SEO World

The Personal Brand Strategy: If you are looking to have yourself and your name branded as an expert or authority in any niche, social media can help you find people who need your expertise, and explore your products or services. In addition to a main site or blog, managing your personal brand on social media should focus on these cornerstones:

• Be Yourself - Honesty goes a long way in on the social web. A person who takes the time to genuinely engage other users gives the appearance of being easily accessible, which naturally leads to being discovered by other users. Additionally,  not all your content has to do with your product or business. By posting about news stories, personal experiences, or general observations about your day, you avoid the risk of being pigeonholed as a one-topic user.
• Stay Consistent – The time you dedicate to your presence on the social web is always well spent if it leads to new opportunities. Don’t focus on imaginary benchmarks that “experts” claim will bring you success (i.e. following 50 people per day, posting 3 links per day). Consider how someone who discovers your profile for the first time, and the impression that they will get about working with you.
• Approach Each Tool Separately – All social networks have basic ground rules, and some level of integration. Saving time is important, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of your reputation. Don’t over-automate your content – otherwise readers see hashtags on facebook (which do nothing), or tweets with cut off text (with a link back to facebook that will be ignored).

The Professional Brand Strategy: Many businesses have a presence on social media, but the successful ones are using these general guidelines.

• Find Your Customers – Depending on the target audience for your product or service, you may find that a specific social network has a more active community of users for your efforts. If you work with professionals or people with specific credentials, Linkedin is ideal for your goals. This is just one example, but finding a primary source for your relationships to develop is ideal.
• Research Everything – The amount of data that can be collected from the social web is worth billions, and the barrier to entry for analyzing it is incredibly low. Using pre-programmed plugins and customizable reports from tools like Hootsuite and Google Analytics gives your instant insights as to how people are interacting with your content on the social web. Use this data to develop better marketing strategies, or even develop new products.
• Integrate Social Sharing Logically – Many brands think that just being on the social web is enough. For some, it is, but the real power comes from having your customers share their experience with your brand to THEIR social network. If you have a sign up form, or commenting on your site, integrate with Facebook Connect for users to share their activity automatically. If people are buying from your site, add an option for a post about the purchase to be automatically tweeted or added to their timeline.

The Corporate Brand Strategy: Big brands have been slow to adopt social media, often playing “follow the leader” to rivals, or finding themselves forced to jump in to resolve bad PR. Large organizations have the resources to dedicate to campaigns of a larger scale, and can see success with the following points:

• Divide and Conquer – For companies that sell many different products, it makes perfect sense to create different social hubs for different target audiences. Amazon is a perfect example of this strategy, as they have multiple twitter feeds for updates on books, music, movies, and other specialized topics. Additionally, a specific account for customer service will allow for more direct communication with customers in need.
• Develop Policy – For brands with different levels of management and a top down decision making culture, before you even create an account, you need to have a clear chain of internal communication as to what your responses will be, who is authorized to post and where to direct opportunities for business development.  In social media flexibility and speed are expected – on the social web, you’re judged by how fast a question is answered.
• Empower Employees – This aspect ties in to the social media policy point, but by encouraging your staff to share their experiences with the company, and acting as a contact point for the public to approach them with questions is a powerful way to be recognized as an innovator. The most well-known example of a company with an open social media platform for employees is Zappos, the shoe retailer who was purchased by Amazon for $ 1 billion in 2009.

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Social Media Optimization

In many ways, your logo is the face of your company. It’s the image your customers will associate with your brand, so it’s important to make sure that you get it right.

Here are 5 tips to keep in mind when designing a logo for your company.

