Essential Blogging Tips for a Great Start

To start blogging, you will have to think beyond content and design. The daily effort that you put in maintaining, promoting and improving your project will be essential for its success. Most blogging tips focus on the basics but several additional techniques are just as important.

Offer Value to Your Readers

Offer your readers some value and you will keep them coming back. Blogging tips usually tell you to write unique content. Even if you have the most original of articles, your blog will fail if readers fail discovering something valuable and useful.

Think about the niche you have a lot of knowledge in and try to figure out what kind of information people will be looking for inside the particular topic.

Communicate with Your Readers

When you start blogging, you will quickly find out that readers affect the content of the blog as much, as you do. Interact with your readers on a daily basis and create a friendly place where people are encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas. Respond promptly to inquiries, be polite and remove spam or insulting content.

Promote Your Blogs

Your blog will be successful solely if you do enough online marketing. You have to tell the world that you exist in order to increase your popularity. Search engine optimization is one of the most effective promotional techniques. Optimizing your blog for particular keywords of interest will help you get targeted traffic. If you lack SEO knowledge or if you want to learn more about it, you should give our blog starter kit a try.

Our blog starter kit will give you a search engine optimized blog, keyword analysis and social media marketing tools. For a limited time, you can benefit from the special offer that will give you access to great professional tools.

Monitor Results

Good blogging means learning from your mistakes. The final part of the blogging tips focuses on monitoring results and doing adjustments needed for success. The blog starter kit special offer will give you access to website analytics, where you can find out more about reader demographics, preferences and online behavior. Seeing what content is popular and which blog posts are incapable of exciting the audience will give you a chance to tweak your blog and to increase its success in the future.

Creating a digital marketing strategy for your business

Digital marketing may seem like an overwhelming task when you try to do it for the first time. You can choose among different techniques and you have multiple channels to put into use.

To focus your efforts, you need to come up with a digital marketing strategy.

Forget about Selling

In the world of internet, you need to forget about traditional promotional strategies. Marketing has to be about building a relationship with your audience rather than about trying to sell a product or a service.

Tell your audience a story. You should provoke an emotional response to increase the efficiency of your digital marketing campaign. Have a strategy based on content and relationship building, regardless of the goal you are trying to achieve.

Know the People You are Addressing

Digital marketing is two directional. You send a message and you get instant feedback from readers, current and potential clients.

Learn more about the people you are addressing. Personalization sets promotional strategies apart. Choose the message, the tools and the channels that will appeal to the people you are trying to “talk” to.

A good digital marketing strategy should include provisions about understanding the audience, getting feedback and incorporating the information in the future marketing efforts.

See What the Competition is doing

In the world of digital marketing, you can learn a lot about your competition.

Always base your digital marketing strategy on competition analysis. Try to find out what other companies in the niche are doing and how they are trying to create loyal clientele. Learning from the mistakes of others will help you maximize the efficiency of your campaign.

Analyze Results

Digital promotion allows you to figure out the results of the campaign just a couple of days after it has been launched. Immediacy makes this type of marketing unique. You can easily measure the results in terms of increased website visits, comments from readers or a higher volume of sales.

Use the information to adjust your strategy and to make it more efficient. You can do changes midway, which helps you prevent a marketing disaster.

Digital advertising is essential for the success of every company. A clever strategy starts with the right goals, it analyzes the target audience and it measures results immediately. All of these steps guarantee the efficiency of the strategy and its ability to accomplish promotional goals.

Are We Addicted to the Internet?

The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature ofInternet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing. Here’s an infographic I came across on flowtown.com.

Mobile social media marketing is an effective way to draw people in

This is because mobile computing is a trend that is only going to get larger as the days go on. People are buying more and more mobile smart phones, and less and less desktop computers. This means that in order to have the most effective social media marketing approach possible, it’s important to keep the mobile audience in mind.  In order to properly cater to mobile audiences, it’s important to keep a few things in mind-

Keep It Short

It’s hard to read long speeches on a tiny smart phone screen. By keeping your messages succinct and the point, you’ll ensure that your mobile social media marketing will hit home as effectively as possible. It’s a sad truth that mobile audiences are even more prone to attention deficit issues than other audiences. This is because as a mobile audience, they are very likely doing other things out in the real world beyond just surfing the net. They are using their phone as a distraction, so distract them! Short messages that draw interest are the way to do it.

