Tracking your marketing analytics can provide a ton of great insight into the performance of your marketing initiatives, show your boss how marketing is faring, and help you to prove that inbound marketing is really paying off.

But that’s only a small piece of why analytics are valuable. In fact, the true value of your analytics is what you can do with them. Good marketers use analytics for the first few things we mentioned. Great marketers use them to adapt, improve, and modify their marketing efforts. In other words, great marketers make their analytics actionable.

Oh, so you want to be one of those great marketers? Well here are 9 ways to make your analytics actionable.

Use Your Analytics To…

1) … Identify Which Topics to Blog About

Use your blog analytics to determine which topics resonate with your target audience. To do so, group blog articles by topic (for HubSpot customers, export Blog Analytics and then sort in Excel) and then take a look at the views for those individual blog posts. Do you notice a trend in how certain topics perform compared to others?

Adapt your strategy to create more content about the topics your marketing personas care about, and less about the topics that don’t resonate. For example, if you’re a unicorn breeder and you blog about various unicorn care-related topics, you might find that your readers are more interested in topics about unicorn diet than unicorn exercise. If that’s the case, you should create more content about healthy unicorn diets!

2) … Refine Your SEO Strategy

Unless you’re just getting started, hopefully you’ve already conducted some initial keyword research to inform your SEO strategy. But if you want to take it to the next level and start refining your strategy, the SEO analytics you’ve built up to this point can play a very important role in deciding which keywords to target in your link-building and content creation efforts.

Take a look at your closed-loop analytics to determine which keywords have driven the most traffic, leads, and customers for your business. This will give you a sense of which keywords people are already using to find you, and which keywords are actually sending you qualified traffic (i.e. the keywords that contribute to leads and customers). Using this information, you might want to start targeting other long-tail keyword variations based on these high performing keywords.

You can also use this data to identify holes in your content creation strategy. If you’re generating a lot of traffic for a given keyword or phrase (maybe you have an awesome blog article that ranks highly for it, for example), yet none of that traffic is converting, it could be that you have no marketing offers relevant to that keyword for visitors to convert on. With that information, you could create new offers to address that problem and start capitalizing on all that lost traffic.

3) … Decide Which Social Media Sites to Spend Your Time On

With so many social media sites at your disposal, it can be hard to prioritize how much time you should be spending on each one. Let analytics be your guide. Look at your traffic sources granularly to see how much traffic and how many leads each social media site is referring to your website. For many marketers, LinkedIn is the top lead generator among the social networks, but this may be different for you.

You should also used closed-loop data to determine how many of those visitors and leads are actually converting into customers for each social channel. Then allocate your time accordingly. If you’re generating little traffic, leads, and customers from Twitter, for example, but are seeing a lot of ROI from Facebook, spend more of your time engaging your Facebook community and less time tweeting.

4) … Determine Email Frequency

Are you emailing your list too much — or not enough? To determine this, you’ll also need to do a little testing, but the insights you’ll gain from your analytics as a result will help you determine your optimal email sending frequency. First, figure out your hypothesis. Are you trying to see if increasing your email frequency yields increased conversions? Perhaps you want to see if decreasing your sending frequency results in fewer unsubscribes than usual.

Once you’ve used you analytics to segment your communications (see what we did there?), choose a segment of your list to use as your sample, and use email marketing metrics provided by your email service provider such as open rate, deliverability rate, unsubscribe rate, and click-through rate to establish the current benchmarks for that specific segment. Now create a series of emails, and send them using the frequency you decided upon in your hypothesis (maybe it’s increasing from once every two weeks to once a week, for example). When the test is over, compare your analytics from the test against the analytics from your previous sending frequency. Do the results align with your hypothesis?

5) … Decide Which Content to Use in Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Not sure which content you should use in your lead nurturing email campaigns? As you’re mapping the content you use to a lead’s stage in the sales cycle, you’ll want to fill in that content map with the most successful content you have. So how do you identify which of your content performs the best? You check your analytics, that’s how!

Use your landing page analytics to determine which marketing offers have the highest conversion rates and contributed to the most lead-to-customer conversions. When you’re choosing the best content for a particular lead nurturing campaign, choose the most relevant offer with the highest lead-to-customer conversions.

5) … Segment Your Email Communications

Are you segmenting your email communication? MarketingSherpa reports that emails that have been tailored to specific audiences through segmentation get 50% more clicks than their counterparts. If that’s not reason to start segmenting, I’m not sure what is. But if you want to start improving the performance of your email sends through segmentation, guess what you need? You guessed it: data!

There are a number of ways you can segment your email communications: by geography (especially if you’re a business for which location is a major factor), by industry/role, by  content interests, by point in the sales cycle, etc. To determine which segments make the most sense for your particular business, take a look at the data you already have available. Analyze the information you gather from your leads via lead-capture forms and lead intelligence. Figure out the most logical groupings based on your buyer personas, the information your recipients want from you, the questions they might have, or their stage in the buying cycle. For HubSpot customers, the List Creation Tool makes it easy to segment emails, and the Marketing Automation Tool allows you to trigger email communication based on specific visitor activities on your website.

