Would you rather get 1,000,000 visitors from Google each month or 1,000? Your gut is probably telling you to go with 1,000,000, but the reality is you don’t have enough information to make an educated decision.

The keyword game isn’t just about traffic, it’s also about quality. You have to look at conversion rates to make an educated decision.

This means you have to look at larger goals and breakthrough keyword volume.

In my ten years in the business I’ve made creating high-converting keyword research plans a priority…let me share my 3-step plan with you:

Step #1: Keyword research for SEO

When you research for keywords on your own site, it’s a lot easier to do because you know the content inside out. It’s almost instinct.

But if you are working on a new site, then it is best that you do a lot of keyword research. This means starting with a list of keywords. If you don’t have a list, then work through as much content as you can.

As you do that, think about this…

• Think about any word or category you don’t understand – Drop these words into Google and see what kind of results come up.
• Do these results match what you are trying to accomplish – Or does it look like their competitor? As you will see when we get into the conversion part of keyword research, keywords that don’t convert waste time and visitors.

When you find non-converting keywords, search through and remove any other keywords that are similar. As you do this your list of categories will probably change as you start to understand your site’s content. But it’s always easier to start with too many categories, which you can reduce later.

Check the estimated search volumes and make sure they match what you expect.

For instance, do more people search for “SEO consultant” or “SEO services.” Or do more people search for “florist” or “flowers”? Or do more people search for “washers” or “washing machines”?

While you may lean towards the more technically correct “SEO services,” you might find that more people are actually searching for SEO consultants, so you’ll want to work more references of “SEO consultants” into your copy.

And you are ready to use these 5 questions to maximize your keyword research. The following exercise is recommended by Jenny Halasz, and is a very helpful way to uncover keywords for clients efficiently and effectively.

1. How would you describe your site? – After you’ve spent some time evaluating your site and creating your own keyword bucket based upon what you read, you ask yourself to describe the site. You’ll notice that you’ll will probably tell yourself a lot of what you read on your own site. But just because you may understand your content and technical jargon, it doesn’t mean others will. This will help you figure out what focus on what needs to change.
2. Why would someone choose you over a competitor? – What makes your product unique? These are keyword conversion type questions that will ultimately decide if you come up in searches versus the competitor.
3. What products are like yours but not competitors? – An e-reader maker might say that smart phones are similar products since people can read on their phones…but not competitors since people will use smart phones for entirely different things.
4. Do you have a flagship product? – Is it your most profitable product? What are the reasons for promoting one product over another? The answer to these questions will help you focus. This will help you first focus all your energy on ranking that one instead of the others.
5. What are your most important keywords? – This question will help you back away from a mistaken belief that you have to rank for thousands of keywords. There are only ten really important keywords. Then there are the others.

Once you have a base of keywords, you have to use them to discover untapped opportunities. See, keyword research isn’t important just for building your current business, but it will help you identify possible opportunities or neglected markets.

This doesn’t have to be time consuming…you only need to pay attention to the data with an eye to helping build your current business and an eye to finding new markets.

Using tools like Google Insights, Keyword Tool and Trends will create a bulk of words in which just with a casual scan you can identify possible new opportunities.

Step #2: Keyword research for semantic understanding

As you develop your core keywords for SEO, you want to next shift into the area of semantic search keywords. There are a lot of advantages for having a keyword database like this:

• Higher CTR – When you are using highly-targeted keywords, your CTR will improve…and if all your conversion funnel elements are in place are optimized for semantic searches…your CTR will skyrocket.
• Reduce bid amount – Naturally, if you are creating keywords that are more a tune with searchers wants, you won’t pay as much for your pay-per-click campaigns as less, but higher-quality clicks will result in less money spent.
• Raise quality score – This situation then leads to your semantically higher relevance for your keywords, which the search engines will happily reward you since you are contributing value to the web.

So, let’s look at some ways to find semantic keywords. They are not as easy to determine as SEO keywords. I’ll show you the tools that I use when analyzing a site and looking to build a semantic keyword database.

• Optimizing semantic keywords around trends – One of my favorite strategies when it comes to staying in the public eye…and at the top of search rankings…is to develop keywords around trending topics. Fortunately there are some great tools to use like Google Trends, Ice Rocket, Trendrr TV and TweetVolume.
• Studying social bookmarking tags – Analyzing how tags are used in social bookmarking platforms is another good way to generate semantic keywords. I would use sites like Diigo, Pinterest, Licorize and Delicious.

And to take things a step further you can also use the advanced search. The quickest way to find semantic keywords is to search on Google, and then look at their advanced search results…

Now click “related searches”…

…and all of your terms will appear:

From the results above you can determine that people are typically looking for brands when shopping. Knowing that is gold.

Google Instant will also give you further ideas for semantic…ideas that don’t show up in the “related search” results:

Now let me show you what semantic search is all about. Search for “lap top repair”…

…and you’ll see all of the similar keyword phrases. But when you look at Google Instant you’ll get this:

Now you have options related to location.

Obviously you don’t scoop all these terms up and dump them in your database. Keyword research involves carefully sorting through and understanding each phrase. Some will be obvious ones to use…others not so much. And then you should use Google Insights to narrow your keyword list down by category:

Just as semantic keyword research is about finding actual keywords you can use in your SEO campaigns…it’s just as much about building a complete profile of your target customer. And the better you can understand your target customer the better your campaign results will be!

Step #3: Creating keywords for conversion

At this point you should have dozens of files that you exported from dozens of keyword tools…flipping back and forth between those files isn’t efficient, so you need to create a master table in a database that you can eventually export into Excel.

This is a trick I learned from Tom Schmitz, and you don’t need to know how to work a database to do it. You do need Microsoft Access. Here’s what you do:

1. Put all of your keywords into one master file.
2. Sort all your keywords into number of words and then number of searches.
3. Identify all relevant keywords under three words.
4. Identify all keywords that are embedded in larger phrases.
5. Set traffic limits that are relevant to the site that you are trying to optimize. I’d recommend that a site that gets a ton of traffic will have a higher traffic limit than a site with a lower traffic limit.
6. Anything that is left over, keep it if it is relevant.

At the end, copy all the keywords you marked or set them aside into one table. These are your keyword candidates.

The above steps are pretty typical for SEO keyword research that is done on a practical, efficient and effective level.

You are now ready to look at the conversion side of your keyword research. The basic rule is this: you need to assign keywords to a target page. If there is no target page, then you have a useless keyword.

Go through your keywords and assign target pages. This post by Rand will tell you how to target more than one phrase to a page.

Once you have assigned keywords, now you can think about tracking these keywords. Here’s what you need to look at:

• Organic visitors – How many visitors do search engines bring from natural search for each particular keyword?
• Exact match search – What is the volume of exact matches when people are searching and landing on your target page? The higher this number the closer you are to correctly targeting your consumer.
• Phrase match – You are looking at the volume of phrase matches for this one, too. And the conclusion is the same…the higher the volume the closer you are to correctly targeting your consumer.
• Keyword diversity – How many different keywords are bringing in traffic? If you have a narrow variety of keywords, then you need to figure out how to expand that amount. Are the keywords with low search volume relevant? Do you need to re-evaluate their effectiveness?

Conclusion

This three-step process of researching and identifying keywords will help you build a comprehensive and effective keyword plan that will help increase your traffic and more importantly boost your revenue.

I know the process above can be time consuming, but if you don’t start off with a proper keyword plan you’ll just end up flushing your money down the toilet.

Do you have any other advice for creating effective and profitable keywords?

Direct response marketing is a huge industry that’s raking in nearly $200 billion dollars every year…even during recessions. It’s based on a few principles that the real Mad Men like David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins and George Lois have used over the last century of advertising.

Knowing these principles can make you a lot of money…especially online where the Internet is a medium that is perfectly suited for these direct-marketing principles.

When I got started as an entrepreneur I studied these guys to learn their secrets and applied their tactics to help build my two companies, Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.

Let me share with you the 7 most important lessons I learned.

Lesson #1: Creating the right list

Direct marketing success lives or dies on you having the right list. This list could be your blog subscribers or Twitter followers. But the tried-and-true method is to grow your email newsletter list.

There are only two ways that I recommend you grow it:

1. Organically: Place an email newsletter subscribe box on your site or use a Hellobar to encourage people to sign up.
2. Guest posting – In your byline of your guest post entice people to visit your site and sign up.

And if you are impatient like me, you probably are going to make some of the mistakes I made when you start creating your list:

• Mistake #1 – Buying lists – I totally understand that you’d like to have a list of 50,000 email subscribers by tomorrow, but as tempting as it is to buy a list, don’t do it. You’ll get blacklisted by your ISP, fired by your email service provider and you’ll look like a spammer because people are going to mark your email as spam if they didn’t directly sign up to your list.
• Mistake #2 – Focusing on quantity and not quality – Large lists aren’t always better. They are difficult to manage, and only about 20% of that list is paying attention. So focus on things that get your readers active and engaged.
• Mistake #3 – Breaking expectations – When you start your list, set up expectations of frequency, design and content. And never break those expectations without giving your readers fair warning.
• Mistake #4 – Looking at open rates only – Open rates only tell half the story. You also need to look at other metrics like CTR, soft bounces, hard bounces, abuse complaints and, of course, unsubscribes.
• Mistake #5: Boring or repurposed content – If you want to destroy your email newsletter quickly then don’t give your readers anything new, special or exciting. Just feed them stuff you can get off your blog, or some random thoughts you had over the weekend. This deserves your best attention and content…so give it to them. 

Lesson #2: The longer your copy the more you will sell

There is a long history of advertising people proving the claim that a long copy will always beat out the shorter version.

Let me point out that this doesn’t mean you should write 8 pages when two will do. The question isn’t “Is it too long?”

The question is “Is it interesting?”

As long as you are focused on the needs of the readers and giving them exactly what they want…they’ll read a 16-page sales letter.

Does long copy work on the web where attention spans are short? Of course! When someone has a problem they want solved they will slow down and read.

So how do you make long copy interesting? One of the best formulas I like to use is called Pain-Agitate-Solve. Here’s how it works:

• Pain – Identify the number one problem that your prospect has. Are they overweight? About to lose their job? Facing a divorce? Want that promotion so bad?
• Agitate – Once you’ve identified and explained that problem in such a way that resonates with them…stir it up. Tell them the consequences if they don’t do something to change. Paint a picture of the pain getting worse and worse.
• Solve – Once you’ve agitated, now give them the solution…which is your product.

And best of all, long sales copy doesn’t have to look spammy. Look how we do it on Crazy Egg as well as on my Quick Sprout Traffic System. The copy on both of those pages convert very well, and the design is clean.

Lesson #3: Use conversational copy to sell

Whether you are blogging or writing a sales letter, you need to write like you talk. If you find this difficult, imagine yourself sitting down with a friend and then telling him or her about your product.

How would you explain it? You wouldn’t use business talk or jargon. Your business partner might know what you are talking about…but your customer won’t have a clue.

Here are the 3 essential rules that I live by when it comes to writing conversational copy:

• Keep it simple – Use words that are about a 5^th grade reading level. This is a proven method of keeping attention that newspapers and direct marketing advertisers have used for years. Programs like Microsoft Word will allow you to test the reading level.
• Ask questions – Ever met a really good conversationalist? Notice how they always keep the attention on you by asking questions? It’s a technique that works equally well in sales copy.
• Use the word “you” – To help you keep your copy focused on the reader, always write “you” instead of us, them or we. This makes it really personal and conversational.

Lesson #4: You have to tell your readers what to do

It may sound pushy, but telling readers what to do is actually a proven technique to generating sales, email subscriptions…in fact, any action you want your reader to do.

In the direct marketing industry, this is called your “call-to-action” or CTA. Every sales letter has to have one. If not, then I don’t care how persuasive your copy is…it will fail.

What are the principles behind good CTAs? Here are four:

• Only one – If you are trying to get your prospect to sign up for a coaching spot, then your CTA should focus on that…and that alone. Don’t offer other CTAs.
• Short – Great CTAs tell you what to do in as few words as possible. “Join Us.” “Buy Now.” “Donate Here.”
• Urgent – Great CTAs also will create urgency by a deadline. “Limited supply. Order now.” “75% Discount ends midnight tonight.”
• Irresistible – You will probably think that this is obvious, but you won’t believe how many times I’ve analyzed a clients site to see boring CTAs. If you want to see some really great CTAs, study Groupon’s offers. These are irresistible, plain and simple.

Lesson #5: Your headline really counts

When writing blog posts, I spend about ten percent of my time on creating good headlines. I have a few books on my shelf that I leaf through to get ideas and several blogs I look at.

Using the 4 U’s, I then write about ten or twenty headlines until I hit one that feels right. I then sit on that one for a while or even run it by a friend. Sometimes I’ll even send myself an email with the title as the subject line and not look at it until later. If I see the subject line and get pulled…even though it’s my headline…I keep it!

Here are the books I recommend for writing great headlines:

• Testing Advertising Methods – This classic has over 18 chapters devoted to headlines. It is essential for any advertisers shelf.
• Psychological Triggers – Joe Sugarman wrote some really great short headlines. While I don’t think these short ones would work now, they are great for generating other ideas.
• Breakthrough Advertising – Eugene Schwartz’s book is a must read, but also essential for the headline ideas.

The blogs that I look at for headline ideas are these:

• Gawker – They really know how to be sensational and get people’s attention. In fact, you may have to tone back a headline if you copy one of theirs.
• Fast Company – They generate a lot of content, so there are fresh new ideas every morning. These are often very long and specific.
• Copyblogger – Of course this list would be incomplete if not for this blog.

Lesson #6: Test everything

Direct response marketing wouldn’t be what it is without the component of testing. Testing is what makes it “direct response.” You get to see the response of your marketing campaigns.

In the past this was measured several ways. An advertiser could buy a one-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with an offer on a coupon prospects clipped and mailed in. All the advertiser had to do was count the number of coupons to measure his success.

The same goes for an advertiser who mails a sales letters to highly-targeted homes. How many reply cards did he get back? That’s the response.

This is what makes direct marketing response so powerful…you can measure return and the tweak to improve conversion.

While it’s pretty simple to test and measure your online campaigns, the growth of the industry has created a lot of confusion and has overwhelmed a lot of people, which is the reason I wrote a guide to help you understand web analytics. Here are the bullet points:

• Identify your business objectives before you start creating copy and testing.
• Specify website goals like “sell more widgets.”
• Create KPIs like landing page hits, economic value and conversation level.
• Discover your segments based upon acquisition, behavior and outcomes.

It will take time to truly understand web metrics, but mastering this skill will give you a powerful edge over your competitors!

Lesson #7: Never stop learning and never give up

When you go through steps 1 through 6 things won’t always work out the way you want them to. I know it didn’t always work out for the people like David Ogilvy and it definitely didn’t always work out for me.

With Crazy Egg, we went through 6 variations of our homepage before we found a version that worked out…and it happened to be a long sales letter. The previous versions were all created based upon customer feedback and data, but none-the-less they didn’t convert well.

With my Quick Sprout Traffic System I launched a long sales page around 3 years ago and it failed. The current version on the other hand is doing extremely well, but I had to go through a few iterations before I created something that converted well.

You probably aren’t going to succeed on your first shot. But that’s ok. As long as you are learning through the process and you keep pushing forward like the real Mad Men, you’ll do fine.

Conclusion

The Internet is truly the direct response marketers best friend…it’s quick and easy to test, create conversational content and build a money making list.

There really isn’t any excuse for anyone who is willing to put in the sweat equity to create a profitable online business. You just have to be willing to open your eyes and leverage some of the tactics that are old, boring, but yet still work… such as direct response.

How are you using direct response techniques?

November 2007 was a weird couple weeks.

It was my third month on the job and I’d just received management duties for an entire business unit. While this was a sweet opportunity, it came with high stakes: I was expected to grow revenue immediately. It didn’t matter that I was a rookie and the previous manager had been a vet.

Sometimes, you either perform or get out of the way.

Somehow, I figured out how to do it. That first month I set a new revenue record for that business. Then I re-set the record the 2nd month. Then did it again the third.

In this post I’m going to give you 3 promotional strategies I discovered during and after that time.

They’re useful for generating both short term, rapid sales boosts and long term, sustainable growth.

• The Teaser-Trailer Technique – It creates an immediate sales spike.
• The Second Closer Strategy Usually boosts sales by ~10% permanently.
• The Testimonial Getter Gets you testimonials, a proof-asset that will also help grow your conversion rate permanently.

I’m also going to show you the exact emails I’ve used for each one, so you can replicate these strategies (and get results) with maximum speed and minimum effort. And finally, we’ll cover the psychology behind each technique, so you understand why they work and further develop your overall conversion chops.

Since that November 2007 “situation,” I’ve consulted many clients in conversion optimization and tested these strategies across different businesses.

They’ve worked every time for me, though your results of course may vary. You’ll need to tweak them to your business specifics, but I’d wager almost any online business can use these. All you need is an autoresponder service and a little motivation.

Let’s dig in:

Case Study 1 of 3: The Teaser-Trailer Technique that Made a Month of Profit in Just One Week

The goal of the Teaser-Trailer Technique (TTT) is to produce a large, immediate cash injection into your business.

It doesn’t create permanent growth, but it’s useful to run once or twice a year to produce a bunch of cash. It persuades your prospect to buy your product by combining 3 psychological forces hardwired into the human brain: reciprocity, scarcity, and anticipation.

Robert Cialdini discusses these in his seminal book, but here’s a quick primer on how these triggers work:

The force of anticipation is simple to understand
If you’re looking forward to or curious about an upcoming event, you’re more likely to pay attention to it when it actually happens.

For example, think about what happens anytime Apple announces an upcoming iPhone event. They share no details aside from when the event will happen, and it sends the tech press into an absolute frenzy of guessing what will happen. By creating this anticipation beforehand, Apple maximizes their publicity and attention on the day of the actual event.

In the TTT, you’re going to leverage anticipation the same way. You’ll announce that something cool and new is coming, but you won’t say exactly what.

Reciprocity is also simple
If I do a favor for you, you’ll feel compelled to return a favor for me. Neil’s “get the tab” strategy is a great example of this. We humans don’t like having debts (no matter how small) to others. If someone does something nice for us, we subconsciously look for ways to pay them back. With the TTT, you’ll create reciprocity by giving your prospect a free, yet valuable gift.

The power of scarcity shows
The less available something is, the more we tend to want it. You will tap into this in your TTT by putting a deadline on the promotion, so your prospects take action without delay.

(Bonus) It’s also important to provide a reason why you’re running any promotion
Humans are inherently skeptical, but if you provide a reason for doing something (however small), our skepticism is very easily calmed. In the TTT, you will tie your promotion to a current event or season theme.

OK, here’s what I did…

How to Execute Your TTT Promo

This might sound simple, and that’s because it is. Simple works. Here are the 4 steps:

1. Create an awesome free report/gift that your followers will love.
2. Send an email to your list letting them know you’ll be giving a free gift the next day. This creates anticipation for the gift, maximizing how many people download it.
3. Send another email that delivers the free gift. If it is truly valuable, this will build good will and a desire in your prospects to reciprocate your kind gesture.
4. Make a special offer for your product. This provides an opportunity for your prospect to fulfill that reciprocation while also getting a special deal.

Here’s how I performed each step.

The Theme and Promotion
The business unit I ran at the time was MindValley Labs (this has since evolved into MindValley Insights). Our prospects were other entrepreneurs interested in growing their online sales. It was Thanksgiving time and everyone was preparing for the upcoming holiday spending, so our promotion tied these 2 ideas together. The basic idea was “online consumers are about to spend a ton of money in the next 6 weeks, so you better get your site optimized for it.”

Our special promotion was slashing our price from $147 down to $97. We rarely discounted our price, so this was a huge opportunity for anyone that hadn’t bought yet.

The Freebie
The key to the Freebie is that it’s truly valuable and immediately useful to your prospect. If she sees your free material is good, she’ll be more interested in your paid stuff. To create this, I took an advanced module from our paid product and turned it into an ebook. It taught readers several advanced conversion optimization techniques, which they could implement right away.

I then added sections in the ebook to announce and link to our special offer. This way, only the people who read the freebie knew about the promotion, so it felt more exclusive. If the reader enjoyed the ebook, this promotion gave her a way to not only get more training, but get it at a rare discounted price.

Email 1 (The Teaser, sent Day 1)
As mentioned, the sole purpose of this email is to create anticipation. All we did was tell her we we’d be sending a special gift in 2 days:

Dear {FIRSTNAME},

On Friday, November 23, 2007, I’m going to send you a special download link to grab a copy of a short report you BETTER READ if you want to cash in on this holiday season. It’s an advanced sales strategy for (ethically) using psychological triggers to inspire customers to buy from you.

It won’t cost you anything, but it is only available until Monday the 26th.

After that, the report will no longer be accessible.

Plus, within the report will be a special holiday gift from MindValley Labs. I won’t tell you what it is now, but let’s just say it“s in the spirit of this holiday season.

Watch your inbox Friday morning.

Happy Holidays,

[your name]

PS — Remember, it’s only available until Monday, so don’t miss the report… or the special gift within.

Email 2 (The Trailer, sent Day 2)
This email should come exactly when you said it would. And all you do here is provide the link to download the free gift, remind her of the deadline, and let her know there’s another cool gift inside the report:

{FIRSTNAME},

You might have received a confusing email from us this past weekend that referenced some deadlines that had already passed. Let’s just say our email server had a large Turkey Hangover and was looking to take the holiday off.

Yes, this even happens to tech companies.

Anyway, as promised earlier, we’ve got the download link ready for you to grab a complimentary copy of our report “6 Psychological Triggers That Will Make Your Visitors Buy From You Today and Tomorrow.”

Obtain your copy here:

[link]

Remember, it is only available for a short time — through Wednesday November 28.

Also, we’d like to remind you that inside this report you’ll find your very own gift from MindValley Labs.

Only people who read the report will be eligible for our gift…

… which we dare say is probably the best one you’ll receive this holiday season.

Enjoy and happy holidays,

[Your Name]

PS — Did you know there will be an estimated 474.5 billion dollars spent this holiday season? Make your piece of the pie a big one!

[link]

A couple notes on this one:

• Our email server messed up the delivery and Email 2 didn’t actually come when we said it would. Hence, I apologized for that in the first paragraph. (The promo was still super successful, though, which is a testament to the technique’s power.)
• The link in this email sent folks to a landing page where they had to sign up to receive the report. This way I could segment them and send targeted reminders about the promotion as the deadline approached.

If you’re new or you’d like further analysis of these emails, you can view the short video below. I go through each email line-by-line and explain how you can tweak them for your own use.

Following Up
For a few days afterward, I sent follow-up emails to that sublist (those who signed up to get the freebie) reminding them about the promo and deadline. No hard selling, just simple reminders like a friend would send (“Hey, just letting you know the sale ends in 2 days…”).

And that was it. If they clicked the link in the freebie ebook, they went to a tweaked product page with all the details. All I did was add a note at the top and reminders wherever price was listed.

I kept everything tied to our theme of “preparing for holiday spending,” so it felt less like a marketing ploy and more like a friendly hook up for those folks who actually took action and downloaded the freebie.

It worked like gangbusters for me and, with a little creativity, you should be able to get similar or even better results than I did.

Here is a Video Walking You Through The Entire Process

Here is an image to go along with it (click for larger size). Disregard the circle about the sharing function, that complicates things unnecessarily.

Why This Works

This strategy was the sole reason I broke our sales record that first month. I had virtually no marketing experience; it succeeded in spite of my personal skills.

And what I took away from the experience was this: while great copy certainly helps, the real key to conversion and sales growth is understanding selling psychology and how to make a truly irresistible offer.

This is critical to understand: what you say is more important than how you say it. Put another way, the strategy is more important than the individual tactics.

To help you solidify this understanding, let’s review the psychological forces this promotion taps into. You can use this as a checklist as you deploy this promo yourself:

1. Your theme gives you a reason why you’re running the promotion – My example: “get ready for holiday spending.”
2. Your promo ultimately makes a really great offer for your product – My example: ~ 33% off a rarely discounted product.
3. Your Teaser email creates anticipation about the cool new freebie you’re about to release – This makes it much more likely your prospect opens the Trailer when it arrives the next day.
4. Your freebie builds good will, trust, and reciprocity in your prospect – Plus, it links to your promo page, so you can cash in on that good will right as your prospect is feeling it. My example: our freebie showed advanced sales tactics my prospect could use right away to increase revenue. Every so often within it, I announced and linked to the promo page in a shaded box.
5. You use deadlines for both the freebie and promotion to create scarcity – This subtly urges your prospect to take action. My example: my freebie was available for ~ 3 days and the sale expired about 3 days after that.
6. Your reminder emails leave nothing to chance – You don’t want anybody missing or forgetting about your awesome promo.

Now It’s Your Turn

The first time I did this it took about 2 days to devise and execute. With this outline and the main emails already written, you should be must faster. Here are the action steps to follow to do so:

1. Devise your reason for running the promotion – Use this as your overall theme throughout.
2. Create a good freebie you can give away – You can take an existing module from your product or create something new. Here are some examples if you’re not sure what to create. If you’re a traffic analytics company, you could create a guide showing specific traffic generation techniques. (You could even get this info from your clients.) If you sell accounting software to accountants, you could interview expert accountants to get the latest tax-saving developments in the IRS guidelines and provide the transcript. If you sell pest-control services, you could offer a guide showing simple things home-owners can do to prevent pests in the first place.
3. Create a simple landing page offering the freebie – When she signs up, your autoresponder should automatically send it to her.
4. Create a tweaked sales page that offers your special sale – Examples of specials are a price discount, additional bonuses, bigger trial period, special 1 on 1 consultation, etc.
5. Tweak my emails to write your teaser and trailer – Then you need write the simple promo-reminder emails.
6. Send them out – You have to mail them out. You can do it on your server or through programs like Aweber and MailChimp.
7. Profit and enjoy a bunch more delighted customers – Make sure you are analyzing everything so you can fine tune your campaigns.

Case Study 2 of 3: The “Second Closer” that Permanently Grew Sales 10%

As of February 2012, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 65.23%.

Imagine that, for every 3 people that take the time to peruse your site, spend cognitive energies deciding what to buy, then add those items to your cart… 2 of them end up bailing.

This soul-crushing statistic has led to a plethora of analysis and strategies for cart recovery. The main idea is: this person has expressed interest by selecting items, but something held her back, so you should think about the possible reasons for bailing and then shoot her a follow-up email that addresses them.

Then hope this email pushes her over the edge to buy. This typically boosts sales 5 – 15%.

This is great, but I have one question. If this person is already on your email list (this nuance is critical, you MUST have permission to contact them)… why only follow up with her once she has added an item to your cart? Aren’t there other forms of “expressing interest” in your products?

In my view, yes there is. And that action would be clicking an email link that points to a product page. If she was curious enough to click your product page link, she must have at least moderate interest in what you offer.

The best part is email marketing software make it incredibly easy to track who clicks what links in your emails. So, if you link to product pages in your emails, you should be able to determine which of those folks didn’t ultimately purchase.

And so this made me wonder: what if I followed up with them and made an irresistible offer? Would that help her complete the purchase and boost sales?

We devised a strategy to find out…

… and were stunned with the results: 10% growth in sales, literally overnight. No matter what your revenue numbers are, this is huge.

Here’s How It Works

Step 1: Once someone clicks a link to a product page, add them to a sublist in your email system

Step 2: If she doesn’t buy within 24 hours, have your system automatically send her a follow up with a great offer

Now, how easily you can implement this yourself depends on your email service and/or shopping cart software. (I’ll explain how we did it below.) However, you should realize that it only takes a finite amount of time to implement, but the growth in sales will pay off forever. If that doesn’t excite you, you might reconsider the business you’re in.

Below is the exact email I sent. It was a software product for online business owners that automated some revenue-boosting activities. I have pulled out identifying details to respect the product owner.

Subject: {FIRSTNAME} – test [PRODUCT] for $1

Dear {FIRSTNAME},

I’m sending you this message because I know you’re into or at least curious about the growing your website by leaps and bounds.

I was there once, sitting at my desk with my hand nervously touching my face.

Some time ago you reviewed the [PRODUCT] but did not buy it.

You’re probably skeptical, so I came up with something that will make it really hard for you to not give it a try:

Test the [PRODUCT] for $1!

{LINK 112}

If you haven’t found all of the answers yet, you can put me up on my promise that this will MORE than deliver a serious sales injection.

You see, some people have trust issues and therefore are afraid that an offer like this would get taken advantage of.

Simply put, I’m not worried about this. In an overwhelming number of cases, people are trustworthy (read Freakonomics for experimental results proving this).

So, I want to extend this offer to try [PRODUCT] for just 1 dollar. If you love the increased revenue to your site – great! We won’t bill you until the 8th day.

If for some reason you don’t like that extra cashola, just drop us an email at [SUPPORT EMAIL] and we’ll cheerfully cancel your purchase and wish you good luck.

Take a look here: {LINK 112}

Thanks,

[ YOUR NAME ]

PS: Yes, you can test the [PRODUCT] for 7 days for just one dollar. If it doesn’t work out for you, simply drop me an email and we’ll give you that dollar back:

{LINK 112}

Let’s take a line-by-line look at what’s happening in that email so you can replicate it:

This email copy isn’t great, but it got the job done. Re-doing it today, I would flow it something like:

1. Remind her that she recently showed interest in the product, but didn’t buy
2. Make a compelling offer (free trial, $1 trial, free shipping, etc)
3. Re-iterate your most powerful benefits and differentiators
4. Show a testimonial(s)
5. Remind her of your guarantee
6. Make the offer again

We implemented this using Autoresponse Plus and our in-house shopping cart. As I write this, Autoresponse Plus is not taking new customers until their new version is done. Infusionsoft and Office Autopilot should also both work fine. With a bit of finagling, a lot of other services should work as well.

Here’s how we set it up.

1. First, the prospect must already be on your email list, so you have permission to contact her.
2. Next, anytime she clicked an email link to a product page, we tagged her as “clicked link to Product X”
3. If she bought within 24 hours, the tag was removed because we don’t need to follow up.
4. If she did NOT buy within 24 hours, our system sent her a product-specific follow up email as shown above

Just like the TTT, this strategy is painfully simple, but the results speak for themselves. For the technically minded, you could also do this:

• Have your email link pass her name/email as variables within the link to the product page
• Install javascript on the product page that reads her name/email and adds her to a “interested in Product X” sublist via the API of your email system
• After 24 hours, have your email system run her name against your customer list. Proceed as I’ve directed in Steps 3 and 4 above based on what it finds.

I should note that we saw an additional small, but worthwhile boost by adding a second follow up after 48 hours, so you might test that as well. The more important point to realize is you needn’t worry or slave over amazing copywriting to make this work. Again, the offer itself carries the bulk of the power. The strategy outweighs the tactics.

It’s far more important that you 1) actually follow up and 2) make a truly great offer.

Also, because we offered a 7-day trial, a fair number ended up canceling. This created a non-trivial amount of support to process. However, I think you’ll agree that 10% sales growth is certainly worth a few extra support requests.

Why This Works

This strategy is based on one simple marketing principle: it makes an irresistible offer to your customer right after she shows interest in your product. If a prospect shows interest in your product, it’s absolutely critical you follow up with her as fast as possible.

With information overload and the day to day grind, she can rapidly forget what made your product compelling in the first place. You need to get in front of her while she’s hot.

Implement the Second Closer and you can act on this principle to grow sales right now.

Case Study 3 of 3: The Testimonial Getter that Pulled in ~40 Testimonials

I stumbled on this strategy in yet another situation of great peril. Here’s the story.

I run a small online hookah business and a few years ago we were exploring paid traffic options. One thing college doesn’t teach you is Google and Facebook forbid tobacco-related products in their advertising programs. Here was all this potential traffic… and I couldn’t access it.

But in 2009 I had an epiphany.

It stemmed from something you do learn in college: smoke rings are cool. Anyone who likes hookah also likes smoke rings. As a result, on our website we generated leads by offering a free guide to blowing smoke rings. To get the guide, she had to sign up to our list.

My epiphany: I could also use this guide to generate leads via paid traffic (looking back, this is a no-brainer).

I could create a separate mini site, bid on hookah-related keywords, and then capture those leads via landing pages offering the guide. There was nothing for sale, so I figured this would let me attract traffic while remaining within Google’s guidelines.

Except I was missing one key component…

Testimonials.

If I had any hope of a decent conversion rate, I needed testimonials attesting to the quality of the guide. Why? Because testimonials boost conversion by backing up your promises.

What I did have, though, was an email list of folks who’d already used it to get results… a big pool of possible endorsers.

I didn’t want to straight up ask for a testimonial because that’s just not that cool. (Plus, asking that way might make my subscribers feel pressured to respond, causing unnatural language and creating unbelievable testimonials that do more harm than good.)

So I came up with a better way, the creatively named “Testimonial Getter.”

It consists of just 3 emails. And on top of pulling excellent testimonials for you, it also gets negative feedback, which is just as valuable.

Here’s How It Works

First, I sent this email to everyone on my smoke ring email list:

Testimonial Getter Email 1

SUBJECT LINE: REALLY QUICK — can you help me with this?

Hey {!firstname}

I’ve got a new project related to the Smoke Ring Guide I sent you… and I was hoping you could help me with something.

(By the way, if you missed the link or lost the guide, you can get it here: LINK)

OK, before I get started on this new project, I need to ask a favor:

Could you help me out by answering these 3 (VERY quick) questions about the guide?

1. In what SPECIFIC ways did the Smoke Ring Guide help you?

2. How long did it take you to learn?

3. Would you recommend this guide to your friends?

Please be as specific as possible. It’ll really help me.

If you hit me back with answers, I’ve got a little treat I’ll send as a “thank you”

Talk soon,

Mike

Here’s a line-by-line review of that email:

1. I quickly let her know I’m asking for a favor and gave a reason for my request. People are inherently good and if you have even a decent relationship with your followers, they’ll be glad to help you.
2. I’m not explicitly asking for a testimonial. This way, your responses will have natural language and cover a wide range of benefits.
3. The questions are specifically tailored to get info that would make a good testimonial (more on that below).
4. Lastly, I’ve incentivized her with a little treat for responding. The “treat” was a coupon for her next order, but I didn’t reveal this yet because I didn’t want to influence her answers.
5. Answering was the only way she could find out what the treat was, so this curiosity drives her to respond.

The responses you receive will either be testimonial-worthy or not, so I prepared a different email for each scenario.

In the event her feedback wasn’t super positive, the response is easy. Thank her for the feedback, respond (if necessary) to anything particularly negative, and then deliver the treat. Here’s the template I used (and you can copy):

Email 2a (No Testimonial Possible)

John, thanks so much for the feedback.

All right, as the “treat” I mentioned, here’s a little coupon for your next purchase. It’s good until June 15, so you can stock up on some good summer shisha.

(IMPORTANT) One you’re ready to use it, here’s how to redeem it:

STEP 1: Go here to register or login to your Hobo account (takes 5 seconds):

LINK

(You must log in or the coupon won’t work… This ensures only insiders like you will be able to access the discount.)

STEP 2: Now make your order and on the first step of the checkout put “smokering!” (no quotes) in the coupon box.

And voila, you just saved 15%. Works on orders of any size.

Rock on,
Mike

I received an overwhelming number of positive responses when I ran this. Here’s a typical example:

1. Well, first off I was only able to nail the coughing and cracking methods, much to my surprise ( I can’t even whistle). So now I am able to blow O’s with faily little effort thanks to the guide. Other than that, the guide opened me up to a new realm of smoking hookah, making smoking sessions more amusing and entertaining. I’ve noticed that my lung capacity has also greatly improved… won’t be hearing a cough from this guy any time soon.

2. It barely took me anytime to learn. Within my first smoking session of trying, I was readily able to get the O rolling. I feel you really just need to sense the smoke flow and control it by experimenting with your own features ( tips in the smoke ring guide).

3. I’d most certainly take the time to present the Smoke Ring Guide to my hookah buddies, as I already have!

Thanks, John.

Look at that. Without knowing it, he gave me perfect material for a testimonial. He told me how he got surprising results, plus how long it took to get them.

What you want to do in this case is lightly edit the response to keep the same message, but make it more concise. Then you ask him to sign off. Here’s what that response looks like.