Media Is Your Friend

Reading long messages on a mobile device isn’t the preferred method, but media can work. Pictures especially, A distracting picture can go a long way to getting a marketing idea across. Links to videos can do this as well, especially short videos with music. Keeping up a constant stream of content with media on social sites like Twitter and Facebook can go a long way to helping you reach your mobile social media marketing goals.

The Rule is Cool

It’s important to stay on topic, but nothing will kill a campaign for mobile social media marketing faster than going on about how important it is to buy a product directly. If you make it interesting, and related to something else as well, so as to stay “cool,” then your campaign is much more likely to do well. Cool movies, music, pictures, or clever tweets or Facebook posts will ensure that your message goes as far as possible. This will also make sure that you have a better chance for your efforts to “go viral,” and reach a huge audience.

The best time to share content on Social Media networks

Social Media Marketing is about sustaining lasting relationships and by creating new ones. By not providing value and by promoting yourself is a big mistake.  Social media is all about entering into conversations and participation.  We all see companies that enters into social networking, blogging, Facebook and Twitter that spends their energy and time marketing themselves.  This will definitely make sure that people run the other direction. Here’s an infographic from Visual.ly about the best time to share content on social media networks.

Are you annoying your friends and followers on social media?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is almost the same as like having a conversation with your friends at a coffee shop.  It is also like getting that unexpected phone call from an old friend and just talking to each other.  It is conversational and laid back.  There are hundreds of companies jumping in on the social media band wagon that really just don’t get it and they are usually trying to hard. I came across this article below on Memeburn.com.

Social media rearchitects itself very quickly… our ability to change behaviours is not nearly as fast. This timing dichotomy results in seemingly appropriate behaviours that come off as thoughtless or self-serving. New tools and capabilities in social media have created new norms, some good, and others that unfortunately encourage repugnant behaviour.

In the past I’ve complained about 29 communication behaviours (see “16 annoying communications that must end in 2011” and “13 annoying communications that must end in 2012”). After some reflection on a few of these annoying communications and others soon to be mentioned, I realize the reason many of these communications irritate me so much is because the sender thinks they’re doing the right thing.

Like being thrust into a blinding swarm after our team wins a national championship, we lose our better judgement as to what’s right and wrong. Just because we see others doing it en masse we benignly think it’s okay to engage in abhorrent activity. What proceeds is a challenge to these mob-OKed assumptions.

Friend collecting

There was a time we used to just guess as to who was the most popular person in the room. Today, we look at your very public follower, friend, or subscriber count and we know. If one person’s number is higher than another’s, then that person is more popular, right?

We like to fool ourselves into believing this is not true, but we can’t stop ourselves from staring at those numbers, comparing ourselves to others, and adding more online friends.

While most of us connect with people we’ve met in the real world or online, there are others who truly collect friends, extending invites to complete strangers on Facebook and LinkedIn with absolutely no explanation as to why they want to connect. Both social networks allow you to send private messages to explain why you want to connect. Yet these “friend collectors” avoid taking advantage of that function. What’s worse is the number of these strangers that refuse to reply to private messages after you’ve accepted their friend request.

Refusing private communications proves that the “friending” is purely a selfish action with the intended purpose of increasing public friend counts with no intention of creating a true social connection.

Asking people to like your content-free Facebook page

Similar to friend collecting is the process of setting up a Facebook fan page and then immediately spamming all your friends to like your page which happens to be void of content. Luckily, this has decreased substantially as it used to be a seemingly automatic request to all of one’s friends upon the creation of every single fan page.

Liking a piece of content or fan page is a transactional agreement. It’s an endorsement that comes after I have approved of what you have shown me. Requesting someone to like your fan page without showing them content is the equivalent of asking for something for nothing.

It’s similar to friend collecting because when you build a fan page your desire to create followers is tantamount. Your fan page has nothing, but you’ve got tons of friends. You’re so desperate and so dependent on your existing friend base that you think they’ll say “yes” to liking your page just because you’ve already established Facebook friendship. If you were the only one doing it, then maybe that would be true. Problem is we’re constantly inundated with these self-serving “please help me get my fan page count up” requests.

Yes, it’s a small request. But without content, it’s a lopsided transaction. And because it keeps happening, it becomes blatantly self-serving and obnoxious.

Requiring app installation to consume a message

Ever get a message like this:

“John Doe just sent you a birthday greeting. Install the Happy Birthday App to view the content.”

