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Article By Matthew Meyer

Google Place Search (formerly known as Google Places) rules local search. Just try it. Go to Google and type in “Personal Injury Attorney Your City.” The first seven listings in the “natural search listings” are all Google Places pages. Since 20% of searches are local and the majority of their over $30 billion in revenue comes from small businesses, Google has decided to go hard after local small business advertising.
They started by creating 50 million Google Places pages using aggregated data from online directories and the Yellow Pages. These pages are mobile optimized and attached to Google Maps.

Only about 8% of local businesses have actually claimed their Google Place Search page. Even less have fully optimized their pages. However, this is changing fast. Local businesses are getting hip to the importance of Google Places pages. If you have a local business, the first place potential customers will start to find you is on your Google Places page from their smart phone. You want to make sure you are at the top of the list for your category. Here is how you get a jump on your competition in local search:
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Article By Nick Stamoulis

Let me start off by explaining exactly what I mean when I say “outsourced content.” Just because a piece of content wasn’t written inside the four walls of your office, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s “outsourced” as I define it. Do I think hiring a freelance writer to manage your business blog counts as outsourcing? No. Do I think having a PR firm write and distribute press releases under your company’s name counts as outsourcing? No. Do I think hiring a social media marketing or SEO firm to write and promote content counts as outsourcing? No.

So What is Outsourced Content?

To me, outsourced content comes from two main sources: overseas and writer databases. Many black hat SEO firms will outsource their clients’ link building activities to India or the Philippines because it’s cheap and easy to do. Oftentimes they do the same thing with content. A writer overseas is only going to charge $5-$20 for a 500 word blog post while a professional freelance writer in the States might charge $200 for the same amount of words. (Notice I said same word count, not same post! Keep that in mind for later…)

I would also classify outsourced content as the content a business might get from a writer database. I’m sure you’ve come across something like this before – you can plug in your topic, content type (blog vs. article vs. whitepaper) and how much you are willing to pay and a handful of writers pitch you for the job. I’m not saying that there aren’t great writers to be found on these writer databases, but those few great writers are often buried under a flood of not-so-great ones.
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34% of businesses say lead qualityis the biggest indicator of online marketing effectiveness. Yet many marketers lack the tools or data to better target and attract more sales-ready leads.Businesses that use closed-loop marketing , however, have the insights into what drives more, high-quality leads, and you can too. Learn everything you need to know about closed-loop marketing in our new blueprint.


In this blueprint, you will learn:

* What the new way of marketing means for your organization
* How to say goodbye to cold calling
* What closed-loop marketing means & how it benefits you
* How the integration between HubSpot & Salesforce works

 

Download the New Guide Now

seomythsWith so much misinformation about SEO having been dispensed over the years, it’s hard to know what’s true and isn’t true – making it all the more difficult to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, as it were. Concerned about the potential harm misinformation about SEO can ultimately cause, I decided to compile an alphabetical listing of the most popular and persistent SEO myths, to either debunk or confirm their factuality.

1. Adwords

Since the arrival of Google Adwords, there has been an ongoing debate over whether or not running an Adwords campaign can improve search engine rankings. Ultimately, only Google knows the answer to that question for sure. However, to my knowledge, there is no credible evidence to support the notion that Adwords can improve your search engine ranking. If there were indeed concrete evidence to the contrary, it stands to reason, everyone would just start an Adwords campaign to boost their rankings.

2. Anchor Text

Although it can be other colors, anchor text is typically the blue, hyperlinked text you see on a web page – the words that you click onto take you to another page. For example:

free marketing tips

Okay, but is anchor text important? Yes, it is because it’s a crucial element in the search engines complex algorithmic formula that helps determine the rankings of websites.

For example, suppose you have a blog that reviews digital camera’s; the more links you have with the words “digital camera reviews” in your anchor text, the greater your chances of increasing your ranking for the keywords digital camera reviews.

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Published: 15 Nov 2011

A study featuring over 2100 adults in the UK has indicated that only eight percent of online adults who have taken a holiday in the past year, have discussed their holidays or read other people’s advice and recommendations on Facebook. This compares to 57 percent of all online adults who use Facebook each week.

Also, TripAdvisor is the single biggest social media used in holiday planning, with 50 percent of UK holiday makers using the site in some way or other.

The study, Mapping the Travel Mind – The Influence Of Social Media, was recently released by Conrad Advertising, in association with YouGov.

Key Findings:

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In order to survive in today’s attention economy, you need calls-to-actiontext, images or buttons that grab people’s attention and drive them to your offers. CTAs are the key to generating leads.

Grab our introductory guide to learn everything you need to know about calls-to-action, from their creation and placement to their optimization and measurement.