Email 2b (Testimonial Possible)

[NAME],

Thanks so much for the feedback — it’s sweet to hear about your progress!

OK, 2 more things:

==============
Item 1
==============

After reading your feedback I wanted to ask one more thing — would you mind if I put your quote on the site? It’s really helpful to show other would-be HoboHeroes what other users thought… rather than me blabbering on and on about it.

To save you some time, I lightly edited it and here’s what it would look like:

“Mike, wanted to let you know I was rolling O’s in my very first smoking session. I was able to nail the coughing and cracking methods, which was pretty surprising ( I can’t even whistle)… and now I’m able to blow O’s with faily little effort thanks to the guide. I’ve now been opened me up to a new realm of smoking hookah, making smoking sessions more amusing and entertaining. Thanks! –John”

Just reply with “yes” if that’s cool to use. If you want to tweak it or need me to edit your name or anything, that’s cool… and if you have a picture I can post with it, that’s even cooler.

==============
Item 2
==============

All right, as the “treat” I mentioned, here’s a little coupon for your next purchase. It’s good until June 15, so you can stock up on some good summer shisha.

(IMPORTANT) One you’re ready to use it, here’s how to redeem it:

STEP 1: Go here to register or login to your Hobo account (takes 5 seconds):

LINK

(You must log in or the coupon won’t work… This ensures only insiders like you will be able to access the discount.)

STEP 2: Now make your order and on the first step of the checkout put “smokering!” (no quotes) in the coupon box.

And voila, you just saved 15%. Works on orders of any size.

All right… please don’t forget to let me know if I can use your quote (and if you have a pic).

Rock on,
Mike

Let’s walk through that line by line:

A few more notes about this email:

1. I explicitly stated the quote would be put on our website and made it ultra easy for him to agree. It is very clear and very easy to respond to (all he must do is respond with one word).
2. I also made it easy for him to disagree or edit so everything is transparent and above board.
3. (Optional.) A testimonial is more powerful if an image is attached with it, so I added that request (a few people sent in some cool pics of them blowing a ring).
4. By making this request at the same time as giving him a coupon, I tapped the power of reciprocity to increase the odds he agreed.

This simple campaign produced around 40 testimonials.

Because the questions were directive, but not overly specific, the testimonials covered a wide array of possible customer objections and product benefits (some I hadn’t even considered before).

They were great response-boosting tools not only for the new landing pages, but also anywhere else I promoted the Smoke Ring Guide to generate leads. These are an enormous asset that has improved my conversion forever.

How to Write a Good Testimonial

The one skill that will help with this is moderately understanding what makes a good testimonial. “Your product is great, thanks!” does you no good because it’s far too generic and flat. Here are some tips to maximize the selling power of your testimonials:

• People only care about results, so focus on them – “I made $100 using Mike’s system” is far more powerful than, “Mike’s system made me money!” Rah-rah style testimonials do little for your cause.
• Be as specific as possible – Be specific about results, time to get those results, etc. “I used THIS product and I solved THESE problems in THIS amount of time.”
• When putting them on your site, include a headline that conveys the main message quickly – A good example of this is, “My Acne Disappeared in 23 days” or “I Saved $96 My First Phone Call.”
• Use testimonials to answer common objections – This way your customers do the selling for you. Example: “I thought I was too tech-challenged to use this keyword tool, but it was actually really easy! Within 4 days of using your software and following the step-by-step guide, my site traffic grew 35%!”
• Attach as much testimonial-giver information as possible – To increase the credibility include name, location, business, picture, etc.
• The most powerful testimonial is one from someone just like the reader – So get them from customers that represent each set of needs, objections, demographics, etc of your target market.
• If you receive future updates from your testimonial-giver, include an “update” below the original quote – This shows how connected you are to your customers and re-emphasize the awesome results they’re getting.

How to Implement the Testimonial Getter in Your Business

1. Prepare a nice gift you’ll give folks for answering. It needn’t be huge, but it should make her feel good for taking the time to write in.
2. Copy the 3 emails and tweak to your business.
3. Send Email 1 to your list
4. Tweak the positive responses into concise, hard hitting testimonials and respond to subscriber feedback using the 2 follow up templates
5. Once you get confirmation you can use them, add the testimonials to your marketing and archive them for future use

I saved this strategy for last because it’s not directly tied to your bottom line, per se. That said, I would argue this is the most powerful of the strategies you received today. Powerful testimonials establish you as an expert in your market, grow your credibility, and increase conversion permanently.

All the great marketers, partners, and clients I know meticulously collect and intelligently use them. You should, too.

Conclusion

Hark the angels! You now have a play by play map for 3 strategies that grow your business. You’re running the TTT a few times a year, or any time you need a fast cash injection… the Second Closer is re-capturing missed sales automatically… and the Testimonial-Getter pulled in the proof you needed to further grow conversion and establish your authority.

Better yet, most of the hard work is already done for you. All you have to do is follow the action steps and let the underlying persuasion principles do the work. Plus, you need only do the work once, but the payoff is forever. Once you finish, you can move on to the next strategy to grow even more.

And here’s the best part. Imagine for a minute that the Second Closer grows your sales 10% (like it did for me). Then imagine you add a few strong testimonials to your product page and that grows conversion another 10%.

What’s the end result?

1 x 1.1 x 1.1 = 1.21

That’s 21% growth. From two simple strategies you can implement then forget about.

Entrepreneurs like to believe growth is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. If you understand where you have the most leverage in your business, you can often grow much quicker than most think possible.

You’ve received a lot of info in this post, and I realize it might feel overwhelming. You might even be skeptical these work. And while I’ve already shared my results, the best next step is to pick one case study and replicate it. Put it to the test and see what happens. If you like what you see, try the next one.

What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best that could happen? Again, I can’t guarantee your results, but if you put in a solid effort I suspect you’ll be extremely pleased.

I will be available for the next 2 days to answer questions in the comment section below.

Plus, if you fully implement any of these strategies, I’ll be happy to do a postmortem review with you. Email the results to mike@mementum.org and we’ll get talk about how to grow even more.

About the author: Mike Williams helps the web’s best entrepreneurs with conversion optimization and sales growth. He also helps business owners learn copywriting at home.

If you’ve experienced a drop in traffic since mid-March…then more than likely you were penalized by one of Google’s recent actions.

Which one of those updates is hard to tell, but the biggest one was the Penguin update, which seemed to take a lot of people by surprise.

In order to help you understand exactly what the Penguin update was…and how other actions by Google during this time, like their parked domain mistake and Panda 3.5, might have affected you…and how to tell if you were penalized by any of these actions…

Let’s take a look:

Penguin update explained

Penguin launched on April 24…and it’s a Google update that wanted to penalize those pages that violate Google Webmaster Guidelines on spamming.

This is the over-optimization penalty that they’ve been talking about.

Most of you probably understand what spamming means, but if you don’t here’s a short video by Danny Sullivan that explains.

Now there is some question within SEO circles as to whether this helps or hurts Google’s search results…but whether this update hurt or improved Google’s search results is hard to tell since most SEO experts can find odd things about the new search…but general Google search users haven’t said anything.

All updates can take up to a week to roll out completely as these updates have to reach different data centers around the world that Google owns, covering all of the search results. It’s safe to say that by now the update is over.

Unfortunately, there is no way to log in to Google Webmaster Central, which does report spamming violations on occasion, and find out if Penguin has hurt you.

So, what you need to do to see if you’ve been hit is to take a peek at your search traffic before and after April 24. If you see a big loss in traffic after April 24, then you can probably assume that you’ve been hit.

If you don’t see any changes, then it didn’t impact you…and if you see a dramatic increase in traffic…you may assume that Penguin actually benefitted you.

How to recover from Penguin

So what should you do if you’ve been penalized? Well, if you’ve been hit by Penguin, then your first step is to get rid of any spammy pages on your site.

In fact, log in to your Google Webmaster account to see if you have messages from Google about spam on your site. If you’ve never done anything about those warnings…now would be the time to do it.

Use the list of violations Google has given you as a starting point and correct all those mistakes.

If you don’t have any warnings from Google but you believe Penguin hurt you, then you need to audit your content and fix anything that may be spammy.

You can certainly use the file reconsideration request in Google Webmaster Central to get Google to look at your account and site to determine if they might have made any mistakes…

…but that won’t help you because this algorithm change is across the board for all sites and not an action performed by a Google engineer who saw something fishy on your site.

You can use the form that Google has set up to report what you think are errors to your site from the Penguin update.

And if you want to report on spam that you think Google missed, you can report that on their standard spam report form:

Just click on the “Report webspam” button.

How to tell Google you think they are wrong

Now, it could be that Google got you for all the wrong reasons. In that case use the feedback form or on Google’s Webmaster forum to suggest that maybe you think the update has wrongfully punished you.

When doing so follow these tips to get the best possible response:

• Provide an example – Explain how you were doing in a particular search query and how those results have now changed.
• Explain your website – Give them a brief rundown of your site quality like the number of pages you have, average word count of each page and average quality of each page, which you create based on their new Panda guidelines.
• Share your actions – Finally, tell them what you have done to your site and what you are willing to do. This may be removing low-quality pages, rewriting some that may appear like your keyword density is too high. Or even removing the spammy links you have built to your website.

Google is interested in the results searchers get, so you need to present a case that a mistaken penalty against you is robbing searchers of good content…and you need to present a case that you are a legitimate web content producer.

If your traffic dropped on April 19

On April 19 Google launched another phase of Panda—3.5. What’s the difference between these two updates? Penguin is designed to punish spam pages while Panda is designed to punish low-quality pages.

It’s the difference between bad SEO and poor SEO.

Now look at your analytics…did your traffic drop on or near April 19? If so, then you were hit by Panda 3.5 and not Penguin. This is important because you now need to recover based upon the Panda guidelines and not the Penguin.

If your traffic dropped on April 17

If you saw that your traffic dropped around April 17, and then suddenly recover the following day…then that was probably due to the mistake Google made when they labeled a bunch of sites as parked domains that were not parked.

However, if your traffic didn’t recover by April 18, then either Penguin or Panda may be at fault and so you’ll need to follow those guidelines to recover.

If your traffic dropped in mid-March

Google took aim at link-blog networks that were used to drive links in unnatural ways to increase rankings. These networks allowed blogs to sign up and then drive links back to their sites. One of the biggest sites to get de-indexed was BuildMyRank.com.

What’s surprising is that a lot of these companies were still in business and people were actually using them with Google’s history of outing them.

So, this means if you lost traffic around the middle of March then those links that were coming from those networks…if you were in fact getting links from those networks, they don’t carry any more weight. Google worked their magic behind the scenes and took those benefits away. There is nothing you need to do and this is not a penalty from Google.

Why you shouldn’t worry about negative SEO

Negative SEO is the strategy of using techniques to ruin your competitors website. For example, many people have complained that now a competitor can send a bunch of links from a blog network to his competition and get them penalized and knocked out of the rankings.

This concern has always been around and is not justified. Nothing like this has really become rampant in the past, and it’s not likely to become a problem in the future

In addition, good SEO on your site will improve its signals so that Google can tell the difference between legitimate links and artificial links. Those who are at risk would be sites without authority.

Conclusion

Don’t get mad if the Penguin update has dropped you in rankings. Google’s goal is to provide an excellent search experience for users…and one of the ways they do that is by indexing excellent content on the web. So when you make updates to your site that can improve the quality of your content and improve the quality of users on your site, you will benefit in the long run and you won’t be penalized.

So what do you think about the Penguin update?

Getting your app discovered is the fundamental challenge every app marketer faces. With millions of apps across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and other platforms, standing out in the boundless sea of available apps is becoming increasingly difficult.

The best app marketers will pursue a comprehensive, well-rounded app marketing strategy that includes pre-launch work and post-launch work. The best strategies will include organic and paid app marketing channels.

Here’s the complete guide to app marketing that every app owner needs to follow.

Before Launch

Contrary to popular belief, your marketing strategy needs to start well before your app goes live in the app store. Like any successful product, understanding who your customers are and where you can find them is one of the most important pieces of the app marketing puzzle. There are a few steps you need to take before you launch your app:

Select important keywords

To successfully market an app, you need to understand the keywords that will matter. The term keyword can mean a lot of things in the app world, but at a general level a keyword should represent a term that a customer will use to recognize what your app does. For instance, the most important keyword for a sudoku game would be “sudoku,” while the most important keyword for a calculator would be “calculator.” These are easy examples, but for some apps the keywords may not be as obvious.

Keyword tools, such as MobileDevHQ’s App Store Optimization tool and competitor AppCod.es make it easy to tell which keywords will be most frequently used between your app and your competitors’ apps. You’ll also learn how often those keywords are searched for within the app stores.

Selecting strong keywords for your app is imperative to the success of the remainder of your app marketing strategies.

Choose a good name

It seems so obvious, but it’s not. The right name can make or break an app. Your app name needs to be unique and memorable, but it should also include the most important keywords that potential users will be searching for. An app name matters a lot in app store search. Before selecting your app’s name, be sure your choice doesn’t infringe on any trademarks – otherwise your app might be rejected from the store altogether.

Find your competitors

After you’ve decided upon your keywords, you can begin to research your competitors. Which apps rank highly in app store search results for your keywords? What are their feature sets? What other keywords do they target?

With the amount of apps in the app stores today, you’ll likely find a variety of competitors whose products are similar to your own. Take note of all your initial competitors without filtering any out. Research this long list of potential competitors and scale it down to the top 4 or 5 heavy contenders based on similarity to your app and the competitor’s success. A 1-star app with only a handful of reviews isn’t likely to be a real contender, but a 5-star app with thousands of reviews is a formidable competitor.

Choose the right category

Surprisingly, managing the category of your app is a whole science in itself. Because so many downloads are driven by the app stores’ Top Charts, it’s important to choose the category that will give your app the best shot of ranking highly in the Top Charts for your category.

The reality is that all categories are not created equally. For instance, the Social category will drive more downloads than the Lifestyle category. However, your app is going to have a harder time ranking highly in the Social category (against the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) than in the Lifestyle category (against things like horoscope and drink recipe apps). The former’s brands are massive and will be virtually impossible to beat, but if you’re able to do it you will earn serious amounts of downloads. The latter’s apps are not as entrenched by users and it’s more likely you can rank against them, but you might not earn as many downloads from it.

Do the risk calculation for yourself and your app, understand the pros and cons of each category, and choose the most relevant category for your app to drive its success.

Create an amazing icon

Your app icon matters. First and foremost, your icon conveys your app’s purpose, its style, and is the first interaction your users will have with your app. Make your icon amazing so visitors will be more likely to click on your app after seeing it in search results. Your icon should also stand out in a grid on your user’s device, making them more likely to open and interact with your app on a frequent basis.

Fun fact about icons: Apple won’t even feature an app (an incredible driver of downloads) unless they believe the icon is well-designed and fits in with their overall look and feel. Now that’s an added incentive to work hard on creating an eye-catching icon.

Take great screenshots

You’ll spend a lot of time finding ways to drive visitors to your app’s detail page within the app store, but that’s only half the battle. Once a visitor is at your app’s page, you need to convert that visitor to a real user by convincing them to download your app. Screenshots are an essential tool to help turn visitors into users.

Make sure your screenshots are memorable, informative, and exciting. They need to draw a visitor’s eye to them, explain exactly what your app does, and convey how easy your app is to use.

Draw Something does a great job of showcasing fun screenshots that include overlays describing features of the app as shown by the example above.

Post launch

Congratulations, you’ve finally launched! While some app creators like to think this is the end of the road, it’s not. In fact, it’s just the beginning. Your next big focus? Marketing your app.

App marketing can be broken down to two categories: paid marketing and organic marketing. Organic marketing refers to any method you can use to earn downloads without paying for each one. Paid marketing is any method you can use to pay for each individual download.

Organic promotion

Some of the best ways to get downloads is organically. Spending money to get downloads is great, but the reality is not everyone can do so. So here is how you can get free downloads:

Sign up for an app store analytics application

In order to accurately understand your organic app distribution progress, you need to first sign up for an analytics tool. You’ll want an analytics tool that will track your apps and your competitors through the Top Charts and Search Rankings.

A variety of analytics tools exist that can perform a subset of the functions you’ll need, but the two most prominent are App Annie and MobileDevHQ.

Get featured on app review sites

A high percentage of downloads for new apps occur after those apps have been reviewed by app review sites or other earned media outlets (tech news, mainstream media, niche related press, etc.). It’s important to reach out to these media outlets in order to drive a burst of downloads at your launch time.

Define the blogs – and the authors themselves – who are writing about your direct competitors and other apps within your realm. Reach out to those authors and pitch them your app. Pitching journalists is a complex art, but there’s really only one rule of thumb to follow: put yourself in their shoes, understand their incentives (do they write popular articles, break news, etc), and offer them something you would want if you were them.

Increase social sharing of content within your app as well as your app itself

Word of mouth (viral!) is another of the most important ways new users can find your app. You have to do everything in your power to make it easy for your current users to share your app as well as content within your app.

Path does an amazing job of this. While Path is a “private social network” that is mobile only, users still have the ability to share pictures publicly. The picture will be publicized on Path’s web site at path.com and can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, or Foursquare, for anyone to view. Viewers who are not users can then see the value in Path and install the app quickly.

It’s also important to make sharing the app itself dead simple: have a way to share via SMS, Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. The simpler you make sharing the app, the more users will engage in the process of sharing.

Encourage users to rate and review your app

Where an app ranks in search results (and, to a certain extent, Top Charts) relies on how many ratings it has and how high those ratings are. It’s critical for your app’s success to receive as many 5 star ratings as possible.

There are plenty of clever ways to encourage your users to rate your app. The most obvious is to simply ask for ratings from within the app as users are engaging with it. You can implement this request after they’ve used the app a few times, after they’ve spent a set amount of time using the app, etc. How to encourage users to rank your app is a personal preference, and think outside the box for interesting, and potentially more effective, ways to get your users to rate your app. For example, the app Move the Box tied virtual currency to rating their app: if a user runs out of tokens, they can rate the app to earn more.

Build a great web landing page

Mobile is great. Apps are amazing. But the truth is the web still matters. Whenever somebody writes an article about your app, they’re likely to link to two places: your homepage on the web, and your app’s detail page in the app stores. Whenever a potential user searches Google for your app, they’ll find both your app’s detail page and your homepage. This makes building a great web landing page a great tool to convert web visitors into users.

Keep in mind that your app’s detail page in the app store is a very limited, non-rich, non-customized experience. Your web page should be the opposite: rich, enjoyable, and engaging. In certain instances you can even embed a web version of your app, mimicking exactly what a user will experience in the app. For instance, look at Wolf Toss: their entire game is available on iOS and Android, but it’s also available via Chrome. This gives users the ability to play the game in its entirety before even downloading it to their device.

Paid promotion

Now that you know everything about getting organic downloads, you need to also consider paid promotion if you want your app to hit the top of the charts. Here is how you can leverage money to get more downloads:

Install Mobile App Tracking

Mobile App Tracking is a great tool to help app marketers understand exactly how many downloads come from each paid ad source. With the recent deprecation of iOS’s UDIDs, Mobile App Tracking is the most accurate way to ensure your spending money in the right place.

For example, Mobile App Tracking gives you the ability to track that the $1,000 spent on Jumptap that gave you 100 installs, while the $1,000 spent on Tapjoy gave you 150 installs. You can use this information to tailor your ad spend to the best performing networks.

Calculate the number of downloads you’ll need to get into the Top Charts

Every category requires a different number of downloads to move into the Top Charts for that category. Do your homework and find out just how many downloads per day you’ll need to get into the Top Charts. Finding the exact number can be challenging, but you’ll be able to approximate that amount of downloads your app needs to move its way up the Top Charts rankings.

To estimate your targeted download number, keep an eye on how many downloads/ratings/reviews the apps in your category’s Top Charts have and how they change on a daily basis. If the app store doesn’t offer a way to follow number of downloads, do your best to approximate. Use your app as a guide for what percentage of users also rate and review it, and approximate the other apps using this same percentage. As an example, if your app has 100 downloads and 5 ratings (5%) while your competitor has 10 ratings, you can assume that your competitor has around 200 downloads. You should be able to triangulate on a reasonable estimate for the number of downloads per day needed to rise in the Top Charts.

Run burst campaigns to rise in the Top Charts, then lower your spend and stay ranked organically

One of the best ways to rise quickly in the Top Charts is to run a burst paid ad campaign to drive rapid downloads. Once your ad campaign begins, you’ll see an increase in the number of downloads and users of your app. If your app is valuable, you’ll get great ratings and reviews, and the app will be shared by users with their friends. Due to the increase in downloads, you will now begin to rank higher in the app stores’ Top Charts.

Once you’re ranking highly in the Top Charts, you’ll be able to decrease your ad spend while your app continues to rank highly on its own. This creates a virtuous cycle of organic app growth: your app ranks highly in the Top Charts, which drives downloads and ratings, which causes your app to continue to rank highly in the Top Charts.

Conclusion

Building an app is hard, and marketing an app is even harder. It requires a multi-faceted approach that is coordinated and coherent. Each of the steps above will contribute to a successfully marketed app, but none of them are silver bullets.

You have to create a great app and consistently promote it through as many channels as possible for a shot at success in the app store ecosystem. With a lot of work, and a little luck, you can build a massively successful mobile app that will drive your business forward.

Have you marketed a mobile app yet? Did you learn any tricks to share with the world?

About the author: Ian Sefferman is the founder and CEO of AppStoreHQ and MobileDevHQ. Through those 2 companies, he helps companies market their apps so that they can rank at the top charts.

Pinterest is now the third most-popular social network in the U.S., and the best part about Pinterest is that it is an image driven site, and people love browsing image after image. And if your business is a product based one, you’re a great fit for Pinterest.

If you have a service business, you can still leverage Pinterest, but it will probably be through other means such as producing viral image rich content. If you can get other people to share and repin your images, then you’ll create a boom in traffic to your site.

Here are 9 tips on how to help you do just that:

Tactic #1: Craft a message on your images

As a blogger you will put a lot of emphasis on writing great content and optimizing it for the search engines, but not so much on the optimization of the images you include.

However, if you use the right image, you’ll get your post pinned.

In fact, the image may be the difference between drawing in more traffic and not seeing any traffic. And if you want to increase the power of that image put a clear message on it.

Here’s a message on the blog post title from Complex Style that will drive click throughs:

G Adventures, which is a travel tour company uses this strategy well, too. For example, promoting their Europe trips they show you that it’s not just about touring cathedrals:

The secret is to use bold, simple text. Here are some image editors you can use to add text to any image (and they’re free!):

• Pixlr – You can create new images from scratch or edit one from the web or from your computer.
• FotoFlexer – Lots of visual effects with this free image editor, but the advanced features are harder to use.
• Gimp 2.6 – A really powerful image editor, but very complex.

Tactic #2: Create a daily theme board

An organization that has taken the text-based image into over drive is Sevenly.

Sevenly raises money and awareness for charities around the world and one of the boards they’ve created is the Daily Inspirational board. The description tells you the purpose of this board:

To date there are over 79 pins with inspirational text-based images like this one:

Notice three things about this image:

1. Sevenly branded it with their URL so that even if someone doesn’t link back to them people still know the original source for the image.
2. The text on the image doesn’t have to be long. If you can blend the right image with the right words, the picture will literally speak for itself!
3. And then in the description they’ve encouraged you to repin it. That’s a great call to action!

Keep in mind that since this is a board that people know will be updated daily, they’ll keep coming back to check up on it.

Tactic #3: Format your photos right

Any time someone visits your site they should be able to pin them to Pinterest, which means your images need to be optimized for Pinterest.

A simple way to test to see if your site is optimized for Pinterest is to go to this page and replace your URL with “YourWebsite.com.”

This is how QuickSprout looks.

Or you could install the “Pin It” button to your browser, visit one of the pages on your site and pin it. This will show you how your image looks.

The more images you have on your page…the more pins you will get…as long as your images work on Pinterest.

Here are some great tips on optimizing images for Pinterest:

Tactic #4: Run contests and giveaways

An increase in traffic to your site can lead to more pins for images…and what better way to increase traffic but to throw a contest?

Contests are very popular on Pinterest. Just do a search for “giveaway” and you’ll get a ton of options:

As you can see that many people put the word “giveaway” in the description. You can up your chances by putting other keywords in the description like “contest” or “enter to win.”

In addition to that, include keywords related to your industry. For example, if you sell body lotion add “body lotion giveaway” in the description. If you sell karate lessons, add “enter to win karate lessons.”

This Etsy giveaway does a good job of including excellent text in the image:

Whenever you use a bold image for your giveaway you’ll surely generate more pins.

Tactic #5: Create a board around broad interests

Let’s say you sell custom-made iPhone cases. Instead of creating a board called “Cool iPhone Cases,” you can create one called “Cool Illustrations.”

This will open up your category so that you can share a lot more awesome images on it…including your iPhone illustrations.

Or if you make hand-made objects like Umbelas then you can create a board for iPhone cases:

If your product changes with the seasons, you can create boards for those…or if you sell sports gear, you can have boards for different sports.

Images rule on Pinterest and if you can share some pretty awesome stuff then people will repin it.

Tactic #6: Show people and animals

Some people will tell you that Pinterest isn’t for every brand…I’m not sure I would agree with that.

Look at a company like GE who sells light bulbs…they’ve got a super cool Pinterest account that helps consumers understand that they do a whole lot more than build light bulbs.

There badass machines board shows that they build trains, airplanes and huge turbines:

And the U.S. Central Command has really humanized their organization with boards like Interesting:

Or their military dogs board:

You have to remember that Pinterest is a social platform like Google+ or Facebook…and that means you have to be very human on it.

This means you have to leave comments but also that you post photos of people and animals in your pins.

Tactic #7: Follow the golden rule

Speaking of being social, make sure you take the time to repin other people’s stuff. If you are constantly pinning your own stuff, the less likely you are to get followers or get your own stuff pinned.

If you want to be repined…then you must repin.

And think outside of the box by creating boards that are dedicated to things not necessarily tied to your business.

For instance, even though I’m a marketing consultant and co-founder of two web analytics companies, I have boards on my Pinterest account dedicated to other stuff I like:

And just like on your blog or website, the more images you pin, the more chances you’ll get content shared.

Tactic #8: Use the Pin It button

If you want to encourage the sharing of images on your site then step one for you is to put the Pin It button on your site.

If you have products, then put the Pin It button beside them, too.

And do the same for your blog. (You can get the buttons here.)

Let people post your blogs to Pinterest. In addition, encourage people to follow you with the “Follow me on Pinterest” button.

And like I said above, if you use a clever message in your image, then you will have a higher chance of getting that image shared. And the more images on your site, the more pins you’ll get.

Tactic #9: Track what is being pinned from your site

No, you don’t need Google Analytics for this trick. All you need to do is put your web address in this link where it says “yourwebsite.com”:

pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com

If I look at the source for all my pins, then I see this:

I like to go through there on occasions and thank the people for sharing my pins. And then I can decide if I want to connect. Usually I’ll pick up a few followers, too.

This is a great strategy for keeping the conversation going on Pinterest and driving even more traffic to your site.

Conclusion

If you can invest the time, and your target demographic is female or you care about referrals, then Pinterest is a great inbound marketing lead generation tool.

Plus, when you can share beautiful images with compelling messages and you make it easy for others to share these images, then you’ll generate a lot of traffic from the boatload of pins and repins you’ll be getting!

What other tips are there for helping people generate more pins?

You need a college degree to succeed, right? Sure, it does help give you a leg up on your competition, but to be an entrepreneur you don’t need one.

I recently ran into Quick Sprout reader, Alex Mangini, who was sharing his story with me. Within minutes I was amazed at his story because he was telling me how he went from making nothing to $10,000 a month in less than a year.

So I naturally started to dig a bit deeper and ask him a few more questions, but the conversation took a drastic turn. As I was asking Alex some more questions, he politely interrupted me and told me how he had to go back to class.

At first I thought he meant that he had to go to a college class, so I quickly asked him his major… but then he said… “I am a high school student”.

So naturally I felt that I had to share his story with you because there aren’t that many high school kids that I know that make $10,000 a month ($120,000 a year). Heck, there aren’t that many people in the world that actually make $120,000 a year.

So here is Alex Mangini’s story:

The early life

Alex was born and raised in Columbus, New Jersey. He didn’t grow up poor or rich… but instead he lived in middle class America. As a kid, he didn’t always fit in because was a dork in everyway you can imagine. He had braces, glasses, heavy metal band shirts… and he loved playing computer games.

He grew up with a sort of rebel spirit in the sense that he was never interested in the standard approach to life, which entailed going to school to get a job. Since the beginning of his early elementary school days, he’s always hated school and never really did well at it.

Life as a gamer

As Alex got older he really got into video games. The first one he got addicted to was Dinky Bomb. But what was unique about this game versus all of the other ones out there is that it had a forum community for the gamers to go and discuss the game.

Alex got so addicted to the community, he actually started to spend more time in the forum itself than actually playing the game. He started to love it so much that he decided to he wanted to start his own community.

At first he was trying to find others to help him create one, but they wanted thousands of dollars, which he didn’t have. At this point he had two options… the first being to quit and the second being to create it himself.

He decided to embark on the journey on web design and development so he could learn how to create his own community. During this process he stumbled on an open source community called WordPress. Within hours he was hooked on it and started to learn how to build on top of it… he accomplished all of this at the age of 14.

He was able to leverage WordPress to create his first blog, which was on web design. Within months of launching it he was able to get it generate a few hundred bucks a month from advertising.

The web life

Although Alex loved WordPress, he felt there was one big issue with it… there were a ton of bad themes out there. They weren’t user friendly, they didn’t look great, and they didn’t do all of the thing things they promised.

In April 2008 stumbled on a framework that fit on top on WordPress that solved all of his problems, which was called Thesis for WordPress. But unlike most things for WordPress, Thesis was $87 instead of being free. Luckily for him, he decided to spend the money.

Once he purchased the Thesis framework, he started to design a theme. The first design he created was an instant hit throughout the community. That one design eventually led to him creating a booming Thesis freelance business. He started his own business that sold Thesis skins, and he got hired to work for the company that created Thesis, DIYthemes.

As a developer working on the Thesis framework and freelancing he was earning $6000 to $8000 a month all while he was only 17 years old.

The not so much college life

While all of Alex’s friends where planning on attending college, during his senior year he made the choice that he wasn’t going to go to college. Not because Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg did it… but because he really believed in himself and the skills he possessed.

He also felt that the schooling system was broken because you go college to learn how to start a business and get that dream job, when he already had both of those things.

During his senior year he worked on building up his rolodex and client base so that he could earn a living after high school. He did this by participating in the Thesis forum, blogging and guest blogging. Through those 3 avenues, he built up his income stream.

The scalable life

Although Alex is young, he’s actually really smart… especially when it comes to business. He realized that if you want to make a lot of money, you need to create a scalable business.

So earlier this year he decided to take a hit in his income by slowing down his freelance work so he could focus on his own project, Kolakube, which is a site that sells WordPress themes.

He spent a few months developing it and in Febuary he launched it. During the first month he only did $500 in revenue. During the second month he generated around $4000 in revenue. And in April he did $10,000 in revenue.

So how did he grow his revenue to $10,000 a month? He did it by creating user-friendly themes that were easy to use and he marketed them through WordPress forums. He would participate in forums such as the DIYthemes forum and give people free advice, which caused people to check out Kolakube and purchase themes from him.

The future

Alex understands that if you want to continue make money online you have to diversify your income. Although Kolakube is generating most of his revenue these days, he is still focusing on expanding his revenue through diversification. He hasn’t decided if he is going to get into other platforms such as Tumblr, but he knows that he’ll have to diversify because it’s never good to have all of your eggs in one basket.

Conclusion

You don’t have to go to college to do well in life. Instead you just have to find something you are really passionate about, and just go out there and do it. In other words, you have to hustle.

Alex did whatever it took to succeed and he didn’t let the fact he didn’t have a ton of money growing or that he barely graduated high school stop him from succeeding.

If you want to succeed, you can’t let anything stand in your way. From grades in school to money, or even your age. Just keep on pushing forward.

So what did you learn from Alex’s story?

There is nothing worse than waiting for a page to load. As a user you probably get impatient won’t wait that long…and if it’s your site that is taking so long to download, understand that for every additional second of download time you lose 7% of your conversions!

So naturally you would want to strip out anything from your website that isn’t necessary… such as images, right?

But here’s the issue…images are so much more important these days, especially for blog posts. Images explain complex information, they are easier to consume and they generate more social media shares.

In addition to that, images can drive a lot of traffic to your site from search engines. And, according to this Poynter eyetracking study, when people are at your site they will look at the images before the text.

The question is…are your images optimized for search, speed and social media? In other words, are they helping your site or hurting it?

The following 6 tactics will help you to optimize your images so they can bring you more traffic to your site…and keep that traffic there.

Tactic #1 – Optimize your images for people

First things first…you should always optimize images for people because they are the ones who really matter.

Let’s look at a few rules:

Keep them relevant

The first rule of thumb when it comes to putting images on your site is to keep them relevant. The content of the image should match the content of the article.

Use super-sized images

The bigger the better! Take advantage of the technology in web design and monitors and use big and bold images. Look at how Fast Company uses images in their header (it stretches across the screen):

And then look how The Verge uses them, too:

It’s a really great way to combine lots of text with great images. And this is also one of the reasons that Google updated Google+ to host super-sized photos.

Optimize for the RSS feed

People who use RSS feed readers will be blazing through these to scan all the content you have. Use a relevant, great image to attract their attention and get them to click through to your site!

Use faces

When you use faces that are looking out at the reader…giving the sensation of eye contact…you will get more views.

Let’s now get a little specific and talk about the difference between how men and women process images…and I’ll even tell you why this is important at the end.

According to a recent eye mapping study, women process images differently than guys do. Here are some of those differences:

• What women focus on depends on their hormone level.
• Women are attracted to images where there is more than one person…in particular a guy and a girl embraces each other.
• Women are also better at responding to emotional images than men are.
• Men will look at faces before a nude body.

Why is this distinction important? Well, it goes back to knowing your audience…and giving them what they want.

Tactic #2 – Optimize your images for search engines

Okay, now that we have our images optimized for people…let’s optimize them for search engines. Follow these rules:

• Compress images – Although you want to use larger images than smaller ones, the file sizes should be as small as possible. Make sure you compress your image file size and if you are unsure on how to do so, don’t worry as I cover that later in the post.
• Limit the number of images per page – You don’t want to clog the page down with unnecessary images…so just select a few very relevant images.
• Use keywords – There are a number of strategic places that you need to use keywords when it comes to images. Use them in the alt text, in the image name, the page title and in the text around the image.
• Long descriptions – One of the most common elements most people miss when using images on their site is long descriptions. Long descriptions are like alt tags, but more detailed. Here is an example of both:
  • Alt tag – Black 1998 Honda Civic.
  • Long description – Black 1998 2-door Honda Civic speeding through a red light.

Implement these strategies and you will help search engines correctly index your images so that they will be served up for highly-qualified searches.

Tactic #3 – Optimize your images for social media

Photos and images are one of the most shared pieces of content on the social web (with video being in a close second).

But just because you have some images doesn’t mean they will get shared. Here’s how to optimize your images so they spread quickly over the social web and drive a ton of traffic to your site:

• Use gorgeous photos – This probably seems obvious, but what most people don’t understand is what makes something gorgeous and inspiring. Check out the 45 most powerful images from 2011 for some inspiration!
• Use standard image formats – As you can see, there are dozens of ways you can format an image…
  
  But the most common image types you should use are .jpg, .gif and .png. These formats are easy to display on any device…thus lowering the barrier of viewing and sharing.
• Publish your photos on social media sharing sites – If you use a really great image in a blog post…go ahead and share that image in Google+ and Facebook. Plus, host the photo on sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Pinterest, Picassa, Instagram and TwitPic. This will make it easy for people to share.
• Optimize for Digg submission – If you use Digg, better use the .jpg format and make sure your image is 160×120 or 160×160 pixels. Otherwise no image will be presented and you will lose clicks.

Tactic #4 – Optimize alt tag and title text of images

While I mentioned above that you need to add keywords to your alt text and image title, I want to go into a little detail right now about the topic and introduce you to a wonderful WordPress plugin.