This is similar to like requests on contentless Facebook pages in that it’s a lopsided transaction. The selfishness in this case lies primarily in the hands of the app developer who sees this as a “viral” technique to increase their install base. In social media speak, the message would read as such:

“Pay me first by giving me access to your personal computer and social network and I’ll show you this message you will probably not like. You can still uninstall the app afterwards if you’d like, but given that most of you don’t know how to do that, chances are you won’t. We’re counting on your ignorance and apathy so we’ll be able to show our investors the number of people who have installed our app. We need another round of funding.”

Auto-DMs on Twitter

Nothing screams “Pay attention to me!” more than automated direct messages (DMs) after you’ve followed someone on Twitter. I think the reason they annoy me so much is how they’re written to appear so personal (e.g., “Thank you so much for following me…”) when they’re obviously not any type of personal communications. I wish Twitter would simply turn this feature off.

The reason it’s so obnoxious is because it’s usually not complimented with an auto-follow. Lack of a return follow means the DM recipient can’t send a direct message back. That’s anything, but a personal engagement.

“Happy Birthdays” on Facebook

Isn’t it great that Facebook reminds us when our friend has a birthday? This alert is a great reminder to send a note about how much you appreciate your friendship. Or you could send a gift. Or maybe record a “Happy Birthday” video greeting. Facebook has provided some amazing personal information about your audience, yet we go out of our way and blow a well-timed opportunity to make a meaningful connection with our friends by just typing “Happy Birthday” and nothing else.

Only typing “Happy Birthday” is truly the least you could do outside of doing nothing at all. What a colossal waste of bandwidth.

Before Facebook, when people said, “Happy Birthday,” your response would be “Thank you. You remembered.” But we can’t say that anymore because we didn’t remember, Facebook did. With this information we chose not to build a meaningful connection, but rather become participants of a massive ongoing spam campaign.

Sharing without consumption

Thanks to the proliferation of like and retweet buttons, we all have the ability to share any piece of content without looking past the headline. While no one readily admits this, we all share content via our social networks without taking the time to actually consume it. It’s often a kind thing to do for a friend who wants to spread the word about an event or a piece of content. It’s not okay to just retweet and share content to build your industry voice.

Blind sharing does provide benefits to the sharer as tweeting out content that other people retweet will raise their Klout and Kred scores. Employers are now using these social rating systems as hiring barometers especially for organizations such as PR firms.

While ostensibly one should believe that blind sharing, even without consumption, would benefit the content creator. When it’s done en masse, then it only benefits the sharers and not the content creators as there are incidents where a piece of content has more shares than views. For stories highlighting evidence of this phenomenon, please read “Here’s what’s wrong with social media: sharing without consumption” and “Why sharing online content may be too easy” on Mashable.

Photo overdose of your kids and your wedding

I have an endless number of photos of my son. My wife and I look at them constantly, and our respective parents can’t get enough of them either.

While I can happily look at a million photos of my child, I can only stomach looking at about three photos of your kid. Understanding that other parents probably feel the same way, I keep a limit to the number of photos I share of my son with my entire social network.

Not all parents are aware of this photo absorption discrepancy between themselves and the rest of the world. Your kid may be cute to you, but you’re the parent and that’s how you’re supposed to feel. The rest of us are not supposed to feel that way.

Same holds true for weddings and honeymoons. The pictures you provide should acknowledge the event, and that’s it. Anything beyond that becomes a tiresome effort that overwhelms your audience.

Posting bad photos

For those unaware of what a bad photo looks like, here are some hints:

• It’s out of focus.
• It’s overexposed.
• It’s underexposed.
• There’s no subject in the photo.
• It’s poorly composed.

While your camera may have this amazing function that allows you to automatically upload every photo you took to Facebook, it also has another great function called “delete.” Not using the always available trash button projects the image of an insensitive clod who wrongly believes everyone will love all his photos he took because the event he was at was just so damn cool. Knock it off and edit your photos.

Follow Fridays

I don’t know why this still goes on. Has anyone ever actually been compelled to follow someone after someone else’s #FF? I would guess not because almost all of them are devoid of context. Those who #FollowFriday still have fooled themselves into believing they’re being selfless, but that’s not the case. You’re alerting those #FFed in hopes they’ll pay more attention to you.