1. Include your name…legibly—While there are some large corporations that are able to get away with abstract logos (the Nike swoosh comes to mind), you shouldn’t take that approach. You probably don’t have that kind of recognition, nor do you have the money to do the type of promotion necessary to make an abstract logo inextricably tied to your brand. So, include your company or product name in the logo, and make sure people can read it easily.
2. Don’t expect miracles—A new logo isn’t going to turn around your company’s fortunes. The sales won’t start suddenly flooding in just because you have a new logo; so while logo design is certainly important, you don’t want to put too much time, money, or effort into it. Keep things in perspective and get your priorities straight.
3. Less is more—Some of the best words of advice when designing your logo are “keep it simple.”  Your logo needs to be clear and easy to reproduce. If you have too many elements and complex themes going on, your message will get lost.
4. Look forward—While you can’t always predict the future, you need to be thinking about it when designing your logo. Where do you want your company to be 5-10 years from now? Will you be adding a new product or service line? What do you want people to think of when they think of your brand? How is the design landscape changing? These are all things to consider when creating a new logo.
5. Choose your designer wisely—Finally, you need to find a designer to bring your vision to life. Not all designers are good. In fact, the industry is plagued with terrible designers and design agencies that charge exorbitant rates for mediocre work. Spend some time shopping around. Always look at a designer’s portfolio before you make a hire.

What are some other logo design tips that should be on this list?

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SEO Hosting Blog

Last week I got the chance to attend the latest BlueGlass conference in LA. I’ve got to admit, when heading out to the US I had high expectations for this event having heard a lot of buzz around previous conferences they’ve held and you might have seen my interview with Chris Winfield ahead of the event. But I’d have to say, they exceeded expectations way beyond what I ever expected!

This was quite easily the best search event I have ever attended (and there’s been quite a few now!), the sessions were packed full of great content – once you’ve been to a lot of conferences you find yourself skipping quite a few sessions, but this conference was the exception – and every session was full to the back of the room! But as is normally the way, the highlight was the networking – you really could just sell tickets for “an audience with Greg Boser” show! Getting the chance to meet everyone before the event at Mike’s SEO BBQ was a great way to kick-off the conference – and the intimate feel of the event by having a limited number of 125 attendees and all staying at the amazing Standard Hotel in Downtown LA with a free bar and rooftop party is always an appreciated nice touch!

Anyway getting into the content, I’ve organised my tweets and notes so that hopefully you can pickup a couple of useful tips even if you weren’t able to attend the event:

Google

• A writer who has the biggest reach is who @GregBoser recommends hiring. This person can influence people in search result …
• Start removing title tags and see how Google rewrites them. Let Google give you hints on what they think is best. @Gregboser
• Great tip from @GregBoser 450 character descriptions give #SEO experts more control over SERP descriptions

Conversion Rate Optimisation

• Use descriptive words on buttons – ‘create a gift’, not ‘buy now’ @hnshah
• Design for conversions tips; CROToolkit, lightbox promotions, cross-promo ad banners, promote top posts @hnshah
• Stick to basics on Twitter, share great, relevant & interesting content. @KISSmetrics grown to 88,000 followers @hnshah
• Use aweber & WordPress for drip email marketing on blogs @hnshah
• CRO tools; whichtestwon.com, usertesting.com, 99designs.com for landing pages, visualwebsiteoptimizer.com @hnshah
• Great CRO landing page examples; RipFire, DollarShaveClub @jasonnazar
• Can also have social proof on purchase page…’verified by’, better business bureau, etc.@jasonnazar
• Use social proof CRO – client logos (e.g. visualwebsiteoptimizer.com), as seen on, customer testimonials @jasonnazar
• Call-to-action; size, colour & text biggest CRO quick win. Dark forest green button converts well – agree, green means go!  @jasonnazar
• Single biggest CRO tip; headline most important text on page – not call-to-action or on-page text. Great example; Square @jasonnazar

