Over 25 great sites to submit your blog and get it noticed. - The Link Medic - Free Blogging Resources. In the mood for some submitting are we? So you have yourself a blog going but the only person reading it is you it seems. You may be thinking about promoting your blog but you’re not sure where to begin. A good way to get the ball rolling is submitting your blog to the various blog directories out there. These can start to bring visitors with not too much effort after the submission process is done. Knowing which sites to submit to is important. Some are a flatout waste of time, others require hefty fees to get listed. Most of these are directories that accept free submissions. Submit it and forget it. The truth is the main thing that will help build visitors is CONTENT. Some are harder to get into than others. . = Link Medic’s Top Picks = Easy Submission = Human Reviewed Updated Sep 21 – 2010 Blog Top Sites – Directory of the Best Blog Sites – – Very clean easy to use dashboard.
. – – Interesting idea for a blog directory. . – Blogorator.com – Book Mentions | The Referral Engine. Segment Your Emails to Increase Effectiveness; 4 Potential Segments. For email marketing, the practice of “batch and blast” is dated. Companies should move beyond this strategy, into a segmented email approach that is more relevant to each individual subscriber and increases the overall effectiveness of an email-marketing program. But where do you start with email segmentation and what strategy makes sense for your company? I address those questions in this article. The first step is to analyze your email database and the information you store about your subscribers. Here are four potential segments to consider. 1. A basic but effective way to split your email database is between buyers and non-buyers. Types of products or categories purchased;Dollar value of purchases;Average order size;Frequency of purchases. Here’s an email from Amazon, segmented by past buying behavior.
Email from Amazon.com targets buyers of biography books. For non-buyers, look at how long they have been a subscriber and segment based on that information. 2. 3. 4. Summary. Email Marketing Essentials: The Keys to Email Marketing that Works. Link Building 101. Increasing the value of email newsletters | Locomotion. I just finished reading the latest edition of Jacob Nielsen’s alertbox covering email newsletter usability . As many of our clientele have email subscriber lists we thought we’d comb through his tips and pull together a few key points and tips. Key Points / Tips: The full article is well worth a read, and provides a much more in depth look at the key points I’ve summarized above. Do You Market Solutions, Or Just Stuff? Do You Market Solutions, Or Just Stuff? People don’t really want your products. They’re not out searching for your service. They want easier lives. They want to be entertained. This, then, is how you sell to them with email marketing: solve those problems.
Focus on meeting people’s needs in a way that positions your product or service as their solution. Selling Solutions These businesses had jackets, tickets, and memberships to sell. Style Every morning, most women, many men, nearly every girl and even a handful of boys stand in front of their mirrors and demand, “What should I wear today?” Usually, the mirror doesn’t answer back. With five new outfit ideas, shoppers need to find a way to recreate the looks themselves.
Entertainment Instead of tickets, Brooks & Dunn present something fun to do with your pals. You don’t necessarily need a giveaway (though they’re a great way to ramp up interest). Time With the subject line “Could you use more time?” Street Savvy The best part? Adventure 1. 2. E-mail Marketing Best Practices | Build Relationships. As a marketing tool, the e-mail newsletter might seem archaic compared with new media such as Twitter and Foursquare. Yet e-mail remains one of the most effective means of building relationships with customers and driving sales. "Most people look at everything in their inbox, even if it's just the subject line," says Stefan Tornquist, the U.S. research director of Econsultancy, a London firm that specializes in online marketing research. "That's not true of a Twitter feed. " In fact, e-mail newsletters have experienced a recent boom, with companies such as Thrillist and Groupon profiting largely on the strength of their mailing lists.
Make a compelling offer People need a good reason to add more e-mail to their overflowing inboxes. Send often—but not too often No business owner wants to gain a reputation as a spammer. That rule of thumb has worked well for The Girl & the Fig, which operates three restaurants and a catering business in Sonoma, California. Facebook Page redesign: 10 things admins should do RIGHT NOW. Facebook announced a massive overhaul of its Pages for business today, and here's the most surprising part: It's awesome.