The plugin is called SEO-Friendly Images and can do a number of very powerful things for you:

• Add alt tag and title texts – You’ll be able to optimize all your images since this plugin automatically adds a title text and alt tag for every image you have.
• Changes title text and alt tag– This plugin will create different title and alt tag by blending these four variables:
  • %title – replaces post title
  • %name – replaces image file name (without extension)
  • %category – replaces post category
  • %tags – replaces post tags

By the way, if you are confused about the difference between the alt attribute and the title attribute, here’s a handy little chart to help you out:

Tactic #5 – Optimize image file names

The file name of an image gets weight when it comes to SEO, so it’s essential that you optimize the file name of your images, too.

The tool to help you do this is a plugin called Media File Renamer. It’s pretty straightforward:

Or you can change the image name manually. Either way, keep these elements in mind when naming an image:

• The file name should be short.
• The file name should describe the image by containing keywords.
• Make sure there are no spaces in your image names. And if you want, you can uses dashes, but avoid underscores.

Tactic #6 – Optimize for image load speed

As you probably know by now, page speed is essential for success on Google, so the final lesson that you need to learn is to optimize them for load speed.

It doesn’t help if you start using huge, killer images to get attention…but it takes forever to load! So what should you do?

Smush it!

Well, that’s the name of a WordPress plugin that will do three things for your images:

• Compress the images.
• Strip unnecessary colors from indexed images.
• Converts certain .gifs to PNGs for better performance.

WP Smush.it is really easy to use and will optimize images when you upload them. But you can also optimize all of your old images in the “Media Library”:

Depending on how many images you have and how big they are will determine how long it takes. I ran Smush.it on a new site that had only 43 images in the library and it took less than 30 seconds to run.

Conclusion

With the web becoming faster and the technology to view it getting so much better…images are playing a huge role in getting attention in the search engines and keeping it when people arrive at your site. You have to do everything in your power to keep that edge.

When you invest some time in implementing these tactics to optimize your images you should start to see more traffic to your site… you just have to give a few months for the changes to kick in.

What other techniques do you use to get more traffic out of your images?

Back in January 2012, search marketing firm Catalyst confirmed the classic SEO theory that rich snippet does indeed increase CTR and traffic.

Here’s what their analytics looked like:

That amounts to a 150% increase in visits and page views!

So by implementing Google’s authorship markup and getting the rich snippet to show up for their content, Catalyst dramatically improved their performance in search engines.

If you don’t exactly know what I’m talking about, let me give you an example of what rich snippet is and how it pertains to Google’s authorship markup.

Google “seo advice” and here is one of the results you will get:

What Danny Sullivan has done is claim his content, which in turn provides incredible benefits in the search engine rankings.

For instance,

• The profile picture lends instant credibility.
• If you click the “by Danny Sullivan” link you’ll get sent directly to his Google+ page.
• Click the “More by Danny Sullivan” and you’ll get a Google search page dedicated to all of Danny’s content.

Let me ask you question…

If you didn’t know who Danny Sullivan was, would you click on his link when you searched for “seo advice”? Or some of the other links without this rich snippet…even if they were higher in ranking than his?

I think you’ll probably say “yes.” And this is what Catalyst did to get that 150% boost in CTR and traffic…and so can you!

But there’s a problem

I’m a somewhat techie guy, but ever since Google launched their authorship markup project, I’ve been scratching my head on how to make it less confusing.

There are a lot of guides out there…from Google’s own guide to AJ Kohn’s lengthy treatment of it to Andy Crestodina’s short and sweet guide…

…and these guys all did a good job, but I’m still confused, which makes me think that most of everyone else is, too.

So, here’s my attempt at writing a dummy-proof guide to getting your authorship markup up and running so you can start increasing click throughs and traffic to your site.

Option one: Link your content to your Google+ profile

The first option for verifying you are the author behind content on the web is to use a verified email address.

Now, what do I mean by a verified email address? Two things:

1. This email address must be the same as the website where you want to connect your contact. In other words, if your content is on yourwebsite.com, then you need to use an email address like this: yourname@yourwebsite.com. 
2. This email address must be verified in Google+ by Google. When you create a Google account, Google will send you a verification email to the email address you used. You must click that link to prove that you own that address.

A simple test to find out if your email address has been verified is to sign in to the Google accounts home page. There will be a message that says you need to verify your email address.

You can also verify your email address using OpenID. Just follow these steps:

1. Use your Yahoo! Address to sign up for a Google+ account – This includes rocketmail.com or ymail.com addresses.
2. Click “Verify by signing in at yahoo.com” – This will show up on the next page.
3. Enter your Yahoo! email address and password – When the Yahoo! sign-in box appears, drop in your information and click “Sign in.”
4. Click “Agree” – When the screen asks you to allow Google to use your Yahoo! ID to share your info and you want to continue, click “Agree.”

That’ll give you access to Google+, and then verify your email address.

Create a byline for each post on your website

Once you’ve verified your email address, your next step is to make sure that you have a byline on all of your articles or posts you want to appear with rich snippet.

Here’s an example from Softpedia:

Using the Author Box Reloaded plugin is a simple way of creating bylines on your blog, but you’ll need to follow a few steps.

First, you’ll need to install the WordPress Plugin Framework Reloaded:

You won’t need to do anything with this plugin except activate it. If you don’t install this plugin, however, Author Box Reloaded will not work.

In fact, it won’t even activate.

After you’ve installed WP Plugin Framework Reloaded, then you can install Author Box Reloaded:

After that plugin is installed, then go to your WP dashboard, click “Users” and “Author Box R3.” From there you will have two choices.

If you want your byline to automatically appear at the end of every post, then click the box labeled “Auto insert.”

Your other choice is to align your picture on the right side of the text versus the left. And by the way, make sure you’ve defined your photo on Gravatar.

Now you get to create your byline. Go to “Users,” and click on “Your Profile.”

Scroll down to the “Biographical info” text box and share some personal information.

Make sure that your byline includes a clear way of identifying you as the author of the content, such as “By your name” or “Author: Your name.”

Important: This name must match your name in your Google+ account.

And by the way, I would take it a step further and in this byline add a link to your Google+ account using this code:

After you’ve verified your email address and created your byline, your third step is to submit your email address to Google’s Authorship page:

An email will be sent to your inbox. Click that link and you’ll be done.

Submitting your email address this way will add it to your Google+ profile under the “Work” section, which you can control the visibility.

Your final step is to see what your rich snippet will look like on a Google search using the rich snippet tool:

You should see pieces of information:

Google is quick to point out that there is no guarantee that a rich snippet will show up on a search results.

However, keep in mind that you won’t see these results in Google search for anywhere between five to 14 days. It just depends on the time it takes for spiders to crawl your site. The rich snippet tool is to help you see what could potentially be pulled.

If something went wrong, then you will probably see results like this:

Even though this is pretty straight-forward, there are a lot of steps to miss…so if this is not working then you will need to go back through email verification…or try option number 2.

Option 2: Set up authorship by linking your content to your Google+ profile

If you don’t have an email address that matches your web domain, then you’ll need to connect your Google+ profile with your content.

The theory behind this option is simple: whatever you write and wherever you write it should connect with your Google+ content…and vice versa.

That means you need to have a byline on all of your posts that point to your Google+ account. If you haven’t yet, go back and read again how to install the Author Box Reloaded plugin to create bylines across all of your content on that domain.

In that byline you need to link to your Google+ account using this snippet of code:

Next, go into your Google+ account and link to your website.

1. Go to Edit your Contributor To section in your Google+.
2. Add a link to the website.
3. Click “Save.”

To test to see if this worked, use the rich snippet testing tool. Again, it takes time for this to show up in search results, so be patient.

How to connect your guest posts with rich snippet

If you are a prolific guest blogger, then you’ll definitely want your content to show up with rich snippet, too.

You might think this is a little tricky to do since it’s not really your site, but it’s actually not.

Let’s take a look.

For each guest post you are required to write a byline. In that byline all you need to do is link to your Google+ account using the rel=author code:

For instance, my guest post byline could look like this:

Neil Patel is co-founder of KISSmetrics. He blogs at QuickSprout and you can follow him at Google+.

Here are some things I did with that byline I need to explain:

1. “Neil Patel” is linked to my About page at QuickSprout. So is the link “QuickSprout.” Never link back to your site using your home page, otherwise you are missing out on link opportunities.
2. “KISSmetrics” is sent to my company site.
3. And “Google+” is using the rel=author code.

Next, from your Google+ account create a link back to the individual post where you were a guest post.

As you can imagine, if you are a prolific guest poster, then your “Contributor To” section could get pretty long. You’ll have to weigh the benefits yourself if it is worth the effort.

Conclusion

There is no way getting around the fact that there are a lot of steps behind connecting your Google+ account to your web content so that you can get the boost in CTR…

But I believe if you take the time to slowly implement these steps you can have Google’s authorship markup implemented within five to ten minutes.

Sure, the results will take much longer, but I guarantee that you will not be disappointed with the results!

Do you have any tips you can share on implementing the Google authorship markup?

Since late 2010, StumbleUpon has been one of the top sources of social media traffic in the US, even surpassing Faceboook as a referrer.

In fact, using StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your site can produce some amazing results. According to Shell Harris, StumbleUpon basically built her website TopTenz. Here are some of her stumble numbers that she shared:

That’s huge traffic that can create some pretty lucrative income stream. The only problem is that traffic isn’t very targeted and your conversion may suck.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a modest stream of traffic but high conversion rates rather than high traffic stream and low conversion rates.

Let’s look at how you can get a high-quality traffic stream from StumbleUpon.

Step #1: Become a stumbler

You won’t be able to use StumbleUpon correctly unless you become a stumbler. If this is new to you, to “stumble” simply means to discover web pages by clicking the Stumble button on your browser bar.

This is what it looks like on Chrome:

StumbleUpon will deliver articles, images, videos and much more based upon your profile and interests. You’ll then get to vote on whether you like those suggestions or not. The more you stumble, share and vote, the better the algo gets at predicting what you like.

Now, since you’ll be using StumbleUpon to promote your own blog and want targeted traffic, then you need to stumble and vote on pages that are similar to your content.

What this does is identify other stumblers who have similar ratings and usage patterns like you. This will get content you stumble, eventually including your own, in front of these users as they stumble. If one of these users sees your content and likes it, he submits it and hopefully that creates a chain reaction of stumbles to other high-quality stumblers.

Step #2: Follow like-minded stumblers.

StumbleUpon is unique in that users are clustered into very specific categories depending upon your stumbles, preferences and even connections.

For example, you may be an entrepreneur and not have that much in common with everyone who is in that category.

But after dozens of very specific stumbles and votes you’ll eventually be getting stumbles based on a very narrow brand of entrepreneurship that interests you.

In other words, you’ll start to get matched with highly targeted stumblers who think like you, and will probably even be interested in engaging with you and your content.

And if you and other users start to thumb up similar content, then StumbleUpon may eventually show your content to those users.

Step #3: Submit interesting web pages – and not just yours.

You can certainly promote your own content on StumbleUpon, but if that is all you do, then you will likely not create a strong following since, like all social platforms, StumbleUpon works when you are social…in other words, you contribute other people’s valuable content to the discussion.

Besides, StumbleUpon does monitor user activity and may prohibit activity if all you do is promote your own stuff.

The point of StumbleUpon is to build up content in their collection that adds value to the community. This will keep you in good standing with their Terms of Service and add credibility to your name in the community.

Keep in mind that you can view which of your discoveries have been viewed the most, which gives you an indication of what people like to see and what they don’t like to see.

This will be helpful when it comes time to sharing your own content…you want to be able to submit content that will resonate with the audience.

Step #4: Create web pages clear

When it comes to optimizing your site for the StumbleUpon community there is one really important rule you must remember: the content on your page must be crystal clear to anyone who sees your page.

Stumblers like to explore pages that are designed to make sense and appear to reward exploration. Give the Stumbler visuals and good writing, along with links to other content on your site to encourage deeper exploring.

TED is a good example of this.

When you land on a page it’s clear from the start what the user must do.

Then there are other options that the Stumbler can explore, like the bio or other videos to watch next.

This is why you never want to submit a home or about page. You want to submit something specific like The Real Secret to 1,000 Subscribers in 60 Days or Less and 6 Branding Approaches They Forgot to Teach You in Business School. Specific articles are more likely to be shared, discussed or saved by fellow stumblers.

Step #5: Try StumbleUpon Paid Discovery

Sometimes you may not get the traction you would like from your organic efforts on StumbleUpon. Or maybe you simply don’t have the time to wait for natural discovery.

You can speed up the process with Paid Discovery.

The nice thing about Paid Discovery is that it sends traffic directly to your site, whereas Facebook ads, for instance, you buy a small ad and hope people see it.

If your site doesn’t violate any of the content rules at StumbleUpon, then you have three plans to choose from.

The cost is based upon how much you want to spend per visitor.

A campaign is broken down into 6 steps:

1. Enter the URL – This is going to be the page that you want stumblers to visit. To track this via Google Analytics, you can enter a utm_parameter by adding this to the end of the URL http://yoursite.com/yourpage.html?utm_source=stumbleupon&utm_medium=paidscovery&utm_campaign=social
2. Choose topics – StumbleUpon gives you the option to choose up to 10 topics or let them guess based upon the content. You also have the option to split campaigns into topics if you want.
3. Choose your audience – Set the demographics you want this content to get in front of based upon age, gender, location or device, or StumbleUpon can actually optimize this for you.
4. Set your budget – A priority placement will bump you to the front of the que, or you can upgrade and set your highest daily spend, which will calculate how many visitors it will send to your site based upon your plan and budget. A budget of $30 a day will send 300 visitors a day.
5. Schedule – Finally, if you set the campaign to start immediately once the ad is approved, then it will run until you run out of money. Or you can set campaign dates so that the submitted page shows up over a period of time.
6. Add funds – From your dashboard, go to the Account area and add funds from your PayPal account or credit card.

Finally, here are some tips to help you optimize your Paid Discovery campaigns:

• Try your content in multiple categories to test what works best. StumbleUpon’s new metric score is a great way to see which categories drive the most stumbles.
• To find out which categories are the most popular, you can select “manual targeting” before you submit your content to Paid Discover.

Step #6: Use StumbleUpon Badges

Another way to get targeted traffic is to have your visitors submit your page, vote or share your content via the StumbleUpon badge.

Putting this badge on your site is easy as it is a matter of no coding…just simple cut and paste.

Of course for those who would prefer to customize it, you can use StumbleUpon’s badge API. You’ll get all the information you need to build a badge perfectly suited to your site.

This customization will also help you offer information on the badge like if that page has already been submitted, how many stumbles it’s gotten and the pages thumbnail and meta data on StumbleUpon.

Conclusion

While StumbleUpon is not often in the spotlight like other social platforms like Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr, it’s still a great workhorse for delivering high-quality traffic…if you do it right.

And, if you spend a lot of time online like I do, stumbling stuff all day won’t take extra hours out of your day…it will become part of your routine.

What other ways are there to drive high-quality traffic with StumbleUpon?

Back in the day when blogging was the only thing in town, you could rely on a handful of faithful readers to help spread the word about your blog.  Over time you would slowly accumulate a following and eventually reach the status of a popular blogger. Sadly, that model would never work today.

There are just way too many people with blogs.

The new model flips the old model on its head…you now have to go straight to the celebrity bloggers, get their attention and then have them endorse you.

Look at Arianna Huffington. She didn’t start out at the bottom and claw her way to the top like Dooce did. She was a multi-millionaire who was married to a senator.

She had serious connections…and she leveraged those connections.

You might not be a multimillionaire married to a senator, but you can still cultivate connections with powerful people and get yourself a 1,000 new subscribers in less than 60 days.

Let me show you how!

You have to attract endorsed traffic

While it’s great to look to social media sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon or Digg that can send you a ton of traffic, you’ll notice something about this traffic when you look at your analytics…

You’ll notice that the traffic from these sites will tend to be high…but your bounce rates will also be high.

And the page views and time on site? That will be low.

In other words, this isn’t very qualified traffic. To get a serious bump of qualified traffic you have to get endorsed traffic.

What do I mean by that? Well, endorsed traffic is one of these three things:

• A-list bloggers linking to your site from their blog.
• A-list social media players sharing your content on the social web.
• Posting content on an A-list players blog.

All those are ways in which somebody with a lot of credibility and authority give you props. It’s that last one I really want to focus on in this post because it will deliver huge chunks of targeted traffic to your site with the right strategy.

How to get the attention of an A-list blogger

Popular bloggers are very busy people…whether it’s from creating content, collaborating on a joint project with another blogger or speaking…but one thing that they are never too busy to do is read comments.

They might not answer every single one. But they will read a lot of them. And guess what they are looking for? They are looking for thoughtful and deep comments that make it clear you get what they are writing about.

If you can write several paragraphs where you teach the blogger and his or her readers something new…then you can steal the show. If you’re really good you can get the A-list blogger to go, “Now why didn’t I think about that?”

One practice I like to teach people is to use your URL in your name when you leave a comment. For example, I would type “Neil Patel @QuickSprout.com.”

So what do you put in the box that asks for your URL? Never put your home page URL. Instead, link to an interior page on your site that is relevant to the conversation. That way you improve the user experience when somebody clicks through to your site.

How to email an A-list blogger about guest posting

No matter how many stellar comments you leave on a blog, you will probably never get a personal invitation to write for that blogger. You’ll probably get a lot of encouraging replies, but not a personal email.

So what do you do? Now that you have their attention through your comments, you email them. What you write needs to be simple and clear:

Dear A-list blogger,

Thank you very much for the high-quality content that you publish every day. It’s really been a benefit to my life and my blog.

I was wondering if you would be okay if I wrote a guest post for you. In the last six months I’ve written for X, Y and Z blogs.

Here’s a link to my blog.

Sincerely,

Your name

This email gets a few things done.

First, it thanks them up front for what they do. It validates their hard work on their blog. Even though that’s a simple statement…trust me, it means a lot for these bloggers. They wouldn’t be blogging for the public if they didn’t want that kind of recognition.

So give it to them.

Second, you make your request clear. You don’t go into the seven points why they should let you write for them. You get to the point right away.

Third, you provide proof that you have the chops to get the job done by mentioning other blogs you’ve written for. Now, if this is your very first guest blogging pitch, then you’ll have to rely on your own blog.

Fourth, you end the email quickly.

If they come back and say “no” (don’t worry, I’ve been rejected plenty of times), then cross them off your list and move on.

If they say yes, then you’ve succeed!

And of course you can email the blogger for other reasons other than asking to guest post. One time I emailed a very popular blogger and asked why it seemed like his Twitter numbers dropped drastically. He emailed back to explain, and we had a short exchange before I casually brought up the topic of writing a guest post for him. Another time during an email exchange a blogger clicked on the link to my blog in my email signature and invited me to write.

How to write a guest post for A-list blogger

Once you get the chance to write a post for an A-list blogger, you have to make sure you write the best post you’ve ever written. This is your chance to shine in front of 50,000 or more people…and I want to show you how to make the most of it.

Here’s what you need to think about:

• Killer headlines: Spend an enormous amount of time trying to create a killer headline. Look at hundreds of examples to see what is popular and use the 4 U’s formula of headlines: Unique, Urgent, Ultra-Specific and Useful. Show the blogger that you really care about attracting a lot of attention to their blog.
• Advanced blog posts: Don’t go light on your guest post…back it up with some really solid research and details. Make sure you write an article that makes people want to bookmark it because it is so full of good information. Think of some of Dan Zerralla’s Social Science posts or those over at KISSmetrics.
• Conversation: Write in a style that is friendly and engaging, but also write in a style that will resonate with their audience.
• Authority: Prove that you know what you are talking about and why they should listen to you. Have you led a huge company? Have you been behind some brilliant scientific research? Have you experienced something mind blowing? Tell them!
• Links: Do your homework on the A-list bloggers site and find a bunch of pages you can link to in your article. This will show them that you’ve done a thorough job of trying to create the best content. And don’t forget to link out to other bloggers in your guest post. They will appreciate you trying to build credibility and connections.

Also, create a byline that will drive traffic to the right page. Stanford Smith over at Pushing Social has a great 3 sentence long formula that answers these three questions:

• Who are you?
• What do you do and for who?
• What’s the call to action?

Here’s how mine could look:

I’m Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogger at QuickSprout. I teach business owners the secrets Big Brands use generate online traffic, leads and profits. Pick up my free course “Double Your Traffic in 30-Days” today and I’ll give you a free bonus worth $300.

Create a personalized landing page

This is absolutely crucial for your success. When you create your byline for that guest post…never send them to your home page.

Instead, send them to a landing page you created just for them. For example, if you write an article for Open Forum, create a landing page giving away your free resource. The headline should read something like, “Thank You Open Forum Readers!” If you write one for Mashable, write a headline that says, “Welcome Mashable Readers!”

I’ve seen registrations jump over 10% with personalized landing pages like that.

Put this strategy into overdrive

Now, as you probably realize, you’re not going to get 1,000 subscribers from one guest post. My guess is you’ll have to publish anywhere from 5 to 10 posts.

That’s the real secret to making this guest posting strategy work.

I explained this fast and furious guest-posting strategy in a Problogger piece I wrote a number of months ago where you settle down, get as many guest post commitments as you can and then write like crazy!

The World’s Strongest Librarian’s used this approach when he wrote 42 blog posts in a seven-week period. It is a lot of work, but you’ll get great results from it.

On the other hand, you can also get one commitment from an A-list blogger, send him an article and then follow up immediately a few days with another article…and then another one…and so on.

Or you could try and get a job with that A-list blogger as regular contributor or even associate editor. That way you’ll get a lot more exposure and great constructive feedback from that blogger as you give them more and more content.

Conclusion

The secret formula to getting 1,000 subscribers in 60 days or less is to put the guest posting strategy into overdrive and publish several articles on A-list blogs…and where you send that endorsed traffic to a personalized landing page.

That personalized landing page is a critical piece…so don’t skip it. It’s truly the best way to maximize all of your hard work!

What other tips can you share to help readers get 1,000 subscribers in 60 days or less?

It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago Research In Motion (RIM) was the smartphone leader. Now the joke is that there is nothing smart about a BlackBerry.

It’s also hard to believe that so-called “crackberry users” are now giving up their beloved phones for an Android or iPhone device.

What happened?

A lot, in fact, has happened that allowed RIM to lose its grip on their market. You can learn a few marketing lessons from their failure that you can apply to your business to keep you and your business growing.

Here are 8:

Lesson #1: Control the conversation with social media

In the social media world, RIM has taken a beating in the last several years from its critics…mostly because they’ve sat back and done nothing.

They’ve never used social media to their advantage.

For example, when the new RIM CEO announced his first earnings report…one in which they said they lost money for the first time in seven years…you think they would’ve created some kind of social media campaign to fight back against all the negative attention.

But they didn’t.

The sentiment on Twitter for RIM during that announcement was 59 percent negative and 41 percent positive.

The conversation dominating Twitter looks like this:

‘Sorry! We’re closing this page because it is too large to load.’ —the tiresome, #memory #bullshit refrain from #BlackBerry #RIM #sorry

It’s not like they don’t have a faithful fan base. They have almost 11,000,000 likes on their Facebook page…

…a community they could’ve easily tapped and asked to rally around the company and help fight back against all of the negative sentiment.

Unfortunately they’ve never fostered a community with those Facebook fans, but used it more like a focus group to bounce ideas off of, so the fans weren’t primed to help out in this situation and become brand advocates.

Marketing Lesson: Your social media strategy should involve at least two things. One, create real connections with your customers. And two, build those customers into a loyal base of advocates who can help you engage critics and get greater control over the brand conversation.

Lesson #2: Build a cult…not a company

Apple probably has the most loyal fan base for a company in the world. It’s the most recognized brand. And that’s because people who buy Apple products don’t do it because they need these products…they buy Apple because it says something about them.

Compare RIM to Apple and you see a company who builds a device that is more popular than the company. Search Blackberry and RIM on Google Insights and you will see way more volume for the product than the company.

Here’s a search for Blackberry and RIM…

The blue line is for RIM mentions. The lesson here…the product is way more popular than the company. Do the same thing for Apple and iPhone and this is what you see…

While the iPhone outpaces Apple, you’ll notice that spikes in mentions always coincide…which means people recognize the product and the company…and people talk as much about the company as they do the product.

Marketing Lesson: Build an emotional, almost-cult like connection with your customers by creating experiences and products that enhances those experiences. As I’ve said before, Apple started with the why…and made the why they exist way more important than what they do.

Lesson #3. Create a culture that values user experience

You’ll never be able to build that cult-like connection with consumers if your own people who work for you don’t value input from end users.

RIM failed because they had technical wizards at the helm who never valued the end users input. It was an engineer-driven culture…which worked as long as there wasn’t any competition.

Consumers had to accept what was handed down to them. The BlackBerry Storm, launched in 2008, showed that RIM didn’t understand their consumer.

Then came along Apple and Google who built companies that focused on the end user…and who truly knew their customers by giving them iPhone and Android devices…and ate up RIM’s market share.

Granted, some people still prefer the thumb click wheel and tactile keyboards over the touchscreen, but that market is small.

Marketing Lesson: If your company doesn’t have a culture that puts emphasis on the end user…start a campaign to change that right now. And if you’ve company already has a focus on the consumer…keep it that way!

Lesson #4: Don’t be afraid to listen to employee ideas

To the researchers, engineers and marketers who worked at RIM, they understood that their technology needed to change. RIM management, for whatever reason, refused to listen to them and innovate.

Sure, they rolled out iterations, but nothing that ever drew in new customers. They were making money and didn’t want to mess with the formula. In fact, they looked down at the iPhone as a toy that enterprise customers would never take serious.

Now, because they never thought about a better way to navigate than a thumb click wheel they are hemorrhaging cash.

Marketing Lesson: Never confuse iteration with innovation. Innovation is when you create something that may even destroy your favorite product…but could be another true winner. Create a skunk works in your company…and create a culture where people are not afraid to challenge the status quo.

Lesson #5: Make passion for the product a relentless mission

Being a first mover in a market allows you to dominate for a very long time. But it can also lull you to sleep and people in your company…from the management down…get really complacent.

There was nothing bold or brash about the BlackBerry…it was never sold aggressively or tried to penetrate new markets or drive deeper into current ones. It was satisfied with the status quo…and people started to lose passion for the product, allowing competition to gain market share.

Marketing Lesson: If you have a product that is revolutionary, you need to quickly figure out how to support demand…and aggressively chase new opportunities like DropBox did. Always innovate to meet what customers want. Chase new markets. Keep that passion.

Lesson #6: Maintain your first-mover advantage

RIM’s main problem was that they thought they had made it and beaten their competition. In 2007, they were on top of the world…

They figured that they had so much market share that nobody could beat them. But sales have dropped ever since as has their market share…

What happened?!

They stopped innovating and rolled out boring iterations. They lost their edge and stopped listening to their customers because they thought they had it locked up.

The same thing happened to Kodak and HP. They thought their hold on the market share would give them time to respond. But we’ve seen that markets can change in less than a year when along came Apple and Google to eat their lunch.

Marketing Lesson: Never stop researching your competitors and paying attention to even the smallest players…because they may hold the key to future earnings for you.

Lesson #7: Replace complacent management

RIM’s problem was that their management refused to make any necessary changes. They were constantly bullish about RIM’s position, confident that the money would pour in until the end of time.

They refused to look at Apple or Google as competition to worry about because they felt like as first movers they had locked up the market. Sadly, they never came up with another great new idea since launching the Blackberry.

It was long overdue for a new team of management to be introduced.

Marketing Lesson: Get people into leadership positions that can bring a refreshing perspective to your company and products. Surround yourself with creative thinkers. Never let the complacency of management hold back the company because it will lead to failure.

Lesson #8: ALWAYS Create more than one product

Like I mentioned above, the BlackBerry is more famous than the company. That fame was spread due to so-called “crackberry,” and it seemed that BlackBerry was invincible and would dominate for a long time.

But you can’t survive as a company if you only have one product. It is never enough. The BlackBerry Mobile Fusion was a good step in the right direction for the company…but it may be too late.

Only time will tell.

Marketing Lesson: Surround yourself with people who will continually push for new ideas. Think of Google’s Labs and all of the products that rolled out of there. Its’ people were passionate about creating a better product for end users. Not all the products were a success, but some really major ones, like Gmail, have changed the game. Multiple products allows you to consume from different markets and not really on just one.

Conclusion

Any company can fail to engage customers in the social web and build products that engineers love, but consumers hate…any company can get complacent and ignore the value in their employees ideas to innovate.

What’s happening to RIM can happen to a Google, Apple or DropBox. It can happen to you. That’s why the real marketing lesson in RIM’s slow death is to always be on your toes. Like Intel’s former CEO Andy Grove once said, “Only the paranoid survive.”

What other marketing lessons can you learn from RIM’s failures?

PS: I am currently a BlackBerry user and have been for over 5 years.

If you were looking at your Google Analytics around the dates of March 21-23, then there is a good chance you saw some changes to your site…

Like a 10% to 30% drop in traffic.

It could be on sites you were working on…or sites you hadn’t even touched. Some speculated that the long-term search was being affected where keywords were disappearing in the Google Suggestions.

In fact, what happened was Google rolled out a fresh update of Panda in February…and then another in March.

Some significant changes have been made through those updates that can affect your link-building strategy…so let’s explore those changes and others to help you maintain if not increase your rankings.

Mistake #1: Too many exact anchor text links

As SEOs it’s natural to obsess about exact match keywords in text anchors, but if you do this too much you can actually be penalized and lose rank.

JC Penny is the most popular example of a website that gamed the system by getting unrelated sites to link to its site with exact match anchor texts.

After an investigation by the NY Times of why JC Penny was ranking so well, it discovered that these links were in no way natural. This violates Google’s Webmaster guidelines, and Matt Cutts deranked them manually to speed up the process.

Google took it a step further on March 23 when they announced via Twitter the Panda 3.4 update:

One of the unnatural link building signals that Panda 3.4 aims at is too many exact anchor text links. Standard practice used to be you’d aim for about 30% to 50% matches…now that numbers dropped drastically. So test the waters out and start with 5% or so and increase slowly.

Mistake #2: Not enough semantic keyword anchor text links

To get around the problem of creating too many exact-match anchor text links…you just have to learn how to create semantic keywords.

These aren’t just synonyms of certain phrases like “yellow,” “amber” or “gold,” but extend into its uses like “egg yolk,” “interior house paint” or “coward.”

The approach of semantic keywords is to help the search engines like Google figure out how you are using keywords…and a liberal use of semantic keywords can help them.

If you say “yellow,” then they can know you are actually talking about the color since you also used a link “egg yolk” to describe it…versus meaning the condition of being a yellow-bellied coward.

When you are creating links with semantic keywords you’ll notice that your rankings should start going up.

Mistake #3: You don’t have enough junk anchors

Panda 3.4 is also looking for the quantity of junk anchors you have on your site.

Junk anchors are text links that could be used anywhere on the web and include such links like “click here,” “Read more” and “Buy now.”

You might think that you would want less of these, but the truth is junk anchors look natural, and you can’t really avoid using them when you create call to actions.

In fact, a careful use of junk anchors in your copy can lead to higher conversion rates. You can do this also with other junk anchors like “Like this post” or “Tweet this post’

Mistake #4: Not enough brand mention within text links

The key to getting this one right is to link from internal pages to your homepage.

For example, when I’m writing a blog post and mention QuickSprout…that is the name of my blog…in other words, it’s the brand name…I would link that text to the home page.

On the other hand, if I was writing copy for the home page of QuickSprout and mentioned that term, I would not link at all.

It would be unnatural.

With Panda 3.4 Google is looking for these types of anchors texts to determine the quality of the link building. An absence of these types of links might suggest that someone is out to game the algorithm since most spammers do not think beyond simply creating masses of links.

You should also try to get outside sites to link to your site with your brand name within the link.

Mistake #5: Not enough social signals

With these latest updates it looks like Google is trying to depend less and less on inbound links to determine the worth of a site…and looking at something that is harder to manipulate like social signals.

This was true with Google+ and Search Plus Your World.

That’s okay, because when it comes to getting more traffic, attention and higher rankings, there is one concept that is starting to have a huge impact on those goals…increasing the number of shares your content gets across social media.

In other words, Google has started looking heavily at the number of social signals a page gets to determine its value and rank position.

For example, if you have a page on “attracting high-authority links” with 1,343 tweets, 99 likes, 42 +1s…plus nearly a hundred saves in Delicious and StumbledUpon combined…then your page is going to rank better than a similar page that is not doing well on the social web.

That means you need to get on the ball and start promoting your work! Here are some suggestions on how to increase your social signal strength:

• Make all of your social site buttons very visible on your page – Use a plugin like Scrolling Social Sidebar to provide an easy opportunity for people to share on the social web.
• Ask readers to share content – Just by installing a social share plugin won’t get the job done, however. Tell your readers to share!
• Tap social influencers – Promote the content and interact with social influencers who may down the road share your content. The exposure to their audiences will prove huge to your content getting across the social web…and increasing your social signal strength.
• Use Tribber – This social site will increase the number of social shares you get when you join this community.
• Buy Tweets with Sponsored Tweets – Get a celebrity to tweet your content and you can drive significant traffic to your site. The traffic may not be high-quality, however.
• Create great content – Finally, people share content for one reason…and one reason only…it’s great content. If you’re not creating a high-quality blog with high-quality blog posts then you are not giving your audience something to share.

Mistake #6: Buying links

While this isn’t connected to Panda 3.3 or 3.4, it continues to be very important…and I also wanted to share valuable link-building alternatives to this mistake.

Even if you can achieve a top three position for a fairly competitive term by buying links, you have to remember three things:

1. Paid links might drive some traffic, but it will be low-quality traffic compared to natural ones.
2. You will pay way more than these links are worth.
3. Most importantly, buy links and you run the risk of getting caught and penalized by Google.

If you are going to buy anything to optimize your site and drive traffic, then buy a blog. That is a sound link-building strategy.

Mistake #7: Exchanging links on a mass scale

If you think that exchanging links with another webmaster is a legitimate way to optimize…you are wrong. And so if you think that doing this on a mass scale would be even better…you are headed for trouble.

Exchanging links for the sake of a link back is a scheme frowned upon by all three major search engines. But even if they didn’t frown upon link exchanges and just ignored them, a mass link exchange wouldn’t do you any good.

I mean, how do you know that you are even getting good links? Are you going to sort through all hundreds of those links? Do you have the time to do that?

And if you ever get an email requesting a mass link exchange…treat it like spam and get rid of it. Here’s an example of a mass link exchange email from SEO specialist:

There’s nothing personal about this email. Just a wide variety of places she’d like to exchange links. That is spam and it won’t deliver relevant, useful content to your audience.

Are there times when an exchange of links is okay?

Yes, when there is a strategic view on value delivered to your site and the other site…where their readers and your readers will benefit from the exchange of content delivered by a link exchange.

Otherwise, just create killer blog posts and you will naturally attract high-quality links.

Conclusion

There is no short cut to long-term ranking results. Buying links, creating hundreds of exact-match anchor text keywords and automating link exchanges may get you short-term results…but you’ll eventually pay for it with a dramatic drop in rankings!

It takes time to build a relevant, useful and compelling links that both people and Google view as significant and valuable. By focusing on things like creating good content, and providing value through your product or service, you can speed up the process.

What other link-building mistakes are important to avoid?

Ever since I started in business, I’ve always loved Seth Godin. He’s a brilliant marketer and a great writer. In fact, he runs one of the most popular blogs.

Over the years I’ve read many of Seth’s books, listened to his interviews and have even seen him speak on a number of occasions…

And while many people view him as “America’s greatest marketer,” there is a lot to learn from him about blogging.

Let’s explore 10 of those lessons:

Lesson #1: Blog, prune, experiment, repeat

When it comes to creating content for your blog, the conventional method is to analyze the trends, see what your competitors are doing, develop hybrid ideas and, more importantly, give your readers what they want.

Seth doesn’t do any of that.

Instead, over time he’s developed a voice that attracts people. He’s trained himself to write a lot, see what resonates, experiment, prune, and write some more until something grabs people.

He repeats that process endlessly, which takes time.

Lesson #2: Blog once a day

In an interview on Ad Age last year Seth explained his blogging ritual.

Seth blogs once a day and each blog post is an insight into the world of business, productivity or creativity.