7) … Improve Your Calls-to-Action and Landing Pages

When was the last time you did a little audit of how your calls-to-action (CTAs) and landing pages were faring, and how they complement each other? Have you ever? Analyzing the click-through rates of your CTAs as well as the traffic and conversion rates of the landing pages they point to can reveal a lot about how effective each asset is, and also provide hints to what can be improved about them. (Note: HubSpot customers can get this data from the Call-to-Action Module and the Landing Pages Tool, respectively.)

For example, if you have a high click-through rate on your CTA but the conversion rate of the landing page it points to is low, then you probably have a problem with your landing page. If your landing page has a killer conversion rate but you find that traffic to that page is low, then it’s likely the CTA for it is the element that needs work.

So what do you do after your initial diagnosis? Start A/B testing! When it comes to CTA and landing page design, a little tweak can go a long way to improve click-through and conversion rates. Here’s a great guide to landing page testing, and another one for CTA testing. For HubSpot customers, A/B testing is easy with the CTA Module and the Advanced Landing Pages Tool.

… Score & Prioritize Your Leads for Sales

Lead scoring is a great way to help your sales team prioritize your leads and only work those that are qualified. If you’re a business that generates lots of leads and you want to implement a lead scoring program, there’s no way around it — you’re going to need to rely on your analytics to set it up. First things first: you need to decide what a marketing qualified lead (MQL) looks like for your business.

An MQL is a lead who is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on their demographic information and their activity on your site before they become a customer. To paint a picture of what an MQL means for your business, you’ll need to gather three types of data from your analytics: demographic information, lead intelligence, and closed-loop data. Demographic information is data you gather from your lead-capture forms to tell you about a lead’s role, company size/industry, etc. Lead intelligence data will give you information about a lead’s interests and activity on your website (e.g. forms completed, number of pages visited, etc.). Closed-loop data can tell you which conversion events you offer on your website have the highest close rates.

Combining this data together will help you identify which criteria make for a marketing qualified lead. Then you can assign point values to these criteria depending on which are more critical than others and decide on a total score that warrants a lead being passed onto Sales. Then your sales team will have a very numerical way to prioritize which leads to work, and which leads they should let marketing nurture more.

For a more in-depth explanation of how to implement a lead scoring process, read this post. HubSpot users can leverage the Lead Management Tool and the Lead Grader App to set lead scoring criteria, auto-score, and re-score leads in real time.

9) … Focus on the Marketing Channels That Actually Work

While we’re on the topic, lead scoring isn’t the only thing you can do with closed-loop data. Another very valuable benefit of closed-loop data is that it lets you compare how effective each of your channels is compared to others. Similar to how you’d use analytics to decide which social media channels are worth your time, you can use your analytics to see which marketing channels — social media vs. email vs. SEO vs. blogging vs. paid search vs. any other channel — are the most effective at generating actual customers for your business, and which ones are lagging behind.

If you notice that email is your best source of customers and that SEO and blogging generate few customers for your business, for example, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity. Invest time in ramping up your blogging efforts and better optimizing your blog content and the rest of your website so more people can find you through search. Or perhaps you’re spending a lot of time on your social presence, but the leads you generate from social media never actually turn into customers (but leads generated from your blog have a high customer conversion rate); it might be wise to start directing more social media traffic to your blog rather than to dedicated landing pages.

Thinking critically about your closed-loop analytics can help you determine which channels are your bread winners and which aren’t so you can adjust your efforts accordingly to make the time you spend marketing more fruitful.

How else can you use your analytics to make actionable improvements to your marketing programs?

Image Credit: Courtney Dirks

Connect with HubSpot:

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Source
HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

How to Get More Twitter Followers

Twitter is BOOMING.   According to Fortune, Twitter now has more than 100 million active users. That’s users that log in at least once a month. And get this, half of those people are signing in everyday. That’s prime real estate for branding your business.  But the biggest question always boils down to “how do I get more followers” or better yet,” how do I get more targeted followers?”  Using these three ways to get more Twitter followers should allow you to pick up a nice size of followers in now time!

Get More Twitter Followers | 1- Follow Related Twitter Accounts

This strategy takes a little strategic thinking. You must think, “What type of people do I want following me?” This may be your target market and people directly related to your target market. Once you have this question answered, think of who those people may be following already. Once you’ve decided that, find the person or business you think your suspects are following and look through their followers list. Voila! Their list will provide you with a robust list of potential followers that are right at your fingertips. Follow the people you believe will benefit your mission and give them some time to follow you back, it would be great if you also socialized with them a bit too. For the people that don’t follow you back after a few days, rinse and repeat. A great tool for unfollowing people that aren’t following you back, check out Who unfollowed me. As a bonus tip, if you want to keep track of the accounts your suspects are following, add them to a “list”, that way you can keep track of your resources.

