I guess there was some credibility built from that statement.
• Coining of the term “ProBlogger”—again being first and having a site called ProBlogger meant that people started to talk about making money from blogs as being a pro blogger, which just grew the site even more. – 2 Different Tales of Blog Growth by Darren Rowse

Successful inbound marketing requires a hand in a number of different marketing channels, from blogging, to social media, to email, SEO, PPC, and even live events. But because there are so many different channels at an inbound marketer’s disposal, what often happens is a marketing strategy that doesn’t call for any integration or cross-channel promotion. Don’t keep your marketing contained in individual silos — integrate it!

Individual marketing channels that work in tandem to promote an offer, promotion, or even a full-blown campaign can give you the oomph you need to generate even better results. Here are 8 ways you can give your marketing more leverage with a more integrated approach to the channels you’re likely already working with.

Image via Wikipedia

Around 2009, small business followed the lead of big businesses and created pages on social network sites right and left. They might have heard somewhere on the Internet that social network is a great way to reach customers and profiles are free to set up, so why not?

A lot of those pages are graveyards now. They haven’t been updated in months and almost nobody Likes them. They didn’t even get a very good response when they were active.

A lot of businesses gave up once they didn’t see a surge in new customers, but no form of advertising can do that for very little work. Everything worth anything takes time and effort, and companies forgot that because they expected social network profiles to provide instant rewards with little effort. Social network requires effort just like any other form of marketing outreach, so how can you improve your social network marketing campaign?

Put some time into it

Casually telling your friends to Like your company page on Facebook won’t cut it. A few of their friends might see posts about your company, but social networks is all about contacting highly targetable customers.

Run an advertising campaign

Let’s say you run an insurance brokerage that sells medical insurance locally. Social networks like Facebook allow you to run targeted ads based on demographics, people’s interests, and even pages that people Like. You can make an ad that is directed toward people who Like, say, pages relating to medical insurance, or healthcare reform. Or, you can go even narrower and make an ad for health insurance with an orthopodic addendum that’s aimed at people who are in Facebook groups about foot health problems.

Social media monitoring

Most social networks have analytics tools that let you see the effectiveness of your advertising in terms of how many people click on your ads, but that’s where they stop. You aren’t able to find out whether or not people are talking about your company or your products. That’s why companies like Alerti offer social media monitoring services to let your company know what people are saying about you online, both on social networks and other forms of social media, like blogs.

Measure your success early

When you run a traditional advertising campaign, you have to wait weeks or more to see if you’re getting good results. Even AdSense campaigns take a while to get accurate results since the variance is so high and Google likes to show campaigns quick results so that they keep buying AdSense ads. However, social media monitoring tools let you get results instantly. When you sign up for a service like Alerti, you can see any social media post relating to certain keywords or linking back to certain URL’s. So, if you make a blog post about your company and promote it on social media, you can easily see if people are reposting your post and talking about it online. Furthermore, most social media monitoring tools have analytics that let you see where people are talking about you the most so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.

New social media service Path promises to bring your true friends (not just acquaintances) together in a much more personal way. However, neither Path, nor Facebook, nor Google+ have fully comprehended that personal circles vary by context, and that context changes rapidly and infinitely.  

In the end, while services like Path get us closer to “personal,” they are still very much “broadcast” versions of social media. Ultimately, new services will arise that will allow the user to easily and naturally build relationships, physically meet and communicate with one’s rapidly morphing groups of true friends.        

How Humans Interact

To fully understand how structured broadcast and personal social models differ, we need to look at real life. First and foremost, people segment friends and groups based on a specific context. To put it simply, there are people we are very close with, people we may have never heard of, but who seem “safe,” then there are thousands of groups in-between. And that context only changes more over time. Even though it sounds confusing, we build and segment groups because the action has been hard-wired into our brains.  - Why Social Media Needs to Get More Personal by Patrick Moorhead

Did you know that I like to have sex on roller coasters? Yes, there’s nothing that does it for me more than wondering if my partner will puke at the point of, um, no return. Okay I’m fibbing. I can’t even imagine how difficult big dipper hanky panky would be, but I got you listening, didn’t I?

While I was being a little devious, and you’re now going to be a tiny bit disappointed that I’m not going to talk about my fetish for fairground frolics, I’ve demonstrated two things:

• A strong hook in the introductory paragraph of your post is crucial to grab the reader’s interest.
• Your hook should be linked to what you’re actually writing about, otherwise the reader will feel like they’ve been duped once they continue.

But then, seeing as the title already told you what this post was going to be about, I can be excused. You knew I wasn’t going to be talking about my fictional amusement park passions, so I haven’t hoodwinked you after all!

But I did gain attention.

First impressions…

They count, don’t they? Unlike networking events or dinner parties, where we may be forced to stay making small-talk with a person we’ve decided we don’t like, when we’re reading blogs, we have a choice. And we don’t have to stick around. Once you’ve got your title, you have to think carefully about the all-important first impression that will follow.

So how do you write a winning intro that will make your reader read on? – How to Write Irresistible Blog Intros by Andrea Wren

Zombie accounts at Reddit are increasingly frustrating content creators on the internet. A “zombie” account is an account that appears to be active to the user, but to nobody else, usually as a punishment for that user submitting his or her own content.

The user submits, and he sees his or her submission. S/he comments, and sees the comment. S/he thinks s/he has an active account, and can go on for months thinking s/he does. But nobody else reads that person’s submissions or comments, and his or her up-votes are generally nullified by automated system down-votes.

No social bookmarking is so cruel as Reddit. I mean, this is downright mean. And no site is so easy to cross, because self-promotion (submitting your own blog post) is frowned upon in almost every way. I’ll bet that the zombie accounts at Reddit outnumber the real accounts by a gazillion to one. Okay, perhaps that’s just a bit of an exaggeration…

So what is a blogger, video maker, infographics publisher or other content creator to do if we wish to legitimately spread the word about a blog post? How are we to know where we can submit our own content and where it will just get us banned? Let this post be your guide. – Social Survival for Bloggers: a Peek from the Inside by David Leonhardt