It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Coming

Here at Marketing Pilgrim we’re dedicated to bringing you the “good word” on internet marketing. Today, we take a break to simply bring you the Good Word. Happy Easter!

2010 LeadingRE Conference: TopRank Digital Marketing Sessions

Last week, I was in Las Vegas for the LeadingRE annual conference and marketing technology event speaking on social media and SEO strategies for real estate professionals. It’s always interesting to see where different verticals are at with their willingness to embrace social channels, and I’m pleased to report [...]

SESNY: 5 Tips To Optimize Press Releases For Search

TopRank Online Marketing has been working with PRWeb providing SEO consulting services starting in 2008. PRWeb was founded in 1997 to help small businesses and communications professionals leverage the web to share their news directly with the public. As part of this process PRWeb lead the way for the “direct-to-consumer” press release, enabling companies [...]

5 Social Media Tips for Ecommerce Marketing

If you run an ecommerce business, chances are your customers â€" regardless of their age, gender or economic status â€" are active on social networks and social media sharing sites. Just consider the statistics from social media monitoring site Pingdom: Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%) 61% of Facebook users are middle aged [...]

Google: The Social Media Company

Over the last few years, the popularity of social channels â€" for professionals, teens, grandmas and everyone in between â€" has skyrocketed. Consider the recent numbers: Twitter experienced an annual growth in 2009 of 1,382% Facebook now boasts 400 million active users Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube Between blog posts, Facebook status updates, tweets, [...]

Advertisers Interested in iPad for Now

Well, have you been able to gather yourself after the iPad finally launched this weekend? There was significant buzz around this event that appears to started out with 300,000 units sold (200,000 of those were pre-orders). Lines formed at all the Apple stores in the US but I found it rather funny that in an [...]

12 Tips on Live Blogging & Content Marketing at SXSWi

So here I sit in the DFW airport hanging out with David Berkowitz and Joe Morin waiting for my connection to Austin. What better way to spend that 45 min than to write a helpful blog post? A big part of my “mission” for SXSXi is to create content after all. I have several other [...]

Shutterstock Voted Best Royalty Free Stock Photos Site for Bloggers

A great photo can really add a lot of flavor to a blog post and in our own analysis at Online Marketing Blog as well as with clients, including quality images with a blog post can boost traffic and referrals 30-50%. To make posts more personal, I try to use my own photos as [...]

What Ad Format Is Best on Social Media?

A study conducted in May 2009 by research firm Psychster asked consumers how they interacted with ads on social sites (PDF). With almost 700 Facebook users and almost 500 users of the cooking/recipe/social website AllRecipes (who sponsored the study), Psychster showed participants a video of an ad type and an interaction. The participants then had [...]

Now Compare Your Search Ads to Facebook Ads Performance

One of the many nagging questions that many online marketers face is trying to show just how well search ads do as compared to social media ads. Well, beginning on April 12, Clickable is giving advertisers the ability to compare their search ads’ performance against that of ads on Facebook. If this works as advertised [...]

Half of Bloggers Consider Themselves Journalists

PRWeek has published the results of its latest study on the media and journalists—and bloggers are increasingly including themselves among their ranks. Just last year, only a third of bloggers considered themselves journalists; now 52% do. However, only 20% receive most of their income from blogging (but that’s up from 4% last year). Just a [...]

SESNY Keynote Interview: David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott is a best-selling author and popular keynote speaker on the topics of viral and online marketing as well as the convergence of web marketing, digital media and online PR. One of his most popular books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online [...]

How To Develop Great Content – SESNY

At Online Marketing Blog, content marketing is frequently a hot topic.  And with good reason:  it’s a vital skill for marketers. Not only do we at TopRank Online Marketing see great results implementing content marketing for clients, but the industry as a whole sees it as a clear trend.  Consider the following stats: 6 in [...]

3 Tools to Help You Share Microcontent Online

Over the last few years, the concept of microblogging has gone from zero to hero. Just a few short years ago, the terms “microblogging” and “microcontent” were known only to early adopters.  These days, the only thing “micro” about microblogging and status updates is character count. Consider a few recent statistics: There are nearly 40,000 Tweets [...]

Greenpeace Questions iPad’s Role in Global Warming

Fresh off the “success’ of shouting down Nestle over their sourcing of the some of the palm oil used in products, Greenpeace is now going after some other less edible targets. Maybe they got confused by the Apple logo but Greenpeace has drawn a dotted line between the soon to be released iPad (Coincidence? We [...]