Get More Twitter Followers | 2- Post Relevant Content With Links 60-80% of The Time

People love interesting and breaking news. Posting juicy content that your followers love on your timeline will make you a sweet spot for engaging information. Studies done by Dan Zarrella shows that the ideal percentage of tweets containing links should be about 60-80% of your total post. Don’t be greedy and only post about your content, give your followers a unique experience. That way they will look forward to seeing what’s interesting going on inside your tweets.  A rule of thumb to ensure you aren’t self promoting too much is to use the 1/9 rule. This means that you post at least 9 post not about you or your business for every one post that include you or your business.

Get More Twitter Followers | 3- Tweet Later in the Day

Studies have shown that tweeting after noon has shown higher click through rates (CTR’s). This means that spending your effort and time in the afternoon and evening when more people are online, will allow you to get more replies, retweets and followers. It may also help if you automate some of your tweets so it won’t be so much of a burden to continuously monitor your updates and interactions. One of the best social media management tools is the 7 Minute Dashboard.

There you have it! The recipe for success. Keep up the engagement, post useful content, follow the right people, and you’ll be on the path to have a Twitter powerhouse in no time!

About the Guest Author - Mike Calloway is the founder of Trinity Marketing, a digital marketing firm that specializes in SEO and Web Design. In his spare time he loves making music, being an avid car enthusiast, and studying successful businesses. He can be found on Twitter at @WesTruthLives and Google Plus+ Mike Calloway

If you liked ’3 Ways to Get More Twitter Followers’, then you may also enjoy other articles about Twitter and Social Media Marketing available at Black Box Social Media.

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Social Media Marketing And SEO For Business

Social media is not just for B2C companies! In fact, some studies have shown that B2B companies are seeing better results with social media marketing than many B2C brands are. Here are three ways B2B companies can better leverage the power of social media to help their own bottom lines.

Use social media in conjunction with offline activities.
Social media is already a huge component of B2B tradeshows, with conference hashtags making it easy for attendees to stay up-to-date no matter where they are, companies live blogging during presentations and so forth. But social media marketing can be integrated into other forms of offline marketing like direct mail or local event marketing as well. Encourage customers (current and potential) to Like you on Facebook or follow your brand on Twitter even if they aren’t on those sites at that exact moment. You want to remind your target audience about your online presence as frequently as possible to make your message stick, even if they aren’t online when you tell them.

Build a bigger social network.
B2B companies shouldn’t just focus on connecting with existing customers via social networking sites, but also build social relationships with industry leaders, influencers and decision makers, and even competitors. You can never be certain whose influence will grow or wane over the year, and having a large social network greatly increases your chances of your messaging strategy reaching a greater percentage of your target network. Think about it like this—let’s say you’re target consumer is IT Directors for mid-sized companies. Instead of just trying to reach them directly, also focus on connecting with those who work with the IT Director like developers, managers, web design (diseño web)ers, etc. These connections might be the first step to getting your brand in front of that IT Director.

Promote everything.
When I say everything, I mean just about everything. Have a webinar coming up next month? Send weekly tweets inviting your followers to signup (don’t forget the link!) for the next few weeks, then post the recorded webinar to your Facebook page for those who couldn’t attend. Use LinkedIn Groups to promote your blog content and post job openings or company news to your company page. Post links to online press releases, white papers, articles your company is mentioned in—everything that can give your network a reason to engage with your brand and build your online brand presence.

Remember that B2B marketing is driven by relationships. The sales cycle is much longer than most B2C interactions, meaning you have that much more time to build strong connections with your social network. B2B sales decisions are much less impulsive than most B2C purchases ($ 70k piece of equipment vs. $ 5 sandwich), so you’ll be spending a long time with your customers and staying in touch via social media.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

Let’s be honest—most business blogs suck. See, companies have been launching blogs for a few years now just because “it’s the thing to do.” Everyone else is doing it, so they do it too. Normally, they launch a blog that only a few people read and that offers no benefit to their company.

What’s so terrible about most business blogs? Business blogs that suck often:

1. Bring nothing new to the table—If people can read the content you’re publishing on dozens of other blogs in your niche, why would they bother reading your blog? If you want to build a loyal base of readers, you need to provide people with content they can’t find anywhere else. That doesn’t mean that you can’t focus on topics others are writing about. It just means that you need to find fresh angles and offer unique insights.
2. Write for the search engines first—Blogging is still a great tool for increasing your search engine presence, but if that’s the only reason you’re blogging, you’re doing it wrong. Optimizing your blog is smart, but if you’re only focused on writing posts for the search engines, you’re going to end up with a low quality blog that no one is passionate about reading.
3. Try to be someone you’re not—There are a lot of great bloggers out there who have truly special voices. Some are funny and witty, others are tough and biting. There’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other bloggers, but if you try to mimic their style and be someone you’re not, it’s going to ring false with readers.
4. Never take a stand on the issues—Stop playing it safe. This is your blog. People read it because they want to know what you think about certain topics. Don’t try to be on both sides of the fence at once. Tell your readers what you really think. Offer your opinions and back them up with research and facts. Don’t apologize for what you think. Be strong in your convictions, whether people like them or not.
5. Let spammers take over the comments—Comment moderation is an important part of blogging. If you don’t clean up your comments, readers will be turned off by all of the spammy comments. Simply put, it makes your blog look unprofessional and unmaintained.

