Archive for the ‘Marketing Tips’ Category

I just tried the Priority Inbox and I love it. I tell all my clients to abandon Outlook and to get Gmail. But you know old habits are hard to get rid off, anyway it will happen sooner or later.

Welcome to Priority Inbox! By automatically separating out your most important messages, Priority Inbox makes it easy for you to read and respond to the messages that matter.

Get through your email faster

Try reading and replying to the messages in the “Important and Unread” section first. Mark anything that requires follow-up with a star, then go through the “Everything Else” section. If you leave Priority Inbox, you can return to it by clicking the link next to Inbox on the side navigation of Gmail. How it works Gmail’s servers look at several types of information to identify the email that’s important to you, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email with these people, and which keywords appear frequently in the emails you read.

Train Priority Inbox

If Priority Inbox makes a mistake, you can use the  buttons to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important, and Priority Inbox will quickly learn what you care about most.

And more…

• Customize Priority Inbox: You can change what type of email you see in each section (like switching the “Important and Unread” section to just “Important”). Just click on the section headers or visit the Priority Inbox tab under Settings to customize.
• Use filters to guarantee importance: If you want to be absolutely sure that some messages are always marked as important (like email from your boss), you can set up a filter and choose “Always mark it as important.”
• Search by importance: If you want to see all the messages that have been marked as important, both read and unread, do a Gmail search for “is:important.”
• Switching back to your old inbox: If Priority Inbox isn’t for you, you can easily switch back to your normal inbox by clicking “Inbox” on the left or hide Priority Inbox altogether from Gmail Settings.

The rules of search engine optimization change and evolve. Google, Bing and Yahoo are constantly working towards delivering better search results. Here are some resources that will help you keep up with this field and help you achieve greater success in your marketing efforts.

1. SEOmoz Blog – SEOmoz has become the gold standard for SEO information and how-to articles. Its team of contributors offers an article per day to help expand your SEO knowledge.
2. Marketing Pilgrim – Andy Beal and his team of talented writers break search engine and internet marketing news and discuss major industry trends impacting marketers.
3. Search Engine Land – This is one of the best search engine blogs for in-depth news and analysis of the search marketing industry.
4. Search Engine Journal – From link building to the newest changes from Google, Search Engine Journal covers news and tactics related to the search engine marketing industry.
5. Search Engine Roundtable – For detailed discussion and explanations of the fine details of search engine marketing, Search Engine Roundtable has you covered.
6. SEO Book – For reviews of the newest SEO tools to analysis of search engine changes, check our SEO Book.
7. ReelSEO – ReelSEO is a resource for marketers looking to learn more about online video’s impact on on search engine marketing.
8. Yoast – Yoast is a how-to focused blog that covers tactics for improving SEO as well as user experience for your website.
9. aimClear – The aimClear blog includes articles about a wide range of search marketing topics, including SEO and PPC.
10. Biznology – This blog discusses many SEO-related issues but has recently focused on content marketing and its connection to SEO.
11. Blue Glass Blog – The talented team over at Blue Glass discusses important industry issues as well as tools.
12. CanuckSEO – Jim Rudnick provides tips and tricks for improving search engine optimization as well as other search engine marketing related topics.
13. Daily SEO Tip – Are you a fan of sites that provide a tip per day? Then this might be the blog for you, offering tips and tricks to help support your search engine marketing strategies.
14. Distilled Blog – The team at Distilled provides insights and musings about the intersection of search and social media.
15. GeoLocalSEO – If local and mobile search is your interest, then the GeoLocalSEO blog is a resource you should check out for tips and tricks related to the local and mobile search industry.
16. Google Webmaster Central Blog – When working in the search marketing industry, you must know what the search engines are doing. Google’s webmaster blog gives search marketers insights into the changes and updates to Google.
17. Graywolf’s SEO Blog – Michael Gray shares SEO-related commentary and advice in his blog.
18. Industrial Search Engine Marketing – If you are a B2B company looking for search engine marketing guidance, then this is a great resource for you.
19. John Battelle’s Search Blog – A co-founder of Wired magazine and a search engine marketing pioneer, Battelle’s musings cover search and much more.
20. Junta42 Blog – Content marketing is critical to SEO success. The team at Junta42 shares insights and tips for successful content marketing.
21. Matt Cutts – Matt is Google’s most famous search engine engineer who shares his thoughts and insights on search engine optimization.
22. Outspoken Media – This team of bloggers discusses all aspects of search engine marketing while providing tactical information and industry commentary.
23. SEO Copywriting – Copy is a critical part of SEO success. This blog goes into more detail than most about the best practices of SEO copywriting.
24. Search Engine Watch – This multi-author blog was reccomended by several readers and covers a wide variety of search marketing issues.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6482/23-Awesome-SEO-Blogs-Everyone-Should-Read.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HubSpot+%28HubSpot%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#ixzz0xiss3xMX

