May 2012
16 posts
A Simple Step by Step Guide to SEO
Some businesses feel put off by the sheer amount of SEO information and guidance on the web. Don’t let information overload dissuade you: this KISSMetrics guide boils SEO down to simple tips that anyone with a website can use. The author covers WordPress plugins which are particularly useful for bloggers as they allow each page to be analysed before the content is even published. Don’t forget...
13 Things to Check Before Hitting 'Send' on Your...
Don’t waste a golden marketing opportunity by being careless. It’s all too easy to send out a mass mail to clients containing a crucial mistake, like a missing link or a spelling error. The golden rule is to check, check and check again, perhaps involving someone else to be absolutely sure your email will be sent with pristine formatting and content. Considering things like background colours and...
Why Purchasing Email Lists Is Always a Bad Idea
When creating marketing mailouts, it can be very tempting to take a short-cut and purchase a list. This excellent blog from HubSpot explains why list purchasing is rarely the amazing time-saver you think it is. Here’s the killer: “There’s no such thing as a good email list that’s for sale.” When creating email marketing, it’s all about quality over quantity - and purchasing lists can get you in...
The 5-Step Guide to Executing an Outstanding...
Inbound marketing is a great way to attract new clients, but putting your marketing plan into practice can be a complex undertaking requiring time and effort. This blog post provides ideas on creating your own DIY marketing campaign - something every startup and SME will eventually need to do. Set aside some time to work through the comprehensive resources in this post and you’ll be able to...
The Customer Lifecycle: How Following-Up Can...
Customers might visit a website several times before signing up to anything. They may actively follow you on social media without you ever knowing they’re ready to make a purchase. They may sign up for a trial, like the trial, then disappear. How do you cope with ‘silent’ customers, or people who are just waiting to become conversions but never reach out? The KISSMetrics blog is goldmine of useful...
6 Ways to Grow YouTube Subscribers and Your...
Without video marketing, many companies are missing out on massive exposure to a near untapped audience of potential clients. YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the web, and for many businesses, it’s unexplored and under-utilised. Creating a great YouTube channel is all about engagement and promotion, and this blog post contains some handy tips on both. There are particular features on...
6 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business
Pinterest has changed over the last few months. Up until recently, the site was chock-full of fashion, home wares, photography and travel snaps. In recent months, social media marketing gurus have begun to experiment with the platform. But is there any real use for Pinterest in business - other than posting infographics and hoping for the best? This blog post contains a number of useful tips from...
How to get more likes on Facebook
Online marketing is big business, and some companies will go to extreme lengths to trigger sharing and retweets from punters. If you’re ever been irritated by mountains of social sharing buttons on an interesting blog, have a look at this great blog from The Oatmeal. If you’ve had your Facebook account for some time, you’ve probably been pestered into clicking Like on something you don’t care...
How to Craft an Offer That Can’t Be Refused
Getting your content right is just one stage of the marketing process. Defining your customer, and figuring out what they really need, is the secret recipe for marketing success. This blog by Chris Guillebeau gives content writers valuable tips on analysing the wants and needs of the audience. Phrasing and tone can help you to figure out the best way to approach the customer without alienating...
The 10 Greatest Marketing Campaigns of All Time
Creating a memorable marketing campaign pays dividends for years to come. This entertaining blog from Lauren Sorenson touches on ten of the best marketing campaigns ever created, and the reasons why they succeeded in getting their message across. Indeed, some of these campaigns have a timeless quality, and they have arguably promoted the brand far beyond their original scope. Most of these ads are...
How To Make Money Online
Making money online is surely the Holy Grail of employment, and there are no shortage of e-books on the subject. But can you really sit at your computer and watch the pounds roll in? Seth Godin has written a 21-point blog offering a fresh window on online opportunities. Some of the key themes are gaining trust and grabbing valuable attention rather than focusing on fads and quick wins. Creating...
The Best and Worst Times to Share on Facebook,...
Capturing social media traffic is trickier than it sounds, particularly on weekdays when Twitter streams move fast. It can be hard to get your message heard among the noise, but careful timing of tweets and updates can help you to attract the most traffic. New research from bit.ly suggests that 1pm and 3pm Eastern Time are the best timezones to post if you have a global or US-centric audience....
This $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into...