It could be a paragraph long or two pages long. That’s a lot of blogging, and an incredible pace to keep up.

So how does he do it?

He writes once a day…but within that day he could write one blog post or fifteen. He then queues up those other posts. What the queuing allows him to do is replace posts he doesn’t love with ones that he does love.

Lesson #3: Avoid comments and Twitter

If you could say one thing about a blogger like Seth Godin is that he is productive.

What is his secret?

Two things: he doesn’t allow comments on his blog and he doesn’t use Twitter.

He avoids Twitter because he knows he would be very bad at it. The power users of Twitter spend an enormous amount of time cultivating a following, researching quality content to share and promoting others.

Seth says he can’t do that very well…or won’t do it.

The thing about the comments is he wants to avoid the rabbit holes that comments can turn into. Rants and arguments can only turn into a downward spiral that distract and burden him.

He does admit that comments are good to help you clarify your thoughts and sharpen your ideas. But for Seth, it turns out to be a waste of time.  Or as Seth put it, “An opportunity to stay busy while not actually doing anything, I wonder if that’s a good choice.”

Lesson #4: Don’t watch TV or go to meetings

In an interview with Georgina Laidlaw at Problogger who said that he was “prolific” Seth said that he’s prolific because he never watched television, which…and this is important…was a conscious decision he made.

He doesn’t spend any time doing it. Zero.

Instead, he blogs.

He also admits to being “America’s worst attender of meetings.” Some people do five hours of meetings…cut that out and you’ve just cleared away five hours to do more productive things.

It’s hard to imagine an entrepreneur like Seth never attending a meeting, but he explains in a book his publishing company has recently published Read This Before Our Next Meeting that meetings are very often treated as three or more people talking about problems they can attack.

But if you want to get things done, you only need to talk to one person…which is a conversation and not a meeting.

Seth admits to talking to a lot of people throughout his day…having these conversations…but he is very careful that each one accomplishes something specific.

Lesson #5: Ship, or else it doesn’t count

Another reason he is very productive is his attitude to ship. To get the product to market…no matter what it might be.

For example, a short-order cook gets paid to ship. They’re paid to cook hamburgers. If he or she doesn’t cook hamburgers, they don’t get paid.

The same with a plumber. They get paid to unclog pipes. If they don’t unclog the pipes, they don’t get paid.

Everyone ships for a living, including bloggers, so Seth recommends you get really good at shipping.

Lesson #6: Write like you talk

One tactic that Seth and I share in common, and which many successful bloggers do, is the ability to write like you talk.

This is important because some creative people will say they can only write when the muse strikes. Yet, if you write like you talk nobody has to wait for the muse to strike to talk.

As he puts it, if you wake up and you can’t talk, then go see a doctor.

Writing like you talk will make your copy conversational and as long as you can come up with thoughts worth sharing, then blogging is not particularly hard. You just write down what is on your mind.

Lesson #7: Notice things

You have to wonder where he gets all of his ideas. Let me tell you. He pays attention. And he notices things.

For instance, if he sees something that doesn’t make sense to him or he doesn’t understand…he will try to figure it out. That may turn into an insight that may land on his blog.

The same applies to you. If you are going about your workday and come across a challenging situation…try to figure it out.

If you don’t have time to do it right at that moment, then jot the thought down and come back to it. You will know that you need to definitely return to the idea if you do nothing with it and it sticks with you for days.

It’s worth shipping.

Lesson #8: Use your blog as a proving ground

One thing that I like about my blog QuickSprout is that I can share ideas in a small manner to see what kind of reaction I can get out of people. If the reaction is good, then I pursue it. If it’s not, then I need to either tweak the idea or drop it all together.

This is blogging as the minimum viable product.

Blogging is a minimal investment to see if an idea has wings. The same is true with Godin who floats ideas and watches the reaction.

Lesson #9: Make blog posts, not money

You would be wrong to think that Seth blogs to make money or promote his other businesses like Squidoo. He resists the idea that he has products or that he is trying to monetize blogging.

He’s okay if it monetizes itself, say in speaking fees or book contracts, but even if they didn’t he believes that bloggers should truly blog for the love of it and not the money.

In fact, he thinks people get into trouble when they start to think of their blog as a sales funnel or even a product you can wrap up and sell.

Why?

In our digital world where ideas are abundant creating something that is scarce and worth a price tag is nearly impossible. In other words, the $99 special report is neither special nor a report.

He believes that ubiquity…being everywhere…is a better strategy than trying to create scarcity.

Lesson #10: Establish what motivates you to get out of bed

As you might have guessed, he doesn’t believe people should blog to generate a full-time income. If that’s the reason you are blogging, then you don’t have a passion…you have a job.

So you have to ask yourself, “What makes me get out of the bed in the morning? What am I passionate about?”

In order to be a successful blogger you have to decide what you are passionate about. And the question that Seth says you have to ask yourself is this: “How hard are you willing to push?”

And here’s the thing about becoming the best at something…you need to make it small.

It’s a lot easier to become the world’s best infant heart surgeon than it is to become the world’s most famous scientist.

One is a narrow specialization that allows you repeated practice to get really good…the other one is so broad that you will take a lifetime to get good at even some parts of it…and probably not even make it!

This means if you want to be the world’s greatest SEO blogger, then you should focus on an area of SEO like link building.

If you want to become the world’s best entrepreneur, then you need to pick an industry that you can master…like Henry Ford did with cars.

He didn’t say he wanted to be the best in transportation…he said he wanted to be the best in cars.

And that’s what he did.

Conclusion

The last thing that I need to mention is that you need a plan. Even if it is as simple as writing two or three goals out on a piece of paper, you need to have an idea of what you want to accomplish this year and so on.

Seth Godin didn’t become a brilliant blogger overnight. It took him years of relentlessly trying to master what he was passionate about. And you can do to!

What other things about blogging do you think Seth does well?

Google wants less spam and more quality content on the web. And you need more links for your website. Guest blogging is the perfect solution to both Google’s wants and your needs. It is the marriage of content development and link building.

Here’s how you can get the most out of guest blogging and link building to drive more traffic to your website:

Step #1: Building your content portfolio

Whenever you are contacting a blog owner or editor for a guest posting opportunity on their site, you will want to provide some of your content for them to review. If you are just starting out, then make your own blog your quality content portfolio.

If you own additional websites or have the opportunity to contribute to other blogs, then be sure to do so. When presenting yourself as a potential guest blogger, the more quality content samples you can provide, the higher your chances of getting your guest post accepted.

So what kind of quality should you be aiming for when it comes to your content? That depends on the sites you want to get a guest posting spot upon. For example, if the main sites you want to guest post upon have posts in excess of 1,000 words, then you will want your content samples to be the same length. This is especially important for sites like Social Media Examiner who want you to submit your three top content pieces before considering a post from you.

Step #2: Finding the best guest blogging gigs

There are many ways you can find great guest posting opportunities such as…

• Google Search – Try variations of your niche keyword plus guest post, guest post by, guest blogging, guest bloggers, and write for us. Also, if you know someone in your niche that does a lot of guest blogging, search for their name plus guest post or guest post by.
• Twitter Search – Use the same keywords suggested above, but search them on Twitter search instead.
• Check Backlinks – Do you know of a website in your niche that gets a lot of links through guest blogging? Run their website through Open Site Explorer and look at their backlinks to find some blogs that are accepting guest posts.

Remember that all guest blogging opportunities are created equal, especially if you are looking to get some good links. As a link builder, you probably know what to look for in terms of PageRank and domain authority. Once you get past that, there are some sites that will give you more link juice than others. Here are some things to look for beyond the main blog stats.

• Blogs that place the author bio (and link) before the content – The higher up on the page your link is, the more link value it will have. While an author box at the end of the post is still better than being in the comments, a link at the top of the post would be ideal.
• Blogs that offer an author bio (and link) on the post itself versus a link on the author page – When it comes to getting clicks from readers to your website, a blog that offers a bio on the post itself will get a lot more CTR compared to blogs where the visitor will have to click on your name to get to your author bio page.
• Blogs that offer more than one link in the author bio – If you’re building links to more than one site or you want to include a homepage and internal page link, finding blogs that allow you more than one link would be best. This way you can include a link for SEO purposes and a link to entice clicks, such as a link to your free report or top post.
• Blogs that offer links to your social profiles in addition to your website link – If you can’t get people to click through to your website, getting them to follow you on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ is the next best thing.
• Blogs that mark author bio links as nofollow – The last thing you want to do is spend time crafting a great guest post, submit it, then find out that the link back to your website has been nofollowed and will not count towards your backlink profile.

Step #3: Organizing your guest blogging opportunities

As you find new opportunities, you want to record them along with your guest posting efforts. Why? Because you might need to use them for additional projects down the road. Maybe someone says that they aren’t looking now, but they will be in a few months. Maybe someone else says they would want you to write more posts for them in the future. Keeping track of these responses will give you a database of opportunities to refer back to in the future. You’ll also want to keep track of every post that you get published!

What I would suggest is having a spreadsheet with two tabs. The first tab is for opportunities and contains the following information.

• Blog Domain – Just the base URL to keep track.
• PageRank – Google’s authority ranking of a domain. Find out any domain’s PageRank using toolbars like SEO Site Tools for Chrome or SEOquake for Firefox, Safari, or Opera. You can also use PR Checker.
• Domain Authority – The strength of a domain as measured by SEOmoz Toolbar for Firefox or Chrome.
• Subscribers – Subscribers are anyone who follows the site. Keep a column for Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and RSS subscribers. If a site doesn’t display their RSS subscribers but uses Feedburner, you might be able to find out the subscriber count by taking their RSS URL and adding ~fc to the link like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/TechCrunch/.
• Traffic – There are several ways you can judge the traffic of a blog. You could record the blog’s Alexa rank by going to http://alexa.com/siteinfo/domain.com. Blogs with a lower number have the most traffic. Or you can get estimated visitor numbers by looking up the domain on Google Ad Planner.
• Guidelines – This is a link to the blog’s guest posting guidelines.
• Contact – This is a link to the blog’s contact form or blog owner’s / editor’s email address.
• Name – This is the name of the person you need to contact about guest blogging opportunities.
• Response – Once you get a response, be sure to record it in this column for future reference.

The second tab is for published guest posts and contains the following information.

• Title – The title of your blog post.
• URL – The direct link to your blog post.
• Link – The link you included in your author bio.
• Anchor Text – The anchor text for the link you included in your author bio.
• Link 2 – The second link you included in your author bio.
• Anchor Text 2 – The second anchor text for the link you included in your author bio.
• Tweets – The number of tweets your post received in a specific timeframe. You can make the cut off point for this one to two weeks after the post goes live.
• Likes – The number of Facebook likes your post received in a specific timeframe.
• +1′s – The number of Google +1′s your post received in a specific timeframe.
• Comments – The number of comments your post received in a specific timeframe.

Keeping track of the analytics related to your guest blog post will help you in determining which topics work best for a blog’s audience. This will especially be helpful if you are going to become a regular contributor to a blog.

Step #4: Getting to know the blog owner or editor

Once you’ve lined up some potential guest blogging opportunities, your next job will be getting to know the blog owner or editor. This doesn’t have to be time consuming, just start by following and interacting with them on social media sites. Twitter is usually the easiest. Show interest in their blog by commenting and tweeting on posts. Be sure to tweet the posts with the blog’s main Twitter handle in the tweet so they notice too!

You can also try to get an introduction through a previous guest poster. If you know someone who has written for the blog before, ask them if they could introduce you to their contact. This could make a huge difference between your name being another in the inbox vs. someone the blog owner or editor will be on the lookout for.

Another great way to get guest blogging gigs is through networking events. When you meet someone, get their business card and find out what their blog is. Then, after you get back to your home or office, check out their blog to see if it is a good fit. If you decide to contact them, gently remind them where you went and of your conversation. The fact that they will recognize you personally and not see you as a complete stranger will help in getting your post accepted.

Step #5: Learning the ropes

Before you make contact about a guest post, be sure to fully review the guest blogging guidelines for that site. Every site has their own requirements. In particular, pay attention to…

• What to Submit – Some blogs will only want writing samples, one or more topic ideas, or full posts.
• Submission Format – Check the guidelines on how to submit a guest post. Some blogs will want you to send it via email in specific format (Word, Text file, or Google Doc), attach it to a comment form on the blog, or create an account on their blog and submit it through the dashboard fully formatted.
• Topics – Just because you want to write about something it doesn’t mean they want you to write about it. Be sure to stick to the topics that the blog specifies. If they don’t specify, take a look through their archives to note topics and level of posts (beginner, intermediate, or advanced information).
• Length – You don’t want to submit a 600 word post to a blog that typically publishes 1,000 word (or longer) articles, or vice versa.
• Links – Some blogs allow you to include one or two self-serving links within your blog post, while others want you to steer clear of anything with your name on it outside of the author box. Also, watch out for blogs that might not allow you to have links to your site at all, even in your author box.

Also be on the lookout for sites that allow you to submit content on a personal blog which has the potential to be moved up to the main blog. SEOmoz is a great example of this. You submit your blog post to YouMoz, and if the post gets good reception (comments, likes, and social shares), it will get moved to the main SEOmoz blog.

With sites like these, you will want to publish great content and promote it so that it makes it to the main audience!

Step #6: Submitting the perfect guest post

So how do you submit the perfect guest post? Once you fully understand the guidelines, be sure to include extra touches that really customize the post to the blog. Some things to include are…

• Links to related posts – Not one of yours, of course, but theirs. The easiest way to do this is to subscribe to their blog via RSS, then scan through the list of post titles until you find one that matches a keyword or phrase in your post.
• Familiar formatting elements – If you get the chance to format your guest post, be sure to do it to fit the blog’s usual style. This means using the same headers, quotes, calls to action at the end of the post, images, and so on. If you make the post feel like the blog owner wrote it themselves, they are much more likely to accept it.
• Current resources – If the blog seems open to link love, include current resources that support your guest post. There’s nothing worse than when someone links to a post that is out of date or something you do not want in your guest post.

Step #7: Writing the perfect author bio for conversions & link building

Now it’s time to get to the important part for you…the author bio. Once you’ve crafted the ultimate guest post, you will want to craft the ultimate author bio to go along with it. The best way to do it is to look at a few guest posts by others on the blog and see what their author bio’s look like. Try to make yours match in word count and, of course, number of links.

You will want your author bio to really click with the blog’s readers. If you are an online marketing guru and you are posting on a blog dedicated to Facebook, then you will want your author bio to focus on your Facebook services vs. your general online marketing services.

As an example, let’s say you want to link to your blog about pets in a guest post on a blog all about cats.

You could go with your standard author bio of “Jane Smith is the author of Pets Anonymous, a blog dedicated to pet lovers everywhere.” Or you could go with “Jane Smith is the author of Pets Anonymous, a blog featuring the cutest cats you’ve ever seen!” Guess which one will appeal to the blog audience you are writing for and therefore get the most clicks?

When it comes to your links themselves, you might be tempted to always go with keyword anchor text. But with Google honing in on over-optimization, you might want to consider mixing it up with non-keyword based anchor text. Link to your website, blog, or business name, or link it to your own name. Another thing to consider is not always linking to your homepage. Think about the audience you are writing for in your guest post, choose an internal page on your site (preferably a piece of content), and link to that instead.

Also, try different approaches to guest posting. Instead of just doing it for links, do it for conversions. Link to a page on your website offering a free report or eBook in exchange for subscribing to your mailing list. This way you can get your guest post readers directly into your sales funnel!

Conclusion

Now you are ready to start guest blogging and building up your link profile. To get you started, here are some links to the guest post guidelines on popular blogs in the online marketing industry that you might want to start writing for.

• KISSmetrics – Topics include web analytics, conversion optimization, A/B testing, social media, online marketing, and case studies involving KISSmetrics products.
• Smashing Magazine – Mostly about design related topics but does include posts on CMS, e-commerce, usability, copywriting, and content strategy.
• Copyblogger – Topics include copywriting, content marketing, email marketing, landing pages, Internet marketing, and SEO.
• ProBlogger – Topics include anything that benefit bloggers including blogging tips, social media strategies, and SEO.
• Social Media Examiner – If you are an established authority on anything social media related, submit writing samples here.
• YouMoz – Become a member of the SEOmoz community and submit posts to YouMoz. If your post gets enough positive response, it could get boosted to the main site.

So what results have you seen with guest blogging for links?

According to Google, mobile search is growing so much faster than desktop search… in fact, it’s grown so fast that it’s even beating Google’s predictions.

As Google’s Zero Moment of Truth ebook says, mobile is “not ‘the wave of the future’ any more — it’s right now”.

With mobile search becoming such a dramatic part of online search, it’s absolutely crucial that you optimize your site so that it is seen by searchers and engines. But before we get into that, here are some statistics for you:

Statistics every mobile SEO marketer needs to know

Let’s look at some stats…

• In a Google Smartphone User study, mobile searches will make up 25% of all searches in the world this year.
• A Compuware study said that over 50% of consumers would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site. In fact, forty percent said they would use a competitor with a better mobile experience.
• 60% of consumers use mobile searches before buying.
• Close to 50% of mobile searchers made a mobile purchase in the last six months.
• 51% of mobile users will buy from a retailer with a site specifically for mobile users…but only 4.8% of brands have a mobile site.
• In the “Mobile Movement,” a study by Google, 77% of smart phone users visit search engines and then social sites.
• Over 90% of mobile searches end in some type of action…visiting a business or purchasing, for example.

As you can see, being mobile ready is super important. Now let’s explore the differences between mobile and desktop search and SEO.

The difference between mobile and desktop SEO

Some people might say that because they are doing traditional SEO they are doing SEO so that basically there is no difference between the two.

This usually leads to the perception that someone with a traditional SEO background could do mobile SEO by using methods like relevance, accessibility, usability and marketing. And it’s true that these general principles apply to mobile search, but there are subtle differences in optimizing for mobile that you wouldn’t apply to desktop.

With normal SEO people push for keyword rich content as that helps the search engines determine the relevancy of a page. When it comes to mobile sites you have to throw the general principle of 250 words or more on a web page for proper SEO out the window.

The main reason why mobile sites demand different SEO standards is that the mobile experience is so much different than the desktop version. If you try to apply traditional principles you aren’t going to get the same results. However, apply mobile-centric SEO practices to mobile search and you’ll start to win the game.

Mobile users behave differently and use different keywords

In traditional searches users are using keywords. This is not always the case in mobile search. Searchers can use a variety of methods like Gesture Search, Voice Search or Google Goggles…in other words they don’t have to go to their mobile browser.

And if they do use keywords those may have different meanings in different contexts. Also, mobile searchers do searches in different contexts and times than desktop searchers.

What this means is that you need to make mobile keyword research a high priority…instead of just focusing on traditional keyword research exclusively.

Mobile users engage differently

According to Google’s book, the top three positions on a search page matters even more in mobile since the digital shelf gets really small on mobile.

In fact, according to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, a drop to the first position can result in a conversion plunge of 90% or more! This means that your SEO campaigns need to take into account click through rates and search volume in the mobile realm.

The other big difference is that they do not want to scroll.

So if you do not have a top three position on search…and this includes ads…and you’re not optimizing for it, then you are not doing mobile SEO.

Debunking common SEO mobile myths

Since mobile SEO is such a new discipline there are a lot of differing opinions about it. For example, Ryan Jones wrote an article called Mobile SEO is a myth in which he said that “mobile SEO” was a concept created by salespeople who wanted to sell more SEO services.

Here is a summary of the main points of his article:

• Creating a site that works on all devices is the best mobile strategy.
• If you can’t do that, then use m.yourdomain.com, canonical tags and device detection to redirect.
• Give users a link to switch to a traditional version of the site.
• Create an app if you want to deliver a true device experience.
• Local SEO is really want we mean when we say “mobile SEO”

While there is some truth to some of the things he said, the overall notion that there is no such thing as “mobile SEO” was debunked by Brian Meunier in an article called 7 Mobile SEO Myths Exposed.

Brian went on to describe seven things that were actually myths in the world of mobile SEO.

• Myth #1: A Dotmobi TLD was necessary for indexing and ranking – The company behind Dotmobi TLD wants you to believe that building a mobile site through their product is the best approach. The truth is that whether you build it on Dotmobi TLD or m.domain.com or another alternative you are no better or worse…however, Google has indexed more m.domain.com sites more than any other.
• Myth #2: Metatxt is necessary for mobile SEO – Metatext files are like robots.txt or an XML sitemap in that it helps a search engine find and index content. The only problem is that it isn’t supported by Google or Bing. That’s significant since they command over 99% of mobile market share. If your content is already indexed well, you don’t need metatext.
• Myth #3: Code validation is necessary for mobile SEO – In a nutshell, when it comes to smartphones, validation doesn’t matter.
• Myth #4: Mobile sites maps are necessary for mobile SEO – Google’s John Mueller said that if you are indexing smartphone content, you don’t need the mobile site map. Now, mobile site maps probably can’t hurt, but they aren’t necessary.
• Myth #5: Mobile formatting is enough for mobile SEO – Just formatting your desktop site for mobile misses a key part in mobile SEO…a site that develops content based on mobile-centric information architecture and keyword principles will always be better optimized.
• Myth #6: Mobile queries are shorter – Research from 2009 by Google shows that these queries are only slightly shorter…2.44 words versus 2.93 words for computers.  In 2011, they found that longer queries are more likely to be typed than shorter ones.
• Myth #7: People Aren’t Searching On Mobile Devices – This myth isn’t as common as the other, but it was made famous by Steve Jobs who said in 2010, “search hasn’t happened on mobile devices.” Early this year Google reported that 1 in 7 queries come from devices. Some industries like restaurants receive even higher percentage of searches on mobile phones. Jobs was actually saying that most search occurs through apps, but Google reported that mobile searches were actually 77% of smartphone users search on their phones than using apps, which was 66%.

Mobile search strategy

Now let’s look at some high level mobile SEO strategies.

Develop sites that can be used across all devices

Search engines rank a page based on some common criteria like page download speed, screen rendering, site performance and usability. What this means is that a fully optimized mobile site will outperform a site that has been reformatted for a smaller screen.

Here is a site that Jakob Neilson tested called allkpop:

The site did many things right like a separate site for the mobile version, which is rendered when the site detects that a mobile phone is visiting the page…and it also has large touch targets.

Key content can be stripped out on a page if you transcode a web page via a cookie-cutter template. This leads to poor usability and incomplete pages to broken pages and bad navigation, all which lead to lower rankings and lower repeat visits, which can lead to even lower rankings.

Device type also informs search engines about search rankings since difference mobile device web browsers will render pages differently. That’s why it’s critical that brands develop a mobile strategy that works across all devices…and mobile operating systems.

Use traditional SEO practices

Although there are SEO techniques unique to mobile, if you apply these traditional SEO practices to your mobile site you should see an increase in rankings:

• Relevant keywords in headlines and copy – Mobile search by consumers focuses on tasks like finding a specific location or researching a specific product. This is different than how searches are conducted on a desktop, so it’s important to understand the behavior of mobile searchers, and how they are going to perform searches. Armed with that research, then you can start crafting headlines and copy that reflect these needs.
• Relevant page titles – Page titles are the first things that mobile searchers evaluate when searching on their phone. The closer you can match your titles with their search queries, the higher your content will land in rankings.
• Accurate page descriptions - Next to title tags, the description provides another opportunity to deliver relevant, high-quality content to mobile searchers.
• Outbound links: Even though there are usability concerns with large links, you want to include outbound links that lead to relevant information that provides a deeper user experience. This will also build a connection and sense of trust when you link to authority brands.
• Standard coding: You must follow valid HTML coding since there are a variety of mobile operating systems. These web browsers still look through code to determine the relevancy of a page. Broken pages are the result of bad or invalid code. And broken pages lead to lower rankings. This seems like common sense but build all sites according to standards that provides the same experience across all devices.

Create mobile-friendly content

After the site architecture and design is determined, your next step is to figure out how you are going to host your mobile site.

You can find lots of alternatives, but I think the best way to do it is simply park your homepage and mobile only pages on m.domain.com subdomain or /m subfolder.

For all desktop pages you won’t change them to mobile, keep them at your desktop URL. Just reformat them for mobile users.

You can also redirect, but when it comes to transcoded desktop URLs, you’ll want to use canonical tags so the link juice is directed back to desktop pages.

Cheat sheet for preparing your site for mobile readiness

Mobile SEO is a rapidly changing landscape…and I’ve provided you with a lot of information above. Here’s a summary of everything I talked about to make it easy for you to apply these steps to your mobile SEO strategy.

• Trigger mobile-formatted CSS – When someone accesses your site via a mobile phone, you’ll want to give them the mobile version, which happens using user agent detection. This pulls up the CSS formatted version or sends them to a mobile friendly version in your directory or sub domain. If you use WordPress, download the WPtouch plugin, which does this for you automatically.
• User opt out – Give users the option to opt-out of this mobile-formatted CSS.
• Don’t block Googlebot-Mobile – Google will check your Doc Type to see if you are using Compact HTML type or XHTML mobile. Depending upon the answer it will be indexed in the mobile version.
• Image rendering – When it comes to images, use percentage or relative rather than pixel or absolute.
• Minimize the length of links – Links that are too long will not look good in mobile view.
• Position call to actions in the top left of the site rather than the top right - The top right, which is normally where the call to actions are positioned, may be cut off in the mobile version.
• Minimize the number of click throughs – Unlike on desktop search where users are happy to click as long as they sense they are going down the right path…mobile users do not like to click more than two times.
• Test your sites mobile readiness – Use MobiReady for load times and device rendering and W3C mobileOK Validator for validation.

The Future of Mobile Search

As mobile gets faster, easier to use and the mobile experience improves, the adoption of mobile phones will continue to rise.

This is no different than the rise of the personal computer.

This means mobile SEO is a powerful and can mean big business for you. Getting mobile SEO right can help you gain and increase mobile traffic.

In the same vein search engines are trying to keep up. They do a lot of testing and change algorithms, so you’ll need to keep up, too.

• Pulling in personal, real-time results – Search results are getting increasingly personal with real-time content like tweets and wall posts. This is great for the mobile user because it gives him or her the information they want quickly. Think Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. The level of personalization will be high since phones aren’t shared like computers, so results will focus on the mobile user even when they are not actually logged in.
• Mobile SEO can also be very focused on location - GPS is not used in normal web searches unless you have actually set your location…but eventually it will be. This will make the results of mobile search even tougher to predict…and for driving traffic to a brick-and-mortar store, people may never even click through to your mobile site, since they can get everything they need from the map, address and phone number provided on the search result.
• Apps change mobile SEO  - Mobile users are also skipping mobile web search in favor of search engine apps like UrbanSpoon, WikiTude, Shazam and RedLaser providing a search experience centered around an industry like restaurants. These apps will also rank in search results…meaning another mobile strategy is to create an app. If it does well in the app store, it may get pulled into universal results on a mobile search.
• Search engines on one URL for mobile SEO – On the Bing Search blog Microsoft said that Bing proposes a one URL per content item strategy. The benefits include more ranking signals coming to one URL. This doesn’t mean that every single mobile URL should be a desktop URL. Sometimes you’ll need a mobile-specific landing page…and if you do, Bing says to block it via robots.txt. Google hasn’t made such a definitive statement. Google says to treat Googlebot mobile like it were a mobile user…but how to exactly structure your site? Google says you can do both by using mobile URLS and a desktop URL with a mobile template. Is one better than the other? John Mueller at Google said to use one URL with a template.

Conclusion

The mobile world is changing fast, which means you need to be on top of the SEO mobile game by looking at your web analytics constantly and follow the industry experts for every piece of news you can get.

Falling behind this rapidly growing market could be very costly. And doing it wrong can be just as costly. Make sure you have the right information and have the right tools to get the job done correctly and in a timely fashion.

So have you optimized your mobile site for search engines?

If you have a local business or one that targets audiences in a specific geolocation, then you will want to move beyond general guides for search and social optimization. This post will take you through several marketing strategies for local search and social media marketing.

Keyword Research for Local Search

Before you can optimize your website, social media profiles, or anchor text for link building, you have to know what keywords you want to use. When it comes to local search marketing, you are not only targeting industry-specific terms, but geo-specific terms as well.

Let’s look at an example of a local plumbing business that might have several locations in Washington. When planning their optimization strategy, the first thing they might do is take a look at some geo-specific keywords + plumbing to see how many times they are searched using Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

While the numbers may not be exact, you can rest assured that, in looking at the above data, seattle plumbing is searched more than tacoma plumbing, but tacoma plumbing is searched more than everett and edmonds plumbing combined. When you start with terms like that, you will also get additional suggestions plus the approximate number of times those phrases are searched monthly.

Want to try some other ways to get keyword ideas? Try typing in your keyword ideas in Google search, then scroll down to the bottom to see the related searches.

You can also take your most popular competitor’s website (the one that ranks highest for your main targeted keyword phrase) and look at the keywords they rank for using SEMrush. A free account will show you 10 keywords they rank well for.

Using a combination of these tools and researching other local competitors in your industry should help you develop the right keywords to use for the local search optimization of your business.

On-Site Optimization for Local Search

Once you have your keywords set, the next thing you will want to do is optimize your own website for local search. Let search engines know what locations you are targeting by including geo-specific information, keywords, and phrases in the following places on your website.

Title and Meta Descriptions

When it comes to search results, people are going to see your website’s SEO title tag and meta description or other related snippet from your website first.

Note that, when searching for air conditioning repair seattle, those keywords are bolded in both the title and snippet about the website. Make these two areas count for local search by doing the following.

• Locally Optimized Title Tags – The SEO title tag is still one of the most important elements for on-site optimization, even if Google sometimes chooses alternate titles for search results. Regardless, you should still assume that Google might choose your specified title tag to link to your website in search results. Hence, you will want to make sure it not only includes your primary keywords, but your location as well within 70 characters.
• Locally Optimized Meta Descriptions – Again, Google might choose a snippet of text from your website instead, but it never hurts to have an optimized meta description. Make sure it includes your primary keywords, areas your business serves, and phone number if possible within 165 characters.

Local Address & Phone Number on All Pages

Another good signal to search engines is a local street address and phone number on all pages. Most businesses will place this information in their website’s footer. Be sure that it is actually in the text and not in an image. This is good for search engine bots and for people on their mobile phones as your phone number will be clickable!

Location-Specific Pages

Have more than one location but only one website? That’s not a problem. Just create a page on your website specific for each physical location. This way, anyone searching for your business in a particular region, city, state, or country should be directed to the appropriate page.

Embed a Map

If you enter an address on Google Maps, you can get HTML embed code to add the map to your website. Just click on the link icon to get the code.

You can also click on the customize link to choose sizing and other features for your map before embedding it on your website.

This is a great way to help visitors to your website find your location easily and who knows – it might tell a Google search bot more about your location.

Create a Geo Sitemap

Want to make absolutely sure Google knows where you are? Then create a geo sitemap and KML file for your website. Geo Sitemap Generator makes it easy. Just fill in your company details, download the files, and upload them to your website’s root folder.

Then go to Google Webmaster Tools, add your website (if you haven’t already), verify it using your Google Analytics code (other options available), and then add your geo sitemap’s URL under Site Configuration > Sitemaps. Instead of waiting for Google to find out where you are, this will tell them where you are!

Local Search Directories

Once you have optimized your site for local search, you should begin to start some off-site optimization. The first places to begin are applicable local search directories.

The above graphic shows the current landscape of local search directories and how they feed into each other.

The following are seven of the top local search directories.

Google Places

The ultimate goal is to have the best Google Places listing. For local businesses, it could mean having your business show up on the first page above some of the organic search results.

To get started, add or claim your business on Google Places. When you create your profile, be sure fill out as much information as possible and add up to 10 supplementary photos. You can even link five videos from YouTube about your business.

Also note that you can hide your address on your listing by selecting that your business serves customers at their location. When you select that option, you will get a checkbox to not show your address.

This is a great option for home businesses that target local clients. Once you have completed your profile and hit submit, you will need to choose a way to verify your business. Some will have the option to verify by phone immediately – others will have to wait two to three weeks for a postcard by mail to the business address.

Once your Google Places profile is live, be sure to encourage your customers to review your business. Be sure to also monitor your business reviews. You can respond good or bad reviews as the owner – this is a great way to demonstrate your customer service skills publicly!

You can even use your responses as a way to advertise your friendliness to potential customers as the above business has done. And don’t worry if customers review you on other sites as many of them feed into Google Places.

The only unfortunately part is off-site reviews won’t count towards the number of reviews and stars shown in Google search results.

While Google Places one of the most important places to get listed on, you have to also build profiles on other sites to build citations for local SEO. The more consistent listings you have on additional local search directories, the better your local rankings will be.

Yahoo Local

Yahoo Local should be next on your local search listings and citations quest. You can add or claim a basic listing for free which includes the vital information (contact information, link to your website, hours, payment options, email address, products, and services) or you can choose the enhanced listing for $9.95 per month which allows you to add photos, coupons, a 3,000 character company descriptions, and a 150 character company tagline. You can also run a report to see the number of impressions and clicks you have received with an enhanced listing. The nice part about Yahoo Local compared to Google Places is that verification is done on Yahoo’s end and takes a couple of days to go live.

Bing Local

Bing Local allows you to add or claim a free listing with up to nine photos for your business. Their submission system (the Bing Business Portal) is currently in beta and not the most user-friendly compared to Google or Yahoo. Verification is done by mail and can take two to three weeks. One nice thing about their local pages is that they pull in reviews from a variety of other local search sites and, unlike Google, the total number of ratings and stars from all sites are listed in Bing’s local search results.

Yelp

Yelp is one of the most well-known local search directories. You can add or claim your business listing for free and add photos and lots of additional details beyond just your contact information. Business owners can respond to reviews on their page, which is a plus for demonstrating customer service skills. Yelp also offers pay per click advertising within their network so you can get your business listing in front of more people.

Merchant Circle

Merchant Circle is another popular local directory that allows businesses to add or claim free listings with an extended description, profile picture, and link to your website. They also offer free basic statistics about your listing including keywords driving traffic to your listing and the amount of visitors your listing has received in the last thirty days compared to average businesses and the top business on Merchant Circle in your category. You can click on the who is this link to find out who the leader in your category is to learn more about your competitor’s local marketing strategy.

Superpages

Superpages allows businesses to add or claim free listings that include an extended description of their business, multiple categories, a listing of products and services, one related business image, and a link to their website. You can add or claim your business listing here.

Yellow Pages

Yellow Pages allows businesses to add or claim free listings that include an extended description of their business, multiple categories, and a link. You can also add additional photos for the business listing.

Additional Local Directories

Looking for more? You can use tools like Whitespark Local Citation Finder which will help you find the best local directories for your business. You can also search for the names of your main competitors to see what sites they are listed on and make sure you get listed there as well.

Why It Is Important to Claim Your Listings

If a business has been around long enough, there is a good chance that the business is already listed with their address and phone number. With that in mind, is it important to claim your business listing? Absolutely! Many local directories do not have any verification method to prove that someone editing a listing actually belongs to the business.

If you take the initiative to claim your listings on major local directories and networks, it prevents other people from modifying (or even completely removing) your listing.

Getting Local Reviews

Once you’ve claimed your business profiles on local search directories, the most important thing you can do to boost your visibility is get reviews. Having a positive rating can help your elevate your business in search results, especially on sites that allow visitors to sort businesses by the number of positive ratings.

Here are some tips to getting great social local search reviews.

• Add Buttons / Badges to Your Website – Let your website visitors know they can rate your business on directories like Yelp by adding links to your business listing on your website.
• Encourage Reviews in Your Store – If you have a store or restaurant, encourage local reviews by simply putting a mention or link to your Yelp or other business listing on receipts.
• Encourage Reviews via Emails – Does your business have an online ordering system? Do you encourage people who buy from your website to sign up for your mailing list? If so, email people after they should have received their purchase and ask them to rate their experience with your business on the business listing of your choice.
• Simply Ask – If you interact with people on a daily basis in your business, simply ask people to add a review on your business listing. Most people will be happy to oblige.

No matter how great your business is, you still might encounter the bad review. As I mentioned previously, many sites like Google Places and Yelp allow business owners to respond to their reviews individually. Be sure to regularly monitor your reviews and respond to them as necessary. Leaving bad reviews unanswered does not make the go away… it just makes visitors to your profile wonder what, if any, resolution your unsatisfied customers received.

