Twitter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the very least, Twitter can drive a few extra visitors to your website each day. At most, it can be a powerful marketing tool that can be used to generate high-quality leads and build up an online brand.

To get the most from your tweets, you must first understand how Twitter works. For an introduction, check out our posts on integrating social media with your overall marketing plan and what not to tweet about. If you already have the basics down (or even if you don’t), you may be interested in the latest findings from Hubspot Twitter expert Dan Zarrella.

Zarrella sought out the best conditions for generating retweets, which are valuable to marketers because they can greatly increase the audience of a given tweet and generate loads more traffic to a website. I’ve summarized his retweet insights below. You can also find them in the post I linked to above.

1. Share lots of content. This one’s a biggie, and it’s just logical: people are more likely to share tweets that link to interesting content, so provide it for them. Zarella found that accounts that link to content in 60% or 80% of their tweets generate the most retweets.
2. Don’t tweet about yourself unless it’s relevant to your audience. This is the one of the things that can really turn people against you. Using your Twitter account as a personal journal (i.e. — “Buying milk at the grocery store,” or “Watching Mad Men before bed!”) is a big no-no if you’re trying to build a marketing audience. People don’t really care about your everyday nuances; they care about getting content that will benefit them in some way. Zarrella found that tweets that contain a self reference are half as likely to be retweeted as tweets that do not.
3. People retweet more frequently as the work week goes on. This one’s pretty self explanatory; see the graph below.
   

   Source: danzarella.com

4. Ask for retweets. Personally, I usually get annoyed by people who ask for retweets. But if you have an urgent or important message to get out, Zarrella’s data indicates asking for a retweet  actually does work. Tweets that include “please retweet” generate more than four times as many retweets than those without it, and those that include “please RT” generate more than three times as many.
5. Tweet about Twitter. Believe it or not, people who use Twitter really like talking about Twitter. It’s the one common interest you share with virtually all of your followers. Use it to your advantage.
   

   Source: danzarrella.com

By now, most people realize how important search engine optimization is, especially for small businesses. What’s less clear is how exactly to do this. This is a much tougher to identify. As Jonathan Rick wrote in a recent guest post on Mashable, search engine optimization is an ”ever-evolving and much-debated field … full of qualifications and judgment calls.”

In sum, there’s no foolproof set of guidelines for search engine optimization. That said, there are some practices that are without a doubt important. If you’re blogging regularly to build high-quality content (and if you’re not, you should be), it’s essential that your headlines include keywords and are written as straightforward as possible. Unfortunately, this also limits your ability to write catchy or clever headlines. 

Rick offers a solution: instead of sacrificing readability for search engine optimization in headline writing, you can use a trick to capitalize on the best of both worlds. He suggests making your article headline clever and catchy and writing a separate, keyword-heavy headline for your page title. Many blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Drupal, offer plug-ins that make it easy to to separate the two. This way, you’ll be able to write compelling headlines without sacrificing search engine optimization.

For example, one of the top stories on the New York Times website today uses the article headline “A Watershed Move, Both Risky and Inevitable.” This is an enticing headline because it invites the reader to click through to the full story to learn exactly what this move is (his endorsement of gay marriage Wednesday). But note the page headline: “Obama’s Watershed Move on Gay Marriage.” The latter headline includes keywords that would likely rank this article highly for someone searching, say, “Obama on gay marriage.”

The (optional) next step is crafting a keyword-rich meta description for your post. Google will do this for you if you don’t, but it’s especially useful if you’re targeting a niche audience.

For other tips on optimizing your content check out our other blog posts on link building and calls-to-action content.

Image via CrunchBase

It’s no secret that Facebook has become a valuable tool for small businesses, which can use their pages to engage customers and attract new ones. Last week, Facebook made it even easier for small and medium sized companies to bring in business using their page by extending its Offers feature to all local businesses.

Facebook Offers allows small business marketers to create Facebook-only coupons to share on their timelines. Fans of the page can then share these coupons with their friends (even if the friends aren’t fans of the page themselves) and redeem the coupons for discounts or other specials at the business location itself.

Creating a coupon using Offers couldn’t be easier: simply draft a catchy call-to-action for the headline and choose a photo to accompany it. You can also include a “terms and conditions” section if their are special instructions that go along with the coupon, although Facebook doesn’t exactly recommend it.

Below is an example of what an Offer looks like, as shared between two of my personal Facebook friends. It’s important to note that I’m not a fan of this business and the person who the coupon is being shared with may not either, but both of us (along with dozens of other mutual friends) are being exposed to it. That’s some powerful reach, folks.

