There are several aspects that must go into creating a successful website and they include the design and graphics of the website, the sales page presented on it, the customer tracking or follow-up capabilities, and finally the use of other types of technology on your website to encourage sales and grab attention.
Website design-if you've spent any amount of time at all searching on the Internet you've probably seen some pretty flashy websites. Some of the blinking lights and flashing designs that jump out at you almost make you think you're visiting the strip on Vegas. All too often, people assume that they must make their website as bold and graphically intense as possible but this just isn't necessary. Your website is designed to do one thing and one thing only: convert visitors into buyers. There is no specific rule that states that you must have a ridiculous amount of loud graphics in which to do this and oftentimes a simple website will work even better than one that is flashy. Having said that, you don't want a website that contains nothing but words either because your visitor will quickly become bored and click away. A good combination of attractive graphics that are specific to your product as well as a decent amount of content designed to help sell it is what is required. You'll certainly want to have a logo of some sort and may choose to incorporate this in a header, which is a graphical bar that will go across the top of your website. In addition, pictures of the product you are selling as well as any other pictures that pertain to the product are often helpful. Don't be too concerned with graphics at this point because if you are a complete beginner there are plenty of graphic and website creation services available that can handle the process from start to finish for very reasonable fees.
Creating your sales page-when someone hits your website it is your job to make sure that the message offered is compelling enough to encourage them to purchase the product. This is done through the use of the sales page.
Basically, the content, at least on the front page of your website, will be a part of the makeup of the sales page. You'll want to include all of the features and benefits concerning your product as well as testimonials from satisfied customers. Creating a sales page that really does an effective job of converting website visitors to purchasers is somewhat of an art form. Many successful copywriters charge thousands of dollars to create such sales letters but there are much cheaper alternatives available for you. One way is simply to create the sales letter yourself. If you take the time to include the compelling reasons of why someone would be interested in purchasing your product you can have great success doing this on your own without spending any money at all. If you choose to go it alone there are some great resources on the web to help you out, just search for how to write a sales letter on the Internet to get a hold of all of the free information you need to help you on your journey to completing your first sales letter. In addition, there are some web and software applications that will help you with this process.
Customer Tracking and follow up-once you get to the point where people are actually visiting your website you want to make sure that you capture some of their information because if they don't buy the very first visit, you have no way to follow up with them if they leave. The best way to do this is through the use of an auto-responder. An auto-responder is simply a type of software that will allow you to load prewritten messages into it and send them out to your potential prospects at regular intervals. You can encourage the visitors to submit their name and e-mail address in a small form located on your front page by enticing them with free offers if they do so. The free offers associated are the follow-up messages you will send using the auto-responder that are in the form of tips and valuable information pertaining to the subject of the product you're selling. These follow-up messages won't be necessarily sales messages, but they will allow you to stay on the mind of the prospect and remind them that your product is available. Offering any helpful tips and information pertaining to the subject they're interested in is often valued by the prospects and they may stay on your mailing list for some time and eventually buy the product you are selling when they signed up, or maybe choose to purchase something else you begin selling at a later date.
Taking Payments - Your website must have the ability to process customer's payments in order to deliver the product they wish to purchase. There are two main ways to do this, one being a traditional merchant account, and the other being online payment processors like PayPal. In order to make the most money from your website you want as many payment options as possible so choosing both of these options is the best way to do this. If you're brand new to the world of making money online, using a PayPal account provides an extremely easy option to get started.
With PayPal, you simply have to register and add your bank account information and have it verified. Once you've set up your account, you can install a buy now button directly on your website that once clicked allows the customer to make a payment that will be sent directly to your PayPal account.
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Blog Marketing - 10 Effective Ways to Market Your Blog
Author: Ngozi Nwoke
Do you have a blog with rich content but no or small number of readers? Having a blog with no one reading it can be very discouraging and disheartening. It is not enough to have a beautiful, well written blog; there is need for you to market it to attract readers and ultimately buyers if you have stuff to sell on your blog. If you need a change today, I present to you 10 simple but effective ways to market your blog.
In-house blog marketing
1. Enable SEO: SEO helps you to bring in real visitors from search engines. Make it possible for search engines to find your blog.
· Have your own domain name,
· create keyword rich titles
· Highlight the important points in your article.