Automatically cross-posting contentless information across social networks

This is the process by which our actions, as measured by various social networks and often without moment-by-moment acknowledgement, are passively shared with multiple social networks. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg happily supports this kind of automated and frictionless sharing as the rise of the social web.

Foursquare check-ins, achievements in social games, and songs we’re currently listening to on social radio stations such as Spotify and MOG can be cross-posted on Facebook and Twitter. While Facebook has smartly turned down the volume on these passive auto-posts, this has not been the case on Twitter which has no power to turn down the volume on anything.

To auto-share your every action across multiple social networks where people haven’t opted in is obscenely egotistical and doesn’t take into account the additional noise being created in the social sphere. Stop it. If someone cared where you checked in they would be following you on Foursquare. No need to let everyone on Facebook and Twitter know as well.

The social media life-cycle

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is almost the same as like having a conversation with your friends at a coffee shop.  It is also like getting that unexpected phone call from an old friend and just talking to each other.  It is conversational and laid back.  There are hundreds of companies jumping in on the social media band wagon that really just don’t get it and they are usually trying to hard. Take a look at this infographic from Mediabistro.com.

The History of Content Marketing [Infographic]

Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales. Online content that you publish is one of your most valuable assets on the web. By sharing your content online you can enhance your company’s brand, broadcast your message across the web and demonstrate your expertise to name but a few benefits. Did you know that you can allow the visitors of your website or blog to share your content with others? Have a look at this infographic from blog.junta42.com.

 

Establish your business as the experts in your niche

As an internet marketing agency you want your business to be seen as the experts in your niche. In today’s digital business lifestyle, being the leader in your field is not won by only doing SEO and top organic rankings on the search engines. It’s about earning your credibility and become know as the expert in your field. It’s an exercise in marketing and branding fundamentals.

What is an expert exactly? You cannot call yourself an expert and hope that you will be known as one. It’s important that you can demonstrate judgement, skill, problem solving, and wisdom in a specific area. To become known as the expert in your field you need to demonstrate your expertise in a transparent way in your market niche.

Why you have to build credibility?

When you brand yourself and your business as an expert, clients will most likely seek you out because they trust you. New customers are much less focused on the prices involved and this means you can most likely up the price. When you are going through the ongoing process of branding your business as the experts in your field, it will also be much easier to attract top talent as employees into your company.

Smaller companies will at least start out with branding a single expert that the business revolves around. There is much more strength when there are multiple experts involved in your business to brand your business as the experts in your niche.

How to brand your business

Expert skills: How good are your skills compared to other businesses in your industry? What do you want to be recognized for? What makes your business unique and how are you providing value to your target audience?

Narrow your focus: Focus your expertise on a  specific area. Target a specific market niche and audience. Your expertise should always be align with the objectives you would like to reach.

Participation: Be visible and engage with your target market online. Be active online and speak at events. An easy way to do this is by presenting webinars online. You can also join various industry related associations and become known in your field as a visible leader. Establish your brand on the social web and be active with engaging with your audience.

Become a leader: Become a leader and not just a follower. You can create new ways of doing this by creating new online content such as blogs, videos, and images.

How the world spends its time online

You can have hundreds of websites on the internet, but if nobody knows about you, you are invisible. A well-planned, creative online marketing campaign can put you out there for the world to see and instantly increase your sales.

What is online marketing?

Unlike traditional marketing (newspapers, billboards etc.) online marketing combines all your digital strategies (websites, blogs, PPC ads, email, mobile etc.) in a way that grabs your customers’ attention and keeps them satisfied in the long run.

It is best handled by a professional who knows what he is doing. It requires careful research, planning and implementing.  The strategies used are just as unique as the client (or business) itself.

Why do you need online marketing?

The World Wide Web is an advertising battlefield – it is easy for your business to get lost amongst all the other websites vying for the attention of users. Having an online marketing strategy can mean the difference between your business booming or blowing up in your face.

If you answer “no” to any of the following, it is time to call in the experts:

• Does your business have a Facebook page/Twitter account and are people tweeting about you or talking about you online?
• Does your business have a blog and does it have a following?
• Can your customers find you easily online via your website or online advertising?
• Do you spend thousands on traditional marketing strategies without attracting more clients?
• Do you make use of SEO strategies in your online marketing?
• Do you follow up on customer satisfaction or keep in touch with your clients on a regular basis via email or mobile?

I can help you implement online marketing strategies that are measurable, goal driven and cost effective.