Google Offers Fixed Response to Certain Searches

Google is starting to make some changes in search results that are designed to “cut to the chase” when a situation could be time sensitive. In a way, it is Google admitting that sometimes you need to dig quite a bit to find what you are looking for on the search engine. In some cases [...]

Google Buzz Privacy Reset Tomorrow

Google Buzz lived up to its name in its first week. After not fully testing the product, Google launched Buzz and forced all Gmail users into it without a way to opt out. Then we realized they were automatically sharing the list of people we chatted with and emailed most frequently. Finally, Google backed off [...]

BIGLIST Update: These SEO Blogs Are No April Fools

On this fine April Fool’s day BIGLIST foregos the tricks and brings you yet another collection of better than average SEO & SEM blog reviews. Over the past 2 years we’ve reviewed over 1,000 SEO blogs and we offer you 5 more to add to your RSS reader and get search engine smart. Think Traffic – This blog by [...]

Sponsored Posts – Measure The Risk Carefully

Sponsored posts have been a hot topic in the blogosphere and among marketers the last few years. What exactly is a sponsored post?  The simple answer is:  a company pays a blogger cash to blog about their product or service.  This is different than an advertorial since the blogger is paid cash to write the content [...]

Consumers Responding to Online Ads Better

This month, the Opinion Research Corporation conducted a survey for Adfusion, the article-based ad network division of ARAnet. While it should probably come as little surprise that the survey found that articles that include brand information were the preferred source of online advertising, it’s nice to hear that all forms of online ads saw a [...]

Buying Your Competitor’s Keywords an Invasion of Privacy?

A new argument to prevent your competition from buying sponsored search listings, containing your brand, is playing out right now in a Wisconsin court room. And it sounds like the kind of court case you’d actually enjoy watching unfold! Habush, Habush & Rottier claims that competing law firm Cannon & Dunphy violated state privacy laws by buying [...]

Yahoo Hacked in China (Still Waiting for Other Shoe)

In January, Google reported a coordinated hack attack targeting Chinese human rights activists’ Gmail accounts. In response, Google (eventually) pulled their search engine from China. And now the hackers are at it again. The Yahoo “e-mail accounts of more than a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders” [...]

Star Results for Google Mobile

At the beginning of March Google introduced the ability to star results in their SERP’s (search engine result pages), which would bring those results to the top of the same search performed at another time. Now this same functionality is being rolled out to mobile search. As with anything that Google does on the mobile [...]

YouTube Video Page Goes Live for All

YouTube has been working on its layout for a long time. They launched the Feather experiment in December and a similar new page layout in January. Just last week, they finally did something to make the comments somewhat more useful, in a limited, no-opt-out test. Apparently that went well, because now they’re rolling out the [...]

Cup of Joe: Are You Profitable or Pragmatic?

I do a lot of different things in the Internet marketing industry. But I think what I do the most, and quite possibly the best, is product development. I write code, I manage designers, and I promote products. All of these things have to do with product development. Over the years I’ve come to believe [...]

Google Adds Localization to New UI Tests

Back in November, Google started testing a new user interface with the search option automatically displayed in the right column (first tested a year ago, added to the SERP in May, but off by default). Users are spotting that layout test again, with some new features including localization. As Barry Schwartz reports, Sara Holoubek noticed the [...]

5 Ways to Electrify Your Social Network

A typical situation for many marketers when it comes to social networks is this: Setup LinkedIn profile, check. Corporate LinkedIn page, check.  Facebook profile, check. Facebook Fan Page, check. Twitter account, check. Corporate blog, check. Check check check! But where’s the buzz? Where are the fans, friends, followers, comments, links, traffic, search engine rankings? Where’s [...]

10 Reasons SES New York is a Must-Attend Marketing Conference

Let’s get it out of the way that Online Marketing Blog is a media sponsor for Search Engine Strategies conferences and also that I serve on the advisory board. In fact, the blog you’re reading right now was the very first blog to be recognized as a media sponsor by a major marketing industry conference. [...]

10 Steps to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

SES New York kicked off with an excellent keynote presentation by David Meerman Scott (interview) followed by a panel on Digital Asset Optimization including Mark Knowles, Chris Boggs and myself. Richard Zwicky moderated. The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file [...]

The Role of News in Blended Search – Observations & Best Practices

We’re starting this Spring Break week off with a very rare guest post from TopRank Marketing client, Jiyan Wei. Jiyan is Director of Product Management at Vocus, Inc. where he drives product platform strategy and roadmap execution for PRWeb. I’ve presented on panels with Jiyan several times at search marketing conferences, talking about the virtues [...]