If you want your business blog to be successful, avoid the 5 mistakes above.

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SEO Hosting Blog

Posted by JoannaLord

It happened friends. After years of Rand exposing me to the many benefits of inbound marketing I am ready to admit it…{big gulp}…today's marketer needs to be doing more than paid marketing. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, if you are only doing paid marketing you are failing yourself and your company. THERE I SAID IT. I feel better. Way better actually.

Because it's true. Things have changed. There is no longer two main players in the game (SEO and PPC). Search marketing itself has evolved. We've covered a great deal of this here on the blog so I won't go into it too much. If you need a reminder, I urge you to go check out Rand's posts where he outlines The New Era of Inbound Marketing, and outlines how quickly it is growing. As marketers, we saw the shift coming, and now we are feeling it in our every day gigs. Our roles are expanding as traditional SEO itself expands. There is so much happening all around us. Who is freaking out? Yeah me too.

The real question you may be asking yourself is, "why is this paid marketing lady talking about inbound marketing?" Good question. The other day I was running through my to-do list and I couldn't help but notice how not-focused it was on paid marketing. In fact, most of my day was spent brainstorming with others on how to better share data, repurpose existing assets, and collaborate. While Justin and I manage paid marketing here at Moz, more and more of our time is spent on learning and leveraging our inbound efforts more effectively.

I thought I'd run through some ways that I'm leaning on our inbound marketing efforts to both reduce Moz's costs and capture more leads. Did you all know you could get leads for free? Yeah, crazypants I know. Anyway, here are the top ten ways I've leveraged inbound as a paid marketer here at Moz;

#10: Share Persona Outlines
You know who is really good at researching a target audience? Content writers. Recently, Michael King actually did a killer webinar on understanding your target audience and using social media tools to help define your best audience. It covers this concept really well. The idea is there are so many excellent demographic tools available to us now that these social networks want us to buy ads on them. We can look at audience sizes, location, categories, etc. All of this information has been helping organic marketers write targeted content for years. Paid marketers should be leaning on this data. What have they discovered that could help me better target high-value leads?  Outline your target audience and extracting personas can be really challenging, but the more teams connect on this the better all our marketing efforts are targeted.

#9: Leverage Landing Pages
Design resources are hard to come by. Here at Moz we have Derric and Ramil basically sleeping in the office and we still have a backlog of projects that need their creative brains. Ask any paid marketer what is the bottleneck and often you will hear design resources pop up. So what can we do? Use landing pages that our inbound marketers have already queued up for us! Brilliant! Often times these pages are beautifully designed, and laced with excellent engagement opportunities. These are mandatory in a solid inbound marketing page and they are requirements of a successful paid search lander…coincidence? I think not. 

#8: Exchange Conversion Reports
Oh conversion data, how sweet you are. I think most paid marketers are looking at the SEO data at their company. At least I hope they are! Beyond that though, there is more data you should be looking at. Here at Moz, we are a little data crazy. Jen, our Community Wrangler, puts together amazing metrics on our social activities every week. I have found that by mining her weekly data summaries I can see what content has gone hot and where. I can see where we are increasing brand awareness and what type of people are taking to the Moz brand. From there I can better allocate our budget to supplement these efforts. 

#7: Collaborate on Keyword Research
So this one is one of those things we keep saying we are going to do, but rarely does it actually happen. I am always amazed by the keyword research process. First off, it's really time consuming. Secondly, it's not effective as a one-time step, it really needs to be done in an ongoing basis. Yet despite all this, both paid teams and organic teams have been doing separate keyword research for years. Ick. Yuck.

An awesome benefit to doing inbound marketing is the speed in which we can detect if something resonates. Where as before I might have used paid search budget to test an adjective or product description, I can now push out a targeted piece of content and see how the audience responds. It's immediate data collection and its statistically valid. I can't get over the power of the social graph when it comes to crowdsourcing reactions to certain keywords. This is the new keyword research in my opinion. We must combine our traditional keyword tools with audience response across these inbound channels. 

#6: Repurpose Content
This one is pretty obvious, yet, so easy to skip over. I am guilty of this too often myself. Paid marketers need to be driving traffic to past inbound marketing wins. For example, about a year and a half ago we updated the Beginners Guide to SEO. This has gone on to be downloaded close to a million times, translated into other languages, and continues to be an excellent traffic driver. Guess how much of my paid marketing budget goes to driving traffic to this excellent piece of content? Yup you guessed it…none.