Get this 42-page ebook and you will learn:

* How to create a killer call-to-action with copy & design
* Where to place calls-to-action
* How to optimize your call-to-action
* Who is doing it right and who is doing it wrong

Download the New Ebook Now

Article By Titus Hoskins (c) 2011

It’s been an extremely busy year for the good folks at Google, not only did they roll out the game-changing Panda Updates, but now they have increased the stakes by implementing Google Fresh. This recent algorithm update is based on the Caffeine architecture introduced by Google a year ago and supposedly makes Google’s listings much fresher.

On the Official Google Blog where this new Update was announced, Amit Singhal states:

“We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”

However, in an update, Singhal explains this measurement of 35% only applies to where at least one result was affected by the changes. In reality, this update only “noticeably” impacts 6 to 10% of searches.

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First things first: Why should I put my resources into this?

Google and other search engines use an algorithm for local listings that is heavily based on how much they trust that your properties are legitimate.

Google looks bad if a search for “New York hotels” returns a bunch of locations that are actually closed. If Google’s results are inaccurate or off, fewer people will use the search engine, meaning Google serves less ads. And Google has made its billions serving ads. So you can see why Google has to vet hotels and other local properties before pushing them to the top of their search-engine results pages.

Of course, Google’s vetting process is all built into its algorithm, and the more you understand how its algorithm works, the better you’ll be able to use it to your advantage. The steps outlined below will help boost visibility in the hotel space on Google, Bing and the other local search engines.

 

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On November 7th, Google+ finally opened its doors to companies. With more than 40 million users, having a business page on Google+ is the perfect channel to grow followers and interact with your community.

But don’t wait to get on Google+. Download our newest guide hot off the press How to Use Google+ for Business to learn how to master the newest social network.

In this guide you’ll learn:

* How to set up a Google+ business page
* Marketing best practices with your Google+ page
* The benefits of Google+ in search
* Google+ Circles & the value of segmentation
* How to incorporate the +1 button on your blog

This is the most comprehensive and info-packed guide to Google+ for Business. Get it while it’s hot!

 

Download the Google+ Ebook Now

Article By Karl Walinskas (c) 2011

OK, so you’ve decided that getting some web video on your website and social media profiles is a great idea to make you more appealing to prospects and put your SEO (search engine optimization) on HGH. You realize that video marketing is a key part of your overall search engine marketing and social media strategy. Bully for you! Now onto the tech stuff. Video formats can be mind-boggling and vary depending on the equipment the video was shot with, the type of computer you use, and the final destination where you want to host and serve up your on-demand video as part of your video marketing plan.

So which is best for you?

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Nov 7, 2011 at 1:04pm ET by 

  • Finally, Google is now allowing businesses, brands and any non-human entity to participate in its Google+ social network, through new Google+ Pages that are launching today, promised to be available to everyone shortly.

Businesses Weren’t Allowed, Initially

Businesses have wanted to be part of Google+ from the start. In fact, many businesses and brands made use of regular Google+ accounts as a way to participate on the service despite their non-human status.

However, in July, Google terminated any business accounts that it spotted, including one from Sesame Street, promising that formal business pages would come — and that they’d be worth waiting for.

Google+ Pages Now Welcome Businesses

Now businesses are being welcomed in, through the new Google+ Pages program. Beginning today, and rolling out over the next two days, businesses will be able to create Google+ pages for themselves, using the Create A Page tool (and assuming you already have a regular Google+ account — more on this below).

Not everyone who goes to that page will get in (many will get a “Google+ Pages isn’t ready for everyone” message). Again, it’s a random rollout happening over the next two days (NOTE: Google tells us now everyone should have access). But once you gain access, you’ll be asked to create a page in one of five categories:

  • Local Business or Place
  • Product or Brand
  • Company, Institution or Organization
  • Arts, Entertainment or Sports
  • Other

Trying to unlock Twitter’s business potential? Maintaining an effective Twitter presence can be a powerful part of your social media marketing strategy, and we want you to have the know-how to effectively take advantage of it.

Learn how to leverage Twitter’s 360 million users in our complimentary guide, “Introduction to Twitter for Business,” which covers everything from getting started with tweeting to generating leads and sales.

 This 40-page guide will teach you how to:

* Optimize your Twitter profile for business
* Find the right people to follow and attract new followers
* Use Twitter for lead generation, PR, and customer service
* Understand Twitter’s role in social search
* Track and analyze your campaigns

This guide has all of the information you need to be a Twitter rockstar.

Download Our Twitter for Business Guide!

Did you know landing pages are one of the most important elements of a website? In fact, 94% of companies say landing pages are a highly effective tool for capturing leads.

But what makes a great landing page? Learn the essentials of creating landing pages that convert by downloading our newest ebook “Introductory Guide to Building Landing Pages.”