On-Site SEO

• Evaluate those low performing pages. Good reminder to either optimize them, or 301 to higher value sections. @alanbleiweiss
• Are your highest visited/stickiest pages converting? A/B test your call-to-action & content wording. @alanbleiweiss
• In Page Analytics in GA recommended by @alanbleiweiss to determine phrases people find relevant, based on internal CTRs
• 400% increase in organic visits shown by @alanbleiweiss as example of why you don’t need to look at granular kw level
• Smart bet is keyword data could go completely & not provided to =100% – interesting prediction by @alanbleiweiss
• ‘SEO is organic ad writing’ great quote by @aimclear
• @aimclear As far as KWs go, (not set) means the URL, GATC , or AdWords wasn’t set up correctly.
• ‘Within analytics work on the short-tail first because it helps you understand the long-tail.’ @aimclear
• GA not provided tip; segment landing page data by keyword & map to GWT to compare no of kw visits @aimclear
• @alanbleiweiss: So many finally validating what i was advocating last spring abt schema as the 2012 big opportunity in SEO

Link Building

• Buy traditional advertising then use that relationship to get free editorial links that last forever. @RavenJon
• Build private lists & set auto reminders to interact w/ people you want to connect w/ on Twitter @RavenJon
• Position yourself or your client as an expert source. Recommends @helpareporter to help them find you @RavenJon
• FullContact, BuzzStream & Tout recommended by @RavenJon to find contact details & manage relationships
• Great answer from @jamies to my question; how do you value how much a link is worth? Measure attention & traffic it generates
• @jamies Is tearing up , fantastic realtime ideas, highlighting TheVerge CMS, also likes AtlanticWire
• Great tip by @jamies: Google Analytics Query Explorer can be used to map traffic alongside links in @seomoz

Content Marketing / Infographics

• Infographic tips; work with a great publishing partner, capitalise on previous success & tap proven ideas @danieltynski
• Serve needs of business & potential customers, once you’ve targeted audience, by creating remarkable content @danieltynski
• Build a content team: Community Mgr, Content Strategist, Moderators, Guest Authors, Video Producers, Graphic Designers
• 43% of online news is shared via social networks, 27% of ppl who share are frequent sharers & responsible for 87% of shares

Blogging / Cultivating Visibility

• Email marketing tips from @chrisbrogan Brevity – 250 words max, don’t start with view in browser, don’t use dontreply@ address
• Nice tip from @copyblogger @chrisbrogan unsubscribe your annoying email subscribers, e.g. grammar nazi’s who always reply!
• Plain text emais have better delivery rates, take people to landing pages, healthy ratio of value vs promotion @copyblogger
• ‘We don’t buy lists, we build audiences.’ ~Brian Clark @copyblogger
• ‘never invest in the carpet, invest in the people who are walking on it!’ @chrisbrogan
•  ’Don’t be an artist. Be a business person who makes art.’ – @chrisbrogan
• There’s so many bloggers out there, but lack of real quality in most niches – still lots of big opportunities @copyblogger
• Thanks for the @copyblogger 10 landing page commandments @JasonNazar

WordPress

• Understand WP version numbers: .1 is a major release, .2 is a security update @yoast

Trusted Recommendations & New PR

• ‘always take your work seriously, don’t take yourself seriously’ great advice from @soniasimone
• Best pitches in the world are 7 words that describe exactly what you’re pitching @petershankman
• We tend to think more ass in chair time produces more. Take breaks. @soniasimone
• I never write unless I’ve just gotten a workout in. Working out spawns creativity. @petershankman
• Don’t just sent out press releases, have conversations @soniasimone
• ‘if you’re not making money from it, you’re doing it wrong’ on PR @petershankman
• ‘Personal recommendation is the new PR’ – absolutely true! @misswetapatel

There’s also been some great write-ups on the sessions, checkout the BlueGlass blog where Kelsey Libert did a great job on covering the key points from each. And if anyone else has tips to add or questions – please feel free to do so in the comments and I’ll keep an eye on these.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 50 Tips & Takeaways from BlueGlass LA

Related posts:

1. 154 Awesome Pubcon 2011 Takeaways, Tips & Tweets
2. BlueGlass LA Interview with Chris Winfield
3. Conversion Conference London: The First 58 Takeaways

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SEOptimise » blog

SMX Toronto was full of a lot of great information. I found that most sessions had at least one presentation that rivaled SMX Advanced conferences I’ve attended in the past, both in speaker quality and in content. In all sessions, every speaker hit it out of the park.