New Google Design & Not Entirely Unlike Jeremiah Owyang

No this is not linkbait using Jeremiah’s name. Read on to find out what this “not entirely unlike” business from Google is all about and what it has to do with him. A while back I wrote about the new design Google is testing (which I like a lot) that adds a third column to search [...]

Twitter Twies Tweaking Homepage

Alright, so the title was lame. It’s been a long time since I even considered overusing the “Tw” that has made Twitter talk funny and incredibly annoying at the same time. Twitter must be really big because this bit of news is about their homepage redesign and not about numbers of Twitter accounts etc. The Twitter [...]

Google: Cyber Attacks on Dissidents Spread to Vietnam

Google’s already made big waves in the international arena this year by deciding to pull out of China after too many censorship demands and a cyber attack targeting human rights activitists’ email accounts. And now another Asian country might get the same kind of press: Vietnam. Says Google: These infected machines have been used both to [...]

How to Become a Link Magnet – SES NY 2010

Links are the lifeblood of the web. Without fresh links, your website has no authority in the engines or consistent referral traffic. Some companies and individuals appear to attract links without really trying. Others struggle and never break through to the point of building links at increasing velocity. We’ve shared plenty of linkbuilding tactics at Online Marketing [...]

Common B2B SEO Mistakes and How to Solve Them

Working with a variety of companies large and small, local and international, B2B and B2C, on SEO projects over the past 12 years has revealed a variety of common obstacles to success.  For many reasons, B2B marketers often lag behind B2C in terms of tactics and adoption of new marketing technologies.  The customer acquisition and [...]

BIGLIST Social SEO Blogs Update 031110

Welcome to the post-Winter/pre-Spring version of the BIGLIST review of SEO blogs.  Snow is starting to melt and you can actually walk around outside (in Minnesota) without your eyelashes freezing together. We have a nice group for you to review so fire up your RSS reader and subscribe. LyndiT blog gets our attention for great design and user [...]

5 Tips for Better B2B Branding

Think branding only falls in the B2C court? Think again. In fact, three of the top 10 brands in 2009, as ranked by Interbrand, generate a sizable amount of revenue from their B2B customers: IBM, Microsoft and GE. As a B2B marketer your brand is your most valuable asset. B2B branding is less about cool, hip monikers (the [...]

Apple to Build a Search Engine? This Just In: Apple Has a Search Engine!

Some analyst predicts that Apple will build its own search engine and the soundbite feeds the blogging community for a week! We’re also going to jump in–hey we have bills to pay too–but our take is a little different. First the prediction: We believe Apple could utilize data unavailable to Google, data generated by the company’s App [...]

Google Acquires a Video Company You’ve Never Heard Of!

While you were either a) drooling over your new iPad, or b) wishing those that had a new iPad would shut-up already, Google went out and bought a company you’ve never heard of. What’s pretty cool about Episodic’s announcement of their acquisition is that they admit you’ve probably never heard of them. I’ve seen many acquisition [...]

Unvarnished Launches: A RipOff Report for Individuals?

Hands-up if RipOff Report keeps you awake at night? Yeah, the site keeps many business owners awake. It takes just one unhappy customer to cause the biggest online reputation headache of your company’s life. Now imagine a service that could end up doing the same for your personal reputation. OK, you don’t need to imagine it–it just launched! While [...]

Twitter Accounts with a Profile Picture Have 10 Times More Followers Than Those Without

When publishing Twitter statistics, one of the most common questions I'm asked is about the effect of setting a profile picture in your Twitter account.

I dug into Twitter Grader data and analyzed nearly 9 million Twitter profiles to produce the graph below.

It doesn't take much, but if you want to get followers on Twitter, it's a good idea to upload a picture of yourself.

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HubSpot TV - Fight Back with Special Guest @ErinWeed

Watch HubSpot TV live at 4:00 p.m. ET on Friday at www.hubspot.tv and use the hashtag #HubSpotTV

 

Episode #85 - March 26, 2010
(Episode length: 27 minutes, 32 seconds)

Intro

• How to interact on Twitter: Include www.HubSpot.tv in your tweet! On the show today is Mike Volpe (@mvolpe), Karen Rubin (@karenrubin) and Erin Weed (@erinweed)
• As always, all the old episodes are in iTunes: http://itunes.hubspot.tv If you like the show, please leave a review!