As natural resources show signs of running out, entrepreneurs and investors are literally looking to the stars for the next start-up opportunity. Last week, fabulously wealthy staff from Microsoft, Google and other companies invested in a new asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources. In time, they hope to develop the equipment to literally harness and dismantle asteroids, mining them for...
5 Tools to Take Your SEO to the Next Level
Optimising your website is a complex process, and relying on one tool is not always the best way to approach it. Aj Kumar rounds up five tools that can help with optimisation, pay-per-click, keyword research, social media activity and backlinks. Many of the packages covered in this post are paid, but most have trial periods so you can give them a go before you part with any cash. The last option...
The One-Two Marketing Punch: How to Combine...
When you’re struggling to be heard among the social media noise, it can pay to reconsider your approach. This post discusses ways to blend digital marketing with traditional marketing to give your business the best chance of success. Using other channels, such as printed QR codes or email newsletters, you can capture a different type of traffic from a slightly different demographic. But you don’t...
8 Tactful Ways to use your Personal Facebook...
Here’s a $64,000 question for freelancers and start-up entrepreneurs. How do you promote what you do on your personal Facebook page without turning it into a business website? This post goes through some strategic and technical tips around engaging people on Facebook, allowing people to subscribe to your posts and promoting your business at the same time. Using these steps, you can also tweak your...
April 2012
15 posts
7 Reasons Marketing & Customer Service Need to...
With social media comes social sharing of praise and criticism, and the way companies react to those messages can become an infinite feedback loop. This can be positive or negative, depending on the way it’s handled. Pamela Vaughan’s article uses the analogy of milk and cookies to describe the way marketing departments and customer service teams should work together to ensure clients are happy....
How to Steal Killer Sales Copy Straight from Your...
Joanna Wiebe has penned this quirky piece for Kissmetrics on how to recycle customer reviews to enhance your own copy. By drawing on customer feedback, you can tap into the kind of language you should be using. She argues that the real gold - and the fundamental clues behind buying decisions - are in customer reviews, not expert analysis. She also says dedicated review sites are best avoided when...
The 5 Easy Steps To Measure Your Social Media...
Social media is a time consuming matter for any business, and it’s vital that your investment of time isn’t wasted. This Kissmetrics blog walks us through analytics and metrics, explains the difference between the two, and offers suggestions for measuring your goals and progress. There’s a really useful tip about a service called SocDir that taps into all available social media tools and tells you...
How to use Pinterest for business: 7 handy tips
Pinterest is the newest social media buzz site, and marketing companies are eager to figure out how to harness the unique user base the site can offer. A very high proportion of users on Pinterest are women, and visually representing your company is key: there’s no content writing needed here. Cara Pring picks out some basics, such as pinning your own products among classic products from other...
3 Slick Analytics Dashboards to Monitor Your...
Monitoring the statistics from your Google Analytics dashboard is a great way to track incoming links and stats, but what about social trending? There are some areas Google don’t cover quite so well. Lauren Hockenson wrote a piece for Mashable about complimentary analytics packages that business owners can use alongside Google Analytics. Some, like Chartbeat, concentrate on real-time web visitors,...
How To Find Hot Topics To Blog About
So you have your website, you have your blog set up - and you’re sitting there staring at a white screen and a flashing cursor. What on earth should you write about? It can take time to develop a theme for your blog, but if you need a short cut, help is at hand. Ryan Taft covers a few ideas for blog posts, with current affairs and Twitter’s trending topics taking centre stage. Using some of his...
Create A YouTube Traffic Jam With These 4 Simple...
Search engine optimisation is a competitive area, and as the competition for keywords hots up, people are looking to harness the power of video to improve their SEO. But how do you make your videos visible in the first place? In this post, the excellent Kissmetrics blog turns to optimisation of video content on YouTube. By tweaking your YouTube channel, plus any associated annotations and...
How to Select the Right CTA for Every Page on your...
If you’re in the process of optimising your site for SEO, or just to improve your conversion rate, your call-to-action strategy could make all the difference. This article takes you through the process of deciding on your call to action and ensuring each one is closely aligned to the sales cycle on your website. Rather than just throwing up a button and hoping for the best, after reading this...
5 Ways to Make Money from Software
As the web makes way for apps, more software companies are struggling with the model of low-cost, or free, software provision. How can you monetise what you produce if nobody wants to pay? Eduart Mitelman has some ideas. The most obvious is to adopt the Freemium model - giving people a free and highly usable option to hook them initially. This is a strategy which has worked well for Zynga, Omgpop...