By responding to your bad reviews, you show potential new customers that your goal is to make sure everyone is happy no matter what.

Link Building for Local Keywords

Once you’ve built your local business listings up, the next thing you should start doing is building links to your website. Keep in mind that you don’t want to over do things as Google is hard at work on an over optimization penalty as we speak. That said, there are many great ways to acquire links.

Since I’ve already discussed 10 hard-hitting link building tactics and leveraging link blending to maximize rankings, I won’t go into any more general link building strategies here. Instead, lets look at some local linking options including the following.

• Related Local Businesses – Look for businesses that are in the same industry, but are not competitors. See if those websites have resource pages that link out to other businesses similar to yours. Then see if you can strike up a dialog with the business owner and convince them why they need to have your link listed as a valuable resource their visitors.
• Local Bloggers – Find bloggers that are in your region whose audience might be interested in your business. See if you can arrange to do a guest post for them, or get them to sample your products or services in exchange for a review on their blog.
• General Local Resource Pages – Search for local business resources that may not have come up in your local directories search and find out if you can get your site listed.
• Competitor Backlinks – Using tools like Open Site Explorer, find out what backlinks your local competitors’ websites have to see if you can get yourself listed on them as well.
• Local Events – Be on the lookout for events in your area, such as industry conferences, expos, or shows. Check the event’s website to see if they link to their exhibitors and sponsors. If they do, invest as an exhibitor or sponsor of the event so you can get your link on their site as well.
• Local Charities – Give back to your community by sponsoring and donating to local charities. Many will have websites that thank their local sponsors and donors, linking back to the sponsor’s and donor’s websites.

Now that we’ve covered most of the local search marketing bases, let’s take a look at some local social marketing strategies.

Local Marketing on Facebook

With 845 million monthly active users, you’re bound to find some of your target audience on Facebook. Here are some ways to make sure your business gets found by Facebook users in your area.

Optimizing Your Facebook Page for Local

The best way to optimize your Facebook page for a local audience is to make sure it is set up as a Local Business. If you haven’t created your Facebook page, make sure to create your page as a Local Business.

If you have already created it, you may be able to change the category, depending on your number of fans. To check to see what category your page is listed as, go to Admin Panel > Manage > Edit Page and then Basic Information. Here you will see a category and sub-category for your business.

Once your Facebook page is set up as a local business, be sure to enter all of your local details including your street address, local phone number, and business hours. If you don’t want to list your exact street address, you can just enter the city, state, and zip code to give users an approximation of your location.

One thing to mention in regards to the new Facebook pages design is the About information for your business. It will generally show your business category, location, phone number, and business hours.

You can make the area show your website by removing your phone number and business hours from your page’s details. You just have to decide which is more important for your visitors – seeing your phone number on your Facebook page or having the ability to click through to your website. If you do want your local business information to stay intact, you can also add a status update with a link to your Facebook page, then pin the status update to the top of the page so it shows in the top left column.

Connecting with a Local Audience on Facebook

Once your Facebook page is locally optimized, you will want to get your page in front of a local audience. Some simple ways to do this are as follows.

• Invite Your Friends – Go to the Admin Panel > Build Audience area and use the Invite Email Contacts option to invite your email contacts to become a fan of your business page. Then use the Invite Friends option to invite friends on your personal profile to become a fan as well. Be sure to invite contacts in your region to get the most targeted audience for your page.
• Become a Fan of Local Businesses Pages – Again, you will want to avoid competitors, but become a fan of related local business pages by using Facebook as your page and liking the page. Once you become a fan, you will be able to interact on the local business page as your page in comments on the page’s updates. This will get you exposure with your target audience and will hopefully lead to new local fans of your page.
• Target Status Updates by Location – Send status updates only to people in specific locations by changing the dropdown for your status update from Public to targeted by Location / Language. There, you can specify an audience within a particular country, state, and/or city.
• Use Facebook Ads – Facebook Ads are a relatively inexpensive way to target Facebook members in your region. Select your Facebook page as the Destination for your ad, and then use the local targeting option to show the ad to only people in a specified country, state, province, city, or zip code.

Local Marketing on Twitter

While Twitter may not have as large of an audience, it does have 100 million active users. It is also much easier to gain followers since you can interact with people without them even following you. Here are some ways to make sure your business gets found by Twitter users in your area.

Optimizing Your Twitter Profile for Local

With Twitter profiles, you don’t have to worry about properly categorizing them from the start to make them local friendly. All you have to do is a few minor edits to your Twitter profile. Be sure that you include a specific location in your Twitter information as well as a local keyword phrase in your Twitter bio.

This will help anyone searching specifically for local businesses on Twitter to find yours easily.

Connecting with a Local Audience on Twitter

As previously mentioned, remember that on Twitter, you can interact with anyone regardless of whether they are following you by simply mentioning their @username in a status update. Here’s how you can grow a local audience on Twitter.

• Connect with Local Twitter Users – There are several ways to find local people on Twitter, thanks to Twitter lists and directories. You can start with TwitterCounter, Twitter Grader, and Wefollow to find the top users in your area. Or you can use Twitter directories like Twellow and Follower Wonk to search for users in specific locations by keyword.
• Check Out Followers for Local Businesses – Look for local businesses on Twitter in your industry (including competitors), and take a peek at their followers. Chances are, they might be interested in your business as well.
• Follow Local Discussions – Use Twitter Advanced Search to monitor conversations based on specified keywords from users near a particular place which can be specified by name or zip code.
• Try Twitter Maps App on Bing – Bing offers several apps to enhance the functionality of their maps including a Twitter app. To access this app, go to explore map apps and select Twitter Maps. Zoom into your location on the map and see tweets that are were sent in your region.

Once you find some people that fit your targeted, local demographic, be sure to follow them on Twitter. Don’t just click the follow button though, be sure to actually follow their updates and interact with them. The second part is key if you expect to get any local followers to your Twitter profile in return.

Local Marketing on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the top social network for professionals, therefore it’s the perfect network for business professionals. Here’s how you can grow a local audience on LinkedIn.

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile for Local

To ensure that your profile comes up for anyone searching for professionals in your area, just make sure you have entered your correct location in your profile’s basic information settings. Then, for keyword optimization, include your location in your profile’s headline. Also be sure to list locations in your current and past job experiences.

Connecting with a Local Audience on LinkedIn

LinkedIn only wants you to connect with people in real life as opposed to networks like Twitter where you are encouraged to follow anyone you are simply interested in. To get more local connections on LinkedIn, be sure to do the following.

• Invite Email Connections – The best way to start building your LinkedIn connections is by importing your email connections into LinkedIn. LinkedIn will then allow you to invite anyone who is on LinkedIn to your network.
• Connect with Colleagues & Alumni – After you have connected with everyone in your address book, you can then connect with current and past colleagues at your jobs as well as alumni from the college you attended.
• Open Networkers Groups – LinkedIn Open Networkers (LIONs) are people who want to connect openly with as many people as possible on LinkedIn. Search for open networkers in LinkedIn groups, join a few LION groups, and then start perusing the member’s list. You will be able to use the group as how you know the person on the LinkedIn connect form. Then just include a private message explaining why you want to connect with them, such as you are trying to make more local connections on LinkedIn.
• Local Networking Groups – When searching groups, be sure to also search for local networking groups. After you have spent some time engaging in the local groups, you can start to connect with other members you have interacted with.
• Email Your Local Contacts – Remember that LinkedIn contacts are not meant to be spammed. That said, you can go to your connections and filter them by location. Then you can select one or more people in a specific location at a time to email. You should probably email everyone individually and personalized if possible, but if not, this could be a good way to get an important message to lots of local contacts simultaneously.

Local Marketing on Google+

Although Google+ doesn’t have nearly the amount of users as Facebook or Twitter, they do corner the market in influencing search results. There are lots of reasons you should use Google+ such as the fact that businesses that might not normally show up on the first page of results will thanks to having the right Google+ connections.

Google has even incorporated Google+ people and pages above Google AdWords ads for some searches.

If you want to reap the search and social benefits of Google+, here is what you need to do.

Optimizing Your Google+ Profile for Local

If you want your Google+ profile to appear in search recommendations for local searches, be sure to include your current location in your Google+ profile in your Places Lived section. Also be sure to add locally optimized keyword phrases in your profile’s headline, introduction, and occupation.

This should help people find you both on Google’s main search and Google+’s internal search.

Optimizing Your Google+ Page for Local

For Google+ pages, be sure to set up your page as a local business from the start. You can even use your Google Places information to populate your page’s data.

This is especially important now that Google mixes people and pages in their main search results and within Google+’s internal search.

Connecting with a Local Audience on Google+

Google+ is similar to Twitter in the fact that you can follow anyone you choose, assuming that they share public updates. If they do share public updates and have it set that anyone can comment on them, you can comment on them without having to wait for them to follow you! Here’s how you can grow a local audience on Google+.

• Make Sure Your Google+ Profile is Publicly Visible – Click on your profile’s Edit Profile button and check to make sure that each section of your Google+ profile is publicly visible. If your profile is not set to public, it will not show up in search results.
• Add Local Google+ Users to Circles – Use the Google+ internal search to find local Google+ users that might be interested in your business and connect with them by adding them to circles using your personal profile. Be sure to create a separate circle for local users so you can target status updates directly to them.
• Interact with Local Connections – Interact with your local connections regularly. For those that share their public updates and allow everyone to comment upon them, this is a great way to gain additional exposure with a local audience.
• Suggest Your Google+ Business Page to Local Followers – Once you’ve built up a good local following, you can suggest your Google+ business page to them through a status update targeted to your local connections’ circle.
• Follow Your Local Connections Back on Your Business Page – Show your local connections that you value them on Google+ by following them back as your page. One of the perks to Google+ pages over Facebook pages is that you interact with personal Google+ profiles as your business page once people are following your page. Be sure to use this to gain even more exposure for your business to a local audience.

Local Marketing on Foursquare

Last but not least on the social circuit is Foursquare, the ultimate social network for local businesses. If you have a location that you want to share with the public, you will definitely want to add or claim your business on Foursquare.

Optimizing Your Foursquare Profile for Local

Foursquare business pages are as locally optimized as they get, so nothing to worry about there. Just be sure to take advantage of adding extra details about your business, including your other social profile links and a link to your website.

Connecting with a Local Audience on Foursquare

The best thing you can do on Foursquare is encourage people to check-in to your business. One of the top ways of doing this is by offering incentives such as discounts or coupons for people who check-in often at your business. You can offer perks by creating specials for newbies, friends, swarms (when lots of people check in during the same time period), loyalty, and mayors (the person who checks-in the most at your location).

The reasons check-ins are so powerful is that most of the time, users will not only check-in on Foursquare but also share their check-in with their Twitter and/or Facebook audience. This is great word-of-mouth marketing as people are more likely to go places their friends have been or recommended.

Promote check-ins at your business location by putting a Foursquare window cling on your business’ window to remind people to check-in. Also be sure to advertise your Foursquare presence and specials on your website so people will know they are getting a great deal to check-in when they arrive.

More Local Social Media Optimization Tips

The following are general tips that fit almost any network in terms of making sure your social media presence is locally optimized and you are ready to build an even larger local audience.

• Include Social Links in Your Emails – Anytime you send out emails, whether they are to your general mailing list or just regular emails to contacts, be sure that your email signature includes a link to your top social profiles.
• Include Social Buttons on Your Website – Add social media buttons or badges to your website so that visitors will be able to connect to your business easily. You can add them in the header, sidebar, or footer of your website.
• Add Social Mentions to Printed Materials and Advertisements – Do you have a brochure in your store, business cards, or advertisements in local magazines or newspapers? Be sure to add a simple “Follow us on Twitter” or “Find us on Facebook” to these items (and direct links if possible).
• Stay Active – Staying active on your social networks will help greatly in encouraging engagement with your current audience.
• Encourage Sharing – If you create content on your website in the form of articles, newsletters, or blog posts, be sure to encourage that your audience shares them socially. This should help lead new traffic to your website and connections to your social profiles.

Looking at Local Analytics

To make sure that your local marketing strategies are getting local results, be sure to check out the following analytics.

Google Analytics

When reviewing traffic to your website, you will want to look in your Google Analytics’ Audience Demographics data.

Here, you will be able to see if local visitors stay on your site longer than other visitors by analyzing time on site, bounce rate, and pages per visit. If you have set up goals on your website, such as when a person makes a purchase or signs up for your mailing list, you can see if people in particular regions are completing these goals more often than others. You might find additional regions that you will want to target your local marketing efforts towards through use of your analytics.

Facebook Insights

Want to see if you are getting likes from the right audience? Check out your Facebook page’s Insights to see demographics information for your page’s likes, reach, and people talking about your page content.

If you notice that you are getting more likes outside of your targeted location, you will need to figure out better ways to encourage audience growth in your desired region such as creating more location-specific content or specials on your Facebook page.

Conclusion

If you follow the steps I mentioned above, you should start seeing an increase in foot traffic to your business. But the thing to keep in mind when doing local search and social optimization is that it takes time to see the results. Don’t expect for miracles in the first 30 or even 60 days. It will take months, if not a year before it really kicks in.

What other local search and social optimization tactics do you use?

As a marketer, have you ever wished you had a resource with all the essential and advanced information about blogging in one place?

You know…information about how to write a viral post to information about where and how to position your comments to get the best results.

Well, I’ve tried to do my best in giving you everything I’ve ever learned about blogging in the ten years I’ve been doing this in one giant post.

Now, I’m sure I might be missing a few facts…but that’s where you come in. I need you to provide that information in the comments so I can keep updating this post so we can make it as comprehensive as possible.

Are you with me? Let’s get started.

Why blogging is still important

First, let’s deal with an issue that might be on some people’s minds.

Some people would like you to think blogging as we know it is over. But as I explained in a Search Engine Journal article there are 7 reasons why it is still important.

• Foundation for all your social media activities – Think about it this way…a blog provides a headquarters for all of your social media efforts. It’s where you drive readers to content that expands on who you are and what you are trying to do.
• Build your brand as an expert – In the last ten years a blog has become the conventional way in which to show that you are an authority on a subject. Successful bloggers like Robert Scoble and Hugh MacLeod are great examples.
• Build trust – A well-designed blog with in-depth articles delivered with consistency will help create a bridge between you and potential readers. That bridge is called trust.
• Exercise your creativity – If you are a writer, a blog is unlike other social media in that it gives you plenty of room to work out ideas you might have.
• Growing stream of organic search traffic – Because of your steady stream of content, a blog will get a ton of traffic from both SEO and the social web. There really isn’t a proven method that can do better.
• Consistency is the key – You can become famous with a blog…as long as you are consistent and hang in there for at least two years. People like Fred Wilson and Rand Fishkin have proven it works.
• Proven business model – We will discuss the monetization of a blog in a section below, so it will suffice to say that a blog run right will make you profit, which is important to running a business.

Great blog content is made of these 3 things

Great blogging attracts attention because it delivers good content over time, which gives you regular exposure to an audience with whom you build trust…

…and will eventually buy from you.

But there is something you have to do before you can sell.

Let me ask you a question…do you buy stuff from people you don’t know? It could be a salesman showing up at your door or the man you meet in the used car lot.

I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t!

You and everybody else only buy from people they trust…and the more you are asking someone to invest in you, the more trust you are going to need.

Fortunately blogging will help you build that trust up through a relationship.

But you have to do this with clear and compelling content that is broken down into three elements:

1. Cornerstone content – What is your blog most known about? Is it psychological tricks to help people get attention on the social web? Are you the expert on web analytics? Whatever it is…this is what defines you. And it is what you will write about for most of the time. The Marketer’s Guide to the New Facebook Pages is pure cornerstone content.
2. Personal content – After your area of expertise, then you can start to share some personal stuff that helps you get vulnerable with your readers, leading to greater credibility and trust. A good example of personal content was my post The 10 People Who Led Me to Success.
3. Spicy content – After the personal content, you’ll definitely want to write some posts about controversial issues. It could be a rant or an argument about a popular figure you don’t agree with. My post Do Business Like a Prostitute is definitely spicy!

In the end, you never want your content to become a high-pressured sales pitch where every blog post tries to sell something to your readers.

You will drive away readers!

You’ll never be able to use blogging to grow your business if you don’t focus on first building trust.  You have to provide high-quality content that makes your readers anticipate every single post you write.

Then and only then will you be able to sell.

6 steps to monetizing your blog

The reason most marketers decide to start a blog is to make money off it. Well, if you’ve have any experience with it…you’ll know it’s not easy.

However, it’s not impossible.

In an article on Problogger called What’s the Secret to Monetizing Social Media? I answered that question with these six steps:

• Step 1: Build brand awareness and traffic – When it comes to monetizing your blog, your first step is to drive traffic to your site. Fortunately, according to the The State of Inbounding Marketing in 2012 by HubSpot, producing consistent content is the best way to increase traffic.
• Step 2: Build audience engagement – The next step to monetizing your blog is to start engaging that traffic to turn them from visitors to subscribers.
• Step 3: Monetize with online advertising – As you’ve developed a loyal following with interesting content, you’ve now earned the right to start displaying ads on your blog. But that’s not the only way to make money off of your blog.
• Step 4: Monetize with applications – You can also build software products and then sell them to your loyal audience. This is exactly what Copyblogger did.
• Step 5: Create a book– Finally, you can take all of your content and turn it into a book that you can sell on your blog. Here are some examples:
  • Fail Nation: A Visual Romp Through the World of Epic Fails
  • Escape from the Cubicle Nation
  • Rules for My Unborn Son
• Step 6: Retain customers through social media – And just because the sale is over doesn’t mean that the selling is done. You can now use your blog to respond to customer feedback.

Follow the above steps and within time you can make money off of your blog.

How to make selling WAY easier

Keep in mind, even though you want to monetize your blog, you are not trying to get a sale the first time you meet your reader.

You don’t want to come off as a snake-oil salesman who pressures you so much you decide to buy so he’ll get off your back. Slow down…put a ring on it and stop hunting for immediate monetization.

The blog posts you are writing are casting a net that will capture future sales through permission marketing and trust.

That net does a several things:

• Answer objections – Write blog posts that answer potential objections that your readers may ask about you, your products or your blog. In a way you are clearing out the objections WAY before they are truly brought up.
• Tell stories – Your blog posts will read faster and people will love them more if you tell stories instead of communicate dry information about your product and service. Tell stories about how people have changed using your products…or how you changed. These include testimonials and reviews.
• Solve problems – Finally, one of the best things you can do for your readers is solve their problems. If you don’t know what their problems are, then you should ask them.

People need to know you, love you and ultimately trust you before they will ever buy from you. There are no short cuts…effective blogging gets people to love, trust and buy from you. They will be happy to exchange their money for what you got!

Great blogging boils down to these things

You’re simple and straightforward goal when it comes to blogging is simply to get their permission to send them more stuff. Your blogging will fail or succeed on how many people you can get to subscribe to your blog by email or RSS reader.

Topics are everything

As a marketer you need to write great content around great topics. If you don’t nobody will read what you wrote.

But it’s hard to come up with a lot of great topics…even if you are creative. So you have to develop a process to get those ideas on to paper and published on your blog. Here’s how I do it:

• Step 1: Visit competitor blogs and check out what they are publishing. Pay attention to those posts that are popular, got a lot of comments and a lot of social shares. Put those headlines in an Excel spreadsheet and input the number of Facebook shares and tweets each post got.
• Step 2: Visit a trending site like Tweetmeme to see what hot topics are dominating for the last couple of days.
• Step 3: Look at what is trending at Google News and Google Trends. Take those topics and input them into your spreadsheet.

With this list of hot topics, start playing with different ideas. I like to write down a bunch of headlines and start mixing and matching to come up with something unique but also compelling.

Be consistent

There is something you need to know about blogging is that if you want to make sure that it grows over time…then you need to blog consistently.

Consistency is the difference between getting a lot of traffic and even decreasing in traffic.

For example, when I first started Quick Sprout I was blogging every week. My traffic naturally grew over time. But when I got really busy and stopped blogging on a consistent schedule I watched my traffic drop.

Listen, your blog will only grow consistently as long as you blog consistently. There is no short cut, like John Chow said, the most important aspect of a blogger who makes $50,000 a month from blogging is that he does it consistently.

Timing is everything

But just posting consistently is not enough. You have to start timing your posts so they get in front of the optimal amount of your audience and maximize the chances it can spread.

In one recent survey, Dan Zarella found when the best time was to read blog posts. The answer was first thing in the morning.

That means if you want to catch as many readers as possible, publish those posts before breakfast. And if you are only posting once a week, then try posting on Monday and Thursdays, according to Hubspot which looked at over 170,000 blogs.

Time your social promotions

The next step in growing your traffic to your blog is to time when you promote those posts on the social web.

According to KISSmetrics infographics, more than half the people who use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are on the East coast. In other words, to get the most tweets out of a post, try to tweet it at 5 PM EST.

Interestingly enough, most of the Facebook traffic is at noon on Saturdays…so share during that time and you will get more exposure to your content.

Keep in mind, you have to know the right time to promote on different social sites…because the times are not always the same.

Time your emails

If you use Feedburner or AWeber to deliver the emails from your blog that notifies users of when new content is up, then you will want to know when the best time is to send them out.

Maybe you’re following the advice above and posting early in the morning on Mondays or Thursdays…that doesn’t mean you should send out those emails at that time!

In fact, email has the highest open rate over the weekends…at about 6 AM EST. Isn’t that strange? Who would of thought that?

On the other hand, you need to control the number of emails you are sending out since too many and the number of complaints you get will go up.

Ask your readers

Finally, great content comes from asking your readers what they want to read about. This will get more and more important as your blog grows…but it will get easier, too, since all that traffic means you will get some great responses that will help you create even more great content.

And make sure you survey your readers consistently. It will definitely improve your blog, and at the end of the day it’s not about what you want…is it? It’s about what they want, right? Focus on making your readers happy and you’ll have a great blog.

Use the 89/11 rule

You are probably going to be promoting a product or service on your blog…if you are, then you need to follow a simple rule that says most of the time you should be creating content that is practical and useful for your readers.

And just a fraction of the time should be spent creating content that promotes your product.

I like to call it the 89/11 rule. In other words, 89 percent of your energy should be geared to creating content that encourages people and builds trust so that your readers get to know you better.

Then the other 11 percent of the time you can invest on crafting promotions for your product. (I came up with the 89/11 rule based off of the 80/20 Pareto Rule…but I wanted to make it very different so as not to be confused.)

Focus on a niche you can dominate

One mistake that I see lots of bloggers make is trying to compete with big sites like Mashable and Gizmodo. It would be great if you could compete with them…but probably can’t since you will have to compete against professionals paid to find and break stories. Instead, pull a Jack Welch and focus on niches that you are certain you can dominate.

In the end, these strategies will work because people will see all the time you are spending with them as readers…how much you care about them. When you show them that you are trying to meet their needs, then they will naturally start thinking about your products, too.

How to write a popular blog post

Let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of actually write a blog post. Here’s how I do it:

• Use simple words – Keep it easy by not using big, fancy words in your blog post. As a rule of thumb keep the vocabulary at a 5^th grade level. If you use SEO WordPress by Yoast you can check the reading ease of your copy in the advanced features.
• Use the word you – Avoid using we, them or I when you write your blogs posts…instead you should use the word “you” a lot throughout your copy. This is the word that people love the most…and it’s the word they like to hear the most…making them feel like the blog post is just for them.
• Write how-to posts – One of the most important lessons you should learn about writing blog posts is that people want useful information…they want practical advice they can apply immediately. How-to posts are a great way to deliver this kind of content. I built my first blog into a Technorati top 100 blog by writing a ton of how-to posts.
• Write detailed posts – I do need to warn you…don’t write simple how-to posts. Make them advanced and detailed, providing a ton of information, statistics, graphs and images. I learned this lesson when I first started Quick Sprout…my first posts weren’t very detailed and my traffic suffered. It wasn’t until I started writing detailed posts that the traffic shot through the roof!
• Hook your readers – You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of readers…so you need to do that with compelling headlines that create a sense of urgency or curiosity that you can’t resist. Study blogs like Problogger and Copyblogger…they use all the tricks, including putting in stats, which hooks readers big time.
• Create a conversation – You know there’s worse than having someone talk at you rather than with you, don’t you think? That’s why it’s so important to create a conversation as you write…ask questions, use the word you and genuinely care about your readers and they will care about you. The number of comments you get will jump dramatically!
• Prove your points – The best way to build credibility in your posts is to back up all of your claims. Like I did above where I said that half of Twitter users are on the East coast…I provided the proof for that claim. That builds credibility and proves you can be trusted.
• Show your authority – Because the competition among so many blogs is so stiff it is super important to make sure you show people why they should read your posts and not someone else’s. But I’m not saying you need a PhD or something. No, it’s easier than that!You just have to be the expert on a subject…which in the world of blogging you can fake it until you make it.
  • What do you like to learn about? Well, whatever interests you, pick up as many books as you can about it and start reading. Read blogs on that topic, listen to podcasts…totally immerse yourself in the subject.
  • Once you start to write about the topic you will naturally not be very good at it. In fact, a lot of your first posts will be crappy and weak. But don’t worry…you are like a baby just learning how to walk…and what do we know about babies? They fall a lot but eventually get up and walk without falling.
  • Eventually you will start to develop a very clear and compelling voice when it comes to your topic. You’ll be writing confident posts that show people you are an authority…and the cool thing is people will start coming to you for advice!

  Your readers are waiting for you to lead them. What are you waiting for?

• Care about your readers – Like I’ve alluded to above, caring for your readers will be the single greatest factor to whether you succeed or not. Blog because you have a mission to help people…not because you just want to share your thoughts. Respond to people’s comments, reply to emails and write posts that make people feel like you care.
• Write posts anywhere – I’ve found that some of the most effective and productive times of blogging come when I shut down everything online and focus on writing. I don’t check email or hop on Facebook. I just focus on writing. A great tool to accomplish this is to use Writer for iPad (a steal at 99 cents!). It helps you focus on nothing but the words on the page. The results will surprise you!

How to write a SEO-friendly blog post

As a marketer you won’t only want to create popular blog posts…but you’ll want to create posts that the search engines like, too.

How do you do that? Amit Singhal at Google thinks you should think like a Google engineer. The 12 questions below are designed to help you do that so you can create quality articles that your readers and search engines love.

1. Is what you wrote original? People get tired of the same old same old…they hate the redundant. So each post you write should reflect new ideas or old ideas viewed differently.
2. Can you provide practical advice or relevant research? In the same way that people like original content, they also love information that will solve their problem. And if you can do that with original research, then you will have created unique, viral worthy content.
3. Did you correct any spelling, grammar or factual errors? You may not be the best writer, but you better be the best proofer. If you aren’t…then hire someone to help you. Why is this so important? Well, pages with low rank had worse spelling than the pages that were ranking high. In addition, the quality of the reading level is a signal to search engines…the easier to read the higher the rank. Use the advanced search function in Google to find out your score. One of my goals is to write like a fifth-grader, so it seems like my strategy is paying off.  I try to do even with complex information, so it seems like I am succeeding!
4. Is the topic of interest to a reader or a machine? There was a great piece written by Greg MacFarlane at Problogger called Why Bieber SEO Copywriting Sex Doesn’t iPad Work Minecraft on bad SEO techniques. As the title shows you, amateur copywriters will write to the search engines…but it makes no sense to the human reader!
5. Is the article well edited? Like proper grammar and spelling, pages that are edited well tend to be more reputable…thus ranking higher. The reason is probably because people like to read clear and concise articles. Here’s my editing strategy in a nutshell…research, write, edit and then put it away for an hour or a day. Sit down and edit it again, then have someone else look at it.
6. Do you write for the interest of your readers or what might rank well in search engines? Strange as it seems, writing content that interests your readers will also make a big impact on the machine readers. The reason this is because the content that readers care about tends to be the content that they share the most. And the more the content is shared the higher in the rankings it will go.
7. Does your site have authority? The simplest way to think about this is this way…is what you are doing adding value to the web? What you create should add value…and that authority leads to relevance, links and quality traffic.
8. Are you providing insightful or interesting information beyond the obvious? A post won’t be seo-friendly if you aren’t providing content that is fresh. For instance, I wrote an article called 7 Habits of Highly Successful SEOs where I went beyond the obvious…page optimization or managing PPC campaigns. Instead, I wrote about creativity and risk taking…explaining the intangibles that SEOs need.
9. Would you bookmark your article? You may want to rethink your article if you don’t think anybody will take the time to save it. What kind of content am I talking about?
   • A detailed report with credible sources on a current event.
   • A compelling story with believable characters.
   • A thorough “how-to” article on a topic that has never been covered before.
   • A long list of sources like The Social Media Handbook-57 Resources for First Time Entrepreneurs.
10. Does the article distract with call-to-actions, ads or promotions? A blog that is buried in ads and 2^nd party content signals may not confuse a search engine, but it will definitely cause problems for your readers who may bounce off your page. And don’t think that search engines aren’t looking at those bounces.
11. Would a magazine or journal print your article? Just because you don’t have to hassle with the typical gatekeeper that stands between you and publication in big media doesn’t mean you can published crap. When you write you need to make sure you are producing exceptional articles that gatekeepers might want to publish if they had the chance.
12. Is your article short, weak and useless? While there is no magic number to the length of a blog post should be, you will want to create long, powerful posts. This might mean that you publish only two times a week, but it’s worth it if the search engines like what they see.

Give your readers more than just great blog posts

In the end, it’s more than just blog posts that your readers want…they want something more, like connection, passion, personality and trust.

Connection

When you are tapped into your readers, you will answer comments within minutes…not days or weeks, which signals to a reader that you really don’t care if they comment.

See, people are taking the time out of their busy day to leave a thought or comment with you…they are giving you their attention…and you need to thank them for it by replying to their comment.

Don’t waste that attention…but spend it wisely by responding quickly to comments and engaging readers.

Any successful blogger will tell you that they’ve invested a lot of time and energy into responding to comments, continuing that conversation and community.

Sure, it can be time consuming, but you need to return the favor since they took the time to comment, and it’s your job to turn that comment into a deeper relationship.

Personality

Are you funny and happy…or dull as a cardboard box? If you are dull like the cardboard box then you will definitely struggle to gain an audience.

See, writing for a blog is not like writing a Wikipedia article. These articles are rich in information, so they are a great source for content…but they are supposed to be impersonal.

You can’t tell who wrote it unless you look at the change log since there is no personality. You, on the other hand, must inject a ton of personality into your blog.

Think of people like Redhead Copywriting who’ve built an audience off their strong personality.

I try to do this by sharing articles on the ROI of fashion or partying. The way I see it, I’m trying to be somebody other than Neil Patel…so feel free to be yourself!

Passion

Another thing that makes Wikipedia a bad example of a blog is that there is no passion behind each article…there isn’t supposed to be because of their policy.

It’s supposed to be neutral.

You, on the other hand, don’t have to be neutral. You don’t have to cool and emotional-less…you can be passionate about what you do.

Your readers want to see your enthusiasm for your subject. They want to see that you love what you write about!

Don’t be afraid to blog if something makes you mad or excited. Rave about a new opportunity or gadget….and please; don’t try to make everyone happy. It can’t be done. And it’s okay to make enemies. If you don’t you probably aren’t passionate enough.

Trust

This falls under the category of authority…but I want to bring it up here since it is so important. See, if your readers don’t have confidence in you then they are not going to trust you.

So the goal is to start building trust by following these simple truths:

• Don’t lie – Tell the truth no matter how much it hurts. And if you are caught lying…confess as soon as possible. You will stop the damage from the lie instead of letting it spread when you apologize.
• Deliver on all your promises – My rule of thumb is to under promise and over deliver. That way I know I can always deliver on what I promise.
• Understand your reader first – Keep your reader front and center…and always learn as much about them as you possibly can.
• Always say thank you – Take every opportunity you can to say you are grateful for your readers. This is a great way to build trust!
• Write clearly and honestly – Use words that are easy to understand and always be honest about what you are writing about. Readers can tell when you aren’t being honest.
• Give proper credit – Make sure to point out who gave you your ideas with a link to that person…never mention something without giving credit where it is due. If people find out, you will lose trust.
• Admit it when you are wrong – People hate arrogant people who always think they are right.

So, readers want connection, personality, passion and trust…are you giving those things to your readers? If not, you are slowing the growth of your blog.

Guest blogging: A guide to your first guest blog post

You can’t really talk about being a marketer and developing a blog and not talk about guest blogging Guest blogging is really the hot way right now to driving tons of traffic to your site.

But maybe you’ve got questions on how to do it. Let me show you how it is done with the following steps.

1. Develop your guest writing strategy – There are two ways you can approach guest blogging. The first is slow and methodical. The other is fast and furious.
   • Slow and methodical is a process where you churn out one guest post a month. You do a ton of research, find the right blog, and then create content for it.
   • The fast and furious approach is the opposite…you offer to write as many blog posts as possible for as many blogs. You have to be a special human to do this…because it’s a little bit like running a marathon…but it will lead to immediate and positive results.
2. Brainstorm for fresh, relevant guest posts- Now that you have a writing strategy in place…you actually need some ideas, don’t you? These techniques can help you generate new and fresh ideas:
   • Mind mapping – Using a tool like FreeMind will allow you to make connections between ideas that slowly generate more ideas…and so on!
   • Time Machine – Pretend like you are in the future and ask yourself how you would solve a particular problem. Then, pretend like you are in the past by 200 years…and ask yourself the same question. You should get some interesting ideas on blog posts.
   • Push the envelope – This technique will push you past your boundaries as you explore how far you can take an idea. And when you think you’ve taken it far enough, keep pushing.
   • Role playing – This is something you can do alone or with a friend, but think of an idea or problem you want to solve, let one of you play the devil’s advocate and start churning out ideas. Write down all the ideas.
   • Hot potato – With a group of people, timer and a ball, start an idea and start tossing the ball to different people.
3. Build a social media presence- Whether you use the slow and methodical approach or decide to get fast and furious, it’s great to have already laid the foundation with potential blog owners by engaging them on the social web. There are three areas you want to focus on:
   • Comments – Spend a significant amount of time leaving and replying comments on a bloggers site.
   • Forum – If the blogger has a forum, join and try to be helpful to new members by answering questions and generating dialog. The blog owner will definitely notice.
   • Email – Once you’ve participated in the comments and forums long enough, send the blog owner an email and ask them if you can write a blog post for them. Some will have a contact form specifically for guest posting. Use it.
4. Master the components of a guest post- Because writing a guest post is different than writing for a post on our site, there are a few rules you need to follow:
   • Links – Never write an article that doesn’t have any links in it! Make sure you pepper your article with links to external sites and also link to pages within the blog, which the blogger especially appreciates, seeing that you’ve taken the time to understand and get to know his blog.
   • Advanced blog posts – While the jury hasn’t quite decided whether you should share your best stuff or not on guest blogs, but my view is that you give them the best.
   • Know the audience – Make sure the post is geared to the audience and actually answers a question they might have. Remember, it’s not your readers…it’s someone else’s readers….so you have to understand who they are.
   • Show them you are an authority – Because you will be new to this audience, it’s important for you to spend some time establishing your expertise…so plan your post accordingly.
   • Hook them with headlines – You’ll fall flat on your face if you write a great article but don’t display a stunning headline. Spend a ton of time on this…because you’ve only got one shot at making a huge impression.

How to optimize your blog for social media

A great blog is optimized for the social web…making the content easy to share, discuss and interact with.

Group and display social account icons in a prominent location

Position all the buttons for your social networking sites on the right…and depending upon your own tests, determine where…at the top, middle or bottom. I’ve found that the best place to position these buttons is toward the bottom of the items on that sidebar. There are more important things above, like the subscriber box:

In addition, although I belong to a lot of social networks, I only display three…Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest:

In addition, I would make sure you display these buttons in the footer to get further exposure, but I would change the size and style so to create a different look that doesn’t feel like a copycat of the others.

What’s nice is you can download a wide variety of styles for these buttons. And make sure that these buttons open in a new browser. Don’t let it take you away from your page.

Make the subscription options obvious

Delivering consistent content is best done when using RSS or email…so make these options as visible as possible…and don’t forget to point out why people should subscribe.