 In this 26-page guide, you will learn:

* What landing pages are and why they’re important
* How to structure the layout of your landing pages
* How to build the perfect lead capture form
* How to follow up with your newly-converted leads

Start generating more leads for your business with great landing pages. Download the complimentary eBook today .

Download the Ebook Now

Learn the key traits of a great business website. Become a website optimization rock star with our new ebook.

Find out what the 25 “must haves” are for a website to generate more visits, leads and revenue.

This complimentary, 52-page ebook gives you access to:

* Essential SEO advice
* Important design and usability tips
* Content creation ideas for engaging visitors
* Best practices for converting traffic into leads

Download the Ebook Now

Nov 2, 2011 at 10:40am ET by 

Yesterday Google formally announced some changes in the presentation of local results on Google.com SERPs. The right rail has been turned into a rich display of Places information, including links to interior business photography in some cases. It brings a great deal more of the Place Page into the SERP and will become a new focus for local SEOs. It also will virtually eliminate any right column ads “above the fold,” when the new SERPs appear.

Immediately below is a “before” image of the results for a query on the San Francisco restaurant “Gary Danko.” The Places content appears below the restaurant’s own sitelinks. There’s address information, some images and links to reviews. However much of the information is visually buried.

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Article By Amanda DiSilvestro (c) 2011

Being a part of a marketing department in today’s world is somewhat exhausting. All day I am stumbling, digging, tweeting, liking, and connecting. For some, this may sound like a foreign language, but for an employee in the marketing field this sounds like work, work and more work. Social media is a great and cost effective way to start growing your company brand, so I love the idea; however, there comes a point when enough is enough. I have always felt that pretty soon consumers are going to fall behind, and it will then become harder and harder to introduce any new social networking site. In other words, if another networking platform is going to try and weasel its way into the hearts of bloggers and marketers, it would have to be pretty amazing.

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1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook, turning the social network into a huge opportunity for marketers. With little effort, you can boost your Facebook interactions by 30 percent or more.

Spend the next 10 days mastering the power of Facebook by downloading our newest ebook, “How to Master Facebook Marketing in 10 Days .”

Download this ebook and you will learn how to:

* Evaluate successful Facebook pages
* Understand Facebook best practices
* Create custom welcome pages
* Use Facebook’s analytics package ‘Insights’
* And much more

Now go young grasshopper; start your journey to becoming a Facebook marketing master today!

Download the Ebook Now

By David Jackson (c) 2011

The two most important elements that qualify companies to promote themselves as SEO experts are competence and professionalism. And the way you find out if a company is competent and professional, as well as legitimate, is to do your due diligence and check their credentials thoroughly, by exercising good old common sense and following these steps:

1. Verify Their Contact Information

If the company provides a street address, Google it to see if it’s a real address. If they provide a telephone number, call the number to see if it’s answered by the company or an answering service. If they don’t provide a telephone number, walk away. SEO is serious business. You need to have the ability to talk to whomever is going to be handling your account. You need to be able to ask questions, and you have a right to expect your questions to be answered in a professional manner.

2. Talk to Previous Customers

If the SEO company publishes testimonials on their website, contact a few of their customers and get their feedback. If the company can’t provide testimonials, walk away, or if the testimonials don’t have contact information, they’re probably bogus. Walk away.
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Article By Nicole Beckett (c) 2011

Don’t let the $2 offers fool you – buying SEO content is a big deal, and it’s not something you can cut corners with. After all, on the world wide web, your content is the only way that people can find out more about you. Whether you want to build up your reputation, get people to sign up for your email list, or sell your product, you’re going to need SEO content to do it.

And it has to be good.

Thanks to the Panda updates, Google is taking a harder stance on content now than it ever has before. But even setting Google aside, people aren’t going to take you seriously if you can’t even string a coherent sentence together. After all, people look for all kinds of reasons to avoid spending their hard-earned money. Mix up “to” and “too”, and you’ve just given them the excuse they need NOT to purchase from you.

Because SEO content is so important to succeeding out on the world wide web, you may be looking to outsource your writing. Maybe you’re not a very good writer. Maybe you just don’t like to write very much. Maybe you have a million other things to do, and you don’t have time to stare at a blank Word document.

Whatever the reason, paying a professional to handle your SEO content writing duties can be a very good thing for your business. It can also be a very bad thing.

Hire the wrong content writing service, and you’re stuck with content that doesn’t get results. Or worse, content that makes you and your business look bad.

So how do you know if the content writing service you’re about to do business with is a good one?

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By Hannah Du Plessis (c) 2011 Attraction Marketing

Is your website bringing in at least five new inquiries per day? If not, you need to look at its functionality.

Your website acts as a “storefront.” You should put as much thought and care into your website as you would to the display in your store’s window. Your website needs to attract customers and keep them coming back for more. The following should give you a place to start and a guideline of what a good website should have and what it should do:

1. Where Do Your Eyes Go First?

You only have a few seconds to catch a visitor’s attention. That means you need to make sure that you capture their interest immediately. You need a headline that stops them thinking whatever they’re thinking, and think instead: “hey, this looks interesting! I need to read this.”