My favorite session was the day after the Penguin update hit, and amazingly there wasn’t a single mention of the webspam update, yet all the content was directly relevant. The session was the “Google Kitchen Sink Panel”, featuring speakers Duran Inci, Ken Dobell, Aaron Bradley, and Ryan Jones.

As a follow up to Greg’s post yesterday about the webspam update, I wanted to throw a quick bullet-point list of my takaways that can be implemented immediately by anyone.

Here is a summary, in short form, of the best takeaways that can help future-proof your site against updates like this Penguin update, or if you’ve already been “pecked” by the Penguin, this is your battle plan, with hand-picked points I took away with me from Toronto:

[Note: Up-to-date SEO professionals won't find anything new here, but I'm a big believer in checklists to hold ourselves to a broad set of best practices, which is why I hope this is universally useful to anyone. My favorite points are at the top and bolded.]

• 2012 SEO is about optimizing data, not keywords, it’s about making content accessible in a wide variety of formats across all devices. – Ken Dobell
• Develop “Power Content” – this is how it’s done:
• Create an update schedule for the top performing 100 pieces of content and update them every 90 days or less (includes home page). Every time you update it, make sure the “last modified” field in your XML sitemap is updated to mark the date of the change. This keeps content fresh. - Duran Inci
• 1000-2000 words in length, should be exceptional quality, use advanced research and present new or interesting ideas.
• Content does NOT equal “copy”. It needs to be RICH – use images, videos, formatting, headings, quotes, etc.
• Use this power content on main pages and category pages, if you have an ecommerce site.
• Get social sharing buttons on all your pages (in another session, Aaron Friedman cited a BrightEdge study stating that social sharing buttons make your content 7 times more visible)
• Remove all exact anchor text links, when possible. - Duran Inci
• Refresh the home page content often. - Duran Inci
• Fix all crawl errors.
• Edit and optimize all major page titles and descriptions so that they are not keyword stuffed, and so they are unique.
• Make sure the blog is in a subdirectory (not subdomain), and is updated regularly with high quality content.
• Create a mobile version of the website – Google cares about multiple devices now so make sure the site works on all of them.
• No link exchanges or sketchy link schemes.
• Create supplemental content for pages and products, like shopping guides. – Duran Inci
• Use a video sitemap, if applicable.
• This is my thought, but heck, even a geo sitemap, schema, and any other ‘bells and whistles’ we can throw on the site will help to differentiate.
• Focus on long-tail: Google’s average search query is over 4 words in length – also, broad (trophy) terms are not nearly as valuable in conversion.
• “A good SEO optimizes where Google is. A great SEO optimizes where Google is going to be.” – @RyanJones, paraphrasing the Great One.

Which of these methods have you already used in practice, and for how long? Is anything here new to you? Did you attend SMX Toronto and want to add anything to the list?

Let’s talk in the comments!

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SEO.com

Today I’ve presented a few tips and tricks to gain the favour of marketing directors at #BrightonSEO.  Whether you are in-house or agency side, selling the value of SEO lacks the glamour of TV advertising, the accountability of PPC, and the buzz-factor of social media.  Here are a few tips and tricks to better promote SEO to marketing directors.

• The secretary/receptionist is your best friend.  These are the gate keepers to your budget, and they’re invaluable.  Chat them up, find out what they like to do at the weekends, and ask about their families; when you have this type of rapport going it’s much easier to ask “has Mike had a chance to review my budget proposal with the MD?” or “Does Mike have any more meetings with other agencies this week?”
• Say My Name.  The sweetest word to anyone, in any language, is their own name.  Use it often to maintain interest as you explain your justifications for increase in budget or while selling your SEO service.
  
