30 ways to get more targeted visitors to your blog
A few years ago Seth Godin wrote a great post on how to get traffic for your blog. Seth listed a number of excellent ideas and techniques that any blogger can use to generate interest, attention and advocacy for their blog.
Six years on and many of Seth's practical traffic-generating tips are still very relevant today, so Dave Chaffey and I thought it was worth sharing for those who missed it first time around. However, a few things have moved on, so I thought I’d re-visit the post and pick out some of the best tips (30 of the original 56) for getting more targeted visitors to your blog: (more…)…
A five step tutorial for better SEO targeting
This is Part Four of a 12 part guide to Website Optimisation. In Part Three, I explored the Google toolset that can help you with keyword research and planning. In Part Four we take that a little further and look how you can target relevant keywords to cover the tail of search, including head, mid tail and long tail search terms.
It’s never an exact science, but with a little patience, you can identify keyword sets that represent logical targets for your search optimisation.
Why is this important?
Because not everybody converts from the first search query they make. You might have heard of the “long tail of search”. There are many visualisations of this; the basic premise is that the volume of searches for a keyword/phrase is dependent upon how specific that keyword query is.
If a keyword query is highly generic (e.g. “moisturisers”), it is indicative…
Why inactive email subscribers may be too good to dismiss
Conventional marketing wisdom tells us removing inactive subscribers from your mailing list is good practice - but is it? Here, we turn that wisdom on its head. I'll show why inactive subscribers are still valuable to your business and explore how you can reactivate them. First, I'm going to tell a story of how I was recently shunned for all the wrong reasons and then give some ideas on a structured approach to make the most from inactive subscribers.
It's simple really, I was recently removed from Dell's mailing list despite spending around $40,000 a year with them online for the past few years.
In Dell's eyes however, I was inactive. I hadn't opened any of their emails for some time and so their marketing department had purged me from the list.
But the fact a customer hasn't opened your emails…
Adapting PR Smith's SOSTAC® to review what's working, what's not and create a plan of improvement
I was recently asked if I use any frameworks or processes when auditing a web site (or any digital marketing activity). To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought until now. On the whole, I just got on with it, so I couldn’t give an answer straight away.
Nonetheless, after considering it for a while, I realized that I was subconsciously utilizing a process that I had become familiar with over the past couple of years: PR Smith's SOSTAC® model.
Now, I’m going to presume that you know all about SOSTAC® (if you don’t, then simply check out this superb post that explains the SOSTAC® planning model) and will concentrate on how I adapt it for use as web auditing process.
I should point out that I have used SOSTAC® as a process for many tasks as I…
The IAB pitches in with new industry best-practice guidelines
Are you doing paid-for promotion of your brand via social media channels? If so, or if you're intending to, be sure have a glance over these new guidelines from the IAB.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released guidelines into the payment for editorial content to specifically promote a brand, product or service within a social media environment.
The new guidelines developed by the IAB’s Social Media Council are also supported by the Voice of British Advertisers (ISBA), the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the Committee for Advertising Practice (CAP), offers marketers direction to ensure transparency when promoting to consumers in the social space.
The guidelines are helpful for brand owners and marketing practitioners since they help ensure that you comply with consumer protection law and do this by featuring six relevant social media scenarios to demonstrate how the guidance may work in…
Life's A Pitch (Part 1 of 3): The pitch process and agency selection
Identifying the need for a pitch
First thing’s first: Why have a pitch?
Your current agency relationship/s is/are tired. There’s nowhere else to go; the agencies you’re working with are all out of ideas and, as a result, your competitors are leaving you behind.
Attitudes. A very common reason for brands to decide its time to move agencies is as simple as a change in attitude of their incumbent – either arrogance, complacency, or just that they no longer come forward with new and exciting ideas or observations.
Relationships. Your account director’s gone, the creative director’s gone, the agency has changed hands and frankly, things just aren’t the same.
Dynamics of your brand. Your brand is moving with the times (as it should) and you’re mad keen to adapt to new consumer trends…
And the 3 you need to action
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Official Google Post from Matt Cutts
Our commentary
With the sheer volume of search engine algorithm updates that take place on Google alone its difficult to keep a track on amends you need to make to your tactics / strategy. This recent post from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) highlights 10 of the more significant changes Google has made recently, well worth you taking the time to ready through them! The top 3 most actionable / useful for me are:
This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets…
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Inside Search intro
Sometimes Google is just too clever, interpreting spelling mistakes, adding synonyms and based results on previous searches. Creating “a search in quotes” can help here, but sometimes you don’t want these additional features.
It’s now introduced “Verbatim” to turn off it’s main “user intention assumption” which you can access as with other Advanced Search features from the left (ex-Jazz) sidebar:
The announcement about the update is interesting for SEOs since it lists the normal improvements Google can make:.
making automatic spelling corrections personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding…
Creating a mobile marketing roadmap
Launching mobile commerce within an organization requires a sound Mobile Strategy and a well-defined roadmap to ensure the right items are prioritized and that actionable results can be quickly obtained.
There are so many options – both technical and business based – that it is important to step back, look the business and marketing strategy, and to determine how mobile fits in at the strategic level.
On the technical side, core ecommerce and marketing services such as content merchandising and discovery, checkout and payment, and content delivery can be provided to traditional desktops, as well as new devices like smartphones, tablets, TV’s and BlueRay players through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The API’s standardize the interfaces which apps, sites or products need to access, simplifying integration and providing common tools and technologies which are scalable and well documented.
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Core skills for non-media companies
Not long ago, everyone was talking about the power of “Like” and nothing seemed easier for a brand than building a tribe of followers; people who declared they liked your company, its brand or product.
This lazy approach to digital marketing led brands into thinking, falsely, that they had found a cheap and easy way to build a network of brand advocates online, the type of people who would enthusiastically follow a brand’s daily posts and pass these on, regardless of how dull or self-centered the updates were, to their friends and followers.
Then came the social break-up
Recent research in a paper entitled “The Social Break-up”, shows that people are more fickle than that. The paper from ExactTarget demonstrates that social marketing with Tweets and updates that resemble press releases or ad copy (broadcast messages) doesn’t build tribes and that lazy, sloppy social media marketing turns people…