· Use lists or bullets to convey your points
· Use multimedia content like images, videos.
· Link to your related posts.
· create unique title tags
· Enable permalinks and trackback
2. Update your content: Create rich contents frequently, 2-5 times a week. Posting quality information regularly will market your blog to new readers. Also, your readers and visitors will know how often to check your blog for a new post. If you your blog is not updated regularly you will lose your readers. Nobody wants to read a blog that is not updated
3. Interact with your commenter: Respond to the comments on your blog as much as possible. No one wants to have a conversation alone, let them know you appreciate them; otherwise you may not be getting many more. Also follow-up some posters with emails, connect with them and build a relationship that will benefit you now or in future.
Outside blog marketing
4. Article marketing: Write article and submit to article directories like Ezinearticles, Articlebase, etc, and link back to your blog on the bio profile. Your article might be picked from there and that will be additional exposure for you.
5. Guest Posting: Offer free guest posts on popular blogs with high number of readers or subscribers on your topic. This will market your blog to wider audience and will also drive traffic back to your blog.
6. Participate in blog comments: Leave quality comments on other bloggers' posts, especially larger blogs. You will get recognition both from the blogger and the blogging community and that will give you some traffic and exposure in return.
7. Participate in forums: Join some forums in your niche and actively participate in them. Interact with other users and help them where you can. This will brand you as an expert in your niche. Add your blog link in your signature and it will drive traffic to your blog
8. Use social networking sites: Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are inviting and intriguing. They are powerful communication tools. Learning how to use them wisely to market your blog will increase traffic to your blog. Share your blog posts with your network and encourage them to share your posts too. That is going viral!
9. Submit to blog directories so that people can find you
10. Use Bookmarking Sites like Digg, Stumble etc. to spread your articles. Encourage your network to promote your shared articles too. It drives a lot of quick traffic.
For someone new with blog marketing, it may seem like a lot of work with little or no immediate return, hang in there, and just know that marketing is something that you have to build. Following these ten simple ways to market your blog will get you on track and make you smile soon. But you need to be dedicated and consistent with these for you to enjoy the large number of readers you desire. Do you have any other effective way to share?
About the Author
Ngozi Nwoke is a business and marketing coach. MLM home-based business is easy on-line. Want more information on how to build your business? Free email updates check http://www.ngozinwoke.com
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Do you have a blog with rich content but no or small number of readers? Having a blog with no one reading it can be very discouraging and disheartening. It is not enough to have a beautiful, well written blog; there is need for you to market it to attract readers and ultimately buyers if you have stuff to sell on your blog. If you need a change today, I present to you 10 simple but effective ways to market your blog.
In-house blog marketing
1. Enable SEO: SEO helps you to bring in real visitors from search engines. Make it possible for search engines to find your blog.
· Have your own domain name,
· create keyword rich titles
· Highlight the important points in your article.
· Use lists or bullets to convey your points
· Use multimedia content like images, videos.
· Link to your related posts.
· create unique title tags
· Enable permalinks and trackback
2. Update your content: Create rich contents frequently, 2-5 times a week. Posting quality information regularly will market your blog to new readers. Also, your readers and visitors will know how often to check your blog for a new post. If you your blog is not updated regularly you will lose your readers. Nobody wants to read a blog that is not updated
3. Interact with your commenter: Respond to the comments on your blog as much as possible. No one wants to have a conversation alone, let them know you appreciate them; otherwise you may not be getting many more. Also follow-up some posters with emails, connect with them and build a relationship that will benefit you now or in future.
Outside blog marketing
4. Article marketing: Write article and submit to article directories like Ezinearticles, Articlebase, etc, and link back to your blog on the bio profile. Your article might be picked from there and that will be additional exposure for you.
5. Guest Posting: Offer free guest posts on popular blogs with high number of readers or subscribers on your topic. This will market your blog to wider audience and will also drive traffic back to your blog.
6. Participate in blog comments: Leave quality comments on other bloggers' posts, especially larger blogs. You will get recognition both from the blogger and the blogging community and that will give you some traffic and exposure in return.
7. Participate in forums: Join some forums in your niche and actively participate in them. Interact with other users and help them where you can. This will brand you as an expert in your niche. Add your blog link in your signature and it will drive traffic to your blog
8. Use social networking sites: Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are inviting and intriguing. They are powerful communication tools. Learning how to use them wisely to market your blog will increase traffic to your blog. Share your blog posts with your network and encourage them to share your posts too. That is going viral!