Keep the search box and the subscription form separate so people don’t confuse the two. I’ve been personally guilty of trying to search in the email box on some blogs…whoops!

In addition, experiment with the best copy on you’re subscribe button:

Both Feedburner and Aweber work well on delivering content to your readers.

Display your social network social proof in your sidebar

You can use some great widgets out there that allow you to display the testimonies people are sharing on their social networks. Plus when it comes to these social network buttons, you can display different sizes, follower counts and recent activity.

The follower count is a pretty persuasive way to get people to follow you as it provides a ton of social proof:

This naturally encourages more people to follow you, building your credibility. These widgets allow users to follow you with a simple click.

Show off the best content in the sidebar

By displaying which content is the most popular right now and over time encourages users to visit that content. It’s a really great way to encourage new visitors to stay on your site.

Display your Twitter activity

This may seem to clutter up your design, but there are some advantages to sharing your Twitter activity that you should weigh to decide if you want to do this or not:

• Snapshot of your activity can give users an idea of the content you share on Twitter…which may prove persuasive when it comes to them following you.
• Makes your branded retweets more visible to your users so they can see how much traction your brand is getting.
• Gets you more shares so you can increase your social sharing influence with your other posts.
• Obviously you’ll get more click throughs.

Like I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, social sharing is a great way to help you rank…so use every advantage you can get. 

Create multiple tweet options to increase sharing

One of the most successful innovations I created when it came to increasing the sharing of my content came when I started creating individual tweets for different parts of the content.

I did this on an article on being an entrepreneur:

And it’s worked equally well when sharing statistics, like we do over at KISSmetrics on a blog post on page loading time.

I pointed out only three of them so you get an idea of what I’m talking about:

Display author name and date posted

You can drive clickthroughs by posting the date of a piece of content. If it’s significant to some day or recent, people are more than likely to click on it.

Also, display the name of the article since writers tend to generate a following after posting for a while. This is another way to drive clickthroughs as you can promote the author of the content. This will also allow the readers to follow a link back to more articles by the same author.

If you can fit into your theme, include a picture of the writer. Readers like to see the writer…which raises credibility.

Don’t make users guess when content was published. The posted date indicates recency and relevance to other events around the posted date, like conferences or holidays.

Tip: Publish articles very early in the day. Most users are more likely to share content recently published and this lengthens your window of opportunity.

Include a thumbnail for the article image

When it comes to drawing attention, an image always does the trick. That’s why it’s so important to include a high-quality image to drive click-throughs.

Some sites create an image thumbnail for each article. It’s also a good idea to include the title in the image, too, like the KISSmetrics blog does.

If you decide to use an image, make sure it is relevant to the article.

Display the social proof for each article

There are a number of ways you can show an article’s social proof. You can do it by votes or how many shares across the web:

I wouldn’t provide too many social buttons, as that will cause confusion on which ones your readers should use.

Keep it simple…

…and I would also recommend only using those social buttons that get a lot of shares. In other words, you might have a Google+ account, but if you are only getting 3 or 4 +1s, then I probably wouldn’t show it off until you can get those numbers higher.

Because there are so many options out there when it comes to what to read, people tend to gauge an article by how many social shares it has. The more popular one will naturally persuade them to check it out.

Tease readers with a shortened version of the article

To make sure that your readers can tell the difference between your blog’s home page and the page that an article sits on by making the articles you display on the home page shortened.

This also teases readers to click through. Don’t forget to include a link to continue reading:

Try to leave enough room so there is more than one article that you see on the home page above the fold.

You can use your Google analytics to test screen size and resolution.

Include a descriptive author bio

Another important element of a successful blog is the author bio. This should be a thorough account of the author that demonstrates you are an authority.

I’ve found that the longer the bio the better, which is why I start my bio all the way back to my birth. And don’t be afraid to include things that are not related to business, like hobbies.

You definitely want to come across as a human being, including your failures, making yourself very vulnerable. This is also a great place to share your success story, starting from where you were down in the pits and how you climb out.

Embed links to your recent articles

If you are guest posting, then position links to all of the articles in a prominent place on your bio page.

If you are prolific and have appeared in many different publications, then embed logos to each publication like Mens with Pens did:

This is a great way to promote your authority on your subject matter.

Write a compelling headline for each article

Believe it or not, but a reader will not only decide whether he is going to share an article based upon the content, but based upon the headline, too.

Remember, however that the title tag needs to be 60 characters or less if you want it to show up in Google SERPs:

But you also need to think about how the headline will appear on Twitter. For example, when the article is tweeted, you want there to be room for at least 11 characters so someone can retweet it.

Those 11 characters will allow enough room for your twitter handle. You don’t want the headline character count to go beyond 98.

Some Twitter users will change title to accommodate the way they want to share it…either adding to the title or removing.

Don’t forget the meta description

While it may not score a high mark in the SEO factors realm, a great meta description will induce higher conversion from the search standpoint…so it’s really an issue about clickthroughs than it is about SEO.

Also, think keywords in the title and meta description…but not for SEO purposes. Keywords are important to inducing click throughs as these are the words that are highlighted on SERPs:

If the keywords that someone is using to search show up on the SERPs, they are going to stand out to the searcher.

In addition, the trick to writing a great meta description is to write a cliff hanger. What do I mean by a cliff hanger? It’s basically to seduce the reader by making a promise but not revealing that promise.

They have to click through to get the promise delivered.

Another reason that it’s important to write a great meta description is that services like StumbleUpon and Digg allow users to enter a meta description…and once submitted you can’t edit them. Never leave it to someone else to write your description.

If there is no description or it’s poorly written, then readers are less likely to click through.

End with a call to action

At the end of the article you need to ask your readers to do something. This is your call to action, or CTA.

It could be as simple as asking them a question to help jumpstart discussion in the comment sections, which is how I end all of my posts:

Or it could be for them to go and support some cause or subscribe to your email newsletter.

No matter what it is never waste the opportunity to request something from your readers. And get this…if you do this early and often for small requests like asking a question at the end of a blog post…then you will train them to respond when you ask for a slightly larger thing.

And that’s the key…progressively ask for a little bit more and more…and eventually they won’t notice that you are asking for something big!

Everything you need to know about blog comments

In a nutshell, what separate a blog from a website are the comments. This is the place where the community gets built. Where all the discussions take place…and you build a loyal following of readers.

But you have to get the comments right.

Provide quick links to the comment form

Readers should understand immediately where they can comment. Give them a link at the top of the page…

…and at the bottom of the page so they can get to the comments quickly.

Comment section should follow after social share buttons

On the actual page of the post, your social share buttons should come first…

Then the comment section should come. It should be easy to notice…so don’t bury it under a bunch of other stuff.

Plus, you don’t want to distract your visitor from the comments. Lead them directly to it by making it easy to find.

And like I mentioned above, make sure you leave a call to action that encourages them to leave a comment.

Some people are deciding to use Facebook as their default comment section. There are pros and cons…one, all those comments are Facebook. On the other hand, you increase social sharing.

Your choice.

Put the form at the top of comments

Never bury the comment form down at the bottom of the comments. That’s a huge pain, especially if there are a lot of comments.

Make it easy to leave a comment

The last thing you want to do when it comes to generating comments is make it hard by asking for too much information.

Instead, minimize the amount of information you ask for. At the minimum you will need an email address and name.

I would also recommend you use a service like Open ID that makes signing in fast and easy…

Disqus, for example, has the functionality built in.

Include commenter’s “website” link on posted comments

Give the option…but don’t require it…that they can leave a web address, too.

Allow readers to rate comments

If you have a loyal audience, then this is a great way to increase activity among them. These simple actions will help push up the good comments and push down the bad one.

Check out how SEOmoz does it:

And don’t forget to include a “flag” option that will help in moderation of the comments that are spammy are inappropriate.

Provide an option for users to subscribe to article comments

Allowing readers to subscribe to comments will help your discussions in the comment section grow. You can give an option to subscribe either by email or RSS.

If you use a service like Livefyre, the system can encourage people to comment by letting people “listen” in on the conversation.

Make the comment count visible

Readers will also use the number of comments on an article to decide if they are going to read it or not. An article with a high amount of comments suggests to the reader that there is a lively discussion going on about this article and that it may prove worth his time to get in and read.

Along with making the comments visible, you may also think about include the average reading time count at the top, too.

Studies have shown that longer articles tend to get more reads and shares…and articles that are less than a minute in reading time get less. The thinking goes that there is more quality behind a longer article than a shorter one.

Produce content that’s worth sharing

I wanted to end this guide on probably the most important part of blogging…creating great content.

Heck, it might be a cliché, but it’s true and utterly important. When you create content that people can’t resist reading or sharing, then you will have created an exceptional marketing blog.

So, to help you create this type of exceptional content, here are five blog posts you must read:

• Neil Patel’s Guide to Blogging
• How to Write a Blog Post
• The Neil Patel Guide to Writing Blog Posts
• Forget Blogging as Usual: 5 Outrageous Tips for Super-Sized Attention
• Your How-To Post Will Fail If You Don’t Use These Techniques

Conclusion

Listen, blogging is still one of the best digital tools in the marketer’s arsenal. And whether you are a one-person shop or a Fortune 500, you can use it to brand your business, build a pre-disposed-to-buying following and generate revenue…and so much more!

So what other advice would you give to a marketer about blogging?

Don’t you ever wish there was a way to land on the first page of search results that didn’t involve the back-breaking work of traditional SEO?

Well, ever since Google started giving more and more attention to its blended results, you have had an incredible opportunity to jump to the first page of results by creating video content.

Studies have shown that videos were over 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results as part of the blended results.

The bad news is that this pushes down web pages…the good news is if you jump on the advantage that videos give you in appearing on the first page then you can get a distinct advantage over your competition.

But you have to do more than just create, edit and upload. There are some very specific steps…

Step #1: Upload videos directly to YouTube

So, while it won’t guarantee first-page results, you can be certain that Google will index your video if you upload it to YouTube.

The only problem is this won’t accomplish your SEO goal of driving clicks to your site since anyone who clicks on a result on YouTube will get sent to YouTube and not your site.

Now, this just won’t be a successful SEO strategy…so that’s not the only thing you should do.

Step #2: Embed the video onto your website

What you have to do is embed the video on your site like SEOmoz does…

By embedding videos onto your website it will help get the videos more views.

This is important because Google algorithms want to know how many times a video on YouTube has been watched…

The views on the video on your site will get included in that tally. Keep in mind; almost all of the videos that Google show on its blended searches are from YouTube.

There are exceptions, however:

Step #3: Embed videos on pages with text

To help search engines like Google get a better understanding of what the content is all about, make sure you are putting copy on the page.

There are two simple ways of doing that.

One, write an introduction to the video that goes before the embedded video:

The other strategy is to put the transcript on the page, too:

You can insert the transcript under the video.

You can get the transcript by using a service like SpeechPad. You are also going to use the transcript on YouTube, so save the transcript as a txt file.

Step #4: Create a video sitemap

You don’t need strict video content to get indexed. Google recognizes a lot of other formats as video like slide shows, screen capture and Power Point presentations that are animated.

The issue is, Google doesn’t see your video content, which means it searches for other ways to determine what your video is all about. That’s where video SEO comes in…

Traditionally, Google reads a page of content to figure out how to index it. But Google, though it is trying, can’t fully read Flash, so the content in the video remains invisible to their spiders. That means you need to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap found at their Webmaster Tools site.

Here is an example:

Step #5: Focus on long tail keywords

The video title is important. It is what Google is most interested in when it comes to the term that is being used for a search. In other words, the title and search term needs to match your video title.

In the above search I typed in “how to buy an iPad.” The title influences the search rankings, as well as the description tag so make sure you fill those in as well.

And just like normal SEO, it’s much easier to rank videos for long tail keywords, so focus on thehm instead of going after generic keywords like “credit cards”.

Here are some examples of keywords I could go after with my Quick Sprout Traffic System video:

• Traffic System
• Quick Sprout Traffic System
• SEO Training
• Online marketing training

Once you figure out the keywords you want to rank for, make sure you video title and descriptions match them, as it will be very difficult to rank them if they don’t.

Step #6: Create a YouTube channel

If you don’t already have one, create a YouTube channel… andmake sure you create a channel name that is related to your industry. You can even go as far as creating a channel name that has your keyword in it.

In the example above you might say “SEO Training and Marketing.” Not many names will be available, so this will take some time. And don’t forget that there is a character limit to the channel name, which seems to be about 30.

The fastest way to get the keyword loaded copy is to upload the transcript to YouTube. The procedure is pretty straight forward…you just upload it like it was a caption:

The reason this is important is because all of your keywords are in that transcript, which then gets indexed by Google

Enter the keyword in the title, description and keyword tag, and now start building links to it.

Step #7: Build backlinks to your video

If you want to build links to your video I recommend that you follow these 10 advanced techniques of getting authority links and these link-building tactics. If you want to be lazy about your link building, you could use Fivver.

Fiverr is a site where people will do just about anything for $5, like dance in spandex and sing happy birthday messages.

But that’s not what you need!

What you need is to look for the Fiverr profile “social_bookmark”.

Once you give him the keyword and URL and pay him $5, he’ll get backlinks to your YouTube video.

In about a week he’ll be finished, even giving you a report with all of the links.

The amount of time that it takes for your video to actually rank, however, may take anywhere from a week to three weeks after the back links have been added.

So in total you could be ranking in one month, but you probably won’t rank as high as you would like as the links that you’ll get from Fiverr won’t be as high in quality. Which is why I recommend that you ideally try to build them manually.

Conclusion

One advantage you have with videos over conventional SEO is that it is easier to get a YouTube video to rank on page 1 than it is to rank a website.

What that means is you can compete for rankings with well-established sites if you have optimized your videos correctly, giving you equal footing with the competition.

Google’s algorithm to find and index videos will only get better over time…and the competition for these results will obviously get more competitive, which means first page ranking will get tougher. So if you haven’t created a video yet, you better hurry up.

What other SEO tactics do you use to rank videos on the first page of search results?

Want to know the secret to getting big time-bloggers to reply to comments you leave on their blog? I’m talking about people like Brian Clark, Ramit Sethi and Danny Sullivan.

“No way!” You say, “Those guys are too busy! They’ll never respond to me.”

Anyway, why should you really care?

Well, getting someone to respond to a comment you left on their blog is a direct line to getting their attention…

And getting their attention is one step closer to becoming popular online.

And becoming popular means you are driving more traffic to your site, converting more of those visitors into subscribers and ultimately building a loyal following who will buy your products.

Over the years I’ve experimented with strategies to get the attention of bloggers and have learned methods from others like Nicholas Tart over at Income Diary, and now I want to share those strategies with you.

Comment immediately

I do a lot of web surfing as I research for blog posts and come across a lot of content…and I have to say that hands down Nick Stamoulis is the king of being the first to comment on most blog posts I see.

The man is everywhere!

And naturally, he also gets the majority of responses from the bloggers. The reason this strategy works is because of blogger sensitivity…bloggers are most sensitive to comments the first few hours they publish content because that is when they are most interested in the reader reaction.

But the older the post gets, the less likely they’ll answer comments. Something you can count on if they post daily. So, if you can comment within minutes of the blog being published, you are going to strike when they are hot.

But how does Nick do it? And how can you do it?

If you’re an iPhone user, you can use a push notification tool like Push 4.0 that sends notifications straight to your iPhone …

If you are a Google Chrome user, you can use the Google Reader Notifier…

…and as soon as you get new content, read it and respond.

Now, this won’t work if you subscribe via email since the delivery is typically scheduled and can arrive in your inbox hours after it was published.

Ask a narrow and meaningful question

Lots of popular bloggers get questions in their comment sections all the time. Most of those questions, however, don’t get answered.

Why is that?

Typically these questions are pretty basic…like “I’ve just started in such and such business, and do you have any advice for me on how I can succeed?”

Talk about opening a can of worms! That’s not the kind of question a busy blogger wants to answer because it would take forever.

Instead, if you want an answer, you need to narrow your question down to something very specific. Here are some examples:

• “In the third section of you post you said X. Have you ever tested what would happen if you did X and then Z? Did you know that the results would not be A?”
• “Your post reminds me of a situation I was in. [Blank] happened. And I did X. Did I do the right thing? What would you do?”

As you can see, asking a series of questions will narrow your idea down so that the blogger’s answer can be more manageable. Make it too broad and you will probably get ignored.

Here’s a good example from a recent SEOmoz post on Google where “explorionary” asked a great question:

To which the author of the post responded.

Leave a ton of comments

Another strategy you can employ to get the attention of the blogger is to reply to a bunch of comments per post.

I’ve seen Sean D’Souza do this over at Copyblogger. He naturally raises Brian Clark’s eyes, who probably not only appreciates the inflation of his comments…but appreciates that Sean is tackling a lot of the questions that Brian might not have time to answer.

In other words, Sean is making things easy for Brian…and a busy blogger definitely appreciates that!

Gregory Ciotti did this recently on my How to Leverage Groupon’s Affiliate Marketing Model to Grow Your Business post:

He answered the first comment and I came back around and thanked him. It helps that Gregory comments a lot on my blog.

By the way, I try to respond to every single comment…so maybe I’m not the best example? Still, I think it is good to recognize the comment.

Reply to the blogger’s reply

When the blogger jumps out there and answers a comment, that’s your perfect chance to engage them. They are obviously interested in the topic…they are hot…so strike when it’s hot!

On the Groupon post Mohideen tailed in on a comment I left:

To which I responded.

You can employ a number of the strategies I’ll mention in this article, such as: leave a thought-provoking opinion, ask a narrow, meaningful question or disagree with what he or she says that encourages the blogger to respond.

Answer the follow-up question

A lot of bloggers like to end their posts with a question. How many people do you think actually answer that question?

I end all of my posts with a question…

And I love it when people respond.

Not very many do, which is unfortunate because bloggers ask that question for a reason.

Make a point of answering the question. Who knows, you may be the only person who answers it…and if you are, you will more than likely get an answer.

Here’s how I would go about answering it: “Hi, you asked X at the end of the post. Well, the answer to your question is Y.” Of course Y is where you answer in detail.

Speaking of detail…

Leave a thought-provoking opinion

Comments are like forums where the discussion that was started in the post is continued. If you’ve deeply read and understood the blog post…then you are prepared to leave a really good opinion.

Leaving a thought-provoking opinion shows the blogger that you took the time to read his post…something most people don’t do, which is reflected in their short and shallow comments.

Furthermore, an insightful opinion will give value to the post. So will an additional tip.

For example, if the blog post is a top 10 or 100, leave a comment that adds no. 101, no. 102, etc.

Follow their advice

It’s so flattering to a blogger to hear about somebody who has taken their advice and applied it. Think about it…you’ve spent hours on a blog post, collecting ideas, writing and editing…so naturally you want it to make an impact on someone.

Wouldn’t you want to hear about how what you wrote helped somebody solve a problem?

This happens a lot on Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich blog…and Ramit comes out and responds quite often…not every time, but enough to make it a tactic to use.

Disagree with the blogger

This might seem a little intimidating. I mean you are going to challenge someone who is at the top of the pecking order…

But don’t worry…

If you truly disagree with blogger, don’t be afraid to say so. The magic is, however, in how you say it. Coming off like a jerk will get you ignored or at least flamed and ejected by the community.

Don’t do this:

“You’re wrong. Where did you get your information? Did you even do your research?”

I didn’t say be combative, I said disagree, and do it this way:

Hey, help me out here. I was wondering where you got your information in section 3. After I added up all of the numbers, I came up with X, where you came up with Y. I did this three times and I get the same thing each time. What am I missing?

If indeed the blogger is wrong, and they are a professional, they’ll appreciate your kind correction.

Everett Gavel praised Copyblogger for a great infographic but went on to explain what was wrong with it:

Which naturally brought Brian Clark out.

Add something controversial

Everybody likes a good scandal, so leaving a controversial comment is bound to signal the blogger.

A couple things to keep in mind when using this tactic though:

• Make sure you do your homework – If you say something you think is controversial, but it’s been proven wrong on Snopes…you’re going to look like a fool, especially if the blogger knows better.
• Be humble – One thing bloggers can’t stand are arrogant commentators. If you are sharing some kind of scandal in a prideful way, you are not going to look good in the eyes of the blogger or the readers.

Use the blogger’s name

People like their first names…and they like hearing it even more.

So, when you go to leave a thought-provoking insight or some controversial reply, make sure to start your comment with the blogger’s name.

As easy as it may sound, you can fail. How? By addressing somebody other than the person who wrote the article.

This typically happens when a blogger let’s someone guest post on his or her site.

This can be easily avoided if you simply pay attention to the author. Sometimes bloggers will put a colored box at the top of the post saying it’s written by a guest author.

Here’s how I do it:

Also look for the byline, which is usually at the end of the post. This is how Problogger does it:

You really shouldn’t have to look too hard to find out who wrote it.

Use your name and picture

You as a commentator need to identify yourself fully. Hiding behind Anonymous is a sure way to be ignored.

Instead, use your full name.

In addition to that, consider getting an account with Gravatar that will allow you to upload a picture that will show up no matter where you comment.

Having that picture is important, especially if you want to brand yourself.

Conclusion

Commenting is just one of many ways to getting the attention of big-time bloggers, but it’s a pretty easy, straightforward and effective method, especially if you get good at combining several of these methods together.

Keep in mind that because of Twitter, blogs don’t get nearly as many comments…but this doesn’t mean bloggers don’t love them. They do and so show them some love!

What other commenting strategies do you use to get bloggers to respond?

The New Facebook Pages design is here. For anyone in the Facebook marketing world, this means a lot of major changes. If you took advantage of the features of the timeline design for personal profiles, then the pages will feel similar. This guide will help you find what you’re going to like and hate about Facebook’s latest updates to pages, including how your brand or business can adapt.

What is New About the Facebook Pages Design

Before we dig deep into the details, let’s take a look at some of the major changes to the Facebook pages’ design.

Here, you can see some of the major cosmetic changes including the following.

• The Timeline Cover Photo – This is probably the biggest and most beautiful of the new features. Depending on your industry, it could be the perfect portfolio or your worst marketing nightmare.
• Your About Info – The about info for your company moves from a tiny box on the sidebar to one of the first areas people will see after they take in your cover photo. Although Facebook doesn’t need to do it, this is the perfect place for you to put a link to your website so you can get a higher click through rate.
• Apps – After the box for your photos (which is not moveable) are three prime spaces for your apps, assuming you don’t want to keep your number of likes on the top row. There are twelve boxes total – ten for apps.

Next, you can see the two columns for updates. As for how this will affect conversions still remains to be seen, but you can assume that having a major update next to one that isn’t that important will take away some of the focus. While you can highlight important updates (which I will discuss later), the highlighting can leave your page’s wall looking unbalanced and somewhat empty if a less important status update is left in a single column.

It’s All About the Cover Photo

The biggest piece of branding on the new Facebook pages design is the timeline cover photo. Here are the things you need to know.

• Size – The optimal size for your Facebook page’s cover photo is 851 x 315 pixels. While Facebook says they can be as small as 399 pixels wide, you should go with the full resolution size so you get the best image quality.
• Rules – There are lots of rules when it comes to the cover photo. The first warning that pops up about cover photos when you go to upload yours for the first time is that they cannot be advertisements, promotions, or coupons. When you go to the read more page, you will see additional restrictions including no price or purchase information, no contact information that should be in your About section, no references to Facebook features such as Like or Share, and no calls to action.
• Ideas – Once you get past all of the rules, you have to start getting creative. Some ideas for a cover photo include a great photo of your latest product, an image of your services, a photo of your company’s employees, or an extension of your logo. Be sure to check out the new Facebook pages in the upcoming inspiration section.

Status Updates

If you’ve grown accustom to posting status updates on your personal timeline profile, then the Status Update box on the new Facebook pages shouldn’t be much of a change.

• To post a link to your wall, simply paste the link in the Status update box and it will automatically pull up the link preview.
• If you want to post a video from YouTube, paste the link to it in the Status update box and it will automatically pull up the video.
• To post photos or video, click the Photo option and upload photo or video from your computer. You can also use your webcam to take a photo or create a photo album.
• To ask an open ended or poll question, click on the Ask Question option.
• To post a milestone (such as expanding offices to a new location), click on the Milestone option.
• Don’t forget to use the targeting option to put specific updates in front of the right demographic of your fan base.

Once you’ve posted an update, you also have additional options.

• Pinning – Want a particular status update to stay up top? Hover over your update, click on the Pencil icon, and then click Pin to Top. This will keep the update pinned to the top of your wall until you choose to unpin it or pin another update.
• Highlighting – Bring extra attention to important status updates by hovering over your update and clicking on the Star icon. This will stretch that update across both columns on your page’s wall.
• Changing the Date – Did you forget to add your latest blog post from Friday onto your wall as an update and realize it after you added Monday’s blog post? Don’t worry. Just add Friday’s blog post on your wall, hover over the update, click on the Pencil icon, and then click Change Date.

Noticeably Missing Features

Although there are a lot of great changes, there are also a ton of things that are missing. Such as:

Missing – Wall Activity from Everyone

Maybe it is just a pre-launch issue, but one thing that is noticeably missing from the new Facebook pages is activity by anyone who isn’t your friend. You can compare the above screenshot while I am logged in to my account which shows the number of friends of mine that have liked Facebook’s page plus a friend’s recent tag vs. the screenshot below where I’m logged into a dummy account that has no friends.

You can still see likes, comments, and shares on wall posts from people you are not friends with. You just cannot see direct posts on a page’s wall or tags of a page from people you are not friends with. This means that you could go to a business page that has hundreds of rave reviews from others, but if none of those people are your friends, you would not see them. It is ultimately determined by the privacy settings of the people who post on pages. Visit Facebook’s help center to learn more about privacy for people who like pages.

Gone – Default Landing Tab

Say goodbye to having people who are not yet fans get directed to your fan gate or welcome tab. While you can use the direct URL of an application to direct people to a specific tab, anyone who clicks on the main link to your Facebook page (such as the one from the Like button or box on your website) will be taken to your main Timeline. This has made some marketers upset as they were able to successfully convert fans or even sales from a default landing tab, but it is sadly confirmed to be gone by Facebook.

Missing – Place Recommendations

Another (hopefully) pre-launch issue is the missing recommendations for local business pages/place pages. If you haven’t converted your local business page to the new Facebook page design, I would suggest copying your recommendations and who they were from before you do. Maybe grab a screenshot or two as well. No one is 100% sure on if this will get re-incorporated into the new Facebook pages or not. You can voice your opinion in the Facebook developer’s bug report for recommendations in timeline for pages.

Facebook Apps & Custom Content

Once you get past the loss of default landing tabs, you will likely next notice additional changes to the way you Facebook apps and custom tabs are displayed.

• Number of Apps & Custom Tabs – As I mentioned earlier, you can use up to 10 apps and content tabs on your Facebook page. While there are twelve boxes, one is reserved for your photos and another is reserved for your page’s number of likes.
• Prioritization – While the photos box always will stay in the first position, you have the option to put your apps and content tabs in the next three spaces. This way, you can display your most important apps and custom content tabs without having to hope that a visitor knows to click the down arrow. Click on the down arrow next to your row of apps, hover over a tab, and click on the Pencil icon. Then use the “Swap Position With” options to move your boxes around to the order you would like them displayed.
• Custom Name & Icons – For any box other than Photos and Likes, you can change the tab name and image. To do so, click on the down arrow next to your row of apps, hover over a box, and click on the Pencil icon. Select Edit Settings. Here, you can enter a different name for your tab or click on the Change link to change the tab image. Images should be 111 x 74 pixels. Use larger images with the same proportion so they will scale down to fit inside the box. Images smaller than 111 x 74 pixels will not fill the entire space.
• Content Size – Custom content and apps now have a width of 810 pixels to work with. Any of your current apps or custom content should be centered within this space until they are changed by you or your application provider to fit the new layout.
• Direct URL – The only alternative to a default landing tab is directly linking to the tab you want to direct your fan page visitors to. Click on the tab you want visitors to see first when they come to your page, and copy the URL from your browser’s address bar as shown below. Then use this URL when you link to your fan page within your website content, email signature, and other locations.

Messages – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

One other major new features that visitors to your Facebook page can take part in is private messages.

• Keeping Bad Comments Off Your Wall – One perk to having the private messaging option on your page is that it has the potential to steer angry customers or fans from writing on your wall to writing to you in private. This way, you can handle a situation without it becoming an ugly (and possibly viral) mess for your brand.
• Keeping Good Comments Off Your Wall – A downside to having the private messaging option on your page is that people who might otherwise leave a good comment on your wall praising your brand might send the compliment privately instead. While you could politely ask if they share their comment publicly (or mind if you share their comment publicly), it would just be easier if they had left it on your wall in the first place.
• Losing Wall Engagement – The other downside to messages is they might take away public engagement with your wall. Instead of commenting on one of your posts, they may message your page instead.
• Turning Off Messages – Once you’ve balanced the pros and cons of the private messaging system, if you choose to turn off private messaging for you page, you can. Facebook certainly did. Simply go to your Admin Panel, then click on Manage and Edit Page. On the Manage Permissions screen, you will see a checkbox for Show “Message” Button on your page. Simply uncheck that to turn off the private messages option.

The New Admin Panel

The new Admin Panel for your Facebook pages gives you the most important information about your page in a quick glance.

The following are some features you will definitely want to check out, staring with the at a glance sections.

• Notifications – Of course, notifications are not new. But when you click the See All link, you will find an RSS feed for your page notifications. This comes in handy if you manage a lot of pages but don’t want to go to them individually to check your notifications. Now you can simply subscribe to the RSS feed for all of your pages’ notifications to see them all in your RSS reader.
• New Likes – Click on the See All link under New Likes to see the latest people who have liked your page. Use the dropdown to also see the Facebook pages that have liked your page.
• Messages – If you leave the private messaging feature on your page, this is where you can see incoming messages. Click See All to view them all, or click on the name of the sender to see the full message and reply.

Next, you’ll want to check out your dropdown menu options, starting with Manage.

• Manage > Edit Page – Under the Manage menu, you will find the Edit Page section. One of the most important screens you will want to visit when you convert to the new design is Manage Permissions as shown above. Here you can customize the posting ability of fans on your page, post visibility, tagging ability, private messages option, and other settings. The rest of the information is the same as your page’s previous Admin Panel.
• Manage > Use Activity Log – If you have used the Activity Log for your personal timeline profile, this one is similar. Scroll through your activity log to see posts by your page and by your fans. Click on the icons to the right of each update to change the settings for each post to Highlighted on page, Allowed on Page, Hidden from Page, Delete Post, Change Date, or Report / Mark as Spam.
• Manage > See Banned Users – If you have ever banned a user from your page, you can see a list of those users here. You can also choose to unban users if your issues with them have been resolved.

The other important menu item that will help you get more Facebook fans to your page is Build Audience. Here is what you will find under it.

• Build Audience > Invite Email Contacts – Have a huge email list? Take advantage of it by importing your contacts (up to 5,000) and inviting those email contacts to become a fan of your page.
• Build Audience > Invite Friends – Page Admins can invite their friends to become a fan of their page. By suggesting your page to a friend, that friend will see a notification on their profile to check out your page. This is a great way to build your fan base. Be sure to take advantage of it before Facebook decides to remove it again.
• Build Audience > Share Page – This is just a quick way to post an update with a link to your page on your personal profile.
• Build Audience > Create an Ad – If you want to expand your page’s exposure on Facebook, try Facebook Ads. It will allow you show your page to a target audience by location, demographics, and even interests.

New Facebook Insights Data

Want to learn more about your Facebook page’s fans and activity? You can with Facebook Insights. To get to your Insights, click on your Admin Panel and See All next to the Insights portion. There you will find the some exciting information about your Facebook page.

Overview

The first screen in your Insights panel is the Overview where you can see the following details.

• Total Likes – The number of people who like your page. Unfortunately this number does not include Facebook pages that like your page.
• Friends of Fans – The number of people who are friends with people who like your page. It seems this number should also include subscribers of people who like your page. Although it doesn’t, that would be a great addition.
• People Talking About This – The number of people who have created a story about your page including posting to your wall, interacting with a status update (likes, comments, and shares), answering a question, responding to an event, mentioning your page in a status update, tagging your page, or checking in at your place.
• Weekly Total Reach – The number of people who have seen any content from your page for the last seven days.
• Posts – The purple bubble on the graph represents the number of posts your page has published on a given day.

Beneath the graph, you can see engagement information about your individual page posts. Columns are sortable by date, post snippet, and the following pieces of data.

• All Post Types – The default view for this section will show all of your latest posts. Click on this dropdown to see posts with photos, links, videos, or questions.
• Post – The post column shows the beginning snippet of your post. Click on it to see a full preview.
• Reach – The number of people who have seen the post within the first 28 days after it was published on your wall. Click on the number to see the graphical breakdown of organic, paid, and viral views.
• Engaged Users – The number of people who have clicked on the post within the first 28 days after it was published. Click on the number to see the number of times your post generated clicks and engagement from users including likes, comments, and shares.
• Virality – The percentage of people who have created a story from your page post (shares) out of the total number of people who have seen it.

Likes

The Likes section shows you a demographic breakdown of people who have liked your page including age, gender, countries, cities, and languages.

Beneath the demographics is a section that tells you where your page’s likes have come from.

This is a great way to see what converts visitors into fans.

• On Page – Likes generated from your Facebook page itself.
• Like Box and Like Button – Likes generated from the Like Box and Like Button social plugins on external websites.
• Admin Invite – Likes generated from the use of suggesting a page to a friend from the Admin Panel > Build Audience > Invite Friends.
• Timeline – Likes generated from people clicking on your page in a person’s personal Timeline profile Likes section.
• Mobile – Likes generated from people on a mobile device.
• Search Results – Likes generated from people who used Facebook’s search box.
• Page Like Another Page – Likes generated from other pages that like your page.
• Facebook Recommendations – Likes generated from a Recommended Pages unit in the right hand column on Facebook.
• On Hover – Likes generated from the popup window shown when someone hovers over a link leading to your page anywhere on Facebook.
• Ticker – Likes generated from mentions of your page in the news ticker.
• Friend Referrals – Likes generated from a story about someone liking your page.

You can also see the number of unlikes you have on a given day. If you see a big spike in unlikes on a particular day, you should see if you posted something on your page’s wall that day and avoid similar updates.

Reach

The Reach section shows you demographics about the people you have reached through your page’s content, posts, and stories by others. Scroll down to the bottom of this section to see two important pieces of information.

• Total Tab Views – The number of times each tab is viewed on your Facebook page, including the main timeline itself.
• External Referrers – The number of referral visits from sites other than Facebook, including any site you have included a link to your Facebook page.

Talking About This

The Talking About This section shows you demographics about the people who have created stories around your Facebook page. Beneath the demographics data are graphs that show how people are engaging with your page including page likes, stories from your posts, mentions and photos tags, and posts by others.

Export Data

Want to see the raw data? You can export your page and post level data to Excel (.xls) and comma-separated text format (.csv).

This can be helpful since most of the Insights screens will only allow you to go 89 days back. The export will include any data after July 2011.

Facebook Insights for All

While detailed insights is limited to page administrators, you can now see some basic insights about any page by visiting the page and clicking on their number of likes.

Here, you can see the number of people talking about a particular page this week, the number of total likes, the most popular week for that page, the top location engaging with the page, the age group of the most engaged fans are, and a graph of their latest engagement activity.

This is a great way to do some competitive research.

• You can target your competitor’s most popular city and age group in Facebook ads to generate new likes for your page.
• You can scroll through your competitor’s timeline to see what they did to make their page popular on the most popular week.
• You can see if your competitor’s latest Facebook marketing strategy is increasing or decreasing their page’s engagement and model your similarly or not.

Your New Facebook Pages To-Do List

So now that you’ve read through this guide, you might be wondering what you should do first. Here’s a simple to-do list of things you need to do to prepare your business page for the new design and functionality. Otherwise, your page could end up looking like this.