Does this sound familiar? You’ve read the books, blogs like this one and attended the webinars/conferences. You get it. Online content is important. You understand we are entering a huge shift in marketing and promotion going from product pushers to trusted resources and that drive, creativity and passion count more than a big budget, especially with all the amazing tools available online.

Trusted resources like you create valuable, interesting, educational and/or entertaining content.

This might be in the form of a blog, web show, online magazine, webinar series, ebook and the list goes on.

So, you decide to hop on the content train for your business either by creating or curating the best content in your niche.

But it isn’t spreading. Nobody is commenting. Nothing is really happening. You start to get nervous. “Is this worth it?” you begin to ask yourself.

Why isn’t it spreading? Sort of like looking in the mirror and saying, “Is it me or is it you?”

Normally there isn’t just one answer and it isn’t black and white. Some things directly matter and others go a little bit deeper with more abstract, yet equally important ideas like trust and authority. But, everything adds up.

Here are a few reasons why your content is lonely and how to get back on the right track with a few hundred or thousand friends:

1. Bad Web Design

If you website looks stuck in 1997 with a construction guy digging and music playing or like a run of the mill template, there is a lack of credibility and trust. Do you share content from sites that you don’t trust?

I wish it wasn’t true, but looks matter. Think about first impressions. It is worth investing in a site that is functional and reflects your personality and brand.

2. Lacking Ease Of Sharing

The best content is like peanut butter, easily spreadable. Easily spreadable doesn’t mean that it takes a scholar to find how to share easily via social networks, email, etc.

Enabling your community, no matter how big or small to share with ease can make a huge difference.

Do you have one click sharing?

3. Product Focused Content

The best content isn’t about your product. The harsh reality is nobody cares about any of our products. People do care about interests, passions, hobbies, solving their problems, getting answer to key questions, learning etc.

For example, let’s pretend you sell dog food. A mistake is to make the content about the food. Meaning features and benefits.

The fix here is to focus on an interest or passion. People aren’t passionate about dog food. Instead, I bet there are plenty of people passionate about dogs. Training dogs, dog health, etc. A better play is for the content to focus on the bigger picture and not just the product.

4. Not-You Focused Content

Injecting personality, passion and quirks into your content? Always a good thing. Making it about you and how amazing you are. Yikes.

Make it about them, not you. It will do better. Trust me.

5. Lack Of Passion

If you aren’t passionate about your content, it will show and will hinder progress. Nobody spreads half-baked material. If you can’t get excited and pumped up about your content, how can you expect anyone else to be?

6. Unclear, Boring Or Ridiculously Long Titles

I get it. Don’t judge a book by its cover or a piece of content by its title. Fair enough. However, the reality of the matter is titles matter, a lot. They matter for search engines and humans. When you have 50 titles in front of you, which ones jump out? Why?

Spending time on titles is worth the time.

7. Oops, I Forgot My Marketing

We have all fell into this trap. You spend all the time creating the content and posting it and then no time is left topromote it. You can have the greatest content in the world, but if you don’t spend time marketing and promoting it, then it will be the loneliest, saddest, greatest most useful content in the world.

My recommendation, especially when getting rolling is to spend 80% of total “content time” marketing and promoting.

This means creating one-on-one connections on social media sites, expanding your network, digital schmoozing, perhaps hosting an event or meet up. Often the best online marketing happens offline.   Content plus connections equals success. You have to give to get.