• Sharing is Caring.  The best way to get in contact with a new business lead or gain the favour of your in-house marketing director is to offer them something.  For instance, if I have an extra ticket to a marketing event or have acquired a niche report on a competitor of interest, I’ll be sure to share it with my new relevant new business leads.
• Smile.  I know, an American telling Brits to smile isn’t convincing – but it works Especially when you pick up the phone, people can tell whether your smiling in your voice.  If Marketing Director Mike has a choice of having a 15 minute meeting with Depressed Deborah or Smiling Sam – Mike will pick Smiling Sam.
  
• Investigate.  You want budget, but what does your Marketing Director of choice hope for?  Is he stressed over the lack of traffic to a new site just launched?  Is he pondering how to spend the remaining budget from a TV campaign which was cancelled at short notice?  Ask questions.
• ABC’s.  Repeat after me “Have I explained that clearly?”.  Marketing Directors are looking at the bigger picture, and as a general rule don’t understand terms like “build directory links” and “institute canonical tags”, nor will most admit they don’t understand.  So keep your explanations in terms a 10 year old would understand.
• Open Questions.  An open question is any questions which initiates discussion and cannot be answered with a Yes or No.  Good open questions usually start with the words how, what, and why.  For instance, “How did you think last year’s SEO budget performed?” will reveal more detailed insight than “Were you happy with last year’s SEO spend?”
• Positive words.  Setting a negative tone, with negative words and thoughts will automatically put dark evil clouds in your marketing directors mind.  Keep things positive, if you’re pitching for new business don’t speak negatively of other agencies, if you’re in house, don’t diss the way Bob the PPC Manager mismanaged his money and it would have been better spent on link building (posicionamiento web).
• Shush!  As the investigator, it’s up to you to nod your head, take notes, and listen.  This is not a 50/50 conversation, it’s 90/10.  The more you listen, the more your are graduating into the role of trusted advisor instead of annoying employee harassing for budget or money hungry agency.
• Alternative avenues for raising funds.  We can all talk about social search and personalised search till the cows come home, so why not look to dip your foot into the resources available in social media?  Is there an in-house team which could help build links through blogger relationships?  For agencies, can you exemplify why your approach works so well with social, and additional budget should be pulled in to work on a united approach?
• What’s the impact?  Marketing Directors must legitimise everything they’ve spent, and so it’s these terms that you must present your solution to them in.  There are three main ways to do this – 1) Revenue 2) Rankings and 3) Traffic.
  
• Revenue.  Evaluate the organic exposure you’re predicting you’ll receive in terms of revenue.  If you get position three for the term “dog insurance”, what does that look like for your marketing director?
• Measure it as PPC.  If you’ve got a plan to boost rankings for a hundred of keywords, value that traffic as it would be worth in PPC exposure.   What sort of media budget would be required to the projected levels you expect?
• Rank.  Appease their vanity!  How often do MDs and Marketing Directors search for themselves online?  A lot.  Plain how your plan will launch them to the top of the rankings for the terms that they hold dear to themselves.  Even if this isn’t your personal priority, if it’s their priority, work it into the plan as a key point.
• Traffic.  Has a lot of money just been invested in a new website that’s invisible in SERPs?  Have conversions rates on site been poor due to the wrong sort of traffic arriving?  Explain how your strategy will deliver the right sort of traffic, and at what sort of increased levels?
• Raise your hand with the answer to solve your Directors problems.  You’ve listened, you’ve asked open questions, you’ve learned what your Directors priorities are, you’ve understood what has gone wrong in the past and have put measures into place to ensure those bad things will never happen again.  So provide your solution!  This should be in the last 10% of your investigation, where you as the trusted advisor know what to do.
• Take a Risk Yourself.  Guarantees are great, but holding them in place with tangible results puts a lot more girth in what you’re predicting will happen.  For agencies, this may mean discounts or refunds if certain projections aren’t met.  In house, this may mean striking deals around future performance – if certain results are met, more budget from lower performing avenues will be set aside for you in Q3.

Do you fly the SEO flag in house or as part of the new business function at an agency?  What tips and tricks have you come across to gain additional budget or sign a contract?