• Take Advantage of the Preview Option – You don’t have to convert your page over until March 30th, 2012. But you can prepare your page to be converted to the new design by clicking on the preview button to see how it will look and prepare accordingly.
• Get a Great Cover Photo – If you have to, hire a photographer to take pictures of your employees, your building, your products, etc. But get a good cover photo. Your page will look abandoned without it.
• Update Your About Information – You can have up to 165 characters in your page’s About field including a link to your website. Use it wisely as it will be front and center and could lead to additional clicks to your website.
• See How Your Updates Look – Scroll through your timeline to see your page’s wall posts and status updates. Make sure that you have a good amount of updates from the past few months at minimum. Use the highlighting option by clicking the Star icon on important updates to make them stand out.
• Break Up Third Party Updates – If you used a third-party platform to update your page, you might find that some of your updates are clumped together. Click on the Pencil icon above a group of updates and the View Individual Stories. This will take you to those updates in your Activity Log. Click on the Circle icon next to each update and change it to Highlighted on Page. Then go back to your page and click the Star icon to un-highlight them. This should make them individual stories on your page’s timeline.
• Backdate Updates to Fill Up Timeline – If you don’t have a lot of updates, post some and then click on the Pencil icon on the update and change the date. Use this to fill up your recent timeline to show some activity.
• Check Your Page’s Basic Information – Click on the About link on your page and take a look at your page’s basic information (contact information, description, etc.). Add additional information if necessary to fill this area out.
• Check Your Custom Content & Apps – Click on each of your Facebook apps and custom content tabs to see what changes need to be made. Contact your designer or application creator to see if they have updates on when they can fit your apps and content to the new Facebook pages layout size.

On-Going New Facebook Pages Maintenance Plan

Once you have taken care of the basic housecleaning, you will need to do the following to keep your new Facebook page’s timeline full of activity!

• Post a Variety of Updates – Keeping your Facebook page up to date is now more important than ever. Be sure to post a variety of updates including simple status updates, questions, photos, and videos to engage with fans and keep your timeline looking healthy.
• Use Pins and Highlights – Take advantage of the pinning feature to keep important wall posts up top and the highlighting feature to stretch important content across both columns for maximum impact.
• Check Notifications & Respond to Messages – Keep an eye on any activity happening on your page and be sure to reply when needed. Especially keep tabs on your messages – you might be able to prevent an angry message from going private to public by responding quickly.
• Do Some Testing – Try new things. If you feel like your number of likes are not increasing at a good rate, try a new cover photo or Facebook ad. If people don’t seem to be responding to links on your wall, try photos or videos instead. Move your tab around to see if you get more traffic on a welcome tab over a Twitter tab.
• Keep an Eye on Insights – Check up on your Facebook Insights regularly. This could be the key to finding out which page posts get the most response, what sources are leading to likes on your page, and other crucial information about your page’s engagement.

Inspiration from Brand Facebook Pages

Need some inspiration for your page? Here are brands using the new design to give you some ideas on cover photos, custom tabs, about information, and more.

• The Today Show – America’s #1 morning puts their main stars on the cover and pins their latest show content on their timeline asking viewers what they thought of the story.
• SportsCenter – SportsCenter shows an inside look at taping the show in their cover photo and highlights the latest sports news in their timeline.
• People.com – The top celebrity magazine puts the most popular celebrity photos on their timeline and use their latest magazine cover as their profile photo.
• Tide – This detergent brand showcases their latest product in their cover photo as well as in their custom tabs.
• Herbal Essences – Herbal Essences displays their latest line of products in their cover photo and highlights 40 years in the business, video reviews, and current promotions in their custom tabs.
• Macy’s – Macy’s prides themselves as being the world’s largest store in their cover photo and lets visitors know they have been around for 150 years in their about info. Plus they pin news about their latest sales on their timeline.
• Livestrong – Livestrong pins the milestone of when they were founded on their timeline, and their cover photo is an extension of their well-recognized logo.
• Chevy Sonic – Chevy uses a creative cover photo of their newest model and custom tabs that make it look like the coolest car ever.
• Kia Soul – One of the most memorable parts of every Kia Soul commercial is the hamsters, and their Facebook page highlights them in their cover photo, profile photo, and latest updates.
• Ford – Ford uses their custom tabs to showcase an app with their top product pages. They also highlight news about their upcoming Google+ Hangout on their timeline.
• American Express – American Express puts a creative spin on their “Member Since” tag on their cover photo and their custom tabs feature the latest Amex promotions.
• SEOmoz – SEOmoz uses abstract artwork for their main cover photo and highlights their mascot Roger in their profile photo.
• Mashable – Mashable updates their cover photo with the latest news on their site, which is currently (at the time of posting) the iPad 3. They also make sure that everyone knows about their other pages by liking them.
• Zena Caffè – This restaurant puts their a delectable dish as their cover photo, enticing visitors to want to stop in and have a meal.
• Canlis – This restaurant shows their lovely location as their cover photo and puts videos and reservations in the custom tabs.

Official Resources

Need to know more? The following are additional resources from Facebook itself.

• Introducing New Facebook Pages – This is Facebook’s introduction to the new Facebook pages design and main features. You can also see the latest big brands that have converted their pages.
• Facebook Pages Common Questions – This covers common questions asked about the new features and managing your new page.
• Learn About Facebook Pages – This is the video guide / course for the new Facebook pages design. It includes information on how to connect with people, customize your page, control your content, and manage your page.
• Facebook Pages – This is the beginner’s starting point for basic Facebook page information. Most of this information has been update for the new design.
• Facebook Pages Product Guide – This 8 page guide covers walks you through the new Facebook page features and includes a checklist of what you need to do to prepare.
• Best Practice Guide – Marketing on Facebook – This 14 page guide covers best marketing practices and includes a list of helpful Facebook resources.
• Building Your Business with Facebook Pages – Although it’s not quite updated to the new design, you’ll find some helpful Facebook engagement tips throughout and editorial calendar samples on pages 12 – 14.

Conclusion

As you can see, while there are some major drawbacks to the new Facebook pages, there are also many new advantages. There is no sense in protesting the changes as they are going to happen whether you want them to or not, so you might as well go with the flow and adapt to Facebook’s new design. Take the next few weeks and make it work for your business!

So what do you think about the new Facebook pages?

Are you a small business owner with a blog? Is the blog successful? Well, if it’s not I might have a hunch why…

…and it has everything to do with content strategy.

Content strategy is a focused look at the entire life cycle of content…from the creation to maintenance and even retirement of content. You look at things like developing, curating, information architecture, writing, editing and marketing.

Unfortunately, not very many people take the time to think strategically about their content, they just design a site and start writing.

I want to change that mindset right now and give you the steps and the tools you need to create killer content…day in and day out…so you can take your business to the next level.

Step #1: Define your blogging objectives with these six questions

The very first thing you have to do is decide what you want to achieve with your blog. Different small businesses will have different objectives. Here are some questions to help you define that objective:

• Do you want to drive foot traffic to your shop or office?
• Do you want to increase sales or generate leads?
• Do you want to attract prospects in an area outside of your local area? Do you want to attract clients from overseas?
• Do you want to educate prospects and customers on what you do?
• Do you want to update your customers about what’s going on with your business?
• Do you want to build a brand?

Keep in mind that you can have two or three objectives, but any more than that and your blog will be unfocused.

Your next step is to figure out who your audience is.

Step #2: Use Research.ly to get inside your blog reader’s head

It’s important you understand who your blog reader is and what he or she likes. To help you figure this out, use the Twitter metric tool Research.ly.

This tool will help you see insights on what your potential readers are interested in. Here’s a search on the keyword “coffee”:

You can see all the searches in the US and globally and then also view segments and sentiments for your keyword, which will allow you to determine how to approach your content creation.

In addition, you will see tweets by gender, popularity and retweets. These trends will open up your understanding about trends in specific industries and communities and help you create content that is reader-centric.

Step #3: Use Facebook Insights to get inside your reader’s head

Another great tool to use to get inside your reader’s head is Facebook’s Insights. How might this help you? Well, if you have a branded business page, then log into Insights and view the page you want to analyze.

You get a big picture of content…like how many likes and how many visitors to your Facebook page, including the overall engagement with the page.

You’ll want to watch this information for trends among the stories and advertising your promoting. You’ll want to discover what’s getting traction and what’s not.

You’ll also want to get a daily view to see the individual interaction of your visitors:

What’s really nice is you can export all of this data into a spreadsheet…

And analyze the daily breakdown to identify what is moving people:

To really get inside your reader’s head, you have to dig deeper. Do this by clicking on the “Get Details” on each report:

You’ll see unique views v. post views, likes and comments and where those likes came from.

Even further down and you can get data on gender, age and country:

Drill even deeper and you can get reports on referrer sources, virality and community activity. All this information can help you understand who your readers are, what they like to read and how you should give it to them.

Step #4: Create a content calendar

Now that you’ve developed a profile of your ideal reader, your next step is to create an editorial calendar.

The best way to do this is to make a list of all the variables that are related to your business and blog. More than likely there will be hundreds of these variables. That’s okay because you’ll eventually prioritize that list into a top 50 or less, eliminating everything else.

What does this look like? Here are ten common variables to think about:

• Date
• Channel
• Content element
• Reader profiles
• Reader events
• Holidays
• Seasons
• Hot trends in your industry
• Content creators
• Content workflow step
• Budget

No two calendars are alike and your calendar will more than likely change from year to year…even month to month. That’s okay.

It also might be tempting to skip this step because it is administrative heavy…but please, don’t skip it! I believe a content calendar is one of the single most influential tools to keep you on track with your blog. And the longer your blog is up the more successful it will become.

Step #5: Manage your blog content with EditFlow

If you have several employees at your small business, you may want to recruit them to write for your blog. This will get you a wide range of content from different angles of your business. But it may not be easy to implement unless you use a tool like EditFlow.

This plugin gives you a snapshot of your calendar:

You’ll also see an improved content status that’s better than WordPress’ default draft and pending review:

What I think is great are the inline comments between writer and editor:

Then there are the user groups to help you keep your team of writers organized by department or function.

Step #6: Create great content using these 13 questions

When it comes to actually creating content, you need to deliver technical and detailed information about your area of expertise, especially since the Panda and Farmer Updates.

Plus, there are so many blogs churning out poor-quality content, your readers are going to ignore half-baked, half-page posts…

This means they won’t comment or share them either.

That means you need to create high-quality, interesting content, which takes time. But if you ask yourself these 13 questions your chances of writing great content increases:

• Is what you wrote original?
• Can you provide practical advice or relevant research?
• Did you correct any spelling, grammar or factual errors?
• Is the topic of interest to a reader or a machine?
• Is the article well edited?
•  Does your site have authority?
• Are you providing insightful or interesting information beyond the obvious?
• Would you bookmark your article?
• Is your article cluttered with call-to-actions, ads or promotions?
• Would a magazine or journal print your article?
• Is your article short, weak and useless?
• How much time and attention did you give to detail?
• Would someone complain if they saw this article?

Step #7: Share great photos

In the 2011 Technorati State of the Blog report, 90 percent of bloggers shared some kind of media on their site, photos being the number one piece of media:

If you think about it, that’s a great content strategy to draw attention and drive traffic to your site.

But you can’t just put any old photo up there. It’s got to be the right photo. And it’s got to be big if you want to get a lot of attention.

One of the most unique blogs of 2011 and a Time favorite blog, Boston Globe’s Photoblog takes full advantage of the 990 pixels of screen space…attracting a lot of attention.

Now, you may not want to go that big, but the point is that the web is a visual media and you can’t neglect getting this area when it comes to your content strategy.

Step #8: Keep your content consistent to drive traffic

According to research by Hubspot in their 2011 State of Inbound Marketing, bloggers who blog daily will get five times as much traffic than those who blog once a week or less.

This means you have to create a schedule in which you can sustain such a frequency. But this is only true if your blog objective is short-term, like driving traffic to your site.

On the other hand, if you have a long-term objective where driving traffic isn’t a priority but deep SEO and links, you may want to cut back on the number of posts you share. This used to be one my objectives on my blog, and one of the things I learned over the years is that a lower frequency of blog posts increases interaction.

In fact, when I’ve run some tests where I’ve delivered long posts that are detailed on a less than frequent basis versus daily posting… my readership and number of comments rise. I believe that it gives space to your readers to digest what you wrote and then to comment and share.

Step #9: Audit your content

When it comes to web content it’s better to think of your content as a living thing that needs long-term care rather than something in a museum that collects dust.

This is where audits come in.

This doesn’t have to be a daily habit, which could get costly in time. Instead, run quarterly site-wide audits. If it’s a huge site with lots of content, audit just a tenth of your site every quarter.

It’s well worth the effort, because without it you won’t be able to maintain a blog that is relevant and accurate, which is critical for maintaining trust and credibility with your readers.

And of course, one of the most problematic parts of the task is checking outgoing links. Are they still pointing to a relevant, live pages? If the page is dead, then the hosting company may park their own page at that link. Or somebody filled a page with a sponsored ad that doesn’t reflect the content of your blog or that page. And even worse yet, it could be point to a porn site.

Another approach is to simply review an older post for every new post you publish.

And if you are wondering what audits look like, here’s what my audits look like (I use a spreadsheet for this):

• Page ID (a number you apply to organize the hierarchy, e.g. 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.2, and so on)
• Page title
• URL
• ROT (redundant, outdated, or trivial?)
• Notes

You don’t have to use a spreadsheet. You can use the Content Audit plugin instead. This plug in will allow you to set up notifications when content has been audited in a certain amount of time:

Then you edit the page based upon the audit category and author notes:

Once you’ve finished your audit, go after the low-hanging fruit. ROT content should be dealt with immediately. Want to dig deeper? Look for opportunities to consolidate, streamline, refine, and update content. When it comes to web content, less is more.

Conclusion

As you can see, starting a blog takes time and lots of energy. But trust me…it will totally pay off! I employ these strategies myself and I use it for my corporate blog. It’s so effective that I haven’t launched one blog that hasn’t hit at least 100,000 monthly visitors.

Do you have any other content strategies that I’ve missed?

Until late 2009, Groupon was considered a massive failure. If you looked at their Alexa rankings before 2010, you would notice they had very little traffic.

Fast forward to the end of 2010 and their traffic exploded… and there was even speculation that Google would buy Groupon for $5 billion dollars.

Groupon eventually turned that offer down and went on to float the largest IPO by a web company since Google.

What accounted for that huge turnaround? Two words: “affiliate marketing.”

Why Groupon grew so quickly

Groupon owes a huge debt to affiliates.

And one important part of their strategy was to cut out the middle men, affiliate networks like Commission Junction and the Google Affiliate Network, which took huge cuts from the revenues generated.

Instead, Groupon focused on creating relationships directly with affiliates.

Key takeaway: Unlike most marketing channels, you only pay per transaction with affiliate marketing. In other words, you only spend money when you make money, which makes it easier for small businesses who are cash constrained to grow.

What it looks like to be a daily deal affiliate

Lets pretend you are a social media nut with a Twitter following of 40,000 and a social media blog with a subscriber count of 11,000. You’ve joined Groupon (and a handful of other daily deal sites) as an affiliate, so each day an email is sent to your inbox with the daily deal.

When these deals are relevant to your audience you share it. Obviously, you include your unique affiliate links and watch the money pour in.

Now, you probably won’t be able to retire off of this income…but it’s not chump change either. You can stuff it away for that trip to Las Vegas or your kids’ college education.

Key takeaway: It’s easy for anyone to become an affiliate. Because of Twitter, Facebook, and for the social web you don’t have to own a website to be an affiliate.

How they made life easy for affiliates

Groupon knew that if you made things hard for affiliates they wouldn’t promote your company. So they made things really simple by giving you banners for you to place on your websites or blogs. The beautiful thing about their banners is that they changed with the deal of the day.

Everyday your website traffic is exposed to these deals…all tied into your affiliate ID. And because these ads change on a daily basis and are tailored to your audience, they convert better.

Can you see why joining Groupon’s affiliate program would be attractive? That’s why Groupon took off.

Key takeaway: If you make things hard for your affiliates, no one will want to promote your program. In addition to that you have to be creative as people have banner blindness. Groupon did this by showing new deals in their ads each day and by making them targeted to each website visitor.

How to develop great relationships with affiliates

I’ve found that in my own experience and the experience of my client’s that there is huge value in creating relationships with the right affiliates.

But how do you find those relationships?

• Bloggers – Approach some individual bloggers who are aligned with your product and industry and ask them if they would be interested in being an affiliate. And don’t just target big-name bloggers. A hundred mid-to-small range bloggers can drive as much quality traffic…if not more…to your site.
• Social media – Like your approach to bloggers, hunt down some mid-to-small range social media enthusiasts who might be interested in joining your program.
• News sources – Ask those who run sites that develop original news stories (TechCrunch) or aggregate news (like Huffington Post) to talk about your affiliate program. Most big news sites won’t write about it, so you will probably have better luck approaching mid-to-small range news sites.

And when approaching these people, make sure you spell out the benefits…in other words, why they should care to join your affiliate program or talk about it.

Key takeaway: Don’t expect affiliates to come to you. Go out there and recruit them by building relationships.

Setting your affiliate program apart from the crowd

Around 2007, entrepreneur Mike Geary, of Truth about Abs, joined the Clickbank affiliate program. He quickly noticed that most affiliates were paying out 35 to 50% to their affiliates.

Because Mike was selling a digital product, he decided to raise his commission payout to 75% since he didn’t have any overhead (and it’s the maximum you can pay out to affiliates).

That might sound excessively generous…which it is. And you might wonder is if you can actually make any money off that.

Well, immediately hundreds of affiliates noticed his generous payout and switched their traffic to point to his website.

Out of more than 10,000 products being sold on Clickbank, in just a few months Mike’s product shot up to being the number one sold, which naturally brought more attention to his product.

According to Mike, his monthly revenue is around $1,000,000. Yes, that’s one million dollars…a month. That’s what happens when you have a great product and promote it properly by standing out among affiliates.

Key takeaway: The affiliate world is a crowded space and your program is competing with all of the other affiliate programs out there. You have to think like an affiliate and ask yourself “why would someone promote my program over a competitors?” In most cases people will promote your program if you offer higher payouts.

How to start your own affiliate program

So, want to start an affiliate program? Well, here are five things you need to think about.

1. Look at your current audience

The key to getting your affiliate program off the ground is to find the right affiliates for your brand. You should start by looking at your blog subscribers, email newsletter readers and social media followers. These people have been exposed to your product for quite some time and probably have even paid for it. Identify those who will make good targets.

2. Define how you will market your affiliate program

If you want a successful affiliate program, you have to market it outside of your current user base. This means you have to look outside of your blog subscribers, email newsletter readers and social media followers. Affiliates won’t just randomly come to you. You have to recruit them.

• One approach is to go out there and find affiliates on your own. Hunt down bloggers and website owners who could promote your product or service. Also look for people who have email lists as some of the people on their list could benefit from your product or service.
• Another option is to go through networks like Epic Advertising and have them recruit affiliates for you. They already have thousands of affiliates in their system and they can plug you right in with relevant ones. Keep in mind though that affiliate networks take a middleman fee.
• You could take a middle road and do a bit of both. This is the route that most companies go.

3. Understand how to drive traffic

You will fail at your efforts if you don’t understand what it takes to generate traffic. I know, it’s your affiliates driving traffic to you, but if you can’t help them succeed then you won’t succeed. So you have to know what they will be getting themselves into.

• Find the secrets -  I’ve written about this a lot and have even created a product that is designed to drive massive traffic to your site using SEO, content marketing social media and email newsletters.
• Diversify your traffic – Make sure your traffic comes from more than one place. If you lose one stream you won’t immediately go under. This means you can’t just rely on affiliates.
• Use paid traffic – Drive paid traffic using tools like Google AdWords or ReTargetter is a great way to figure out what converts for you and what will potentially convert for your affiliates.
• Build relationships with bloggers – Like I mentioned above, your best route is to develop relationships with some serious bloggers. As they can drive tons of traffic and push a lot of sales.

4. Announce the program

Once you’ve understood how to drive traffic, your next step is to announce your affiliate program. Here’s a template I like to use:

• Blog post – Write a blog post that explains your affiliate program. Share it throughout your social media network.
• Social media – Schedule tweets and Facebook posts using Hootsuite that will pepper your audience with opportunities to join your affiliate program.
• Email – If you have an email newsletter list, shoot them an email announcing the program. Plus, don’t forget to email all of your contacts and let them know about it!
• Guest posting – Write an article about a topic that is relevant to the audience of the blogger you are going to write for…and then figure out how to weave your affiliate program into the post (assuming they are ok with it).
• Directories – Publicize your affiliate program on directories like OfferVault, PointClickTrack or  5 Star Affiliate Programs and even go after relevant forums.

In the end, it’s not about how many affiliates you have…it’s about the quality of those affiliates. A handful of enthusiastic, driven affiliates are worth way more than a bunch of lazy affiliates who do nothing.

5. Measure your results

This is such an important step because you can’t grow something you aren’t measuring. So, use your analytics tool (read How to (Finally) Make Your Web Analytics Work for You and Which Web Analytics Is Best for You…and Why for more information on web analytics) to figure out what is working and what is not working

Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

• Which affiliates are driving the most traffic? – Can you encourage them to drive even more? It may be a huge site who is putting minimal effort into your program. If you dangle some incentives out there to the site owner, he or she may only have to put in a little more effort to double your traffic. Get them to throw their whole weight behind it…and you could explode!
• Which affiliates are driving the least traffic? – Can you encourage them to drive any? Are they worth your time? Should you even cut them off?
• Is the revenue worth it? – Are you getting a ton of complaints and refund requests? Some affiliates will drive customers who won’t be happy. Find out which affiliates are driving you good customers and cut off the ones that are driving you bad customers as you can lose money.

One of the main reasons it’s so important to figure out what works is because you need to reinvest in the things that are working and cut off the ones that aren’t.

Conclusion

Groupon harnessed the power of direct relationships with affiliates to go from nearly being broke to becoming a powerhouse that attracted over $700 million dollars for an IPO. And I don’t believe that kind of success is limited to a company with hundreds of employees, because you also see it in the success of Mike Geary and his “Truth about Abs” company.

What’s most encouraging about Groupon’s success, however, is the amount of time it took to grow so big. We’re not talking a decade or even years…but in reality were just talking about one year.

But don’t think that it’s easy because if it was that easy everyone would be doing it. Creating a good affiliate program will take a lot of blood, sweat and tears…

Did I miss any affiliate marketing secrets that should be shared?

If you are blogging to promote yourself or your company, then there are two trends you need to be very concerned about…

The speed of your site and social sharing.

For the last two years, search engines like Google have been putting heavy emphasis on these two issues. Plus, web users are abandoning sites that are slow to load and they are moving towards reading content with high social shares.

But how do you make your site faster? And how do you encourage more shares?

Fortunately, if you use WordPress, then most of the work is done for you. You just simply have to download one of these plugins, tick off some boxes and you’re off to a faster site with more shares.

Here are the ten plugins that you ought to use:

Plugin #1: WordPress SEO by Yoast

All in One SEO used to be the go-to plugin when it came to easy SEO for WordPress blogs and sites. That’s until Yoast came out with WordPress SEO.

This plugin has so many cool features like a snippet preview, and a page analysis to help you optimize a page’s content, including meta data like titles, keywords and descriptions:

Other options include:

• Robots meta configuration – Keep single posts or pages out of the index…or entire sections with this simple feature.
• Canonical - This allows you to control the correct canonical on each page, including the homepage, tags and categories. (This got messy when Yahoo, Google and Microsoft started supporting a new link element to clean up duplicate URLs on sites.)
• Breadcrumbs – Control which taxonomy to show for each post and control which title to use for each post, page and taxonomy.
• Permalink clean up – You can make sure that links pointing toward you are clean (they don’t end in a weird variable like /2 at the end of them) by directing those weird links away from you.
• XML sitemaps – Using a XSLT stylesheet renders your sitemap readable by humans but also talks to your SEO plugin so that when you noindex a page, it won’t accidentally still end up on your sitemap, which happens when you use a different XML sitemap generator.
• RSS enhancements – Add a piece of content to the beginning and end of your content, which allows you to link back to your blog and the particular blog post…helpful if you content is getting scraped.
• Robots.txt and .htaccess editing – This makes editing the robots.txt and .htaccess easy. You can now do it straight from the plugin files menu.

Plugin #2: HTTP Compression

If a browser supports compression, then a blog using the HTTP Compression plugin will compress pages in gzip format…

Rendering a 60-80% reduction in the size of your pages, which turns into a 3 to 4 times increase in page speed, which is essential if you don’t want to lose visitors.

If you’re not using the latest version of WordPress, you may not be able to use the gzip compression. Test your blog using the simple tool at Is My Blog Working?

If the “Your blog application doesn’t support gzip compression” is showing up, then you probably need to install the latest WordPress version.

By the way, this plugin won’t work if you are using WP Super Cache, since it uses compression functionality. Your blog will still work, but WP Super Cache will stop caching new pages.

Plugin #3: WP Super Cache

Another plugin that speeds up your site, especially in the case of a sudden surge of traffic, is the WP Super Cache, which creates static HTML files that are served instead of the heavier PHP scripts in WordPress.

Super Cache helps in two ways: when your server is underpowered or when you are experiencing a heavy surge of traffic.

It’s been tested under some extreme examples…and proven to work without a hiccup.

For example, Scott Beale had a page show up on the Digg front page twice, a mention on Slashdot and some major media exposure…with over 200,000 page views in one day:

Scott was using Super Cache and didn’t experience a slowdown in server speed.

Plugin #4: Facebook Comments Box

Comments Box is a social plugin that enables users to comment on your site.

There are two key benefits to using Facebook Comment box for your comments:

• Social relevance – The most relevant comments, comments left by friends, the highest liked comments or active threads are all ordered from top to bottom; basically leveraging the social signals of users.
• Distribution – Using this plugin allows you to spread a discussion onto Facebook. When a user keeps the “Post to Facebook” box checked their comment will show up on their Facebook streams, exposing their comment and your blog post (and the link) to their friends.

That last point allows your friends to now comment on the discussion by liking or replying to your comment, which is done directly in Facebook. However, these discussions are all linked and connected back to your site. This perfect social commenting ecosystem is why Raven Tools made the switch to Facebook Comment Box.

Unfortunately, this plugin renders your comments in an iFrame (yes, that means Facebook owns your comments), which search engines will not crawl.

The workaround is to grab the comments from the API…

…and stick them in the body of your page behind the comments box. But that’s a lot of work, so you need to decide if the advantages gained in social sharing are worth the losses in SEO impact.

Plugin #5: WPtouch

More and more people are accessing the Internet via their smart phones. Unfortunately, most websites and blogs are not mobile phone friendly. That means you need to get your site ready for mobile use…or miss out on opportunities to spread your content in a new way.

Fortunately, if you have a WordPress website or blog, adapting it to mobile is pretty simple due to the WPtouch plugin.

This plugin takes your WordPress blog and turns it into an app like theme:

The plugin works on iPhones, iPod Touches, Android, Blackberry 0S6 and Palm Pre/Pixi and gives users control to switch between the WPtouch theme or your regular view.

And keep in mind this does not change a bit of code.

The WPtouch Pro gives you more options with theme style, color, 10 languages and even advertising options. Also, the 2.6 version gives you iPad theme support.

Plugin #6: WP-DBManager

Your database can get clunky and cluttered by all the WordPress features…and if you are a blogger who’s been at it for years…then your site will slow down in speed, potentially driving away visitors.

This will only get worse as you add more articles.

Use the WP-DBmanager and you can clean up that database and improve site performance. It will allow you to analyze…

…and then repair, optimize and back up your files.

You can even set this to work automatically.

But, it’s important that you understand the basics of databases. If you don’t, then this plugin will be just too complex for you to use, and I wouldn’t recommend using it. The last thing you want to do is mess something up.

Plugin #7: Yet Another Related Post Plugin

Sometimes visitors may land on your site because they followed a link. And the article they scan may not be of much use to them…

But the articles that you recommended, however, turn out to something they are interested in, which they then share.

This is why I use a plugin like the Most Popular post as it widens the net of interest for my readers. But it’s also why you should consider using the Yet Another Related Post Plugin.

In essence, when you write a post, this plugin will scan your archives, find articles that are relevant to that particular post and then display them at the end of your posts.

With this plugin you’ll get:

• Customized recommendations – The algorithm will look at post titles, tags, categories, content and keywords to determine which posts they should show at the end of your posts.
• Customize template – You can also control how your post looks.
• Caches – The plugin will store these recommendations in the cache to improve site speed.
• RSS feeds – Recommendations will also show up in your RSS feed.
• Prohibit certain tags and categories – You can also control which page or post doesn’t get recommendations.

While it’s not fully customizable, you can also tweak the recommendation engine to deliver up posts that are pretty close to what you prefer. It pretty much lets you customize which posts you want to appear.

Plugin #8: ShareThis

Making your social sharing buttons visible will help you get higher rankings as more people share your content.

With over one million sites using ShareThis (like Mashable and U.S. News), you know you are in good company. Why is it so popular? Because you can install and customize it in just under a minute.

You can also give your visitors the option to share over 50 social networks, including email, and also get real time metrics:

You can even identify the best audience to promote to by using the Social Quality tool and embed the buttons directly into the media, whether an image or video, with the Social Advertising Units.

When using ShareThis, make sure you optimize it for speed.

Plugin #9: Simple Ads Manager

A lot of bloggers embed ads on their sites to help monetize their social media, but too many ads can slow down your site speed.

The trick is to find the one or two top performing ads and place it in the best position on your blog.

But how do you figure this out? Simple, just download the Simple Ads Manager plugin. It’s got a great UX to help you manage the position and weights of your ads:

And there are dozens of ways you can customize your ads, including:

• Deliver ads as a block
• Deliver ads in a single page or post
• Deliver ads based on types of pages
• Automatic outputting ads in single post/page if allowed
• Schedule of ads
• Deliver ads based on hits or clicks

You’ll also get plenty of statistics based upon impressions and clicks, and a process to accurately detect crawlers and bots.

Plugin #10: Google Analytics for WordPress

You can’t really know how well your blog is actually performing if you don’t track and measure. That’s why analytics are so important…and why I recommend you use the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

The installation is super simple, and it uses the asynchronous Google Analytic tracking code, so that it doesn’t slow down your website. Plus the plugin does a lot of other things, such as:

• The code will automatically track your site speed.
• You can track outbound links and all downloads.
• Easily connect your Analytics account with your AdSense account.
• Track metadata like author, post type, logged in users, publication year and tags.

Keep in mind that you can’t run this plugin with another Google Analytics plugin…otherwise the tracking will break.

Conclusion

If you are using WordPress, then you really have no excuse not to be running a fast and social friendly site. The plugins I suggested above can improve the performance of your site almost overnight with minimal effort.

What WordPress plugins do you recommend for bloggers to speed up their site and make their site social friendly?

Update: A better plugin for caching is W3 Total Cache. You should use that plugin instead of WP Super Cache.

Ever wish there was a way you could speed up the link building process?

I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if you could hunt down hundreds of possible links, evaluate them, and then ask for those links automatically?

Unfortunately, it’s a process that really needs a human at the steering wheel. And that’s something you can’t automate.

Trust me… I’ve spent years and over a hundred thousand dollars trying to figure out ways to make the process more efficient. Whether it was through programming an automation tool to hiring someone else to do the work for me, I tried about everything I could think of.

There really is just no easy way.

But over the years I’ve learned quite a bit from trial and error, as well as from other SEO experts in the space on how to make the process more efficient without compromising quality.

Here are the 3 steps you can take to get more quality links in less time:

Step #1: Use tools to speed up link prospecting

When it comes to getting things done and being more efficient, you should always focus on automating things as much as possible.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

A long time ago a lot of us used to drop hundred links into a program that would retrieve PageRank scores for every link. From there we would drop those results into a spreadsheet and delete any links without a PageRank score of at least 3.

That process in itself would take a minute or two, which is so much faster than doing it manually.

But luckily enough, there are now tools like Majestic SEO and OpenSite Explorer that can compute huge amounts of data, like scoring back link data and giving you anchor text information within seconds. So if you want to speed up your efficiency you should use these tools.

• SEOBook Toolbar – use this tool to collect information on search engine rankings. Set your results count at 100 and then carry over the results into a spread sheet.
• Ontolo Campaign Manager – find relevant competitor back links by topic or type. You can also brainstorm for content marketing ideas and monitor competitor back links.
• Blogscape – Monitor the popularity of any brand, URL or keyword on a daily basis.

Another great tool to use is the Link Building Tool by Ontolo. Once you’ve defined your keywords, asset type, opportunity type and campaign type…

The tool will then generate a list of “link building queries”:

Click on one of those queries and you get a search engine results page with link possibilities:

Of course you’ll have to hand-select the right results, which is hard to automate at the moment, but it is still a great start.

Step #2: Identify the critical components of qualifying links

This part is a lot harder to automate because so much of qualifying needs a human involved. From a broad standpoint, you know so much more about your product, market and the content landscape than a tool will. A tool can’t tell you that links from a sports site will not work for you if you are in the airline industry. Hopefully it will one day, but as of now it just doesn’t exist.

And as you already know that qualifying individual websites isn’t something you can systematize, either. Just because you have a client in one category like mobile operating systems doesn’t mean you can treat a site dedicated to Android apps like you treat a site dedicated to Symbian OS.

Is there any way to automate this process? Well, there are about three places that you can do this:

• Prospect requirements – your first step to develop some requirements on prospect links based on scores from PageRank, backlink counts, mozRank or mozTrust. For example, you could develop requirements that a page that is a potential link prospect has to have a homepage PageRank of 5 and URL PageRank as 3. This way you can set a baseline level of value so you know that you are going after established websites. In most cases you are going to have to do this by hand, but you can delegate it to a college kid.
• Link relevancy – what makes a link relevant? Topical relevance. Topical relevance is all about finding sites that have relevance to your topic. Using the example above with the mobile OS market, a site on Symbian OS won’t be helpful if you are hunting down sites related to Androids…or vice versa. This is another task you can delegate to an intern or college student.
• Human-review – this process will take hours to go through because you are taking each link and opening them up on the web. You can speed things up with the URL reviewer tool that allows you to go through hundreds in an hour.

In the end, link qualification needs the eyes and mind of an expert on it to work effectively. There is just not too much you can automate here.

If you are wondering what I look for when going through a site:

1. Relevant external links – I only ask sites for links when they only link out to relevant sites. I wouldn’t request a link from a mobile site that links out to dog websites.
2. High rankings – most people look to get links from sites that are indexed. I look for links from sites that rank high for terms in their title tags. Because if a site doesn’t rank well, the link probably won’t carry much weight.
3. Good design – if a site looks spammy, it probably is. I like links from nice looking sites.
4. Fresh sites – links from websites who don’t update their content isn’t as effective as links from sites that constantly are adding new content. Plus if someone isn’t updating their site, they probably won’t add a link to you.
5. Geographically relevant sites – if you are based in the US and you want to rank on Google.com, then you should get links from sites that are hosted in the US. You can find out where a site is based out of by using Whois.sc.
6. Good sites – what I mean by “good sites” is ones that don’t talk about porn, pills or casino related topics. I know most website owners don’t talk about that kind of stuff, but a lot of websites have user generated content these days. So even if the website owner doesn’t talk about that stuff, you should do a “site:domain.com bad keyword” search on Google to double check.
7. Content links – sites that like adding links within their content is better than sites that like adding links to external sites in their footer or sidebar.
8. Authority sites – sites that are old, have a ton of backlinks, and are well known in a space are authoritative. I love links from those sites.

Now that you know what I look for, lets move onto step 3.

Step #3: Build a template to speed up link acquisition

So once you’ve used some of the techniques above to find great links to prospect, what’s your next step? Send out an email to see if the site is interested in linking with you.

As you know, this takes forever. There really is no easy way to automate this. Well, sure, you could automate this (it’s called spam), but you’ll fail because people will think you are just mass mailing and ignore your email.

Email link acquisition needs a carefully crafted human element. That doesn’t mean you have to write every single email from scratch.

In fact, you can create a template where you personalize just a portion of the email…leaving the rest alone for every email you send.

• Always personalize the email – do your homework and get the webmaster’s name and email address.
• Introduction paragraph – your first paragraph should demonstrate that you understand their audience and what they are trying to do on their website.
• Second paragraph – explain how your website is related to theirs and the benefit their audience will get if they linked to you.
• Closing paragraph – tell them you know they are extremely busy so you appreciate their time and attention and you look forward to hearing from them. Unless it’s an outstanding site that you have to have a link from, send the email without saying you’ll follow up. You are simply too busy to do such a thing.