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With more than 800 million users, Facebook has become a powerful marketing tool. In fact, 45% of B2B and 67% of B2C companies have acquired customers via Facebook.

Whether you’re looking to get started with Facebook or make the most of an existing presence, download our ebook “How to Use Facebook for Business: An Introductory Guide” to become a Facebook marketing rockstar!

This ebook will help you:

* Get found by potential customers
* Connect and engage with current customers
* Create a community around your brand
* Promote and expand the reach of your content
* Generate leads!

Download the Guide Now!

By 

fandangoPublished October 10, 2011

Is your website meeting the needs of on-the-go mobile users?

When you’re developing your first mobile site, you may be at a loss. That’s understandable—a mobile website is an entirely different animal from a traditional website.

Given that, it’s important to keep some best practices in mind as you develop your mobile presence.

What follows are 9 best practices you can use to ensure your mobile site is as good as it can be.

About Mobile Users

But before we dive into the 9 best practices, it’s important to keep one thing in mind—the person viewing your site is mobile.

That may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised by how many people forget that simple truth.

When someone is mobile, they’re expecting an entirely different experience from the one they’ll get on your standard website.

For example, a mobile visitor is typically looking for a few key pieces of information: directions to your office, a click-to-call phone number or a map of your store locations. What they’re not looking for are lengthy staff bios, information about your corporate philosophy or PDFs of your latest press releases.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the 9 best practices for mobile website design that can help you create a site that puts your best foot forward.

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By Jeffrey L. Cohen - Tue, Oct 11, 2011

B2B companies now have the ability to share updates with their followers on LinkedIn. This is the first company page functionality that LinkedIn added that would be more effective with additional followers. Based on executive remarks, more functions are coming to company pages. To make sure you are ready, here are five ways to increase the number of followers of your company on LinkedIn.

1. Write a blog post
The best way to draw attention to your LinkedIn company page and increase your followers is to write a blog post about LinkedIn in your industry and include a link to your company page. The post is not just a follow my company post, but one that provides some value. It could be the 10 top Groups in your industry or a how-to article about growing your business using LinkedIn.

2. Add a Widget to Your Website
LinkedIn-Company-Profile-WidgetLinkedIn provides an easy way to create a company profile widget that you can put on your website or blog. This should go in a sidebar, or another part of your site that is always visible.

3. Add Company Page Link to Your Email Signature
Email is still the preferred communication medium for most businesses, so don’t miss the opportunity to include a link to your LinkedIn company page at the end of each message. Encourage other employees to do the same.

4. Add Company Page Link to Your Group Post Signature
LinkedIn power users know that their interaction in LinkedIn Groups facilitate connections that lead to business on the social network. Rather than sign your Group messages with a link to your website, try a link to your company page instead. People in LinkedIn are more likely to view a page in LinkedIn than to leave to go look at your website.

5. Promote on Other Social Media Profiles
You should promote your presence on one social media site on other social media sites. Tweet a link to your LinkedIn company page. Post it on Facebook too. You need to make sure everyone in your universe is aware of this page. There is certainly more value to come from these company pages.

What are other ways you are planning to share your LinkedIn company page to get more followers?

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at@jeffreylcohen.

Read more: http://socialmediab2b.com/2011/10/b2b-linkedin-company-followers/#ixzz1ahwcWGuu

Oct 10, 2011 at 9:55am ET by 

Press releases have long been a preferred (and now a patented) part of optimizing sites; when done well, they can be a good method for link building on steroids. Larger corporations often use the medium effectively, while it doesn’t occur to many local businesses. Here’s why you should consider it for promoting your local company online.

Press Releases for Local Online Marketing

I’ve written in the past about using press releases for improving PageRank, and as a vehicle to get reporters to promote businesses. Press releases are nearly a throwback to an older time period — they follow a moderately standard format and have been used for over a century to announce new developments to newspapers and other news media.

Perhaps it’s this semiformal nature of the press release that makes many small businesses overlook it when planning ways of promoting themselves. But, press releases are not just for large, national companies.

Press releases are a great source of links (when links are included in them). The websites that host press releases can be worthwhile for link weight, and newspapers or other news sites may sometimes publish the entire release as well. In the past, this near-instant PageRank value conveyed by issuing PR was considered very worthwhile.

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By Travolution October 12, 2011 

Lastminute.com was just steps away from becoming Groupon long before the daily deals model was invented but failed to take the opportunity because it had lost a culture of innovation.

That was the assessment of Lopo Champalimaud, now chief executive and co-founder of health and beauty site Wahanda and former Lastminute managing director of European lifestyle.