In the past, my argument was "it didn't drive enough free trial signups to show ROI." What I've realized over the past few months is I need to go deeper into what "conversion" means. What does acquisition mean? What does growth mean? My paid marketing efforts should be wrapped around these already successful content pieces. Repurposing hot viral content through paid marketing channels is a great example of how we can accomplish cross-channel marketing. Isn't it pretty when we all get along? Who wants to hug? Bueller?

#5: Share Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is gold, pure gold. Inbound marketing is about being found online through a variety of activities — content publishing, social engagement, etc. A huge benefit of these conversations and interactions is the wealth of feedback you can receive from the community you have created. Often here at Moz, we will ask our community team to help us understand what our customers really love about our PRO service. We can hear right from them what keeps them happy, and what we can do better. This helps drive our marketing messages and our product roadmaps. Sharing the customer feedback and voice is so important, and the value found in sharing that across multiple teams in the organization is huge.

#4: Planning for Resources
Over the past few years we have seen the expectations of an online marketer change. We have more on our plates, more tools to log into, more reports to pull, more content to write, and so on and so forth. Inevitably these demands require more resources and more talent on any given project. I have found that by asking the organic marketers and community marketers here at the company what they are working on, I can better plan for my paid projects. If we are contracting a copyeditor for a content piece, I can slip in a request to revisit some ad copy headlines in the same contract. I can also repurpose design resources for banners, and landers. By knowing what your inbound team is working on, all of us can push out more faster. This is a huge benefit to connecting the to teams in both goals and resource planning.

#3: Fuel the Fire
I am a big fan of the halo effect as it applies to marketing. The halo effect, for those that might not know, is when customers show a bias to a product or brand based on some favorable or pleasant experience they have had previously. The beauty of it as it applies to today's marketing efforts is there are so many opportunities for a brand impression, and most of which are free.

A positive conversation a brand representative has with a user on a Facebook page may be enough to persuade a user to click a retargeting banner when faced with the brand's logo. Those two combined may build enough trust to persuade them to take a free trial. I call this "fueling the fire." While paid marketing may be measured on a CPA basis, there is a lot that happens prior to an action that influences the likelihood of a conversion. Inbound marketing offers mutiple opportunities to positively bias a potential customer. The goodwill a customer has in a brand often has very little to do with push marketing efforts, but has everything to do with these more organic experiences.

#2: Prequalify a Message
At the heart of it, marketers are story tellers. We love to persuade. As a paid marketer I spend most of my time coming up with ways to message my audience. Sometimes it's a new audience and sometimes it's my current audience, but either way I need to constantly be testing new ways to capture their attention. Prequalifying a message can be time consuming and can cost a lot of money depending on how I test it.

In the past I may have run a banner campaign on a relevant blog post and looked at metrics like CTR and CR. I may have also thrown money at a focus group (and whoa those can cost a lot) to see how people responded to a story we had crafted. These days I can use the power of social to test messages in record time. I can put together a presentation or a white paper and see how many times it gets shared, viewed, and downloaded. By counting these "social votes" I go beyond just clicks as a means of pre-qualification. It's a really great way for me to collect good data fast.

#1: Strengthen the Brand's Story
While the other nine ideas are great, this is my favorite. Nothing is more powerful than a consistent marketing message. Over the years I've worked to connect retargeting banners, paid search ads, landers, affiliate banners, and social advertising to send a strong and cohesive message. You know what stinks about that? All of those cost me money…which is no fun. Keeping money is fun. Spending all your money…not fun.

For promotions or time sensitive messages, if I really wanted to see an impact, I had to have serious budgets. There has to be a better way. Aligning some of these paid efforts with some inbound efforts makes for an even more compelling story for half the cost. As you push out new things and try to create buzz, you need to be asking yourself, "Is this the best use of my time and money?" I think as a paid marketer we can often forget to take that pause. We rest on the channels we know well but we need to push for more.

In Conclusion

Rand was right. In fact, all of my SEO friends were right. While paid marketing has a role to play in all of this, the direction the web has taken demands more from us marketers. While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful. If we share resources, connect data, and collaborate rather than compete I think both teams win. I'm super excited about what this means for the future of paid search marketing. If you do paid and you aren't connecting with your organic marketing and social teams, you really are making your job harder than it needs to be. 

I'd love to hear from you guys if there are other ways you have seen the teams connect and work more effectively together. Where do you see this all going as social marketing and content marketing continue to take more of our time as marketers? Where does paid fit into this? 
 

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

When you have a blog, you’ll attract all different types of readers, from those who just pass through one time to casual readers who come by occasionally to dedicated readers who subscribe to your blog and read every post. Clearly, your goal is to attract as many dedicated readers as possible, but that doesn’t happen instantly. Typically, you have to work on turning casual readers into dedicated readers over time.

Here are 5 ways you can transform a casual reader into a dedicate reader.