Here are some tips for writing an effective email:

• Go heavy on the benefits – do your homework so you understand their audience and then tell them how their audience will get better, stronger or faster from being introduced to your site.
• Delegate followups – if you insist on following up on every single email you sent, I suggest you outsource to someone else for really cheap.

If you are wondering what one of these link request emails looks like, here is an example:

Hey Bob, it’s Neil here from KISSmetrics and I wanted to drop you a line and just compliment your site. Nice layout, good info, and I love your detailed guides. Especially the one on “Getting the most out of your Google Analytics”. I’ve been in the web analytics space for over 6 years now and I have to say, you write some of the best content in the industry.

That being said, I also noticed you guys link out to recommend analytics providers. I am the co-founder of an analytics company, KISSmetrics, that provides actionable insights to companies like Amazon, Ebay and Etsy. We are trusted by over 100 Fortune 500 companies and I wanted to see if you would be open to including KISSmetrics in your recommend analytics list.

On a side note, I would love to hook you up with a FREE account that you can mess around with and even use on your blog. I’ve actually took the liberty of registering you… you can go to KISSmetrics.com to login:

USER: bob@bobpatel.com
PASSWORD: QuickSprout

Let me know if you have any questions or need any help with KISSmetrics.

Thanks for reading this email… I know you are busy.

Neil

PS: I hope it’s sunny in San Diego, it’s rainy like crazy here in Seattle.

Conclusion

I truly believe that if you take these ideas and use them in your own link building practices you’ll see a better return on your time, a higher quality of relevant links you generate and an improvement on your search engine rankings.

I know my process isn’t fully automated… but it works. Just try it out.

Do you know of any parts of the link building process that can be automated?

When it comes to on-page optimization and increasing your conversion rates, you have to place the important things above the fold.

But being above the fold is not just for on-page optimization. You also need to be above the fold when it comes to search engine results.

People don’t scroll, and are used to clicking on the first result they see, which usually means the top three search results. And the sites at the number one position can get nearly 35% of all the clicks.

As you can see, the second position gets just 12%, while the third gets 9.5%, and it trickles down to 2.2% for the tenth position.

It’s important to rank high…but ranking high alone is not enough. You also have to make your link irresistible.

Here’s what you need to do.

Write click-worthy titles and descriptions

When it comes to writing titles for search engines, the first thing you have to know is this…you only have 65 characters to write your headline.

You could write the greatest headline, but if it’s over 65 characters, it will get cut off. This is what you will see:

Fortunately, the most important part of the headline is saved, but the rest is cut off. So keep it short.

Here are some other tips to keep in mind when creating click-worthy titles:

• Front-load your titles with keywords – You should also front load all of your keywords in your titles. People will typically only scan the first two words of a title.
• Keep it predictable – Your title should click to a page that meets the expectations of the user.
• Clear – The reader should know what your webpage is about in 65 characters or less.
• Make it emotional – Dan Shure wrote a great guide to writing titles, and one of his most important lessons is to make your titles emotional. See his SEOmoz article Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click-Worthy and Viral?! for great examples.

Create clean, focused and optimized URLS

While your title tag needs to be emotional, your URL doesn’t. Let me show you what I mean.

Here is an example that Dan Shure used:

Avinash’s title tag is optimized for SEO and click rates. It’s optimized for SEO by including the keywords “digital marketing,” and optimized for click rates due to the words “change or perish,” which are very emotional, wouldn’t you agree?

His URL, however, does not include “change or perish.”

It doesn’t need to because it is only ranking for “digital marketing.”

How might you change this title tag to optimize it? I’d rewrite it like this: “Digital Marketing: 2015 Rule Book. Change or Perish.”

That way you move the two keywords up front.

Write a great meta description

The meta description is the next element you must optimize.

If you view the source code, the tag looks like this:

<META NAME=“Description” CONTENT=“informative description here”>

If you use a WordPress plugin like All-in-One SEO Pack, you’ll get this form at the bottom of your blog editor:

Google has made this easy by giving you tips to creating good descriptions. Here are the two most important:

• Make them descriptive – Front load keywords that are relevant to the article. If you like formulas, ask “Who? What? Why? When? Where? How?” That’s a formula journalists use to report. It works equally well writing descriptions.
• Make them unique – Each meta description should be different from other pages.
• Make them short – Google limits meta descriptions to 160 characters or less.

While this is not as important when it comes to getting clicks because people don’t seem to pay nearly as much attention to the description, it is still important from an SEO ranking perspective.  So don’t ignore it!

Use Google+

Another big way that is attracting attention when it comes to ranking above the fold is with Google’s new authorship markup and Google+ search strategy.

You can accomplish some pretty amazing things when it comes to search rankings if you have an optimized Google+ account.

For instance, you can appear in these vanity searches above the fold:

And when you confirm you are the writer of your content across the web, you’ll improve click throughs:

The combination of the picture, “by Danny Sullivan” and “More by Danny Sullivan” will lead to more click throughs over and above content that doesn’t have those elements.

I’ve already written extensively on this topic, so if you want more information on it, read How to Create an Effective Google+ SEO Content Strategy.

Reducing the noise on the page

Good SEO involves good web design. That’s one of the latest trends in the SEO world, and you can’t ignore it if you want to rank above the fold on search engines.

So, here are some basic tips on good SEO design to help you clean up your site:

• Reduce the clutter in your sidebar – While this is really meant to raise your conversion rates once someone is on your page, this will also reduce the bounces when someone does land on your page. Too much clutter in the sidebar can drive people away…and when Google starts to notice the bounces they might give it a thumbs down.
• Reduce the ad space on your page – Too many ads can drive people away. Check your analytics to see which are your best performing ads, and only keep one or two of them.
• Keep ads below fold – Last month Google announced their “Page Layout Improvement Algorithm,” which penalizes pages/sites that shove a bunch of ads to the top of the page. Google suggests you use their Browser Size Tool to see how much of your content is visible to visitors at first glance. 

Drive links to important pages

You can’t expect a page to rank above the fold if you don’t have links going to the page you want to rank. And when it comes to links pointing to that page, authority links rule.

Read my Quick and Dirty Guide to Modern-Day Link Baiting for ideas on how to get a bunch of regular links.

Then read 10 Hard-Hitting Link Building Tactics That’ll Boost Your Rankings for some general tips on attracting even more links.

Add social sharing

Most SEO experts agree that social signals on the page level will impact search results:

So if you want to take advantage of this growing impact that social is having, then use these ten ways to get higher rankings through social sharing:

• Make share buttons very visible – Position these buttons in strategic places…side and bottom of page, and a scrolling widget, too. Also, limit the number of buttons you use. Too many can confuse people!
• Ask readers to share content – It’s been proven that your readers will do what you tell them to do.
• Tap the influencers – Create relationships with big names and get them to share your content.
• Use Triberr – This new social network amplifies your tweets immediately.
• Use sponsored Tweets – If you have a budget, spend a few dollars using this advertiser’s tool.
• Use Facebook’s Sponsored Stories – Sort of like Twitter’s sponsored tweets, but better.
• Create a worthy brand – Nobody wants to share content from someone who can’t be trusted. Focus your energy on creating a presence that people see as a trustworthy authority.
• Tap into your circles – Use your own personal network to share content.
• Bribe your followers – From offering links to using Cloudflood, you can get your readers to share content by paying them in some way or another.
• Produce great content – This is the number one rule!

And don’t forget to think out of the social sharing box and engage in sites like Pinterest, Digg and Reddit.

Write great content

Last but not least, you can do all those things above, but if you don’t have great content, your pages will simply be buried under a ton of other results.

Take the time to create great content. These posts will help you do that:

• Neil Patel’s Guide to Blogging
• The Neil Patel Guide to Writing Blog Posts
• A Quick and Dirty Guide to Your First Guest Post
• Your How-To Post Will Fail If You Don’t Use These Techniques
• The 10 Golden Rules to Attracting Authority Links
• Forget Blogging as Usual: 5 Outrageous Tips for Super-Sized Attention

Conclusion

Ranking above the fold can mean the difference between a few thousand impressions to tens of thousands…if not hundreds of thousands…so it’s necessary that you create content that ranks high.

But you also have to create content that will actually convert impressions into clicks. Hopefully this guide has helped you do that.

What other tricks do you use to boost rankings above the fold and encourage click throughs?

Leaving comments on blogs is an old-school search engine optimization technique…but is it still effective in this social media world where most of the conversation has moved off blogs and onto Facebook or Twitter?

The answer is yes!

More than ever leaving comments on blogs is a good strategy for building up your social web influence, improving your SEO efforts and driving more business your way.

That’s why I wanted to share with you some of things that I’ve learned about commenting, SEO and the social web over the last year and how you can leverage them.

How commenting makes you more influential

First off, leaving comments will help you reach out to people, making you more influential. How else could you connect with a blogger or thought leader if not by contributing consistently on their blog through the comments? Those bloggers see that you are reading what they write…and a good comment sends a message that you spent time on it.

So, before you send a cold request to someone about posting as a guest on their blog…or asking for some other favor…invest several weeks of commenting. When you approach them they will know you are legit, serious and can add value.

Of course, that means you can’t leave links that are irrelevant to the blog or conversation. You need to leave links that will improve the discussion.

SEO, social layering and commenting

One of the latest developments in SEO is the social aspect. With the introduction of Search Plus Your World and Google+, Google has made social networks a core part of search ranking.

And it’s my belief that commenting on blogs is a vital part of this social layering. In fact, you could get more clout with Google by having more articles on your blog, by writing guest posts, contribute to question and answer sites like Quora, and, of course, leaving more comments.

Google likes it when you contribute to the social web. So let’s look at a commenting strategy that will boost your social influence and improve your search ranking.

Understand the blogger

Your first step in your commenting strategy is to figure out where you are going to post. You are probably busy and don’t have time to comment on 100 blogs. Instead, you need to be strategic about where you comment because you could leave comments on blogs that don’t really carry any social weight.

Instead, look for blogs that are worthwhile to comment on. If you get a link back from them, it will actually mean something.

Use Google’ doubleclick planner to help you select some good blogs/bloggers:

Then choose from the list:

If some of these blogs are multi-author, you may want to choose one or two authors to follow instead of trying to comment on every author.

But before you jump into leaving comments on a blog, study that blogger. Read a bunch of his or her posts to see what they are like.

How do they write? What is their style? What do they care about?

Understand the commenting community

Next, read through a bunch of the comments on the blog, and read through all the comments on the post you are thinking about responding to. You should even read some of the comments from the past.

What is the community like? Are they friendly? Sarcastic? Mean? Smart? Will you be getting over your head if you leave a comment?

You may actually realize after reading the comments that you don’t want to contribute to that discussion or blog, so this step is important when it comes to figuring out strategically where you are going to post.

Use an authentic identity

One of the things you will have to figure out early is your commenting identity. If you are new to the commenting game, the temptation may be to remain anonymous or actually use some avatar and symbolic name.

However, the best practice if you are a professional and plan on making a serious go at this to emphasize your online presence, is to use your authentic identity.

That means a first and last name and real photo. Here’s an example:

Remember, this is all tied into your social search strategy, and it will also build credibility with the community you are about to contribute to.

Here’s a tip for you: use Gravatar to manage your online contribution profile. This allows you to pull the same image across the web as you comment on different blogs.

Read through all the comments

To avoid simply repeating something someone else already said, take the time to read through all of the comments. Most sites don’t have hundreds of comments, so this will not be too hard.

But it’s okay to scan through the comments if there are hundreds…the point is to make sure you understand what is being discussed.

You can lose credibility if you post a comment that repeats a prior comment, or if you ask a question that has already been answered.

Don’t take that risk!

Besides, you may find that your comment might be better posted in the thread of a side discussion. In fact, you may find that you can provide more than one comment on the post based upon what other people are discussing on side threads.

How much should you write?

There are no hard and fast rules about how much you should write in a comment except to say that you should be clear, concise and compelling.

I like to think about it in terms of sales copywriting that never asks “Is it too long?” but “Is it interesting enough?”

Keep in mind that short comments tend to get overlooked, especially if there dozens or more comments.

So really there are two strategies to getting attention when it comes to how much you should write and standing out:

• Write a long comment
• Write several short-to-medium sized comments on the same blog post.

Both will get you attention.

Another strategy is to simply write a post on your blog in response to the original post. This will help you if you want to drive traffic to your site because the original author may decide to link to your post by updating his own.

You can draw more attention to the post you wrote by leaving a comment on the original post saying something like, “You know, this post really got me thinking…that’s why I decided to respond in a post.” The blogger will appreciate the link to their site, and probably return the favor by linking to your.

You can also offer to write a guest post in response to the original post. Just email the blogger, lay out your argument or piece in an outline and then offer to write it.

He or she may go for this since you will be the one providing content…and not them!

Number of link you should leave

I would never leave more than one link to my own site in a comment. That would just seem too self-promotional. If you are going to link to someone else, two is probably the maximum I would leave.

This is kind of tricky, though, because by default WordPress filters comments with two or more links as spam, so your comment may get holed up in that folder…and possibly never be seen.

It’s better to use HTML code make your links anchor texts…

Than to simply drop the URL and not have rich anchor text links:

Some moderators are even more aggressive, making just one link drop too many, sending it into moderation or spam.

But if you notice that your comment didn’t get approved, email the blogger, apologize and see if they can release it.

Promote your comment on the social web

Finally, if you contributed a comment to a blog post, share it on your social media accounts.

Bloggers don’t mind it when you promote your comment…because you are also promoting their blog post, too, so it’s a win-win!

Conclusion

In the end, a well-executed commenting strategy can build your reputation and influence in a community that will have natural benefits like more followers in the social web and even business opportunities that will crop up.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest excuses when it comes to a commenting strategy is the lack of time. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any tips on how to overcome that hurdle.

You just have to do it. And don’t worry about checking if your comment links are followed or nofollowed… it’ll just vary per blog. Just write great comments as it drives traffic and some of the links will get picked up.

What commenting tips have helped you in SEO rankings or online social influence?

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about design. It’s been hailed as the core ingredient to the success of everything from ad campaigns, to products, to entire companies. In this post we’ll look at how to design for the success of your website or Web app.  From Jack Dorsey calling every employee at Square a designer, or Airbnb fixing an inefficient market through design, it’s clear that design makes a difference.

We can thank Steve Jobs (among many others) for this design-focused renaissance. He trained consumers to expect things that not only look great, but are designed to “make sense,” and create experiences that are, in his words, “magical”. Great design makes products more useful, allowing the user to be more effective, leading to greater satisfaction and, frankly, happiness.

This market expectation means that design is no longer optional; it is required for success. Take a look at Airbnb and compare it to VRBO. In today’s design-minded culture your product can be easily disrupted or ignored without thoughtful design.

When it comes to designing for the Web, there are core actions you want users to take. You may want them to sign up, download something, buy something, subscribe or share with their friends. Each can be optimized through design that meets the user’s needs. Here’s how:

1. Get More Clicks

If you’re trying to convert visitors to customers, you’re exceptionally interested in maximizing the clicks on primary calls to action that turn that visitor into a subscriber, fan, or purchaser. More clicks in the right spot means more potential customers.

Here are techniques that have proven to generate greater clickthrough rates (CTRs) on all kinds of sites.

• Lead with your benefits – ScoreBig does a great job with this on their sign-up page. Their headline is “Members save up to 60% on sports, concert, and theater tickets.” It’s clear and compelling.
• Clear call to action – Make your call to action clear, prominent and enticing. Use tempting buttons with visual styles, such as arrows, that signify forward movement, compelling users to keep going.
• Visual hierarchy – What is the information priority on the page? What do you want people to see and absorb? Use typography, font sizes and emphasis and visual cues like in line iconography to draw the user through the page.
• Remember AIDA – Awareness, interest, decision, action. Conquer the first three and you get the click, the action. Create awareness and interest, then provide information to allow for a decision.

An Example – Retargeter

We worked with ReTargeter to redesign the banners they use to drive customer acquisition. Their original ads had clickthrough rates on par with display advertising benchmarks, but they weren’t satisfied. The goal was to use enhanced design and messaging to really move the needle. Below are the before and after for the banners. You can see there was intentional emphasis on messaging, clear call to action, and smart design that stood out and communicated the benefits of ReTargeter to the viewer.

The result? The new banners performed nearly five times better than the original ads, significantly lowering their customer acquisition cost.

2. Get More Sign Ups

If you’re launching a new web application or a service, you likely don’t have a huge marketing budget. Therefore, the performance of your friend referral program is critical. It’s imperative that companies design viral loops to leverage new customer referrals from their existing customer base.

Here are some techniques to drive the viral loop:

• Optimize landing pages – Ask only for information that is absolutely necessary. The fewer form fields, the higher the conversion to sign ups.
• Use Facebook Connect – Not only does it making signing up that much easier, it allows you to employ some sophisticated referral techniques, as well as provide social credibility that drives sign ups. RockMelt used Facebook to show users which Facebook friends were waiting for an invite, driving invitations and user sign ups.
• Create Exclusivity – The more scarce the invite the more valuable it becomes. Create exclusivity through messaging and design, and keep invites to a level that makes them worth something, while still giving your loop room to grow. Google+ used limited invites to drive excitement and value, creating a frenzy of people clamoring to get in.
• Reward Existing Users – Can you reward your existing users for facilitating the viral loop? Dropbox gives customers extra storage, Groupon gives users Groupon Bucks for each friend who buys, and Appsumo rewards members who help promote their deals.

An Example – Hello Bar

We designed a viral loop to launch Hello Bar, our notification bar plugin for websites and Web apps. The entire user experience, from the first invite, to the activation email, to the refer-a-friend loop was designed to drive referred users. Thoughtful design and optimization can make your referral program go like wildfire, or fizzle out before it even gets started.

The Hello Bar launch site was invite only, creating a sense of exclusivity. This created anticipation and value for the invite. Once Hello Bar users were invited in, they had a limited number of invites to send to friends. This keeps perceived value high and ensures that invites are sent to people who will likely enjoy the service. This creates a stronger feedback loop than just letting people blast their entire address book. Once those people were in, design kept the viral loop going, by providing the new user with limited invites and encouraging the referral behavior through the messaging and user experience.

3. Get More Likes and Follows

Social proof is an important part of building customer trust and confidence. Not only do Likes and follows build first-time visitor confidence, they also help extend your reach to the social web and help energize word-of-mouth. Like everything else, you can design your use of social badges like the Facebook Like button and the Twitter Tweet This button to maximize your conversion and exposure on the web.

There are a handful of best practice techniques to consider when implementing social sharing on your site.

• Add popular sharing buttons to your site – More than 700 million people are on Facebook, what other sites do your customers use regularly?
• Pick buttons that work for your site – Ensure that they don’t take away from the key purpose of the page. ModCloth has Facebook Like buttons on product pages, but they are custom-designed so they don’t distract the user from the clear call to action to buy.
• Less is more – You don’t need every button for every service on your site. Pick the ones that a) drive the most traffic, b) are relevant to your audience, and c) that you yourself are active on and can support. Two is a good rule of thumb.
• Design the share – Too often people add Facebook Like or Tweet This buttons and don’t customize the message being shared. Make sure every element is crafted to drive new visitors back to your site.
• Integrate shares where users are most likely to leverage them – What are the points in your user flows where you can maximize this social activity?
• Fix a spot in the design – Buttons shouldn’t just be randomly affixed to the site. They should live in a consistent location.
• Communicate the benefits – Why should someone Like or follow you? What’s in it for them?
• Add social destinations to your contact page – Have a Facebook Page, Twitter account or Foursquare Page? Put them on your contact page so people can find you easily on the social web.

An Example – ModCloth

ModCloth does a great job of integrating Facebook Like buttons right into the product pages. Their benefit here is three-fold:

1. They act as social bookmarks, publishing the user’s like of the product to their Facebook wall.
2. They drive new visitors directly to the product page.
3. They act as social proof, an item with a lot of Likes is popular and increases conversion by validating the user’s purchase.

An Example – Tiny Prints

Tiny Prints integrates the Facebook Like Box on to the order confirmation page. It’s a smart choice. Moments after you’ve just completed a successful purchase you’re asked to Like Tiny Prints on Facebook. Your successful shopping experience combined with overwhelming social proof makes you more likely to click “Like”.

This is a viral loop in it’s own right and has two main benefits to Tiny Prints:

1. They easily acquire new fans on Facebook that allow them to stay top of mind and market to customers.
2. They get more viral spread across Facebook as the Like shows up in the friends’ feeds of the user who just liked Tiny Prints.

4. Get More Sales

Designing for sales means two things: clarity and reduced friction. Use design to make it easy for people to understand what you’re selling and the benefits of what you’re selling, and then get out of their way. Let’s come back to Airbnb and how they’ve used design to make their product the market front-runner over the much older VRBO.

Lets look at the techniques they used to get more sales with design:

• Let users experience the product – As much as possible let users experience what they’re buying before they buy it. Use a content slider to house a product tour. It let’s people see and interact with the product and its features without bouncing between pages in order to learn more.
• Lead with the benefits, not the features – Customers don’t buy features, they buy benefits… it doesn’t matter what the product does, they need to know why they should care. Start with the benefits and drive the sales process through those key benefits.

An Example – Airbnb

• Prominent and simple search – Compare Airbnb’s homepage to VRBO’s homepage. One is clean, easy to understand with one core call to action. The other is cluttered, confusing with multiple calls to action with little perceptible hierarchy.
• Minimizing clicks – You can get to booking a place on Airbnb in two or three clicks. On VRBO it can take five. Reduce friction. Drive more sales.

An Example: Zappos

Zappos does a great job with designing for sales by providing loads of customer confidence. They’ve has also spent a lot of time designing the VIP experience, even so far as creating a whole new instance of the site, vip zappos.com to make VIP shoppers feel even more special.

• Create customer confidence – Zappos’ legendary customer service, free shipping, no-hassle returns and highly publicized corporate values give customers tons of confidence in buying.
• Make customers feel special – By providing VIPs with a special site it makes them feel like they’re part of an exclusive club, driving loyalty, repeat purchases and increasing their likelihood to refer other customers.

An Example: Crazy Egg

By using the techniques above Crazy Egg was able to increase its conversions 21.6%. Crazy Egg used a custom SlideDeck to create a product tour that explained the benefits of their service to website owners, while explaining it in a clear and concise manner.

5. Get More Leads

Converting a website visitor into a new subscriber, member or account holder is one of the most important conversions there is. In fact, a whole field of analytics, conversion rate optimization (CRO), is solely focused on improving sign up conversions through improved landing page design. Let’s look at a few examples of the sign up process, and how design makes a difference in maximizing conversion.

• Tell a story – Show how your product or service solves your customer’s problem, to the point where the only logical step is for them to sign up.
• Use clear hierarchy – Walk users through from beginning to end and make it easy for them to grasp the main benefits and identify the calls to action.
• Be concise – Don’t clutter up your pages with lots of extraneous information. Be ruthless about what makes it into your story.
• Choose compelling imagery – Your story isn’t communicated through words alone. Make sure your images are communicating just as well as your text.
• Limit the amount of information required – Keep the information you ask from a potential customer to the absolute minimum that you need.
• Provide limited time discounts – Can you provide a discount or other incentives to make signing up worth it on the first visit?

An Example – Monsoon Company

Monsoon Company’s service required a high amount of contact and exchange; therefore, they needed a method of driving sign ups in order to start an initial conversation. Right off the bat, they have a clear message paired with straight-to-the-point imagery. Following that, they have brief supporting copy to tell a little more about what they do. Their main desired point of contact, a phone number, is then listed right below, with a prominent lead form (for users less inclined to contacting by phone).

Putting it All Together

Being conscientious about design and user experience can create exceptional returns for your business. Be thoughtful, test your assumptions and designs, measure which ones perform better and then constantly iterate to improve all aspects of your website, product and service.  When an experience is well-designed it is the only thing your user sees. The design just works and is at the heart of the product.

By being design-oriented in your thinking you’ll achieve a greater level of success not only in sales, but in customer satisfaction. And by driving toward even better results for you and your customer you’ll create an experience that really does make a difference.

About the author: Chuck Longanecker is the CEO and co-founder of digital-telepathy, a user-experience design company passionate about creating products, like SlideDeck, Hello Bar and Impress, that make the Web more intuitive and compelling.

When it comes to getting more traffic, attention and higher rankings, there is one concept that is starting to have a huge impact on those goals…

Increasing the number of shares your content gets across social media.

That means if you write a post that gets 500 tweets, 100 likes and 40 +1s…and you do that consistently…your bound to grow your traffic and grow your search engine rankings.

So how do you get people to share you content across the social web? Here are 10:

Tactic #1: Making social sharing buttons very visible

Never force people to hunt down your social sharing buttons. Instead, make them obvious.

For instance, I use a social sharing plug in that allows my buttons to scroll up and down the post as people scroll through it:

The other place to include buttons is at the end of the article.

Tactic #2: Ask readers to share content through social channels

Most of your readers won’t read your content and think “I want to share this.” That’s why you have to encourage them to share it.

Even though it was a study of re-tweets, Dan Zarella proved that simply asking people to “please RT” generated 4 times as many RTs as tweets that didn’t include that phrase.

Unfortunately, too many people simply drop the social sharing bar plug in at the end of the post and then hope people will use it.

You have to tell them to use it!

Here are some other tips on encouraging social sharing:

• Test for the best location – I haven’t found anybody to tell me where the best location for the social sharing CTA should be…as it is probably going to be different for every blog.
• Boost social sharing numbers immediately – Nobody wants to feel like they are the first sharing your content, so get the numbers increasing by sharing the content yourself and asking people to share it.

Tactic #3: Tap influencers in social content

Your social sharing numbers can get a jolt of life when a social media thought leader shares your content. They can even crash your servers.

But how do you even get these authority figures to tweet or post about your content on Facebook or Google+? You have to build a relationship with them.

Here’s how to gain the attention of these influencers:

• Post round ups – Write a blog post once a month that gathers all the best content for the week…including a few content pieces from the blogs of these authority figures. Do this often enough and they will notice you.
• Post lists on a specific topic – This is like the weekly round-up except you are creating a resource or guide for a particular topic, like I did with my Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest or 100 Ways to Become a Twitter Power User. Include some of these authority figures in your list post.
• Interviews – Take the time to reach out to some of these authority figures and offer to interview them. Do your research and find a topic they haven’t talked about in a previous interview.
• Always link to them – Get in a habit of linking to these authority figures on every piece of content you write. The more links you send out the better.

Go a step further and contact these people when you publish your content and ask them to tweet or share it every once in a while.

Tactic #4: Multiply your social sharing reach through Triberr

Triberr is a social site that leverages the strength of numbers by gathering like-minded bloggers together in a “tribe.” That tribe will get you a lot of benefits, including:

• Automatic social sharing – When you join Triberr you join a tribe. And the system is set up so that the moment you post content, the members in that tribe will automatically tweet your content.
• Increase reach of your content – By joining different “Tribes” you expand your network across these different audiences. For example, one Triberr member who belongs to 6 tribes has a reach of over 6 million Twitter followers. Talk about a boost in social sharing!
• More high-quality visits to your site – Each tribe is created to focus on a specific niche…so your extended audience will be focused on people who are like-minded.
• More comments – Because this automatic tweet extends your reach and drives higher-quality content to your site you will naturally experience more comments on your site.

Tactic #5: Using Sponsored Tweets

If you have a budget for social sharing, then you can tap into the power of Sponsored Tweets. This is basically a platform that connects advertisers with high-powered Twitter users who sell their tweets.

You can be very selective with whom you work with, like choosing maximum amount per tweet you are willing to pay and minimum number of followers the Twitter users needs to have:

Among those who are more famous you can advertise with are celebrities like Carrot Top, Bethanney Frankel and Kendra Wilkinson.

I wouldn’t recommend you do this on every post, as that might get pricey and you should only do this relevant Twitter users. For example, you wouldn’t want to pay a celebrity to tweet about your blog post on SEO.

To learn more, check out their Code of Ethics.

Tactic #6: Using Facebook’s Sponsored Stories

A Sponsored Story is a post from someone’s FB feed that an advertiser paid to highlight in the sidebar so there is a better chance it will get seen among their friends.

This sidebar is 240 pixels wide and only will show up in that FB user’s friends’ streams…meaning it won’t go public across FB. The idea behind Sponsored Story is to leverage your friend’s recommendation of your brand.

Basically what happens is someone posts something about you, your blog or brand…you catch wind of that mention…and then you pay to have it show up in the Sponsored Story spot.

You can use Sponsored Story for a number of Facebook user activities:

• Likes – When someone likes your Facebook page, you can pay to highlight that “Like.” The nice thing about this is the “Like” button will show up in the Sponsored Story so that people like it immediately…thus driving up your social shares.
• Page post – You can sponsor actual posts that Facebook users publish. These will show up in the sidebar with a “Share” button to generate even more “Shares.”
• Page post “Like” – If someone “Likes” a Facebook post in the last seven days you can also promote this to a Sponsored Story.
• Blog “Likes” – You can also promote “Likes” that originate from your blog or website.
• Apps – If a Facebook user shares a story using your app, you can promote this action, too.

Again, since this is a paid way to promote social shares, you won’t want to promote every single like or post. Be strategic with which content you want to grow in social shares.

Tactic #7: Create a social sharing-worthy brand

I’ve spent years and lots of money promoting my brand so that when people see my name, my blog or one of my companies they think of someone who is influential in the Internet.

In other words, my brand shows people that I am an authority. Here’s how I grew my brand…and how you can, too:

• Create detailed and heavily research posts on your blog – I’ll talk more about this below, but it’s enough to say that your strategy is to give your followers content that they want and love. It should always be useful and valuable in their eyes.
• Share content and interact across the social web – Give your followers great information that help them solve their problems and entertain them. Mix business with fun.
• Comment on other blogs – This means to read, share and take the time to engage not only with the author of the content, but his or her followers as well. Choose a few blogs at first and ideally they should be popular ones.
• Attend and speak at conferences – You can’t spend all your time online! Get offline and travel to conferences to meet influential thought leaders. Buy them drinks and dinner so you can pick their brains and exchange links.
• Grow your social networks – My best recommendation for you is to focus on growing one network, then moving to the next. For instance, you could focus on Twitter, Facebook and then Google+.

When you build a brand that people know, recognize and trust, your own social sharing numbers will grow as well. It takes time though, so be patient.

Tactic #8: Leverage your personal social circles

And once you have that social sharing-worthy brand, your own network will grow and allow you to use it.

If you want to increase your social sharing numbers, then you need to take the time to promote others. And as you promote others, even if they already have a huge following, they will notice you and be happy to do you a favor if you ask.

This could be as easy as emailing them and asking them to write a blog post about you. Or you could tweet them and ask them to “share” the content. If you’ve laid the groundwork over the years, then more than likely they’ll do it.

Tactic #9: Bribe your followers

You can easily increase the likelihood your content will get shared if you pay off your followers. But how do you do this without going broke?

Give away free content.

Well, not just any free content. I’m talking about white papers, ebooks or podcasts…content that you have to download. Here are some ways I like to bribe followers to share my content:

• Offer links – Choose a few power Twitter users, Facebook fan pages or Google+ thought leaders and ask them to share your content. In exchange you’ll create a post telling people who shared the content. Keep in mind…these don’t have to be super stars. These can people who are in the same tier as you so that the exchange is pretty even.
• Put a Cloudflood button on your site – This service by Viper Chill will make people have to share the content before they download it. Once they share it, they can get the free content. Create a cloudflood button here.
• Run a contest – Run a little competition between your followers to see how many people can share your content across the social web. The winner gets a prize and a link.

Tactic #10: Produce content that’s worth sharing

I saved the best for the last because increasing your social sharing numbers starts with creating great content. I’ve written about this so much that it’s worth sharing some posts that will help you create content assets that people will want to share without encouragement from you.

Here are seven:

• Neil Patel’s Guide to Blogging
• How to Write a Blog Post
• A Quick and Dirty Guide to Your First Guest Post
• The Neil Patel Guide to Writing Blog Posts
• Forget Blogging as Usual: 5 Outrageous Tips for Super-Sized Attention
• Your How-To Post Will Fail If You Don’t Use These Techniques
• The 10 Golden Rules to Attracting Authority Links

Conclusion

Increasing the number of shares your content gets across the social web is a numbers game. A game that these 10 tips will help you play and win.

And when you start winning that game a number of things will happen…you’ll get more traffic, more attention and higher rankings in the search engines…which will be a nice reward for all of your hard work.

How do you go about increasing the number of shares your content gets across the social web?

If you want to maximize your rankings on Google what do you have to do? Well… other than write good content. You have to link build, right?

According to a survey SEOmoz did from 100 SEOs, the most important aspect of SEO is link building. But the big issue with link building is… everyone is already doing it. So how the heck do you compete? Link blending and stage 2 link building are two things that very few SEOs are actually doing.

Here’s how you can leverage link blending and stage 2 link building.

Tactic #1: Link blending

Link blending is the process of building links to your site as well as other authoritative sites. Lets say for example you have a website that sells bicycles online and you convinced one of your female friends, Michelle, who runs a mom blog to write a blog post about your bicycle site.

If you are trying to rank for the keyword “affordable bikes” you probably going to nudge your friend to link to your website with the anchor text “affordable bikes” because the more sites that link to yours with that anchor text, the higher you will theoretically rank.

If you want to rank really high, you want to ideally become an authority site. One way to do that is to keep on getting more and more links, but this ends up becoming very expensive in the long run.

Another way to do it is to get sites to link to you as well as other authority sites on the same page so that way search engines will start treating your website the same way they may treat other authority sites like New York Times or Wikipeda…they rank extremely high for almost every term out there.

So going back to your friend Michelle, who runs a mom blog, you wouldn’t just have her link to your website, but in that same blog post you’ll want her to link to a Wikipedia article on the history of bicycles, and a study Harvard did on bicycle safety for kids.

When she links to Wikipedia and Harvard, you have to make sure she doesn’t use rich anchor text links to them as they can easily start out ranking you if she does that.

And to be even more cautious, if you are building 10 links to your bicycle site, make sure you don’t link to Wikipedia and Harvard 10 times. As that wouldn’t be natural. Instead you would want to get other people to link to other authority sites that talk about bicycles… such as an article on about.com on how to assemble a bike, or Los Angeles Times article on the importance of wearing helmets.

By leveraging the tactic of link blending, you’ll start noticing that when you do a “related” search on Google, they will show a list of all of the other authoritative sites you are related to…

Plus, you’ll also start to rank a lot higher without having to buy as many links as your competitors.

Tactic #2: Stage 2 link building

Have you ever heard a SEO tell you that you want to build related links as those help the most? So if you own a bicycle site, you want links from other bike sites or outdoor activity sites…

Although most SEOs are correct, the way their definition of a “related link” is a bit different then mine. For me, a related link means you are getting a link from another web page that ranks in the top 100 results on Google for the keyword you are trying to rank for.

I know… you are probably wondering how the heck do you get someone who ranks for your keyword to link to you? You could buy them, although that goes against Google’s policy, and I also don’t recommend you break Google’s policies. Plus someone who ranks in the top 100 for your keyword is probably not going to link to you.

Another solution is what I call stage 2 link building. So if you go back to your friend Michelle, she wrote a blog post that links to your website about “affordable bikes for your children”. That blog posts in most cases won’t even rank in the top 1000 results for the term “affordable bikes”, but if you build a handful of links to that blog post with the anchor text “affordable bikes” it will start showing up in the first few hundred results if not top 100 results for that term.

If you accomplish that, which isn’t too hard, that link will be highly related. Plus you’ll rank a lot higher for your key terms without having to build a ton of links.

Conclusion

Leveraging the same old link building tactics that your competitors use can be effective, but it will be very costly. If you really want to rank high, you need to utilize smarter link building strategies that include link blending and stage 2 link building. Those two tactics aren’t as costly and are very effective.

The only caveat is that you need to know how to build links to leverage the two tactics above. Ideally, you need to be able to build links without purchasing them, as that would break Google’s guidelines.

You could do things like write guest posts and link back to your site as well as other authority sites when relevant. Or you could leverage email link building and email website owners and ask if they would link to you… but when asking also point out a few other good authority sites they should link to that might benefit their readers, so you can link blend.

Do you know of any other unique link build tactics that are effective?