He told a Travolution Summit session on innovation that he had spoken recently to Lastminute co-founder Brent Hoberman and laughed about the missed opportunity. During the original dot com bubble Lastminute had a database of 15 million emails, and was the largest source of restaurant and hotel deals, Champalimaud said.

“At the heart you have to put a culture of innovation in a business and a culture of development. At Lastminute we were a few steps away from having Groupon,” he said. But he added the reason the chance was let slip was because “we lost that culture of innovation and development”.

“If you are not ready to step up and allow it to fail, you are not going to get the right answer,” added Champalimaud. US giant Groupon is the most high profile daily deals site to emerge in recent times becoming the fastest growing corporation in US history.

It has filed for an IPO valuing the company at around $30 billion and claims to have 83 million subscribers and more than 56,000 merchants. Although recording revenues of $644 million in the quarter ending in March this year its operating losses were $117 million.

Earlier at the summit Ariadne Capital founder Julie Meyer was asked about the valuation of Groupon. She said: “Groupon may go down in history as the company that turned down the $600 million deal [from Google]. I’m not sure why they did that.”

Generating leads with social media isn’t a myth. 63% of companies say it has increased their marketing effectiveness.

Businesses today are using different tools to manage, monitor and measure their social marketing efforts. In fact, we’ve compiled the ultimate list of social media tools in our complimentary guide, “99 Tools to Help You Generate Leads with Social Media.”

Whether you are just launching your social marketing or are at the stage of optimizing your efforts, this guide will assist you with the right tools to:

* Easily manage multiple social media channels
* Promote content to gain followers and grow your reach
* Monitor the social sphere to engage with your audience
* Track and analyze social media effectiveness
Download the Guide Now

Article By Alesya Krush (c) 2011

I bet all SEO’s have faced this problem at least once – a client looking up their target keywords on the Internet and seeing different website rankings than the ones stated in the rankings report. How do you explain to clients that you are not trying to cheat them?
Users may get different search results for one and the same search term because of their:

1. Web History

Personalized search results are no secret to anyone. We know that nowadays search engines (particularly Google and Bing) custom-tailor your search results based on the queries you make, websites you visit and search results you click. What’s interesting is that your results get biased by default, unless you specifically opt out.

Search engines collect users’ browsing history in 2 major ways:

(1) by tracking signed-in users’ activities and
(2) by planting cookies into signed-out users’ browsers.

Say, you are signed in with your Gmail account. Your Web history will be recorded there. And, if you are signed out of all your Google accounts, Google will send tracking cookies to your browser and your browsing history will be kept track of with the help of those cookies.

If you’d like to see search results that are not biased according to your Web history – sign out of all your accounts, clear browser cookies and perform the search again.
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By Amielle Lake on October 11, 2011

The marketing community has an infatuation with fans — that is, the kind of fan that simply clicks a button on Facebook. Some now believe the bloom is off the rose. I concur. Roughly 70 percent of Facebook users say that they do not want to be advertised to by businesses that they are fans of. So, why lust after something that won’t pay? Given the above, are Facebook fans useless? On their own, they are. However, I believe that with the right approach there are smart things marketers can do to make these fans evolve into true customers. Four tips come to mind. But, first, let’s explore the value of a fan.

What’s in a fan?
To understand the true value of a fan, we need to consider their context, their behavior and the resulting data generated for marketers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted 10 October 2011 10:01am by Mike Essex 

The first step in getting a product or service reviewed is to realise that people don’t actually want to review it.

Instead you need to give them a reason to write about you. Once you look at reviews in this way it’ll become easier to identify opportunities.

This post highlights how to do this with customers.

Customers tend to fall into two camps:

  • Those who don’t want to review your product or hate it.
  • Those who can’t review it or don’t know how.

Unless you’re already a well established brand with a must have item, the vast majority of people won’t jump at your feet or seek you out to test your latest wares. Likewise if you are a service based industry, you’ll find most people will only write about you when they have something bad to say.

None of this is good, especially if you want those who are searching for your product online to see a mixture of good reviews. Having no reviews at all will spark suspicion and negative reviews turn customers away.

However, the first step in getting a product or service reviewed is to realise that people don’t actually want to review it. Instead you need to give them a reason to write about you.

Once you look at reviews in this way it’ll become easier to identify opportunities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Content creation is at the core of an inbound marketer’s job. It has to be timely, accurate, relevant, thoughtful, unpredictable, informative – even funny.

Never run out of great content with our new ebook “100 Inbound Marketing Content Ideas.”

This 20-page complimentary ebook will help you:

* Position your company as a thought leader
* Analyze the effect of your content
* Create content that resonates with your audience
* Repackage existing content

Download the Ebook Now

By Terri Seymour (c) 2011

Traffic is essential to anyone who owns a website and/or blog. Without traffic we have no customers or sales. Unfortunately traffic does not just come to us, we have to work at it and we have to be consistent and persistent.