Expand your business, create awareness about your brand and engage your customers through social media – it works!

How internet marketing grows your business

The use of proper internet marketing grows your business with a wider reach than if you did not have an online presence.  If you consider the internet reaches the entire world, you potential are marketing to the world.  The first step in marketing on the internet is to have an online presence.  There are a couple of ways to go about this, one being an information website.  Another being a blog, however you can successfully combine the two for greater impact.

The first step in building a website is having a professional look.  Hire a web designer to make your website shine on behalf of your business.  Using your website is the first step in successful internet marketing.  Build the pages with quality content.  If you are not good with writing content, hire a professional writer.  You want the content to do two things, first to make sense to your visitors and second to make sense to the search engines that rank your pages.  Search engine ranking is one of the modes of marketing, by pulling in visitors who search for keywords and phrases related to your business.

Internet marketing requires your website be search engine optimized, meaning it is set up to help the search engines to crawl your pages and rank them on the search engines pages.  This is a way to draw free traffic from generic searches.  The goal is to use the meta tags on the website, with keywords you wish to be found for by your visitors.  These keywords need to be in the meta tags, the title, description, and keywords, and a few times within the content.  This helps the search engines to know how to rank you.

Another mode of internet marketing is social media.  Using social media websites like Facebook and Twitter helps to grow connections and network with others, which helps to grow your business.  If you connect the social media accounts to your website and if you interact at least once a day on the accounts, you will increase your list and raise the chances that others will also share about your business services and or products.  Place follow and share buttons on your pages to encourage your visitors to share with their connections.  This offers a way to advertise your business free and a way to make it go viral.

Lastly, internet marketing includes paid advertising.  There is a host of choices with paid advertising these days from your traditional print ads in newspapers and magazines to video commercials on television to ads on websites and with the social media groups.  There are also ads on search engines, pay per click, as well as on websites like Facebook.  The internet has many options for paid ads, from banners, to contextual, to full page features.

Consumer reviews VS other ad tactics

We all know how important “Word of Mouth” marketing is and with the power of the Internet it is even more important. Web visitors are more inclined to buy your products, services or solutions when they verify your credibility.The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature ofInternet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Enjoy today’s infographic about consumer reviews VS other ad tactics.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketingcan be immense for a business looking to expand its appeal to the online community. However, despite the numerous social media marketing advantages that exist, it is not ideal for all types of businesses. The reason for this is that whether social media marketing is useful for a business or not depends entirely on the correlation between investment and returns. Investment here is not only monetary but also effort and time. Similarly, returns can also be in forms other than money alone.

The best way for a business to evaluate if social media marketing is useful for it or not is to understand its significance and potential as much as is possible. In other words, before a business commits itself to a social media marketing campaign, it is important for it to assess not only the social media marketing advantages but also social media marketing disadvantages.

Social Media Marketing Advantages

There are more social media marketing advantages than disadvantages provided it is used properly. Consider the following:

1.  Social media marketing can be used to create brand value for a product manufacturer or a service provider. However, for this to happen, the content needs to be compelling and generate a lot of interest.

2.  One of the crucial social media marketing advantages is the fact that it allows a business to gradually establish itself as an expert in the field. Becoming an authority can generate sales in its own right because it means that people view the business as trustworthy.

3.  Social media marketing can be used to engage and interact with the target audience on a personal level so as to get their feedback about the business, product or service. This can create a sense of recognition and empowerment in the target audience.

4.  Economically speaking, social media marketing is one of the cheapest ways of not only engaging the target audience but also putting across relevant information. In fact, there is a drastic difference between the financial outlay of a decently sized conventional marketing strategy and a good social media marketing strategy with the latter being on the lower end.

5.  Moreover, the most direct of the many social media marketing advantages is the fact that it can generate leads and boost website traffic single-handedly. This can create a positive cycle where more visitors result in more sales and search rankings which, in turn, lead to more visitors again.

Social Media Marketing Disadvantages

While there are more social media marketing advantages than disadvantages, social media marketing is not entirely free of disadvantages. The following are some examples.

1.  Even though a social media marketing campaign can be done without any investment of money, a lot of time and effort is required to make it a success. For instance, resources would have to be set aside for not only making updates but also following and responding to them as and when required.

2.  Like most modes of marketing, the impact of social media marketing can be very difficult to assess quantitatively. The reason, as is obvious, is the fact that the objectives of such strategies tend to be intangible as opposed to statistical.