Surprise Guest! - David Meerman Scott

Special Guest - Erin Weed

• http://www.erinweed.com
• http://www.girlsfightback.com

Headlines

Nestle Faces Social Media Terrorism

• Nestle's Fan Page
  
• Nestle / Facebook / Greenpeace timeline (in process)
• Crisis Planning: Prepare Your Company For Social Media Attacks
• Marketing Takeaway: Proactively monitor trends to prevent potential social media attacks.
• Marketing Takeaway 2: Think about multi layered social media campaigns, like Greenpeace, to make a bigger splash.

Twitter Is a Popularity Contest

• Finally, Twitter Search to Rank Tweets by Popularity
• Marketing Takeaway: To become more visible in search engines, get on the social media train!

Google Allows Users to Block Tracking

• Cookies under fire as regulators move in
• Marketing Takeaway: Pay attention to this trend. It could vastly affect your marketing measurement in the future.

Forum Fodder

Marketing Tip of the Week: Don't get caught with your guard down - pay attention to online conversations so your company is not the victim of a surprise attack.

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Facebook Launches Community Pages for the 'Unofficial'

Facebook just released a new page creation option -- the Community Page -- specifically designed to support topics, causes and the 'unofficial' (pages created about but not by companies, brands and public figures).

Community Pages are similar to Facebook Business Pages, with the exception of their functionality.  According to Facebook, if a Community Page you've created spikes in popularity, its administrative capabilitie s will be removed from you and handed over to the Facebook community, making popular Community Pages akin to a public wiki.    

It seems this new page option has an obvious benefit for businesses on Facebook: Community Pages help eliminate previous discrepancy issues between officially and unofficially created Business Pages.  If used correctly, businesses will no longer have to worry about unofficial Business Pages cropping up about their own brands, allowing Facebook users to more easily identify a particular Business Page as the brand's official Facebook presenc e.

The Marketing Lesson:

While the new page feature seems to have obvious benefits for Facebook in its management of distinguishing official from unofficial pages, the most important thing to note is Facebook's attempt to introduce new features based on the recognition of its users' needs.  In a nutshell, Facebook paid attention to its users' activity and saw an opportunity to fulfill a need.  Facebook's new addition was also another step toward building community and promoting interaction.

I think there are two major things we, as marketers, can learn from this:

1. Closely listen to and watch for feedback/hints from your customer base about their needs.  Is there a way you can improve your product/service to fulfill these needs or create a better user experience?
2. Look for ways to promote interactivity and build community on your own website.  I think we'll start to see a lot more customer-generated communities sprouting up on Facebook about companies and products, particularly if that company or product is not already offering a community offering of its own.  Community is important.  Take advantage of using the opportunity to generate traffic to your own web site rather than Facebook.

Live Webinar: Social Media Optimization Is The New SEO With Brian Solis

New Media thought leader, Brian Solis, will share how to implement and manage a Social Media Optimization (SMO) program. Date and time: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 12:30pm EST  Reserve your spot now to increase your visibility in social media!

 

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How to Generate More Blog Traffic With Evergreen Content Promotion

If you've been blogging consistently for a few years now, chances are you have a pretty impressive supply of content. While this content may not exactly be new, we at HubSpot hesitate to call it old.

(Who likes to be called "old" anyway?)  Rather, we refer to much of our past content as evergreen content, considering the fact that to many of our r eaders, fans, followers and audience, this content is still largely valuable and interesting.

Over the past couple of months, we decided to conduct a little experiment based on the hypothesis that although our evergreen content may not exactly be "new," our audience would still be eager to check it out.  If you consider the fact that lately we've been publishing 3+ articles per day and not everyone in our community reads every article, you can assume that many people are missing out on our content when it's first published and would derive value from it a second time around.

The Experiment

HubSpot experimented with the promotion of evergreen content items (blog articles, archived webinars and Marketing Hubs) via social media sites Twitter and Facebook for two months.  The goal was to generate additional traffic to the HubSpot blog without spending time creating more content than the HubSpot team was already creating.  

The Process

How Content Was Selected -- Since the bulk of our content is in the form of blog articles, evergreen articles made up the bulk of our content items. To narrow them down, we chose articles that were most successful in the past (in terms of page views and inbound links).  Content that was overly timely (e.g. breaking news-related articles) was excluded, and we individually reviewed each article to make sure we did not promote content that would no longer be valuable to readers. 

Amount of Content & Frequency of Promotion -- During a month's time, we promoted 57 total content items divided between Twitter and Facebook.  Based on the difference in nature of Twitter and Facebook, we promoted about 3 content items per weekday on Twitter, and 1 content item per weekday on Facebook.