You can also set a limit on the number of coupons that can be redeemed (or choose to leave it unlimited) and create an expiration date for them. As Hubspot’s Pamela Vaughn points out, sending out a coupon several days in advance of its expiration date can make a coupon even more successful because it gives followers the time to share it with friends.

Any business which categorizes itself under the “Local Businesses and Places” option in the “Basic Information” portion of its page’s settings is eligible to use the Offers page for free. It’s a great way to not only bring people into your place of business, but grow a social media following very quickly.

By popular demand, we’ve created another round of inbound marketing memes!  If you don’t know what a meme is, check out our blog post about how you can use memes to boost traffic, widen your online reach, and engage your social media networks.  If you haven’t seen our other inbound marketing memes, be sure to check them out here.  Enjoy!

As you may already know, creating and sharing memes can be an easy way to build simple backlinks to your site.  You can post memes to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest to help engage your customers via social media channels.  As my colleague points out in his recent blog post about using memes to boost traffic, build backlinks, and engage social media followers, it only takes one meme going viral to drive large amounts of traffic to your site — so get creative and make some memes today!

In the spirit of Friday, we put together some memes for you to share about inbound marketing strategies. Enjoy!

Don’t forget to share your own inbound marketing memes with us below!

As an associate consultant here at CloudTactix, I meet experts daily in everything from biotechnology to custom picture framing.

And though these experts may need help refining their SEO strategies, when it comes to their chosen disciplines they’re damned good at what they do.  It’s not uncommon for us to see clients with 4- and 5-figure Facebook followings (mostly devoted clients/customers) and upwards of 100 videos on YouTube.

In fact, we’re seeing a very obvious trend in our service-based clients right now: expertise isn’t just necessary for them to perform their service, it often is their service: many of our service-based clientele double as educators — and thankfully so.  Having a client who’s a passionate expert in a specialized field makes us all breathe a little easier around here: it means they’re often quicker to adopt inbound methodologies, so much of which depend on expertise for creating remarkable and original content. So besides the videos and blogs, what’s another way clients can increase their search engine ranking and general brand cred?

Quora

We sat down with a potential client last week to perform an initial analysis on their site and related social media efforts.  These guys were good.  Their resident blogger averages a post a day and they’ve shared dozens of videos on YouTube, all related to very industry specific software for which they offer classes in-house.

Chris Murvine (@CloudTactix) suggested they get familiar with Quora and start using it both as a way of generating inbound links and strengthening brand recognition.  They’d never heard of Quora.

Rising Searches for "Quora"

But they will.  This is the ‘rising searches’  box from a Google Insights report for “Quora.”  (I wrote an article last month laying out a scenario for using Google Insights for branding.)

Notice the highlighted searches.  What’s striking about this report, although both terms are breakout searches, “Quora app” ranks higher in the system, likely indicating that more people than not already know about Quora — because now they’re concerned with getting it on their mobile devices.

What does this mean big-picture?  Quora’s increased consumer interest may in fact be a direct result of its disruptor premise: as 140-character droplets flood the social-sphere, searchers have begun looking for a knowledgeable, credible, and professional life raft.

What does this mean for niche-market clients?  Simple: they need to be on Quora, and not just to attract customers but also to encourage the exchange of ideas amongst competitors.

It’s very likely that Quora will lead the charge of next generation online question & answer forums.  Encourage clients to place a Quora follow button on the social bar of their site, just as they should already have with Twitter and Facebook (Get it here).

Google Chrome (Photo credit: thms.nl)

As important as search engine rankings are to the inbound marketer, it can be an awfully frustrating thing to keep up with. Any number of things could be causing your search engine rankings to fluctuate and only some of those things are directly in your control.

For example, Search Engine Watch’s Eric Ward compiled a list of a few link building problems that could affect your search engine rankings in a recent blog post. Many of the problems, which I’ve listed below, can happen instantaneously without your immediate knowledge of them happening.