3.  It can be very easy for a campaign to go wrong if it is not handled in the right manner. The proper use is the right balance between engagement and sales.

Blog Design For Killer Search Engine Optimization

Online content that you publish is one of your most valuable assets on the web. By sharing your content online you can enhance your company’s brand, broadcast your message across the web and demonstrate your expertise to name but a few benefits. Here’s an infographic about designing your blog for SEO.

 

Starting out with mobile social media marketing

We are all part of the continuous mobile buzz and it doesn't look like it will be stopping anytime soon. Everyday you find people sitting at their favourite coffee shop with their tablets and smartphones working. The new on the go office space is 100% mobile and it's no longer necessary to sit in a cramped office to get work done. It is now easy to get things done on the go.

People are slowly shifting away from reading traditional newspapers as all the latest news can now be accessed from mobile devices. E-books are changing the way booksellers are selling books like Amazon. When last did you go to a bank to do a bank transfer? Why am I asking this? It's simple - the times are changing and you should get your business on board.

Online you will find many digital marketing articles explaining that Social Media is the best route to take for Internet marketing. Even though I agree with that, I believe you should take your social media campaign further and integrate mobile marketing into your strategy. This will help boost your business to be visible in the ever changing digital business world. With a mobile marketing strategy, your customers will be able to have access to your business on the go, virtually from anywhere in their own comfort zone.

If you already have a social media marketing strategy and it is geared for traditional online users, I guarantee you that you are missing out on lots of valuable business. To start integrating mobile marketing with your social media campaign, find below a couple of tips that can help you with this.

Mobile social media marketing tips

Use mobile platforms: Create profiles on social media platforms such as Foursquare, Google Places, and other related local networks. Having an active presence on these mobile platforms will help your customers find you online.

Mobile website: By creating a website for your business that is mobile friendly with mobile friendly graphics, guick loading times, your business will be ready to tap into the mobile market.

Mobile app: This is very different from a mobile website. A mobile app for your business can help your users interact with your business. You can create a mobile app to allow users view your latest news and blog posts, schedule appointments, contact customer service or even place orders. The possibilities with a mobile app is endless.

QR codes: Create a QR code that you can use in your internet marketing strategy. One of the easiest ways to create a QR code is to use Google's URL shortner Goog.gl.

As more people are starting to use smartphones for business, make buying decisions, and to find information, it is important for your business to tap into this medium in order to reach customers.

Conversion Testing For Your Business

We all know how important “Word of Mouth” marketing is and with the power of the Internet it is even more important. You must have Internet Marketing integrated in your business. Web visitors are more inclined to buy your products, services or solutions when they verify your credibility. Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales. Take a look at this article from TopRankBlog.com about conversion testing for your business.

In the 1989, Greg LeMond overcame a 50 second deficit in the final stage to win the Tour de France by 8 seconds.  He clocked the second fastest time trial ever recorded in the Tour de France.  So how did LeMond secure a stunning victor after 3 weeks and 2025 miles?

Optimization.  The optimization of his equipment, including aerodynamic handle bars and helmet, allowed LeMond to shave crucial seconds from his time and ride to victory in front of his less well optimized competitors.

Optimization results had a big impact on this race and they can have a big impact on business as well. I recently attended a session by Mikel Chertudi, Senior Director of Marketing of Adobe on Conversion Optimization: From Strategy to Execution. He offered strategies for businesses to optimize their digital marketing, in order to move ahead of the pack and secure a victory.

Conversion Optimization: 3 Key Takeaways

1. Alignment & Strategy

The path to successful conversion optimization begins with linking optimization goals to your overall business strategy. This may seem like an easy one, but the fact is, not everyone is doing this.

In order to do so, think in terms of how conversions impact your overall business results. That is how you tie number the impact of more conversions to your sales and marketing budget, relevance and revenue. Create an optimization strategy statement which clearly states your goals and secure buy-in from key players within your organization to move forward. This ensures that conversion optimization is a focused effort for your organization and you have both the funding and buy-in necessary to support conversion testing and implementation.

2. Process & organization: Once you have aligned your strategy, the next step is understanding the processes, organizational design, and elements to create a true culture of optimization.

Creating an optimized organization and process is vital at this stage. Focus on process design, change impact, organizational design and end user training. Also consider the roles and responsibilities of the people who will be involved.