How Content Was Positioned -- We wanted to be careful not to position evergreen content the same way as the new content we were simultaneously promoting.  At the same time, we didn't necessarily want to make people think they would be clicking on old or stale content. Therefore, promotion was usually conversational in nature (e.g. posed as a question, a tip or piece of advice) rather than tweeting the full title of the article like we do for brand new articles. (Here's an example of a tweet, an example of another and one more!)

Results -- In order to determine whether our evergreen content was succeeding in generating more traffic to the HubSpot blog, we tracked the change in social media traffic to the blog.  We also created unique bit.ly links for each of the content items we were promoting and tracked the number of clicks on those links. As a result, evergreen content links received an average of 198 clicks, and we noticed an increase in traffic from social media sources to the HubSpot blog. In fact, traffic from social media sources to the blog has more than doubled since the end of 2009.

Note: The spike in social media traffic in January can be attributed to a Twitter retweet contest we ran on the blog in January.

Is your company's evergreen content collecting dust?  If you have a good supply of evergreen content that may still be useful to your followers, why not try a similar experiment to see if you can generate some additional traffic -- and ultimately leads? 

Photo by Shell

 

Webinar - PR 2.0 for Marketers: Why Social Media Participation Matters

Want to learn more about how creating remarkable content can lead to PR coverage and lead generation? Download the free webinar to learn how inbound marketing and PR can be combined for results.

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How Many Posts Does Your Business Blog Need to Grow Leads? At Least 20.

This is the second of three articles that share findings from The State of Inbound Lead Generation, a new HubSpot report based on statistical analysis of 1,400 customers' inbound marketing activities. The study identifies lead generation best practices based on results from these companies. The report and this article were written by Sophie L. Schmitt.

In the last post, we discussed the strong connection between Google indexed pages and leads. Here, we're taking a look at the significant positive relationship between blogs and leads. More specifically, we're looking at blog usage as well as blog size based on the number of articles available on the blog.

Blogs Need to Reach a Critical Mass of Articles to Generate Leads

We grouped 760+ HubSpot customers who blog into four different categories based on the size of their blogs. When comparing the median customer's monthly lead number in each category, we observed that leads started to grow once blogs offered a critical mass of articles, on the order of 20 to 50 articles.

Customers with blog article numbers above this critical threshold are likely to have enough content to make a significant impact on search engines through additional indexed pages and new keywords with which to associate. In addition, other sites are more likely to link to a blog that offers a steady stream of content. Customers with blogs of 24+ articles are more likely to be committed to updating their blog frequently and, thus, are likely to generate more traffic from referring sites.

The graph also indicates that lead growth has the potential to a ccelerate for customers who grow blogs beyond the critical threshold. Customers with 52+ blog articles generated median leads that were 77% higher than the median result in the "24-51 article" group. This growth is twice the increase between the prior two groups (30%).

Marketers With Blogs Generate 67% More Leads

Along with blog size, we looked at plain and simple blog usage. We have written about the impact of blog usage on leads before. Here, we compared median leads of customers who blog to those of customers who don't. We looked at leads over a three month period (November '09 through January '10).

As expected, the median customer who blogs generated 6 7% more leads than the median customer who does not blog, or 15 vs. 9 leads. The results were the same for both B2B and B2C customers in our sample. 

This graph also shows that marketers with small blogs (fewer than 10 articles available) generate similar lead results to marketers who choose not to create a blog.

Marketing Takeaways

Marketers who are not blogging are leaving leads on the table. Marketers who do blog must invest time and effort in developing a blogging pro cess that ensures there is always a critical mass of articles available to attract visitors who convert to leads. Blogs impact leads because they:

• Grow indexed pages in Google more rapidly than by adding web site pages. As we showed earlier, the more Google indexed pages a site has, the more leads it is likely to obtain.
• Increase the number of keywords marketers rank for in Google. Through blogs, marketers have the opportunity to create unique content that can be different from their web site content. They have the potential to significantly increase the number of keywords they rank highly for in Google. 
• Generate inbound links, which are a central factor in Google's org anic search ranking algorithm. Other related sites are likely to link to a blog that provides interesting and fresh content.
• Increase repeat visitors. Blogs give visitors a reason to come back and interact with sites.

Read article 1 in this 3-part series.

 

Want to read more? Download the full State of Inbound Lead Generation report.

Live Webinar: The State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation

Learn how companies are using inbound marketing techniques to generate higher volume and lower cost leads and customers. Date and time: Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 1:00pm EDT  Reserve Your Spot Now

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