How To Use Social Media To Promote Your Small...
Hands up: how many of us put enough time into your business social media presence? I bet there aren’t many people who could honestly say they give social media the attention it deserves. Kym McNicholas has written a step-by-step guide. Step three? Before you go any further, sign up for a social media manager: a free tool that allows you to consolidate your updates and harvest stats about the...
10 tools to analyze your website
When looking for web analytics tools, most of us default to the big guys. Google Analytics is certainly powerful, but it’s also incredibly complex. There are a whole host of other tools that provide interesting, useful data about your website, and Dan Rajan has reviewed some of the most interesting analytics suites in this post. Use Wordstream to tie analytics with marketing spend, or Clicktale to...
Publish What You Learn
Plenty of us spend most of our working day connected to the internet, and in the course of each week, we pick up all kinds of knowledge. Louis Lazaris has written a great, highly motivational blog post about turning what you learn into fresh content for your own website. This multi-part guide also points out the importance of experimenting and learning from your own errors, even if you have to...
Creating Ultimate Guides and Using Them to Build...
Content creation is the key to attracting visitors through social networking, and many companies invest a large of their marketing budget in quality articles and blogs. This piece by Kristi Hines discusses ‘Ultimate Guide’ blogs: blogs which claim total authority over a subject, site or news item. It’s not just about choosing a subject for the piece and writing it well: Kristi also goes on to...
Minimalist Posters Of Famous Hollywood Movies
In an era of sensual overload, isn’t it nice to keep things simple? Subhajyoti Ghosh, an illustrator from Kharahpur in India, has re-imagined a range of classic movies as single, lone images in a collection called ‘Less is More’. In some cases, the theme of an entire film has been whittled down to nothing more than an icon and perhaps a single number: yes, our favourite is the remixed, simplified...
Get Rich or Die Trying
As British businesses brace themselves for another recession, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s advice about bouncing back in business could be timely. You too could follow in the footsteps of Amazon, Zynga and Pandora in rekindling your business’ vitality. The key to getting things back on track? According to Ashkan, talent and education might be helpful, but the ability to act selectively on advice and...
March 2012
12 posts
42 Things To Do On Twitter Besides Tweet Spam &...
If you’re a small business owner with a social media presence, the first problem you’re likely to hit is how to find the time to use it. When you’ve got the resource, what next? Pam Moore has put together a list of suggestions if you’re struggling for inspiration. Yes, some are obvious and there’s a fair amount of overlap, but some ideas are genuinely brilliant - and not so obvious. As Pam says,...
Killer Landing Pages: 3 Examples of Landing Pages...
The landing page is one of the most important pages on your website, particularly if you want to improve your conversion rate. Some SEO companies spend weeks split-testing different layouts to find out what works. Although there’s no magic formula, this useful post from Erez Barak provides some basic ideas and emphasises seven key areas that you need to analyse to ensure your landing page is...
How To Make Your Tweets More Trustworthy [STUDY]
Researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University have conducted research into Tweets which appear to be credible and believable. According to Twitter users, there are a range of reasons why one tweet could be more believable than another, including whether it was retweeted by a trusted friend, or written by an author who’s perceived to be an expert in the field. But there are a number of...
Improve Your Website Search Optimisation Using...
New to SEO, or need a handy tool to evaluate your own website? SEO Site Tools instantly shows the Google Pagerank, Quantcast and Alexa ranks, Majestic and SEMRush information, backlinks, traffic data, Google Trends, site index data and SEOMoz Linkscape all from within Google Chrome. You can also see a breakdown of the page structure and the quality of the SEO, quickly highlighting problem areas or...
Top 10 Free Online Blogging Platforms
Blogs have evolved from basic ‘e-zine’ toolkits to fully-featured, rich web applications in their own right. Having a blog is also vital for SEO. Sufyan bin Uzayr has collected ten suggestions of popular, capable blogging tools that are suitable for novices and the more experienced user. There are plenty of sites here that you’ll already know about, but a few you may not, such as Jux, Blogetery...
6 Indispensable Free & Freemium SEO Tools
SEO isn’t something anyone can learn overnight, but it’s always useful to know the principles of SEO so you can get your website on the right track. Some SEO tools and packages are incredibly expensive (and, arguably, overkill for the novice user), but Kristi Hines has rounded up six really useful freebies, or premium tools with useful free versions. Research keywords, monitor marketing efforts...