Sales conversion rates normally average less than 5%. What this means is that only 5% of the people who visit your site will become a paid customer. So, to grow your sales, you need to boost your traffic and/or your conversion rates. Below are twelve things you can do right now to start increasing your traffic to get those sales.

1. Launch an Article Marketing Campaign - Writing articles is not as hard as you might think and it can do wonders for your traffic! Write about something you know and just pretend you are telling a friend all about it. There is no need to use big, fancy words because people just want basic, straightforward information. Submit your articles to some of the more prominent article directories such as Ezine Articles.

2. Guest Posting and/or Commenting on Blogs – Do a search to find quality blogs in your niche and ask if they accept guest posts. Write helpful comments on existing posts and leave your link. Get involved and start building your reputation! A good place to find blogs that need guest posts is BloggerLinkUp.

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Measuring the ROI of trade shows is tough: they are expensive and vague in terms of delivering results. It’s time to change that.

Maximize the ROI of your next trade show with our new guide, “The Inbound Marketing Trade Show Planning Guide.” Find out how to leverage inbound marketing to ensure buzz leading up to the event and grow traffic to your booth.

 This 16-page guide will teach you how to:

* Set goals for your trade show
* Pick the right social media tools for the job
* Track the ROI for your trade show
* Follow-up with attendees

Download the Guide Today 

Earlier this year we announced a limited pilot for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search queries data from Webmaster Tools. Thanks to valuable feedback from our pilot users, we’ve made several improvements and are pleased to announce that the following reports are now publicly available in the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics.

  • Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
  • Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
  • Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

All of these Search Engine Optimization reports offer Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. With the secondary dimensions, you can view your site’s data in ways that aren’t available in Webmaster Tools.


To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports for a web property, you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator of that Property. Once enabled, administrators can choose which profiles can see these reports.

If you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by , Product Manager

Learn the key traits of a great business website. Become a website optimization rock star with our new ebook.

Find out what the 25 “must haves” are for a website to generate more visits, leads and revenue.

This complimentary, 52-page ebook gives you access to:

* Essential SEO advice
* Important design and usability tips
* Content creation ideas for engaging visitors
* Best practices for converting traffic into leads

Download the Ebook Now

Keith Dawson

A few details have come out of a meeting in which Google revealed some of its plans for brands in Google+. The +1 button and Hangouts will be big.

Andrew Blakeley, social strategist at the DDB agency in the UK, was invited to meet with Google staff last week to talk about how brands will be able to use Google+ when it opens up to them — which will be soon, by all accounts. Blakeleywrote up brief notes about the meeting on his Google+ account.

It is not clear from his account whether Google’s purpose was to pick his brain or to provide a conduit for some details of its brand plans to emerge. But since he implies there are things he is not at liberty to talk about, he probably at least had an understanding with Google about what it was all right to divulge.

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Scott Olson/Getty Images

In June, Groupon was preparing to go public at a valuation as high as $30 billion, but the offering has repeatedly been put off.

By 
Published: October 1, 2011

Like businesses across the land, the Madison Avenue spa Wellpath tried to drum up customers by running heavily discounted coupons on deal-of-the-day Web sites. But the Internet coupon fad is shrinking faster than fat from a weight-loss laser.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

“They would get another coupon and go do it with someone else. There was no loyalty.”

Coupons for the spa drew women from around the metropolitan area eager to see their bulges melt and their wrinkles removed. Once.

“Then they would get another coupon and go do it with someone else,” Wellpath’s director, Jennifer Bengel, said. “There was no loyalty.”

Just a few months ago, daily deal coupons were the new big thing. The biggest deal maker, Groupon, was preparing to go public at a valuation as high as $30 billion, which would have been a record amount for a start-up less than three years old. Hundreds of copycat coupon sites sprung up in Groupon’s wake, including DoubleTakeDeals,YourBestDealsDealFindDoodleDealsDealOn,DealSwarm and GoDailyDeals. Deal sites were widely praised as a replacement for local advertising.

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By David Jackson (c) 2011

With the advent of the Internet and the worldwide dominance and prominence of Google, Facebook and Twitter, one could reasonably assume the whole world revolves around the Internet. It doesn’t. There’s a great big offline universe out there with nearly 6 billion people in it that was here long before the Internet. And if you don’t have an offline marketing strategy to reach those billions of people, and complement your online marketing strategy, you’re missing out on a significant amount of traffic and income.
Following are 19 affordable and effective offline advertising methods that generate traffic to your website:

1. Bookmarks

Everybody has books in their home – some more than others. But I think that you’ll agree, just about everybody owns books. And what better way to get your marketing message in front of readers, than with a bookmark with your company name and website address printed on it? And distribution couldn’t be more easy! Simply get a bunch of bookmarks printed up and hand them out to everybody you meet. You can purchase bookmarks imprinted with your company name from Branders.com.
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Whether you’re just getting started with internet marketing or you just want to brush up on the basics, our ebook can serve as your essential guide to setting up and implementing a successful internet marketing strategy, step-by-step.