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How to Pitch SEO: Sales Tips for Appeasing Marketing Directors #BrightsonSEO

Related posts:

1. 116 Best Tips from SES London 2012!
2. 5 Powerful Facebook Guerilla Marketing Tips to Outsmart Competitors
3. 154 Awesome Pubcon 2011 Takeaways, Tips & Tweets

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SEOptimise » blog

Almost every website uses contact forms for one purpose or another. On my website, I use contact forms on my home page and service pages as a conversion tool. It’s how I generate leads.

But having success using contact forms on your website requires more than just slapping up a form on each page. Here are 5 tips to help you create better contact forms.

1. Make them visible—Visitors shouldn’t have to search your website high and low to figure out how to get in touch with you. Your contact forms should be clearly visible on your home page and product/service pages. Most studies I’ve seen recommend placing the contact form along the right-hand side of the page, above the fold in order to get the most responses.
2. Add an interesting design element to them—Don’t just add lifeless contact fields to your page. Spruce things up and create a contact form that jumps out from the page. After all, you want people to see it and be motivated to fill it out, right?  A creative design for your contact form adds life to your page and can increase response rates. Just make sure you don’t sacrifice usability and simplicity while designing your contact form.
3. Keep them short—The purpose of the contact form is to get only the most essential information from the visitor. You’re just trying to get the ball rolling. All you need is their name, email address, and information about why they’re contacting you. Don’t ask for anything more, or else you’ll kill your conversion rate.
4. Explain the benefits or purpose of completing the form—Why should anyone spend their time completing the form to contact you? People don’t do anything without a good reason. Let people know what the benefits or purpose is of completing the contact form. If it’s to get a free quote, put that on the form. If it’s to subscribe to your email list, give them some benefits of becoming a subscriber. Don’t just say “contact us” and expect people to do it.
5. Avoid CAPTCHAs—Not only are CAPTCHAs on contact forms annoying and frustrating to complete, they can also harm your conversion rates. I hate SPAM as much as the next guy, but I’m not willing to lose quality leads in my battle to reduce SPAM responses.

What’s your best tip for creating more effective contact forms? Share it with us by leaving a comment below.

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SEO Hosting Blog

Tips to drive traffic to your web site

If you have your own website, online startup, or even online business, promotion is something that is key to being successful especially in the early stages. Many people tend to pay for services to come in and help boost their SEO and traffic or to buy advertisements. But if you already used a do it yourself website builder to make your site in the first place, why can’t you do the traffic building yourself too? Well actually you can, and here are some tips on do it yourself traffic building and SEO without having to spend a dime.

Guest Posting

This is one of the most time tested and effective ways of helping to build your site’s traffic and SEO metrics. The concept is pretty simple. You write a great piece of original content for another blog. They in turn post that content but give a byline where you can talk about yourself or your site and then include a backlink to it. The site owner has gotten some great free content and you now have a link exposed to a group of new readers as well as a link that will help increase the value of some of your metrics such as Alexa ranking. Every site has different policies and guidelines when it comes to guest posting so make sure to review them and submit guest posts that are in compliance so you have the best chance of getting it published.

Site Submission

Not only are there plenty of blog directories out there, but if you are a business there are plenty of sites whose sole purpose is to list and review internet startups. You can spend a little time submitting your own site there with the potential to be reviewed and gain you some free publicity. Plus, a few positive reviews can really help create some interest in your site. Other sites you can submit to are social networks and social sites that are designed for sharing links.

Analytics

Though this doesn’t directly solve any traffic or SEO woes, it can help you target the causes. Properly reading and understanding your site’s analytics can help you see where the issue lies. For example if you have a high bounce rate, chances are your home page isn’t appealing or intuitive enough to be explored by your visitors. Or if your conversion rate from search engines is low you may want to look at registering with the search engines or changing around your keywords.
So if your site is just starting up, there’s no need to spend a fortune on services from freelancers or other businesses for simple things that you can go ahead and do yourself.

