10 Ways to Refresh Your Digital Life for the New Year The New Year offers a fresh start. It's a fantastic time to reset your goals, aims and ambitions. In addition to making positive changes in the real world, it's also a great opportunity to refresh your digital life. Here are 10 suggestions for revamping "digital you" in 2012. Take a look through our gallery. Thumbnail image courtesy of Rachael Towne How Path is Making 'Small' the New 'Big' in Social Media Revolutions don't happen overnight. Look at inbound marketing. It has been the better part of a decade, and the movement -- while HUGE -- is still gaining momentum. Something similar has happened with a little known social network called Path. Commoditization vs. The idea behind Path was right from the beginning. Revolutions Need a "WOW" Moment! Again, revolutions don't happen overnight. When you are out to change a person's fundamental behavior, you have to give them a "WOW" moment. The concept of the social journal combined with brilliant software design provided a "WOW" moment that's rarely achieved in social media. Path - Introducing Path 2 from Path on Vimeo. Since the launch of the redesigned application, Path has gone from adding 10,000 active users per day to 300,000 active users each day. Design > Features The "wow" from the new Path is partially due to a clearer and more refined purpose, but the real impact is design. Marketing Takeaway Change is hard. 1. 2. 3.
25 Eye-Popping Internet Marketing Statistics for 2012 2012 is officially here, and what better way to kick off the New Year than with some data porn? In its recent US Digital Media Usage report, eMarketer estimates how digital media usage will grow in 2012 in terms of the internet, mobile, social, video, and ecommerce. So whether you need to justify your inbound marketing-centric strategies to your boss or convince yourself that inbound is the right way to approach your marketing program in 2012, check out these 25 eye-popping marketing stats that highlight the probable growth of digital media in 2012 and emphasize why you'll definitely need inbound marketing this year. The Internet in 2012 1) In 2012, the audience of internet users in the U.S. will expand by 3.1% to 239 million, representing 75.6% of the total population. Tweet This! In other words... 2) More than 3/4 of the total population will be online in 2012. Mobile in 2012 3) Mobile internet users will reach 113.9 million in 2012, up 17.1% from 97.3 million in 2011. Social Media in 2012
5 Tools to Battle Social Media Content Overload This is a guest blog post by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a Twitter publishing application. He writes Twitter Tips every week on his blog. When Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that we will be sharing twice the amount of content from just 12 months ago, there were some very interesting responses. Nova Spivack mentioned that this will cause a Sharepocalypse to happen. Finding the right filters to optimize both sharing and consuming content is one of the most important ways of dealing with this information overload. The current landscape of tools available to you is abundant, so let's narrow it down to 5 awesome tools that will help you battle social media content overload. 1. This tool allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, and Google account to feed it with the most popular stories in your network. The suggestions are top notch, as the algorithm has been refined a lot in recent months to show top stories that suite your preferences well. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The Anatomy of Conversion-Optimized 'Thank You' Pages After your newly converted leads fill out a form, you should always send them to a “thank-you” page, which delivers the content you have promised on the landing page. This is where you bring back the navigation and direct people to other parts of your site or more offers in which they might be interested. Just as for landing pages, there are a number of distinct strategies that you can use to optimize your thank-you pages. The four most important components of an effective thank-you page are: access to your offer, social media sharing links, secondary calls-to-action, and auto-response emails. 1. Access to Your Offer First of all, your visitor has just taken the time to complete your form, and has decided to download your content or sign up for your offer. It is also a good idea to include the title of the offer in the title of your thank-you page to reassure the viewer that they are on the correct page. 2. Next, add in social media sharing links. 3. 4.
Starting A Blog For Your Business in 2012 – Part 3: Setting Up Your Blog | DigitalSherpa.com In this series, I encourage businesses to start a blog in 2012. Part 1 – Early Challenges Part 2 – Getting Started So far, we’ve discussed how to align your business objectives with your blog and how to begin thinking about planning content and building a team of contributors. The next decisions you’ll face are: Where to host your blog How to plan your content Choosing The Right Software A lot of the popular blogging software are similar. You’ll want to set up an account with several different platforms and spend some time in each before making the decision on which you are going to move forward with. The most popular blogging platforms for businesses are: Each has different features and limitations that you’ll want to explore. Here are some questions to ask when choosing your software: Is there a cost associated? Will I be doing paid advertising on my blog? How much technical experience does the software require? What tools are there for creating and maintaining the design of your blog?