Don't listen to the angry mobs complaining about change. Today's shift is overwhelmingly positive and creates much-needed options for Page admins. That said, you've got some work to do if you want to make the most if it. We've compiled 10 simple steps that will get you started on the right foot: 1. Turn on the new Page format. Yes, it's opt-in. Tip: If you admin lots of pages, but only want to upgrade one or two for now, the upgrade system is wonky. Don't want to switch? 2. Here's the first cause for celebration. Tip: First thing, click "Edit Page," then "Basic Inforrmation" to select your category and subcategory. 3.
Facebook seems to be defaulting all upgraded pages to a setting that e-mails you when a fan comments. Thankfully, the setting seems to default to "off" if the Page is large (I'd guess the threshold is around 10,000+ Likes). 4. 5. 6. 7. They've moved! 8. 20 Awesome Facebook Fan Pages. Facebook is a key online marketing tool for businesses-;if utilized to its fullest it can drive increased traffic to your website, generate additional sales, promote brand recognition and loyalty, and provide you with a direct communication link to your clients and customers.
Here's 20 companies-;chosen from nominations by entrepreneurs, social media experts, Inc. editors, and Facebook-;that we think have awesome fan pages. Vote for your favorites by clicking the "Like" button on this page. Bare Escentuals Minimalist is the answer for Bare Escentuals. Mineral-based makeup is the new rock star in cosmetics, and companies have flooded the marketplace with natural-sounding "mineral" foundation, blush and eye-shadow formulations. Bonobos A very active blog page provides stellar advice on men's fashion while generating tons of feedback and user-generated comments. Brendan's Irish Pub eCycler. Seven tips for a killer Facebook landing page. A great Facebook landing page should turn visitors into subscribers, engage people, and encourage them to explore your products and services further. So what makes a successful Facebook landing page? Here are a few tips taken from our How to Create Amazing Facebook Pages guide...
The landing page should be relevant to the ad If you have used an ad, online or offline, to attract visitors to your Facebook page, you should provide continuity, just as you would with PPC ads. The content on the landing page should be relevant to the ad content, so if you have lured vistors with a special offer, this should be visible when they arrive at the page, while images used in ads should be repeated on Facebook. Create a custom landing page The default landing page for your Facebook visitors is the wall. This is why a dedicated landing page is a better idea, such as this from Mercedes: You can set your custom landing page by going to 'edit page' then 'edit wall settings'. Add a clear call to action. Pages_Insights_Guide_Updated.pdf (application/pdf Object) Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas » Online Advertising: The 3 obstacles you must overcome to create an effective banner ad.
We’ve been asked this question a number of times: how do you create an effective online banner ad that stands apart from the hundreds of thousands of others out there? I would like to help answer that question by giving you the three major obstacles all banner ads face and options that you can use to overcome them. Overcome this obstacle by asking yourself: how has your attention been diverted in the past when you were already doing something? If you listen to a radio station with ads while driving to work, which ads did you actually pay attention to? When you are watching TV and your show cuts to commercial, which kind of commercial stopped you long enough to keep you from changing the channel (or looking at your phone)?
In the online world, there are six elements that can help capture attention: Use the bullets above as an attention checklist. Visitors are already doing something. We’ve seen ads that know how to get attention. This is the hard part. You’re not stupid. 1. 2. 3. 7 Blogging Mistakes That Small Businesses Make, Page 2. Blogging for your business is important, but doing it wrong can cost you customers and your reputation. As more and more small businesses enter the world of content development, the scrutiny continues to increase. Consumers can be retained or lost simply from your blogging efforts, so its imperative this public-facing activity is done correctly. In this guide, we'll explore why small businesses should have a blog, a company that is doing it right, the biggest mistakes made by small businesses, and how to avoid those potential pitfalls. 7 Blogging Mistakes that Small Businesses Make: Why Start a Blog?
"Before the Internet, everybody was geographically niched," says Liz Strauss, a Chicago-based social web strategist, blogger and community builder, and the founder of the business bloggers conference series SOBcon. But before you jump into blogging, you need to answer a few questions: What is this blog going to do for your business? Dig Deeper: Your 10-Step Guide to Blogging 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Has Facebook Killed Your Brand’s Personality? How To Get Your Social Marketing To Stick And Spread l RaveTopia.