This comprehensive internet marketing ebook will guide you through every essential step you should be taking to effectively market your business on the web, whether you’re a software company, a chimney sweep, a tailor, or a marketing agency, to name a few.

This comprehensive guide will cover the following 8 essential steps to internet marketing success:

1. How to define a keyword strategy
2. How to optimize your website
3. How to create a blog & other content
4. How to promote content & participate in social media
5. How to convert site traffic into leads
6. How to nurture leads with email marketing
7. How to be mobile-friendly
8. How to analyze & refine strategies

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If there’s one thing nobody seems to want to talk about, it’s pricing. Most designers don’t publish their rates, and good luck getting a company to tell you how much they paid for their site.

The results of this situation is that it can be pretty hard to know how much to spent on design. Spend too much, and you’ll be accused of wasting money like those $300,000 logos you read about. Spent too little, and you risk ending up with a crappy “designed by my 14 year old nephew” website.

So I asked 40 of Folyo’s designers to answer a couple questions about their pricing strategies, and I hope the results will help you get a better picture of design prices.

More Info 

By Nick Stamoulis (c) 2011

By now, most site owners realize the importance and value of SEO in the development and growth of their site. A properly optimized site is going to rank better in the search engines, see more targéted traffic being directed over, have a higher conversion rate and much more. However, SEO is incredibly long term and nothing can rush time. It takes time for a site to build a good trust factor with the search engines and until that happens, most of your off-site SEO efforts are going to produce minimal results.

If you recently launched your site and are already looking into SEO, here are 5 things you should focus your time and energy on.

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92% of online users look for information on search engines. Is your website optimized according to the newest SEO best practices?

Our most recent guide, with a brand new section on social search, teaches you how to increase traffic to your website. It will provide actionable steps toward improving your chances of getting found in search engines and social media.

In this 27-page guide, you will learn how to:

* Identify keyword opportunities
* Master on-page SEO
* Create link-building strategies
* Incorporate social media into your SEO efforts

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By Janette Speyer (c) 2011

In this day and age, technology is constantly evolving. Everyday we are inundated with new features, new interfaces and improved designs that can sometimes make our head spin. Facebook is not exempt from this either and has undergone a lot of major transformations over the past several years. Just recently, Facebook has made some major modifications to its features, and whether you’re a fan or not, they are here to stay.

Combined News Feed Layout

One feature that Facebook has changed is its news feed layout. Before, you had two feeds: your “Top News” and “Most Recent News,” depending on its relevance to your interests. Also, if you only checked Facebook occasionally, you wouldn’t see anything about activities that happened a week ago. Now, the most interesting stories will always be displayed at the top and you won’t have to worry about missing anything importan

Additionally, prior to this change, you had to scroll down quite a bit just to see what people posted the day before. If your business heavily relies on social media, then this may have been a little labor intensive. But now with the combined news feed, your news stories are more customizable and will save you time in the long run.

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Learn how to get started with paid search. While paid search can sometimes be complicated, our new introductory guide will give you specific direction and tips to be successful.

From designing your strategy to calculating metrics and setting budgets, this guide will walk you through the essentials you need to support your inbound marketing efforts.

In this 30-page guide, you will learn how to:

* Leverage paid search to maximize lead growth
* Create highly relevant keywords, ads and landing pages
* Structure your account and set budgets
* Calculate essential metrics to measure success
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Article By Matt Jackson (c) 2011

Finding effective and sustainable methods of building links to your website can prove challenging. However, with some effort or investment on your part, it is possible to enjoy an boost in direct traffic as well as a boost to your link profile and search engine rankings through an ongoing link building strategy. There are tried and tested techniques that have been used for years that help build links in volume, as well as techniques that aim to build a smaller number of links but of much higher value – the perfect combination for a natural looking and effective search engine link profile.

1 – Directory Submissions

Directory submissions should be considered a staple part of your link building campaign. While directory links provide less value than they did several years ago, they do still provide benefit. What’s more, while there is a finite number of directories online the number is massive and you can submít to one or two hundred directoríes a month for at least the first year or so of your link building strategy.

There are location and topic specific directories as well as general category ones. There are also those that will only accept home page links and those that will take deep links to other pages of your site. Combining these and using them accordingly will help generate the best results.

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Your business’ website can appear on the first page of search engines if you optimize it for local search. Have you leveled the playing field yet?

Our new guide will show you how. From creating your Google Places listing to better leveraging local link-building opportunities, this guide will help you build a solid foundation for local SEO.