9. Submit to blog directories so that people can find you
10. Use Bookmarking Sites like Digg, Stumble etc. to spread your articles. Encourage your network to promote your shared articles too. It drives a lot of quick traffic.
For someone new with blog marketing, it may seem like a lot of work with little or no immediate return, hang in there, and just know that marketing is something that you have to build. Following these ten simple ways to market your blog will get you on track and make you smile soon. But you need to be dedicated and consistent with these for you to enjoy the large number of readers you desire. Do you have any other effective way to share?
About the Author
Ngozi Nwoke is a business and marketing coach. MLM home-based business is easy on-line. Want more information on how to build your business? Free email updates check http://www.ngozinwoke.com
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How to Start a Successful Online Business
| Blogging | How to Blog | Blog Marketing Answers |
Do you want to help the economy? Do you dream of working at home? Then learn how to create wealth and get that idea you have been sitting on for a long time out there.
1. Choosing your Market and Products
When deciding to start an online business a target market must be chosen. These are the people the LLC will reach. Does the LLC want to sell manufactured products that were patented and created? Does the company want to sell products bought directly from manufacturers and wholesalers? Does the company want to be large? Does the company want to offer a large variety of products or only a single product? What kind of competition is out there? How can the company's make the product(s) better than the competition? What are the company's strengths and weaknesses? Most businesses require a team. This is because one person cannot wear every single "hat." There is no I in team. A team is needed in a company because this is what makes it strong. The CEO is there to guide the team but is not always strong in all areas of the company's structure. The CEO should be a solid leader, be able to spot weaknesses, and have a vision for the company for which all are on board.
2. Where to get products
Depending on what you are trying to sell there are several options. Note that many more business-to-business transactions take place than business-to-consumer. In essence, the retailer will have an easier time finding the products needed at the price they need to effectively resell them to the consumer. Wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors will be more apt to work with you as long as you have the proper documentation in place, which can be filed for and received online within 24 hours for free. At this point begin a search online for what you want to sell and look for wholesalers of that product. Then register for a state tax ID, and a federal tax ID which is also know as an employer identification number. Now manufacturing your own products is another wonderful idea.
Very key: businesses need products. Will the company make them? Is this is a small business that is a one man/woman show and the product can be manufactured at home? Believe it or not there are large manufacturers in the USA as well. If you want to be big and have your item mass produced, have a reputable manufacturer in your city make the product for it. There are companies that will make a prototype first. Patenting is important if the product is the company's and a prototype is required in this case. Lawyers are very helpful in getting the patent process moving fast.
Writing a Business Plan Many people skip this because they think it's not needed. Especially if they are financing their own business. However this is a map of your company. Eventually you will need investors but more importantly it's something you need for yourself and other executives. It describes in detail every single little piece of your business. It's not something anyone other than the CEO should write. It should never be outsourced. And depending on the complexity of your business it should be between 15-30 pages and include everything from marketing to financial projections. Use charts that are easy to read. Describe every aspect of your company in detail: management structure, employees, marketing, incentives, and more. Look online for business plan templates or I highly recommend reading the ABC's of Writing a Winning Business Plan.Very key: businesses need products. Will the company make them? Is this is a small business that is a one man/woman show and the product can be manufactured at home? Believe it or not there are large manufacturers in the USA as well. If you want to be big and have your item mass produced, have a reputable manufacturer in your city make the product for it. There are companies that will make a prototype first. Patenting is important if the product is the company's and a prototype is required in this case. Lawyers are very helpful in getting the patent process moving fast.
3.Financing Your Business
A good business plan and spending time with a venture capitalist is the number one way to finance your business. A second option is to setup meetings with personal networking contacts. Your job is to help him/her see what you see and show him/her that this company will be profitable.4. Choosing a Domain Name and Web Hosting
There are many options out there for one to purchase a domain name. First let's explain what a domain name is. A domain name is what is typed at the top of your browser that tells it where to go. For example www.google.com. That is a domain name. Web Hosting is where the information for webpage(s) are stored. Godaddy.com offers hosting. Hostgator.com offers hosting and domain registration. Lunarpages.com is another good resources for registration of a domain and hosting. A list of the best hosting and registration companies can be found at hostaz.com. Just go into google and type in domain name registration and hosting and many options will pop up. A business will need both the registration of the domain and hosting to start.Choose a name that relates to the company's product or brand.