1. Focus on creating a great reader experience—The quality of your content isn’t the only thing that matters. It’s the overall experience that keeps readers engaged and coming back. Your blog needs to have a clean, compelling design. You don’t want to annoy readers with pop-up ads, complicated registration processes, spammy comment section, etc. Focus on creating the best possible experience for your visitors.
2. Make it easy for readers to subscribe and participate—The easier it is for someone to subscribe to your blog, the likelier it is that they’ll do so. Make sure your subscribe button is clear to see, and you can even include a call to action at the end of each post encouraging readers to subscribe. Also, make it easy for your readers to comment and share your posts on social networks. Don’t require them to register or complete a CAPTCHA to leave a comment. It’s annoying and kills their drive to participate.
3. Interact with your readers—If you want readers to stick around and keep coming back, one of the best things you can do is interact with them. Respond to them whenever they leave a comment. Connect with them on Twitter and Facebook. This builds relationships and increases their loyalty to your blog.
4. Give your readers a sense of ownership in your blog—Make your readers feel invested in your blog so they’ll keep coming back. Allow them to submit guest posts. Highlight the best comments. Ask them to submit ideas for topics they want to see you write about. Hold a contest. All of these things will create a community and make your readers feel like they own a piece of your blog.
5. Be real—It’s the easiest blogging advice you’ll ever receive. Just be yourself. Write like you talk and let your personality shine through in every aspect of your blog. That’s how you’ll build a personal connection with your readers that keeps them coming back for more.

What’s your best tip for turning casual readers into dedicated readers? Share it by leaving a comment.

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SEO Hosting Blog

5 Ways to Market Your Small Business on the Web

The online medium has turned into a hotspot for people wanting to make their business visible on an international level mainly because the internet gives you more exposure with less money. If you take up land based marketing ways, you will need to set aside a significant part of your capital for advertising. Getting brochures and pamphlets printed alone can take up considerable amount of money, let alone other methods such as visual ads. So, the best option is to go online with your marketing.

5 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Small Business on the Web | Article marketing

One of the best ways to market your business online is to undertake article marketing. This is the strategy where you write articles that elucidate the subjects that your websites deal with. Article directories get a large amount of traffic from people wanting specific information because these sites act like virtual reference guides. You can post your articles along with a resource box that mentions your business details. Make sure that you include links to your website in the article. There are several free directories that you can submit your articles to. For well written articles, you can hire the services of a good article writing service or white label from article providers.

5 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Small Business on the Web | Organic link building (posicionamiento web)

If you are on a limited budget, organic link building (posicionamiento web) is the best way to market your business. Organic link building (posicionamiento web) refers to the technique where you build links naturally, without paying another web master to post your links on his page. The strategy takes a bit of time but the results obtained are very positive. Also, unlike paid marketing techniques such as PPC or PTC, organic link building (posicionamiento web) gets you a significant amount of target traffic and very good ranking in SEO lists.

5 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Small Business on the Web | Social networking sites

You can enter communities that are related to your niche on social networking sites and share information about your business. This brings a lot of enhancement in the visibility and awareness of your site. Further, you can sign up with multiple related communities and take your online marketing (marketing online) to another level. This does not cost you anything. You only have to spend a bit time.

5 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Small Business on the Web | Email marketing

Email marketing is another easy and cost effective way of marketing your small business online. There are various ways in which you can collect email addresses of potential customers. You can request email addresses of visitors on your site and encourage them to share your web page. Once you collect email lists, you can send your newsletters and other business updates to all of them. Since you can send emails in bulk, it neither takes up much of your time nor much of your money.

5 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Small Business on the Web | Outsource your marketing campaign

If you want to fast track your online marketing (marketing online) campaign, you will have to hire people to carry out different publicity drives. A better alternative is to outsource your marketing campaign. This saves you money and ensures that you get a professionally handled marketing campaign. You can also outsource specific requirements such as generation of email lists, links for link building (posicionamiento web) and other such needs.

About the Guest Author

Anita is an online SEO and marketing specialist who works for workmonk.comas project manager and often writes on Seo/Sem and business marketing strategies regularly as guest blogger.

If you liked ’5 Cost Effective Ways to Market Your Small Business on the Web’, then you may enjoy other articles about search engine optimization (posicionamiento en buscadores) and social media marketing available at Black Box Social Media.

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Social Media Marketing And SEO For Business

The whole point of A/B testing is to put your feelings aside, and let data tell you if the layout, content, and design of your web page or marketing element is optimized to meet your goals. But what happens when the way you proctor the test messes up that data, leading you toward misleading results and inaccurate analysis?

Just as it’s important to know the best practices of landing page creation and A/B testing to see great results, it’s crucial to know what not to do to make sure your efforts aren’t wasted. Consider these 7 common mistakes marketers make when performing A/B tests, and make sure none of them crop up in your next (or current) round of A/B testing.

The 7 Worst A/B Testing Mistakes Marketers Make

1.) Running an A/B test when you should run a multivariate test. What’s the difference between the two? In a few words, an A/B test evaluates the performance of two different versions of a web page; a multivariate test evaluates the performance of the elements inside of one web page, and offers far more possible outcomes because of the combination of elements that can result. Make sure you’re running the right test for your needs. If you’re not sure which test is right for you, read this explanation breaking down the difference between A/B tests and multivariate tests, and how to know which test to run.