In this 17-page guide, you will learn how to:

* Build a powerful Google Places listing
* Attract customer reviews
* Leverage Yahoo! Local and Bing Local
* Optimize your on-site content

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Posted 16 September 2011 11:45am by Henry Elliss 

When you work with brands using channels like Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, you become very familiar with some of the pitfalls companies can fall into – and what results they seem to generate.

I’ve never been one of those people who likes to kick-up a stink when a brand makes a mistake but I like to keep a close eye on what trends seem to annoy customers most, if only to learn from them for the future.

As well as my own experience, I decided to do a bit of amateur research this week. I asked people to reveal what they find most annoying about brand behaviour on social media platforms, with a particular focus on Facebook and Twitter. Below is the culmination of that research.

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By Nathan Labenz Sep. 17, 2011, 9:00am PT

TripAdvisor, the leading hotel and travel reviews site, will be spun out from its parent Expedia this month, andshareholders are giddy. With 50 million reviews and counting, the site is shaking the travel industry to its core.

Underlying TripAdvisor’s success is a powerful long-term trend: ratings websites threaten to make many brands irrelevant.

Historically, brands were built on the assumption of limited information. As mass production made it possible to sell soap and soup nationwide, companies developed brands to represent quality and cultivate product loyalty. Brands were a natural fit for radio and TV advertising, and brands thrived with the proliferation of cable channels, which kept advertising costs down while offering unprecedented demographic targeting.

With the rise of user-generated content, however, brands have faced challenges. People are talking about brands on social media sites in ways that brand managers can’t control and often can’t even detect. Facebook and Twitter get most of the attention for brand disruption, but the biggest problems for brands are in search and e-commerce.

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By Rocky Agrawal Sep. 14, 2011, 4:30pm PT 

Groupon has made its business off selling deals that sound too good to be true: restaurant meals for half off, dirt-cheap massages and manicures, even trips to the dentist for 75 percent off the regular price. This has been a boon to consumers, especially during these difficult economic times.

With its recently launched Groupon Getaways product, Groupon is bringing the same pitch to travel. Only this time, the deals that sound too good to be true may actually be too good to be true.

While the main page features beautiful pictures of luxurious hotel rooms and sun-swept beaches that entice users to click the “Buy!” button, most come with significant restrictions.

Consider these partial restrictions from one recent deal:

  • Expires Sep 30, 2012
  • Not valid 10/21-11/6
  • Travel must be completed by 9/30/12
  • Valid only for option purchased
  • 10 day cancellation notice required or fee up to 1/2 the Groupon price may apply; on the following dates/holidays, 30-day cancellation notice required: 10/1-11/10, 11/23-11/26, 12/26-1/1, 2/10-2/14, 5/25-5/28, 7/4-7/7, 8/31-9/3
  • 12.75% occupancy tax not included

I’ve seen restrictions on Groupon Getaways that have extra cleaning fees of $175-$400, which is a significant percentage of the deal price. Some other unusual restrictions: “10% property propina not included,” “All cancelled reservations are subject to a $50 processing fee; 8-day cancellation notice required for travel from 10/17-12/20 and 15-day notice required for travel from 1/5-2/28 or fee up to Groupon price may apply,” “No Friday check-in with two-night option,” “Must book by 11/15/11 and complete travel by 1/31/12″ and “$15-per-night resort fee and 12.5% tax not included”.

Most deals also have blackout dates and availability restrictions. Blackout dates, dates when you definitely can’t use your Groupon, are disclosed up front.

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Ebooks are a critical component of effective lead generation. Learn how to create ebooks that not only generate leads, but also educate prospects and propel them through the buying cycle.  HubSpot

Our new guide will unlock the secret of great ebook creation. Step by step, it will take you through the entire process, from writing the opening sentence to creating the final call-to-action.

In this guide, you will learn how to:

* Pick the right topic
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* Create calls to action and social sharing links
* Promote your eBook

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By Kipp Bodnar
Inbound Marketing Manager

By Enzo F. Cesario (c) 2011 BrandSplat

People long have loved to find new and innovative uses for the most innocuous technologies and advances. In the late 19th century, “moving pictures” were a nickel-arcade novelty. Today films such as Avatar are made on budgets comparable to military-grade hardware investments. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone could barely call from one room to another; now the average iPhone has more uses and computing power than all the computers used in World War II combined.

This trend is repeating itself with the rise of social media network marketing practices. What started as socialization programs only slightly more complex than the average e-mail client has grown into one of the newest and most promising marketing niches in the entire world. Taking advantage of this means familiarizing oneself with a few surprisingly simple concepts that have unusually far-reaching implications. In particular, marketers are finding that the “Like” and “Share” features on Facebook have become the newest and best tool in the marketing online arsenal.

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