In addition to process, you must create a culture of optimization. Not only do you have to have buy-in from your executive team, your organization must be willing to invest in people, training and technology in order to facilitate testing. In order to ensure ongoing impact, create processes to perpetuate culture, like weekly optimization update emails.

3. Tactical Execution: Now that you have laid the ground work for conversion optimization it is time to get started.

Our recommendation is test, test, test! Testing is the only way to truly know what is working and what is not when it comes to your digital strategy. If you are wondering where to get started, here are top five areas which offer the most impact.

Top 5 Conversion Opportunities for Maximum Impact

1. User Experience Design and Site/Page Layout:  Design and site layout out are huge opportunities to impact the overall user experience. Page layout can impact what content is read, clicked on, and how much time the visitor spends on the page. Try testing these aspects:

• Auto-sizing/movement of content: The size of the browser window and design can impact how content moves around on the page.  Try testing moving around certain page aspects to determine if conversion rate goes up.
• Pop Ups vs. Static content: Test offering value added content, like a download, on the page instead of through a pop up.

2. Lead Form and e-Commerce Process Testing

• Lead form: Once a user has clicked on the lead form, the form itself can have a huge impact on whether or not they fill it out and submit or simply exiting the site. Test the pre-population of certain fields based on IP address in order to determine conversion changes.

3. Headlines and Bullets In Body Copy

• Question versus Statement: While a question may seem more engaging, test leveraging a statement instead.
• Bullet Points: Summarize copy using easier to read bullet points to determine impact on conversion.
• One Offer versus Two Offers: Create a test leveraging multiple versus a single offer to determine which is most successful. Although a single offer is more targeted, multiple offers may win out.

4. Relevant Images

• Beautiful versus Easy to Read Images: The look and feel of your images can be highly influential on conversion rates. Test the preference of your audience for images which are beautiful, compared to easy to read  when it comes to conversions.
• Call to Action with Marquee: Try adding a call to action within your Marquee image rather than next to it. This small change may have a big impact.

5. Calls to Action

• Button versus Link: Testing switching a link to button. Buttons tend to be more attention grabbing and easier to read.
• White paper versus guide: Finesse the wording of your call to action to determine what works best for your target audience. For example, update ‘download white paper’ to ‘download guide’ to test the psychological impact of wording.

You can use these tests to get you started but one of the most important ideas here is that you can and should test everything.  Every audience is different, so try testing some best practices you assume are true. You may be surprised on the impact conversion optimization can have on your business results.

What type of conversion testing are you doing in your business?

4 Blogging Tips to Double Your Site Traffic

Did you know that you can use yourbusiness blog for branding and it also establishes you as the authority in your niche? Blogging is an interactive method that will allow you to reach your target audience. This can include using the blog for website traffic, reaching new customers, branding, and it can be used as a communication medium. take a look at these tips below from SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Jason Crawford, president of the Parts and Service division of Block Imaging, was upstaged by his six-year-old daughter.

In her ponytailed debut on the Block Blog, Crawford asked her, “Madeleine, do you know how to fix a laser aimer?”, to which she confidently replied, “Yes!”

The pair then demonstrated with charming aplomb a simple troubleshooting tidbit for Block’s medical imaging equipment customers.

The video was one of a slew of ideas that came out of a two-day retreat aimed at kickstarting a company-wide commitment to content marketing through their blog.

Since then, Block has seen an increase of approximately 150% in organic search traffic to their site, which has translated to more and better-qualified leads and shorter sales cycles.

Sales volume has increased significantly enough since September that the company—which had been in a slump—hired 13 employees, including 3 additional salespeople.

Organization: Block Imaging International, Inc.

Social Media Handles & Stats:

• Website — Block Imaging International Inc.
• Blog
• LinkedIn
• YouTube — 12,591 views

Highlights:

• Organic search traffic increased from 4,000 to approximately 10,000 visits per month
• A single post was the impetus for a $70K order
• Three new salespeople hired since the company-wide commitment to blogging
• Over 250 downloads of The C-Arm Buyers Guide in its first 3 months

Block’s search traffic increased significantly after a September 2011 company retreat focused on content marketing.

Block Imaging, a 70-person company in Lansing, Michigan, provides preowned and refurbished medical imaging equipment, including machines for MRI, CT, X-ray, C-Arm and mammography, to a worldwide market.