2.) Not establishing the criteria for success. Now that you know you’re running the right test, do you know what your goal is? A successful A/B test will have a specific end it is trying to achieve. Hypothesize what the changes you’re making will result in, and know which metrics will indicate success. Some admirable goals might be to lower bounce rate for new visitors by a certain percentage or to increase click-through rate by 1300%. Whatever criteria for success you choose, remember that you can’t achieve success without knowing what it looks like!

3.) Starting your test with crazy web pages. The design, layout, and copy you choose for your first pages shouldn’t just be a shot in the dark. Base your decisions off of best practices so you’re not wasting your time with designs that, based on hundreds of thousands of tests from other websites, probably won’t work. In other words, they’re called best practices for a reason.

That being said, one reason A/B testing is so useful is because it tells you when you should flout best practices to achieve the best results. But only when testing tells you it’s prudent to do so. So in the meantime, follow best practices from people who’ve learned the hard way, and tweak according to the results of your A/B tests.

4.) Not performing a radical redesign. We just told you not to start with crazy web pages, and now we’re telling you to perform a radical redesign. What gives? The pages you’re testing should follow best practices, sure, but they shouldn’t still look exactly like one another. Move the form from the right side of the page to the left; dramatically change the size of your header; test the response to totally different language; experiment with different images. And do it all at the same time. If you don’t perform radically different tests, you could hit your “local maximum” and start iterating on designs that aren’t as effective as they could be to begin with.

5.) Performing tests on pages with too little traffic. A/B testing is great for new websites because you don’t need a ton of traffic to get meaningful results. But you still need enough traffic for statistical significance. Make sure you run tests on pages that are either highly trafficked, or if you’re running this test on new or buried pages, that you run the tests for longer than you do on your more popular pages to ensure you have enough data points for a meaningful evaluation. Before jumping to any conclusions, make sure you have enough data to make a relevant determination of success.

6.) Not considering how your changes affect other metrics. Have your design changes increased conversions but decreased time on site? Is that okay? It might be. If you’ve established the criteria for success (see mistake #2) and you analyze how all your important metrics are affected when you make design changes, you can be sure what you interpret as improvements aren’t actually having an unintended, negative consequence.

7.) Giving up when you see no results. Just because you didn’t see results with one test doesn’t mean you’ve hit the jackpot page. Consider more iterations you can test — different colors, layouts, copy, images, and proportions — to see if there’s still a better page design out there that you just didn’t consider in the first round of A/B testing.

Have you made any mistakes while A/B testing that adversely affected your results? Share them with the rest of us so we can learn from them, too!

Image credit: orijinal

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Press releases still serve a very important PR and marketing purpose. Whether you distribute them online or email them to reporters and bloggers, the goal is the same—to get your news read by as many people as possible.

In order to achieve this goal, you need to write better press releases, because the sad truth is most press releases just suck. Here are 4 ways you can write better press releases.

1. Find a unique angle—The average reporter is bombarded with press releases all day long. They’re probably receiving press releases from your competitors too. That means it’s crucial that you do something to make your press release stand out from the crowd. The same old, tired, straightforward press release about a bland topic no one outside of your company cares about just won’t cut it. You need to find a fresh approach to your stories to make them more relevant and more compelling.
2. Don’t write to the template—Nearly every press release looks the exact same. The headlines are the same, the opening paragraphs are the same, the buzzwords are the same, and the dull, lifeless quotes are the same. If you want to distribute a press release that gets noticed, you have to steer clear of the paint-by-numbers style of press release writing.
3. Know thy audience—Who is going to be reading your press release? Reporters? Buyers? Investors? Affiliates? Customers? Know your audience, and write your news in a way that appeals to their main interests.
4. Edit. Edit. Edit.—Too many press releases are filled with fluff. That is, they contain irrelevant, useless information that does nothing but boost the word count. Your readers, no matter who they are, are pressed for time. They just need the main points of your story quickly and clearly. Anything that doesn’t need to be in the press release should be cut out. Get rid of the buzzwords and industry jargon while you’re at it.

What press release writing tips would you add to this list? Share them by leaving a comment below.

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SEO Hosting Blog

If you don’t know what Screaming Frog is, (then where have you been!?) It’s a tool that let’s you crawl an entire site on demand. But that’s not all it’s good for…I was recently working on a clients site and I found myself turning to the tool more and more for tasks other than the standard crawl feature. I thought it might be useful to put together a list of other ways to use Screaming Frog.

1 – Verifying Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors

I recently wrote a post on how to do a site audit using Webmaster Tools. I’m a big fan of it’s features, find that the GWT doesn’t update the crawl errors frequently enough. This means there are often things like 404’s reported when they’ve actually already been fixed. I’ve been using Screaming Frog to solve this problem. Below is my new process for 404’s and other common errors.