Here’s a list of problems that could be to blame if your site’s ranking is lower than you’d like it to be, complete with tips on how to go about fixing them:

1. Your competitors’ linked content is simply of higher quality than yours. In this case, there’s no easy way to go about fixing the problem. You just need to build better content, attract links to it and seek out links for the content you already have. Consider employing SEO-friendly 404 pages or  other creative link building tactics
2. Google changed its algorithm. Google constantly changes the way it indexes and ranks pages. This affects not only where your page ranks among competitors, but how valuable links from other sites, whose devaluation could also hurt your site’s ranking, are.
   If sites that link to yours are devalued, loosen your ties with those sites. If your site is hurt directly by the changes, there’s not a whole lot you can do about this other than try to improve your own content and link building efforts. For more information on how Google ‘works,’ check out our blog post from last week on it.
3. Someone’s cheating. If you or one of your competitors is using questionable linking tactics like spamming or paid-for text links, your ranking will be affected. Fortunately, Google catches on pretty quickly to shady tactics like those, so the boost in ranking is likely to be temporary. If your competitor’s spammy links are ranking it highly, it probably won’t last too long before Google devalues them. If you’re the one employing these strategies, it’s only a matter of time before Google finds out and your ranks take a hit.
4. A site that provided your site with valuable link juice shut down. This is rare, but sometimes sites shut down and unfortunately, they take all of their links with them. Once again, there’s not a whole lot you can do but move on and find other sources of links if this is the case.
5. Someone sabotaged your SEO strategy. I’ve personally never heard of this happening, but Ward says he’s had several clients whose sites were devalued because of spammy links placed on it by someone else. The insight to gain here is to always make sure your site is secure.

As more and more businesses scramble to cash in on the potential profitability of Facebook, we’ve seen a range of increasingly unique marketing methods of building Facebook fan bases. I personally experienced one of the more drastic methods the other day when I stopped into my local mall to purchase new clothes for work.

I was headed to The Limited after receiving a 30% off coupon for signing up for their emails. After looking around for a few minutes, I loaded up on nice tops and dresses and headed to the fitting room. As per usual, I was greeted by an artificially friendly salesman in the back, who unlocked the fitting room door for me before unloading her upsell. The conversation went like this:

Saleswoman: Are you shopping with a Limited card today?
Me: No.
Her: Well, just so you know, if you open a Limited card today you can get blah blah blah off your purchase!
Me: Thanks, but I brought in your email coupon, so I think I’ll pass on the credit card.
Her: The email coupon? I’m not familiar with that one. Are you a fan of The Limited on Facebook?
Me: No…
Her: Well, just so you know, if you “Like” us on Facebook while you’re in the store, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off up to 3 new items today. So if you have a smartphone…
Me, trying to get the woman to close the door already: Okay, really, thanks. Wait… what?

So here I am, trying on new clothes for my office job as an inbound marketing consultant, and thinking to myself: why the hell would a company that sells $150 dollar suit jackets offer 50% off up to 3 items just for a Facebook Like?

Needless to say, I went back through the store and picked the 3 most expensive items I could find to make sure I got the most out of their Facebook Like coupon (pictured below).  Overall, my total for a blazer, pair of work pants, and sheath dress came to just over $300. My total after “liking” Facebook at the checkout counter on my Smartphone? $150.

The Limited's 50% Off Facebook Like Coupon

Now, as someone who once worked in retail, I realize that retailers mark up their prices significantly so that when they offer sales, they can still make a profit on their products. But 50% off of three insanely expensive items for a Facebook Like puts the value of my Like at $150. This is in stark contrast to ChompOn’s recent valuation of a Facebook Like at approximately $8. Hmm. What’s going on here?

Without further ado, here’s what small business can learn from The Limited’s mistake of overvaluing their Facebook Likes:

Don’t overvalue your Facebook Likes. Let’s look at some numbers from my example above. The Limited has over 200,000 followers. Let’s say that 10% of their fans, or 20,000 Likes, came from using their 50% off offer. If those 20,000 people took advantage of the deal the way I did and saved $150, that’s $3,000,000 worth of discounts. Obviously, the price of your products and services and the percentage of the coupon deal you offer for Liking your company will alter these numbers. But avoid taking a huge monetary hit like this by promoting an offer that’s reasonable for your company.

Don’t undervalue your email list. The fact that The Limited’s 50% off deal for a Facebook “Like” was significantly more than (in fact, almost double) the 30% off coupon for signing up for email blasts undervalues their loyal email customers. While the benefit of using Facebook over email is the ability to post multiple times a day without making followers feel spammed, make sure to recognize that your email followers and Facebook followers are likely part of different demographics, and should thus be engaged in different ways.

