I have a confession.  I use the Typepad text editor and I have even recommended it to others... This means against the Top 100 blogs shown in the graphic, I sit with Geekdad, The Pioneer Woman and Seth Godin who all favour this easy to use WYSIWYG platform.   But Typepad is not the mainstream choice, used by just 16 of the Top 100 bloggers.  So what are the choices and what are the SEO fundamentals to check for? At the heart of any blog is great content, I guess it goes without saying doesn't it? It also goes without saying that SEO is just as important for blogs as it is for websites.  When you are considering SEO for blogs, there are many established techniques you can use so that search engines can discover your content, however…

Many of the most successful digital marketers have a background in direct marketing. I think this is because they're very comfortable with using a structured approach of Test, Learn, Refine to get the most from their campaigns. They're also good at modelling campaign performance from customer demand to response rates and campaign costs to make sure they get positive ROI (See my Emarketing Planning Spreadsheets on my old site for free tools to help here). Of course, many marketers looking to use the Internet don't have this background, so appreciating the principles direct marketing is useful to prompt different thinking about digital marketing. I was chatting with Dan Croxen-John, the CEO of Applied Web Analytics and we thought it would be useful to talk through what online marketers can learn from traditional DM approaches. Watch out for Dan's Top #3 mistakes to avoid. Dan is the CEO of Applied Web…

Steve Woods is suggesting that may be the case for companies that use a consultative approach to sales and marketing, and that changes to your digital marketing hold the answer. He suggests that with the advent of most new technologies there are two phases (my experience certainly supports something like this), the first is that the new technology is adopted in a similar way to the old technology causing lots of incremental improvements, and the second phase frames the problem in an entirely different way leading to sweeping innovation with the largely same tools in place.

The Impact For Sales & Marketing

In his eBook for Eloqua, a company that he co-founded, Woods"€™ takes a very B2B bias approach (though this is very relevant to B2C products and services too) and suggests that technologies that have become common place in marketing - search, email, web, blogs, and video - have created…

Social media is hot and being adopted by small and huge businesses alike - as a channel transcending the middleman and connecting brands directly with people it can only gather more momentum. Yet, despite all the hype and potential - how much are you actually doing in social media? My guess is not very much or at least not as much as your gut tells you that you should be doing. Why?

The F Word (again)

My experience is that it"€™s primarily fear of the unknown that is preventing faster adoption because there are simply so many questions for a busy team to answer:- how much to spend, how much time to invest, which tools to use, how to resource it and how to measure success. There"€™s a lot to learn before investment can be justified to senior management and an already massive agenda of work. Well, some help is at hand - this…

The email marketing world sometimes thinks of itself as too specialist. [Agree - integration should be the name of the Email game for it to stay relevant in today's social media world: Dave Chaffey] Consider the sign-up form, for example. It invites website visitors to complete a transaction: you agree to provide regular doses of valuable content and/or offers and the subscriber "pays" for this by giving you an email address. If payment is completed - the address is submitted correctly - you have a conversion. If we're dealing in transactions and conversions, then surely there's much we can learn from the ecommerce world? (Think, for example, of all the information out there about website order form optimization: lessons that might equally apply to your subscription form.) One retail phenomenon we can borrow is the idea of buyer's remorse [or "Post-purchase dissonance" as they call it in academic circles]. Read Mark's six…

Update to keyword ranking tool May 2010

Google has now updated this tool for showing keyword positions in response to user feedback renaming it the "Search Query" tool. The main changes are: Average position now shown to avoid need for drilldown You can "Star" the target keyphrases most relevant to you to monitor on a separate tab

Original post Wow, this is amazingly useful for reviewing the effectiveness of your SEO AND your marketing messages within the Google SERPs. On April 14 Google has introduced a new facility within Google Webmaster Tools to help search marketers review click through rates within the natural search listings. Here is an example for a "brand search" on my name:

So if you, or your agency aren't signed up to Google Webmaster Tools, then…

Ignoring the power of LinkedIn to drive new business and build relationships is missing a big opportunity for companies small and large alike. LinkedIn is the first place many larger businesses check out potential suppliers and new hires. Using LinkedIn makes you more visible to existing and potential clients as well as your peers. These reach and growth figures are undeniable: LinkedIn has over 65 million members in over 200 countries. A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and about half of our members are outside the U.S. My ten practical tips are aimed at helping you to get more out of LinkedIn. 1 - Complete your profile Improve how people can find and connect to you by adding past places you have worked, details of your higher and further education (leave out schooling  before 18), activities and professional memberships. You have 1895 characters to create your LinkedIn profile. Do include: BACKGROUND HOW WE CAN HELP YOUR COMPANY CONNECT…

"€œThe purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer"€ - Peter Drucker With digital marketing in mind, I"€™d add the word "€œinspire"€ to Peter Drucker"€™s quotation. We must create and inspire customers - since inspired customers have a reason to be loyal, to spend more and to talk about your brand, products or services to other potential customers. Customers that feel positively about their experience of interacting with your brand, product or service is paramount to success in a heavily connected digital age - here are a few significant reasons why: "€œBirds of a feather flock together"€, and never before has this mantra been so true, your customer are participating within the audience that you wish to connect with We"€™ve all understood that prior to the Internet an unhappy customer will spread more messages about you to their friends than a happy one - today an unhappy customer gets to…

I don't have to explain to you that a big part of human communication occurs without us even knowing it. We smell and sense fear, affection, tension, pressure and even love. We "read" body language and we have a gut feeling about the person we are communicating with. First impressions, a sense of attraction, trust or maybe disgust. And of course there is the way we have learned to look at the world and people, ages ago. Education, culture, early experiences, you name it. We often call all these abilities and ways of interpreting the unconsciousness, "that what we cannot explain", the unreadable, allow me to call it the sixth sense. How you call it depends from your way of looking at the world and life. Are you religious or an atheist? Are you a sociologist or marketer? Do you prefer the views on mankind of Freud, Jung, Maslow or Seth Godin (the…

Gaining direct, real-time feedback from customers and site visitors is one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing for me, which really takes advantage of the real-time interactions available online. A few months back I created a post giving my recommendations on the categories and examples of feedback tools that marketers should review to help them understand their customers' needs better. Of course, Kampyle, was one of the tools featured since this is commonly used as a tool to gain feedback, so it wasn't a complete surprise, when I got a mail from Eran Savir, the co-founder of Kampyle. He said that he sees the categories of tools slightly differently than me, so I thought it would be useful to setup an interview to understand how he sees the market, in order to help site owners…