One bonus fun fact: Time. Trust, influence, authority and community isn’t built with just one post or overnight. It takes blood, sweat and tears.  While the opportunity to create has been democratized, that means you have to work hard to stick out. Keep at it, experiment, refine brick by brick, click by click, over time you might be the ruler of the next content empire.

What has been your experience? What would you add to the list?

This was a guest post by David Siteman Garland. Garland is the Founder of The Rise To The Top, The #1 Non-Boring Resource For Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, Cheaper.

A

Application Programing Interface (API) – An API is a documented interface that allows one software application to to interact with another application. An example of this is the Twitter API.

Avatar – An Avatar is an image or username that represents a person online within forums and social networks.

B

BackType – BackType is a social media analytics company that helps companies measure their social engagement. Previously the service started as a blog comment search engine.

Bit.ly – Bit.ly is a free URL shortening service that provides statistics for the links users share online. Bit.ly is popularly used to condense long URLs to make them easier to share on social networks such as Twitter.

Blip.TV – Blip.TV is a online video sharing site that provides a free and paid platform for individuals and companies who host an online video show.

Blog – Blog is a word that was created from two words: “web log”. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Blogger – Blogger is a free blogging platform owned by Google that allows individuals and companies to host and publish a blog typically on a subdomain. Example: yourblogname.blogspot.com

Blog Talk Radio – Blog Talk Radio is a free web application that allows users to host live online radio shows.

BoardReader – BoardReader is a free search engine that allows users to search for keywords only in posts and titles of online forums, a popular forum of social networking.

Boxee – Boxee is a social video application that allows users to watch online videos on their TVs and computers. Users can share and watch videos from a variety of online videos sources for free.

C

Chat – Chat can refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, but traditionally refers to one-to-one communication through a text-based chat application commonly referred to as instant messaging applications.

Collecta – Collecta is a real-time search engine that includes results from from blogs, microblogs, news feeds and photo sharing services as they are published.

Collective Intelligence – Collective Intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision-making in social networks.

Comment – A comment is a response that is often provided as an answer of reaction to a blog post or message on a social network. Comments are a primary form of two-way communication on the social web.

Compete – Compete is a web-based application that offers users and businesses web analytics and enables people to compare and contrast the statistics for different websites over time.

Craigslist – Craigslist is a popular online commerce site in which users sell a variety of goods and services to other users. The service has been credited for causing the reduction of classified advertising in newspapers across the United States.

Creative Commons – Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. It provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

D

Delicious – Delicious is a free online bookmarking service that lets users save website addresses publicly and privately online so that they can be accessed from any device connected to the Internet and shared with friends.

Digg – Digg is a social news website that allows members to submit and vote for articles. Articles with the most votes appear on the homepage of the site and subsequently are seen by the largest portion of the site’s membership as well as other visitors.

Disqus – Disqus is a comment system and moderation tool for your site. This service lets you add next-gen community management and social web integration to any site on any platform.

DocStoc – DocStoc is an online sharing service for documents. Users can view, upload, share and sell documents.

E

EventBrite – Eventbrite is a provider of online event management and ticketing services. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects a fee per ticket.

F

Facebook – Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. Facebook is the largest social network in the world with more than 500 million users.

Firefox – Firefox is an open-source web browser. It has emgered as one of the most popular web browsers on the Internet and allows users to customize their browser through the use of third-party extensions.

Flash Mob – A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.

Flickr – Flickr is a social network based around online picture sharing. The service allows users to store photos online and then share them with others through profiles, groups, sets and other methods.

Forums – Also known as a message board, a forum is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system.

Foursquare – Foursquare is a social network in which friends share their locations and connect with others in close psychical proximity to each other. The service uses a system of digital badges to reward players who “checkin” to different types of locations.

G

Google Buzz – Google Buzz is a social networking and messaging tool from Google, designed to integrate into the company’s web-based email program, Gmail. Users can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in “conversations” and visible in the user’s inbox.

Google Chrome – Google Chrome is a free web browser produced by Google that fully integrates into its online search system as well as other applications.