If you’re going to offer discounts for in-store Likes, make the promotion quick and painless for your customers. Yes, the saleswoman in the store persuaded me to Like the store’s Facebook page. But when I opened my iPhone’s code scanner and asked her for the QR code, she had no f*#^ing idea what I was talking about. So if you want in-store users (who are already dedicated to your brand, considering they’re in your store) to commit to your Facebook page, direct them to Liking your page with a QR code. Use a free QR code generator, such as qrstuff.com, to direct customers to deals and other compelling content, which brings me to my next tip.

If you’re going to push Likes, make sure you’re sharing compelling content that discourages fans from Unliking and creates brand loyalty. This is perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from this example. If you’re going to spend the money on a promotion to build your Facebook fan base, give followers incentives to stay loyal. Yes, I clicked Like to get the instant discount, but I also clicked Unlike on the walk from the register out of the store—if you don’t prevent this from happening, you may as well be setting your money on fire.

A worthwhile agency will have a strategy that incorporates all the principles of inbound.

So, you’re ready to take the plunge.  You’ve read the ebooks, the blogs, and every white paper you can get your hands on.  You follow all the big names on Twitter and you’re a part of several Groups with ‘Inbound’ in the title.  You’re ready.

But what do you look for when hiring an inbound marketing agency?

The truth is, a lot of things.  But, if you’re still feeling overwhelmed by inbound, here are 5 quick traits to look for in a prospective inbound agency.

1.) They Offer the Right Services

They offer methods for increasing traffic to your site (SEO, PPC, etc.), as well as premium content like landing pages and other forms of online lead generation.

2.) They Have a Plan

Is there a strategy at work?  They should be able to articulate the specific details of their plan–and it should make logical sense.  For example, first they’ll focus on SEO and social media, then premium offers and landing pages, and, finally, lead nurturing.

3.) They Personalize 

You can tell whether your prospective agency is client-centered by the first meeting: do they tailor their pitch to you and your business, your website, your social media accounts?  Can they demonstrate, on the spot, the ways in which your website can be optimized for search, or how you can tie-in analytics to your social media posts?  Or are they working from a one-size-fits-all Powerpoint?

Stay away from one-size-fits-all Powerpoints.

4.) They Can (And Want) To Train You

This is important.  Because inbound marketing takes work.  Your prospective agency will, of course, spearhead your marketing efforts, but they’re going to need your help, especially when it comes to creating content.  You’re going to have to know the platforms like the back of your hand, and if your new agency is anything like ours, there’s going to be a lot of platforms.

5.) They Value Transparency

The most successful inbound campaigns are born from an understanding that they are partnerships.  And any lasting partnership requires transparency on both ends.  Your prospective agency should be forthright about their methods from the beginning, from everything from strategy to billing.

There you have it.  Not a comprehensive list by any means but it’s enough to get you started.

We want to hear from you.  What are some of the good, and maybe not so good, traits you’ve found in the inbound marketing professionals you’ve previously worked with?

Related articles

• 8 Easy Ways To Get Better Inbound Marketing Results(cloudtactix.com)

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• 5 Ways To Integrate Social Media With Other Inbound Marketing Efforts(cloudtactix.com)

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• The Opportunity Cost of Outbound Marketing: a Case Study, Part II(cloudtactix.com)

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Image via CrunchBase

Improving your company’s search engine ranking is the crux to inbound marketing. If your page doesn’t rank highly, your chance of getting found and therefore generating business is much lower.

The first step towards improving your inbound results is understanding exactly how Google works. Google’s head software engineer Matt Cutts gave a brief explanation of how Google used to work and how it currently works, including how it crawls the web, indexes pages, ranks them and handles search queries.

You can watch the video in full below, where I’ve also summarized Cutts’ main points.

Google used to crawl the web for a month before taking an additional two weeks to push out the data. Now, it crawls a significant portion of web pages daily, to keep its search results up to date.

“Instead of waiting for everything to finish, you’re incrementally updating your index. And we’ve gotten even better over time. At this point, we can get very, very fresh. Anytime we see updates, we can usually find them very quickly,” Cutts said.

The next step is indexing pages by what words and phrases appear in them.

“The whole process of doing the index is reversing so that instead of having the documents in word order, you have the words and they have it in document order. So it’s these are all the document the word appears in.”

The toughest part of the process, and probably the most important for inbound marketers, is ranking the pages. Cutts explained that things like word proximity, page reputation and links to it are among the most important factors when ranking pages.

“Once you’ve done what’s called document selection, you try to figure out how should you rank those, and that’s really tricky. We use PageRank as well as over 200 other factors in our rankings.”