Everything Marketers Need to Know About SOPA UPDATE: As of January 20, Lamar Smith, chief sponsor of SOPA, is pulling the bill. PIPA is also being taken off the table for now. Click here for more information. By now, you've likely heard about the controversy that is SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act." But if you thought its effects only applied to the music and entertainment industries, then you've got some catching up to do. If the bill passes in two weeks, internet marketers will definitely feel the heat, too. So, What Exactly Is SOPA (and PIPA)? SOPA is the acronym for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," a bill that was introduced to the House of Representatives in October. PIPA ("Protect Intellectual Property Act") is the Senate's version of SOPA, which is a bill that calls for enhancing enforcement against "rogue websites operated and registered overseas" and defines infringement as the distribution of illegal copies, counterfeit goods or anti-digital rights management technology. How SOPA Threatens Businesses and Marketers 1. 2. 3.
5 Real Life Examples of Fantastic Calls-to-Action Last week, we rounded up some of the most impressive landing pages out there and broke down why they rock from both a user's perspective and a marketer's perspective. But before visitors even get to your landing page, they're usually beckoned by a call-to-action. And it better be pretty awesome to get them to click. We've discussed the elements of an effective call-to-action before, so now it's time to find real life examples of awesome calls-to-action (CTA) that can inspire your own designs. GoDaddy GoDaddy is a web and email hosting company that also sells domain names and other related services. Why it's effective: The best calls-to-action are easy to find and have a focused objective. But GoDaddy goes beyond the basics and implements one other trick to hammer home the point of the page to its visitors. Jetsetter Jetsetter made an appearance on our list of the best landing pages, but hey, when you're good, you're good. Intuit Yapta Zynga Image credit: torley
16 Quick Ways to Squeeze More ROI From Your Blog You're a dedicated inbound marketer putting already strapped time and resources into creating content for your blog on a regular basis. And you deserve to get as much return as possible on that investment. But did you know there are some things you can do on top of creating remarkable content that will make those blog posts work even harder for you? Alone, each one of these things may not seem like much; but together, they add up to a powerhouse punch that will bring a blog post from good to great. These blog post add-ons only take a little bit of time, but they will make your blog content infinitely friendlier to both search engines and readers. Next time you write a blog post, take a little extra time to polish it up with these 16 tips that will make your blog perform better with more visibility and reader engagement. 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) 7.) 8.) 9.) 10.) 11.) 12.) 13.) 14.) 15.) 16.) Are you squeezing all the ROI you can out of your blog? Image credit: Keith Williamson
Achieving Revenue Disruption Through SMarketing One of the biggest trends in business organization for 2012 will be how businesses can better align their sales and marketing organizations. Businesses with mature sales and marketing organizations are seeking ways to improve their efficiency and generate more leads and customers without having to blow up the size of their teams. This is where the idea of revenue disruption can enter a business’ goals. Revenue disruption describes how changes to the way businesses organize their marketing and sales efforts can help them become dramatically more successful. One way that companies will do this is through a “SMarketing” effort, making sure that their sales and marketing teams are well aligned and communicating with each other. New Technology For Sharing Data One way that new technology is joining the revenue disruption game is by providing smarter listening tools for social media. Closed-Loop Marketing Is Necessary For Success Start "SMarketing" For Better Communication Image credit: SashaW
7 Types of Email Addresses to Delete From Your List NOW! The average email list depreciates by 25% every year according to MarketingSherpa. Smart email marketers are actively involved with that depreciation. But why would you want to contribute to the depreciation of your email marketing list? Because by regularly scrubbing your email list, you are removing irrelevant leads and contacts that could be harmful to your email marketing success. List cleaning decreases instances of unsubscribes and recipients marking you as SPAM; it helps you better segment your emails and increase content relevancy; it improves your deliverability and sender reputation; it improves your email open rates; it saves you money if you're charged on a per-send basis; it makes you look like a marketing superstar when your email metrics improve; and most importantly, it keeps you legally compliant. Now that you're undoubtedly convinced of the importance of keeping your email list clean, how do you do it? The Email Addresses To Scrub From Your Email Marketing List 1.) 2.)
Search Tops Social in Local Business Research [New Data] If you haven’t been sure in the past about whether investing in website content and SEO makes sense, this new study might help you see the potential value for your business. According a new study released by Pew Internet, 51% of American adults get information about local restaurants, bars, and related businesses from the internet. For other local brick-and-mortar businesses that don't fit into those categories, 47% of Americans obtain information about those local businesses from the web as well. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone reading this, and may even seem a little bit on the low side. But before you start to criticize, remember that half of American adults is still a very significant number, especially considering the fact that nearly 25% of Americans don't have a personal computer at home. Search Beats Social Media for Local Business Research Marketing Takeaways Is your local business putting enough emphasis on the importance of local SEO? Image Credit: heliosphan