Google Documents – Google Documents is a group of web-based office applications that includes tools for word processing, presentations and spreadsheet analysis. All documents are stored and edited online and allow multiple people to collaborate on a document in real-time.

Google Wave – Google Wave is a collaboration tool developed by Google as a next-generation solution to e-mail communication. A wave is a live, shared space on the web where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Gowalla – Gowalla is a social network in which friends share their locations and connect with others in close psychical proximity to each other.

Groundswell – A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, pg. 9)

H

Hashtag – A hashtag is a tag used on the social network Twitter as a way to annotate a message. A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a “#”. Example: #yourhashtag. Hashtags are commonly used to show that a tweet, a Twitter message, is related to an event or conference.

hi5 – hi5 is a social network focused on the youth market. It is a social entertainment destination, with a focus on delivering a fun and entertainment-driven social experience online to users around the world.

HootSuite – HootSuite is a web-based Twitter client. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and view metrics.

HTML – HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a programing language for web pages. Think of HTML as the brick-and-mortar of pages on the web — it provides content and structure while CSS supplies style. HTML has changed over the years and it is on the cusp of its next version: HTML5.

I

Inbound Marketing – Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that essentially focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively).

Instant Messaging – Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time direct text-based communication between two or more people. More advanced instant messaging software clients also allow enhanced modes of communication, such as live voice or video calling.

J

Joomla – Joomla is an content management system (CMS) which enables users to build websites and online applications.

K

Kyte – Kyte is an online and mobile video application that provides video hosting and stream for both recorded and live video feeds.

L

Lifecasting – Lifecasting is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the Internet and can involve wearable technology.

Like – A “Like” is an action that can be made by a Facebook user. Instead of writing a comment for a message or a status update, a Facebook user can click the “Like” button as a quick way to show approval and share the message.

Link Building – Link building is an aspect of search engine optimization in which website owners develop strategies to generate links to their site from other websites with the hopes of improving their search engine ranking. Blogging has emerged as a popular method of link building.

LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of June 2010, LinkedIn had more than 70 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide

Lurker – A lurker online is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, social network, or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates in the discussion.

M

Mashup – A content mashup contains multiple types of media drawn from pre-existing sources to create a new work. Digital mashups allow individuals or businesses to create new peices of content by combining multiple online content sources.

MySpace – MySpace is a social networking website owned by News Corporation. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006 and was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008.

MyPunchbowl – MyPunchbowl.com is a social network that facilitates party planning and provides members with ideas, invitations, favors, gift registries, photo/video sharing, and more.

N

News Reader – A news reader allows users to aggregate articles from multiple websites into one place using RSS feeds. The purpose of these aggregators is to allow for a faster and more efficient consumption of information.

Newsvine – Newsvine is a social news site similar to Digg in which users submit and vote for stories to be shared and read by other members of the community.

O

Opera – Opera is an open-source web browser. While not as popular as Firefox, Opera is used as the default browser on some gaming systems and mobile devices.

Orkut – Orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil.

P

Pandora – Pandora is a social online radio station that allows users to create stations based on their favorite artists and types of music.

Permalink – A permalink is an address or URL of a particular post within a blog or website.

Podcast – A podcast, or non-streamed webcast, is a series of digital media files, either audio or video, that are released episodically and often downloaded through an RSS feed..

Posterous – Posterous is a blogging and content syndication platform that allows users to post content from any computer or mobile device by sending an e-mail.

PostRank – PostRank monitors and collects social engagement related to content around the web. Essentially it helps publishers understand which type of content promotes sharing on the social web.

Q

Qik – Qik is an online video streaming service that lets users to stream video live from their mobile phones to the web.

Quantcast – Quantcast provides website traffic and demographics for websites. The tool is primarily used by online advertisers looking to target specific demographics.

R

Real-Time Search – Real-time search is the method of indexing content being published online into search engine results with virtually no delay.

Reddit – Reddit is similar to Digg and Newsvine. It is a social news site that is built upon a community of users who share and comment on stories.