Their sales growth over the past year is to a great extent directly attributed to theirfocus on content marketing through their blog.

Four factors have contributed most to their blog’s success.

#1: Buy-In From the Top

The atmosphere at Block Imaging in summer 2011 was fearful and distrusting; sales were down and every department had scaled back.

Vice President of Marketing Krista Kotrla articulates that they had two options: “Are we just going to accept this not being a good year and cutting and scaling back on everything, or are we going to go all-in on something to try to grow this business?”

She had experimented with getting a blog going the previous December, but participation and results were spotty. “It was kind of relegated to the marketing department trying to get an article from the company president maybe once or twice a month,” she said.

Kotrla proposed a two-day company-wide retreat with a content marketing specialist to launch what she calls a “culture of content marketing.” Response to the retreat was extremely positive, generating a host of ideas for blog posts and videos such as the one Crawford made with his daughter.

“I had never written a blog before, and I had never done a blog video before, but I figured we’ve got to start somewhere,” Crawford said. “It really came down to being willing to be a little vulnerable and a little real with people.”

Block Imaging employees in a team blog-title brainstorming exercise at their company retreat.

“It was a definite intentional shift from leadership saying that this is the way we are going to go, this is the wave of the future,” said Product Manager Chris Sharrock.

#2: Make it Easy for Everyone to Contribute

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy at Block for coming up with content. Sharrock dove in wholeheartedly, and has no problem consistently cranking out two to three blog posts a month, but some others have needed a little more help and encouragement.

Some people can take a list of keyword phrases that marketing has gleaned from Hub Spot and run with it; others work better with a specific blog post title. Others are more comfortable verbally. “Some salespeople feel much more comfortable standing in front of the backwall we set up in the conference room and filming a short video,” Kotrla said.

And if there is someone who hasn’t sent any submissions in a while, “We pull them aside and in a one-to-one meeting, try to figure out what they need,” she said. “Is it more keywords, specific titles? Sometimes they just need permission to stop the daily grind and sit down and talk it out. Other times, they feel more comfortable if they know it’s being reviewed by an engineer, so we’ll take a salesperson and an engineer out to lunch and flesh out a few outlines.”

Block’s ambitious goal of one post every weekday means managers must keep on top of department quotas, but they find that an atmosphere of inclusiveness and flexibility has far better results than reprimanding people for not participating. To date, over 40 people from the 70-person company have contributed to the blog.

#3: Empower a Content Officer

One strategy that has helped tremendously is to have a single point of contact for all blog drafts, someone they have taken to calling the “Content Officer.”

Jordan Batterbee, originally from engineering support, emerged as a natural writer who can take a draft, outline or even a list of bullet points from another team member and craft it into a well-edited, SEO-keyworded post, injecting some humor and personality along the way.

Jordan Batterbee, Block Imaging’s Content Officer

Having him as the conduit for all posts has been “hugely significant,” said Kotrla, “Because it made it a lot easier for people to contribute very little and turn it into a post that they get recognized for. It makes it easy and comfortable for people to participate.”

Batterbee has increased his contribution to the point that he is about to move over to marketing full time. “I wish we had invested sooner in developing a dedicated person to carry more weight in helping to oversee our blogging machine,” said Kotrla.

#4: Make it Fun and Rewarding

The one factor that ties everything else together is consistently celebrating and rewarding contributions to the company’s content marketing, creating an environment where employees are intrinsically motivated.

“Every two weeks at the staff meeting, we reward two content superheroes who have contributed something significant to the blog. We have a Spiderman mask and a Wolverine mask that they put on and we take a picture that we share in the next all-team PowerPoint presentation,” said Kotrla.

Two of Block’s biweekly Content Superheroes.

“We also have a really cheesy Plinko board with gift cards at the bottom, so they get a gift card, too. But it’s not really the gift cards, it’s the fun of knowing that you contributed. We try to inspire in the team that all of their efforts arecontributing in a significant way to the overall company vision.”

But besides the chance to unleash their inner superhero, the biggest motivator for Block’s employees is success.

Said Crawford, “When we get feedback when someone says, ‘Your answer to a common question helped me make a better decision,’ or when people begin to see that they helped someone get a better result or find an answer to a problem they were having, that’s a great feeling that people want to experience again and again.”

What do you think? Does your company have a blog? What strategies are succeeding or not succeeding in your content marketing? Leave your comments and questions in the box below.