The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal. ITSMA Special Report: How to Fit Social Media into Your Overall Marketing Strategy and Make it Stick. 22 Creative Landing Page Designs – A Showcase, Critique, and Optimization Discussion. After my last landing pages examples post (Your Landing Page Sucks – Here are 10 That Don’t), people asked for some examples from smaller companies. At Unbounce there is a giant pile of cool small-to-medium sized businesses that are creating landing pages every day, so I trawled through the community and asked some people to share their work. 22 landing page examples created by Unbounce customers Below, you’ll find 22 examples of landing pages that cover classic lead capture, product pre-launch/beta pages, ecommerce “buy now” or click-through pages and even a few microsites – and I’m stoked to say that they were all built using the Unbounce landing page platform.
As usual, I’ve given them a mini critique to explain why I like them, and a couple of ideas they could use to optimize and test their pages for higher conversions. A discussion about conversion optimization My goal here is to provide suggestions that might help others to solve similar issues on their pages. Ecommerce Click-Through. Create stories using social media - storify.com. Google Analytics Unveils A New User Experience. Google has just announced a new version of Google Analytics, introducing a completely new user experience. The product got a significant face lift and it now looks more enterprise-like. The last time Google Analytics released such a major version was 1.5 years ago; we covered the release in-depth on this post, but basically the release included the intelligence engine, custom variables, expanded goals, expanded mobile reporting and others.
Below, I share a few screenshots of the new face of Google Analytics (still in closed beta) and explain how they will change product usage. The new version of Google Analytics will gradually rollout to users in phases according to Google. Main Navigation It is interesting to see that Google Analytics has adopted the look and feel of the new Google navigation bar released back in February. As we can see below, the new navigation bar prioritizes the following: Account Home Multiple & Improved Dashboards Report Nomenclature User Interface Improvements.
Is Your Social Media Strategy a Field of Dreams? Is Your Social Media Strategy a Field of Dreams? One of the biggest questions I get is how exactly does a company develop a social media strategy that drives business results? Recently, I have seen a huge influx of companies getting into social media marketing; they setup up all their accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and just expect the leads to just come pouring in. Unlike Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, that just does not work. It’s no wonder that only 12% of executives say that their companies are using social media effectively (Havard Business Review Analytic Services Study) Companies need to take time to determine how to put their best foot forward that is in line with company objectives before jumping in. This requires a little bit of research, but the result will be a focused campaign that best uses their resources – and reaps rewards for their business.
Step 1. Take Notes: What’s being said? Note the following about each network in which they have a presence: Step 2. What Makes the Ultimate Internet Marketer? If you think Internet Marketers are just people who add “keywords” into a website for “search engines” to see, there is nothing further from the truth. Internet Marketing as a whole, involves a wide range of skills that can take years or even decades to master. What I learned quite early on is that there are so many pieces to the puzzle and if one thing is wrong, it can affect your entire marketing campaign.
Let’s examine each of the different skills involved that make up the “Ultimate Internet Marketer: Research/Analysis No Internet Marketer is complete unless you are able to be able to perform in-depth keyword research, competitor analysis and market research. Without these skills, your efforts will surely suffer or fail. Understanding the balance between search volume, market saturation, and website authority is KEY!
Personality/Character Even though Internet Marketers are on the internet, they still need to be able to have personality. Technical Skills Copywriting Link Building Conclusion. Digital salary survey: how much should you earn working in social media? 100+ free HTML email templates. The Anatomy of a Social Media Policy. Social media policies are on the minds of most business owners these days. After all, nearly everyone we know uses a Facebook account, and lots of people are blogging about their families or uploading videos from last weekend’s party to YouTube.
So how do you protect your business when your staff are loose on the social web? The answer is not to lock down Internet access at work – after all, your employees can access Facebook right from their smart phones at their desks. Smart businesses have social media policies which govern the actions of employees in social media – whether on behalf of the company or while on their own time. Most policies are crafted primarily with company protection in mind. I’d argue that an equally important goal of your policy should be to eliminate confusion on the part of employees, making it safe for them to engage in social media without constantly asking for guidance (or fouling up). Flickr: walknboston Related articles. Social Media Marketing Case Studies.