S

Scribd – Scribd turns document formats such as PDF, Word and PowerPoint into a web document for viewing and sharing online.

Search Engine Optimization – Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via unpaid or organic search traffic.

Second Life – Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab that was launched on June 23, 2003. Users are called “residents” and they interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade virtual property and services with one another, and travel throughout the world.

Seesmic – Seesmic is a popular desktop and mobile social application. Using APIs, Seesmic allows users to share content on social networks such as Twitter and Google Buzz from the same application.

Sentiment – Sentiment is normally referred to as the attitude of user comments related to a brand online. Some social media monitoring tools measure sentiment.

SlideShare – SlideShare is an online social network for sharing presentations and documents. Users can favorite and embed presentations as well as share them on other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Skype – Skype is a free program that allows for text, audio and video chats between users. Additionally, users can purchase plans to receive phone calls through their Skype account.

Social Media – Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.

Social Media Monitoring – Social media monitoring is a process of monitoring and responding to mentions related to a business that occur in social media.

StumbleUpon – Free web-browser extension which acts as an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing web sites.

T

Tag Cloud – A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, typically used to describe the content of web sites.

Technorati – Technorati is a popular blog search engine that also provides categories and authority rankings for blogs.

TweetDeck – TweetDeck is an application that connects users with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more.

Tweetup – A Tweetup is an organized or impromptu gathering of people that use Twitter.

Twitter – Twitter is a platform that allows users to share 140-character-long messages publicly. User can “follow” each other as a way of subscribing to each others’ messages. Additionally, users can use the @username command to direct a message towards another Twitter user.

Twitter Search – Twitter Search is a search engine operated by Twitter to search for Twitter messages and users in real-time.

Tumblr – Tumblr lets users share content in the form of a blog. Users can post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, or email.

TypePad – TypePad is a free and paid blogging platform similar to Blogger. It allows users to host and publish their own blogs.

U

Unconference – An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered on a theme or purpose. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

USTREAM – USTREAM is a live interactive broadcast platform that enables anyone with an Internet connection and a camera to engage to stream video online.

URL – A URL is most popularly known as the “address” of a web page on the World Wide Web, e.g. http://www.example.com

V

Video Blog – A video blog is a blog the produces regular video content often around the same theme on a daily or weekly basis. An example of a successful video blog is Wine Library TV.

Viddler – Viddler is a popular video sharing site similar to YouTube and Vimeo in which users can upload videos to be hosted online and shared and watched by others.

Vimeo – Vimeo is a popular video sharing service in which users can upload videos to be hosted online and shared and watched by others. Vimeo user videos are often more artistic and the service does not allow commercial video content.

Viral Marketing – Viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes.

W

Web Analytics – Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

Webinar – A webinar is used to conduct live meetings, training, or presentations via the Internet.

Widget – A widget is an element of a graphical user interface that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or text box.

Wiki – A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser, allowing for collaboration between users.

Wikipedia – Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 15 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.

WordPress – WordPress is a content management system and contains blog publishing tools that allow users to host and publish blogs.

X

Y

Yammer – Yammer is a business communication tool that operates as an internal Twitter-like messaging system for employees within an organization. It is used to provide real-time communication and reduce the need for e-mail.

Yelp – Yelp is a social network and local search website that provides users with a platform to review, rate and discuss local businesses. Over 31 million people access Yelp’s website each month, putting it in the top 150 U.S. Internet websites.

YouTube – YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. YouTube is the largest video sharing site in the world.

Z

Zoho – Zoho is a suite of online web applications geared towards business productivity and collaboration.

Zooomr – Zooomr is a online photo sharing service similar to Flickr.

The loyalty of a single email contact is stronger than any social media follower (unless Oprah followers you) because users are not only opting in, but providing you personal data that they might not submit elsewhere. Typically, the exchange is a name and an email address for access to free material, and a possible lead for the company. I’ve been noticing that despite the advent of social networking, 71% of marketers believe that email will be more important this year. Email, if done right, is targeted, personal, and directs subscribers to other websites, including your own. You’ve also noticed that when someone sends you a Facebook message or adds you as a contact on LinkedIn, you still receive email notifications.