How To Write Readable And Retweetable Tweets
Capturing the imagination of a reader in 140 characters isn’t easy. So how can you encourage retweets and responses on Twitter? Dave Copeland gathered top tips from twelve social media experts. In a nutshell: mention other people, ask a question and make your tweets really short so people can add comments when they retweet. One hashtag is good, and a link is a must - but don’t put it at the end of...
The 7-Point Checklist for Powerful Landing Page...
It’s not difficult to write content for your website, but writing effective content that drives conversions is a whole other issue. Calling the reader to action is a vital skill for web copywriting, but it’s something many inexperienced writers miss. Corey Eridon highlights seven important areas where you can improve your landing page and encourage the user to make a purchase (or make contact -...
4 Big Reasons Why SEO Will Never Die
Since Google started to rank web pages to encourage more relevant content, SEO has been a booming and highly profitable industry. But SEO is not without its detractors, many of whom would like to convince you that SEO has had its day. This post from Ray Comstock summarises why SEO is still important and relevant for businesses, and the ways SEO has helped the web to evolve. He also puts across a...
WARREN BUFFETT: The Investment You Think Is 'Safe'...
Stock market fluctuation can spook even the most confident and experienced of traders, but could it be time to re-think the traditional logic on investment? Warren Buffett, the so-called ‘Oracle of Omaha’ and a Goliath in the trade, argues that the concept of safe and risky investments should be turned on its head. Why? You’ll have to read the article to find out, but there’s undoubtedly logic to...
Keys to email creative success: Marketing and...
Email marketing is sometimes regarded as a quaint concept, but don’t underestimate the power of delivering a relevant and highly targeted message direct to a customer’s inbox. The key to creating an effective campaign, argues Patrick Cox, is the design of the email: take time to make it look good and you’ll get a great response. Combine powerful copywriting with a clear layout, but steer clear of...
How to Get Business from LinkedIn - and Spend Less...
Social media can be something of a danger zone for small business owners; it’s all too easy to get distracted. A visit that began as a quick check of an incoming message can lead to an hour’s procrastination. LinkedIn is primarily a business network, and this article gives some helpful tips on how to get the best out of your time on the site. Dedicating time to social networking is certainly...
December 2011
9 posts
So You Want To Build A Software Product
Do you want to build a software product? Something that would be useful for a niche market or the next Facebook? The online dream is big at the moment with companies like LinkedIn and Groupon going for multi-billion dollar IPO’s and even the smallest of startup’s receiving millions in funding. This article aims to guide you along the way, help you avoid some mistakes and point you...
Razzie’s Of Logo Design: The Worst Logos Ever...
A logo is a companies mark through which they can generate brand recognition and loyalty. However, some logo’s just don’t hit the mark. This article is a compilation of some of the worst logo’s ever designed. It’s a light hearted easy article so sit back, relax and get prepared to judge! Please click here to read the full article.
How to Design a Killer Facebook Advertising...
Facebook is now a serious player in the online advertising game. With an estimated 800 million members, most of which use the site on a daily basis, you can’t afford to ignore Facebook advertising. This article aims to break down the steps you need to take and explain what, why and how to do each part. By the end you should have a killer Facebook campaign and hopefully a new way to get...
40 SEO terms you need to know
Search Engine Optimisation is crucial to get your website to the top of the search engines and to grow traffic. However there is a lot of jargon associated with SEO… well… this article will help you brush up on your SEO language skills. A quick reference guide to help you learn your anchor text from your meta description. Please click here to read the full article.
Video: What’s Trending @ Twitter - Infographic /...
This video looks at some of the recent Twitter stats including who users follow, why they follow them and how they find new users. Please click here to read the full article.
The Ultimate Showcase of Convincing Call to Action...
Your call to action button is where people go from checking out your website, product or service to making a decision to move forward and contact you or register. The design and look of the button can play a big part into whether people have the desire to click it. This article is a collection of some great call to action buttons. Please click here to read the full article.
Is Your Company Guilty of 7 of the Biggest Online...
Online is where it’s at… But are you doing it right? Online marketing is a myriad of choices, display ads, paid search, social media, local marketing… the list goes on. Kiss Metrics have produced a short list of what they call the 7 deadly sins of online marketing. Do you commit any of these sins? Please click here to read the full article.