1. Crawl the entire site and put all 404’s into a spreadsheet.
2. Download all 404’s from Google Webmaster tools and put them into the same spreadsheet.
3. Remove duplicates.
4. Copy all URL’s into a text document and save it as 404.txt
5. Using the Screaming Frog list mode, upload the 404.txt document and start the crawl

You can then export all the remaining 404s and fix them.

2 – Checking If a Site Migration was Successful

A site I was working on recently changed their URL structure. For a couple of reasons, some of the URLs were not redirecting correctly. The list in Screaming Frog mode came in useful for checking which URLs were not redirecting correctly.

I got the client to send me a list of all the old URLs and followed the same process as above to find out which of the URLs were returning a 404. I then downloaded all the URLs with the problem and passed them to the developer to fix. This made identifying the problem really easy.

3 – Finding Infinite Links

Sometimes websites that use relative URLs can create never ending chains of links. Again, this recently happened on a client’s site. They were using relative URLs everywhere except some pages on the blog.

This meant that sometimes when they linked to a page on the blog, it was being appended to the existing URL. For example:

http://www.example.com linking to www.example.com/page1

Was creating http://www.example.com/www.example.com/page1

This was causing infinite lists of URLs. This means that search engines could be wasting their time crawling pages that technically don’t exist. Because this wasn’t the case on every page, I had to identify where on the site the issue was. When looking at some of the examples, the cause was using links that didn’t include the “http”. To find where this was happening I used the “custom” feature.

This is under the configuration tab. I asked it to include only pages that included the html :

“<a href=”www.”

This then returned all of the pages that were linking to other pages in this way.

4 – Checking a List of Links

During processes of outreach, you often end up creating a large list of pages you are expecting links from. Going through each one to check that the link actually exists on the page can be a tiring job. To speed up the process, the Screaming Frog list mode lets you check a stream of URLs very quickly. There is already a post on the Screaming Frog blog on how to do this: Auditing Backlinks Using Screaming Frog.

5 – Creating a Sitemap

Screaming Frog makes creating an XML sitemap really easy, but it’s important that you set up the crawl correctly before you start. If you don’t limit the spider to crawl only those pages that you want in your sitemap, you can end up with a bunch or URLs that shouldn’t be in there. An example of this is with wordpress, which I discovered when I crawled my site.

A common problem with WordPress is that it creates pages like http://www.craigbradford.co.uk/about-craig/?replytocom=12 when people leave comments.

I don’t want these pages indexed and definitely not in my sitemap, so I can use the exclude tool (which is under the configuration menu), to ensure anything with this style of URL tail is excluded.

Once you have set up the configuration, let Screaming Frog compete a full crawl of the site. Once complete you have the option to export the sitemap. Under the main navigation go to “Export” then select sitemap. You can then upload it to your site and submit it through webmaster tools.

6 – Check Sitemap for Errors

Duane Forrester from Bing recently said that Bing allow a 1% level of ‘dirt’ in a sitemap. “Dirt” could be anything from 404 errors to redirects.

Screaming Frog can be used to keep your sitemap clean and healthy. If you have the XML file like shown above, you can simply change to list mode and upload the XML file. Screaming frog can then crawl all of the URLs and tell you if there are any errors such as 404s or pages that are redirecting.

7 – Using Screaming Frog for Linkbuilding

When doing outreach, I often find it easier if I first contact a link target through something like Twitter.

Taking this one step further, an easy and innocent way to get on someones radar would be to crawl their site for them, find a blog post that returns a 404 and tell them about it.

Assuming you don’t use an SEO profile, this is a good way to be nice and draw attention to the fact that you read their blog. Now when you actually do contact them for outreach, it’s not out of nowhere and they’ll at least recognise your name and face.

8 – IP and User Agent Redirection

Two features that don’t get much attention are proxy option and the ability to change user agent. Taking them in order, the proxy feature can be useful for clients that are using IP based redirects. To see what’s going on you can use buy a set of international proxies or else try some of the free ones at Hide My Ass. You can them compare the results. To use this, select “Configure” then “Proxy”.

Tick the box for “User Proxy Server” and enter your proxy details. When you crawl the site now, it will be using the international address instead of yours. If you are going to do this, I would recommend paying for private proxies as the free ones can be quite temperamental.

Changing user agent can be useful for checking if websites are treating search engine crawlers such as Googlebot differently to users. it can also pick up if robots.txt is explicitly blocking certain content from individual search engines. To use this feature just select “Configuration” and then “User agent”, it doesn’t get much easier than that.

That’s all folks! I’m sure there are Lot’s of other ways to use Screaming Frog or other crawlers, if you have any tips, please leave a comment and I’ll update the post with any other tips. If you have any questions, you can get me on Twitter @CraigBradford.

Craig Bradford is an SEO Analyst at Distilled London. He loves learning anything and is currently learning to be a code master. SEO interests include site speed and deep diving into competitor analysis.

Follow @CraigBradford

Craig Bradford

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distilled