If you liked ‘DIY Traffic Building and SEO Tips’, then you may also enjoy other articles about search engine optimization (posicionamiento en buscadores) and social media available at Black Box Social Media.

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Social Media Marketing And SEO For Business

As much as I try to handle client communications through email, I always have clients who want to have conference calls to discuss projects. About the only thing I hate more than sitting on a conference call is driving across town for a pointless meeting.

Now, I know what you’re thinking—What’s so bad about getting on the phone to talk to a client?

In theory, conference calls are a good thing. They allow you to brainstorm and interact in a way that you can’t really do with email. They also help you strengthen your relationships with clients, because there’s just something about hearing the other person’s voice that makes the relationship more human.

But the problem is that most conference calls end up being a waste of time. They are filled with ideal chatter, unprepared participants, people talking over one another, dropped calls, mumbling people who are impossible to understand…shall I go on?

Fortunately, there are some things I’ve been able to do to make the conference calls I participate in a little more productive.

1. Create an agenda and email it to all participants before the call—Make a quick outline of the main points that need to be discussed during the conference call. Email this is everyone who will be participating on the phone call, and urge them to have the agenda on hand at the time of the call.
2. Gather everything you need ahead of time—Take a look at the agenda for your call. Will you need to gather any materials to reference during your call? For example, if the conference call is about the discussing the mockups for your new logo design, you’ll need to have those mockups on hand for the call. Be prepared so you aren’t scrambling during the call and holding everything up.
3. Stay on schedule—Start the call on time. End it on time. Simple.
4. Take notes during the call—Invest in a hands-free headset for your phone so that you can easily type or write down notes as you talk. There’s nothing more frustrating than having a lengthy conference call about something important, only to have everyone later forget and ignore the things you discussed. Write everything down.
5. Send a summary to all participants afterward—Once the call is finished, create a brief meeting summary based on the notes you took. Provide a brief recap of what you discussed, and if there are specific action items that people need to follow up on, mention that in your summary.

What tips do you have for making conference calls more productive?

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SEO Hosting Blog

I’m not going to lie and tell you that everyone can be a great writer. Writing is just like anything else—some people are great it at, others suck, and everyone else is just average. The good news is that writing is a skill that can be developed. There are certain things you can do to become a better writer. Here are 5 of them.

1. Know the goal of the content—Before you start to write anything, figure out what the purpose of the content is. For example, if you’re writing a landing page, the purpose is probably to sell something. The purpose of this blog post is to instruct you on how to become a better writer. By knowing what you want to accomplish with the piece, you’ll have a clear direction for your words.
2. Don’t overstate the obvious—Don’t tell your readers something they already know. I didn’t start this post by talking about how important it is to be a good writer. You already know that. Skip the obvious crap, and get to the meat and potatoes of the content.
3. Cut the fluff—Every writer struggles with trimming the fluff from his or her work. Many experienced writers will tell you to print out your first draft, take a red pen through half of it, and then cut that in half again to get your final draft. Force yourself to find things you can cut from your content to help you create a tighter, more to the point draft.
4. Don’t try to write like someone else—Too often, writers try to imitate the style of other writers they look up to, and they often do so poorly. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be an avid reader and study the craft of writing from others, but I’m saying that you do need to be yourself. There’s no one else quite like you, and if you try to be someone else, your true voice won’t shine through.
5. Let your writing breathe before you finalize it—Everything that I write sits on the shelf for a day before I go back and edit it. You have to take a step back from your writing, let it breathe, and come back to it later with a fresh set of eyes. You’ll always find something that can be improved.

What’s your single best tip for aspiring writers? Share it with us by leaving a comment below.

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SEO Hosting Blog

On February 24, I spoke at SEMpdx’s SearchFest on Advanced Analytics with Conrad Saam. I covered quite a few Google Analytics tips that I consider rather custom or advanced, and my slide deck is attached at the end of this post.

If you are in the Portland area, you missed a great conference, and I’d strongly encourage you to consider attending next year.

I want to focus on the multi-channel funnel piece of my presentation in this post primarily, and also I’d like to keep this short, sweet and actionable, so here goes.

Multi-Channel Funnels

Added back in August, it seems like everyone, including myself, has been meaning to check out Google Analytics’ multi-channel funnels, but just hasn’t gotten around to them. Now’s the time to check them out, because there just might be some real gold in there. The following is the biggest takeaway I can offer about multi-channel funnels.

Create Your Own Custom Channel Groupings

There’s three reasons for this, The first is MAJOR.

1. The stock “social network” group is essentially worthless!!!

Would you consider Twitter a social network? How about Google Plus? Yeah, I thought so. Well, the built-in logic for determining which referral source counts as a social network is a bit outdated. Take a look at this here picture for proof:

What we see there is actually the view when drilled down into the “Referral” basic channel grouping. Not “Social Network”. That’s because clicks coming from t.co and plus.google.com are not in the stock “Social Network” channel grouping logic. So let’s fix that right away, shall we?

Let’s copy the Basic Channel Grouping template

Now let’s click edit in the default social network grouping

Finally, we’ll scroll to the bottom and add the regex to include t.co and plus.google.com into that group. That regex (in text form) is ^(.*\.)?t\.co$ and ^(.*\.)?plus\.google\.com$

Could you imagine spending hours looking into multi-channel funnels, only to later discover that clicks from Twitter weren’t considered “social”? Yikes. Fix this fast.

2. Separate Your Branded/Unbranded Organic Searches

You’re hopefully segmenting your branded and unbranded organic search keywords when looking at your keyword reports. For most any business, this is just as important when looking at multi-channel. You’ve probably got your regex already built for your branded keywords as an advanced segment. Grab that, and follow me down this wonderful set of images I’ve lovingly plucked from the web.

Add Ye Olde New Rule

Apply your branded regex logic

Now, just recreate the same steps above for our unbranded channel but flip the “include” on the keyword line to “exclude” and voila! Done, right?!

Actually, no. Remember everyone’s new favorite keyword? Yup. Foiled again by (not provided). I hate you so, (not provided).

Make sure you ALSO create a (not provided) channel because otherwise it will fall into your unbranded keywords group using the logic we just did above. And that just ain’t right. Personally, I try to get back at (not provided) whenever I can by calling it names. Who’s gonna stop me, really? Some faceless group of keywords hiding in a big bucket? Yeah. Right. Hey! (not provided)! Your momma’s so fat that when she…okay.

3. Everyone’s Channels Should be Custom

This one’s kind of a no-brainer, but everyone’s tracking should be different. Use affiliates? Might want to create a channel for ‘em. Should be pretty simple logic if you’ve got your affiliate links tagged with a campaign tracking code like utm_medium=affiliates.

Hows about AdWords? Could you break your campaigns into separate channels based on the point in the buying process the buyer might be? This screen cap from one of my slides should illustrate:

Hopefully you get the point, but if not, take a dive through your (other) channel grouping. That’s where all the leftovers fall by default. You might discover some campaign tracking parameters or referring sites that really deserve their own channel.

Some Other Tidbits

File Downloads

Want to track file downloads as pageviews, but don’t want to go through the trouble of manually tagging each download link with a virtual pageview? Entourage.js is a simple JS file created by Tian Davis and TechOctave that will do all the hard work for you.

Events

Events can be used to track some snazzy interactions on your site. Checkout Justin Cutroni’s latest series of posts on content tracking and analysis with Google Analytics’ Events. In my presentation, I highlighted the usefulness of tracking checkout errors with events. It’s pretty simple, really.

Alrighty, that’ll do it for me. Thanks to the SEMpdx folks for inviting me to SearchFest. It was an extreme pleasure. Portland’s wonderful, the audience asked great questions, and I ate a fantastic grilled cheese with bacon and apple butter. If you had come, I probably would’ve given you a bite. So there.

Oh, here you go, here are my slides.

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