5. Blogging
Blogging has become the trend nowadays. People want to be heard and want an outlet. This is also a good place to write about a business as it develops. Anything that comes to the mind about a business should be here. Make one for the business. Talk about opening day, what's going on, and just what's running through the CEO's mind (which should be a lot).
6.Top Search Engines
Seventy Five Percent of Search engine inquiries come through google. You can tell google is a large company because it's name is synonymous with search. Just like when someone says xerox it (make a copy), or I need a Kleenex (tissue). The 2nd largest search engine is bing. Yahoo is a close 3rd. The rest hit around 2-3 percent of the search market.Search Engine Optimization Also Known As SEO
This is where your company will either fail or succeed. Most new customers will come from where your site is placed in the search results thus increasing the relevance of its importance.
- Here are some simple tips for SEO:
1. On Page Optimization Techniques There are many things a business can do online to increase its presence.
This takes up about 15% of SEO criterion but it is still important. It includes things such as a good meta description (see website design section), using alt tags on images, and having a variety of quality products on the pages of the business website.
2. Article Marketing.
Article marketing is another SEO method that has been around for some time and has had much success. Essentially, write articles that focus on a keyword or two and have a link back to the business website. You then upload those articles to article directories that publish them for free.
3. Trusted Site Backlinking This is simply using other sites to advertise for yours.
This is sometimes paid advertising and sometimes you can make a trade with another start up company or small business with an online presence. One business advertises yours and you in return advertise theirs. Making a trade with a start up is especially convenient with smaller businesses who are willing to trade advertisement for advertisement. However the add should never be placed on every single page of the site. Google actually penalizes this and brings your ranking down. Your best bet is to setup an affiliate program where all ads can be placed on their own individual website page. Or you can place banners on certain pages of your site. The home page is often the most desired location for a banner advertisement.
4. Social Media: Using it Wisely
Social media is a phenomenon in this day and age. Also a very good place for some free marketing. Blog content can be promoted here. Your company blog can be promoted here. And a good company page on facebook or digg surely helps. You basically want to create a ring of all your social media sites and company website linking each other together. For example on your blog you have a link to your website as well as articles you have written. On Linkdin you have a link to your blog and site. On Digg you have links to everything you have on the net. Everything links together. This is also a creation of backlinks and sources of traffic to your site.
5. Viral Marketing - This is one person spreading the word to the next and that person spreading it to their friends and eventually millions of people hear about it. This is the basic definition of viral marketing.
In Viral Marketing, just as in social media and backlinking, the goal is to spread the word out and draw people to you. Especially in your target market. Have business cards handy at all times. If as the owner passion for the business shows then conversations will take place. Business cards should include not only contact information, but a little about the business as well.
Business Structure
Any business starting out wants to register as an LLC. What does LLC Stand for? Limited Liability Corporation. It basically creates the business as its own entity rather than falling back on the person creating it. It is structured to affect the businesses credit, not yours. It has all the parts of a major Corporation: Public or Private Stock, CEO, CFO, President, Board Of Directors, Private Shareholders, and Public Shareholders if you choose. An LLC is perfect for small business. There are many benefits of an LLC in which major Tax Breaks are the most desirable. Everything that you do from a meeting to purchasing equipment for your small business can be written off. Going out to dinner, home office space, business trips and/or retreats, and more can be written off. Business is not a one player game although it can be, but a team is suggested. Any successful business has a successful team.Tips
• Do your homework when it comes to litigation, Search Engine Optimization (If you are not savvy when it comes to technology outsource this to a local company in your area). Read as many books on subjects pertaining to your project, wealth creation, business, SEO, and anything you can get your hands on. If you can't design websites, have someone do it for you.Warnings
• Be Patient. Any successful entrepreneur lives and dies by the code that the desire of Instant Gratification will kill a business. It takes time. You will experience setbacks. You will have to climb many hurdles...but don't take your eye off the prize.Get the secret software the Guru's use to rank their sites
How to Breathe New Life Into Your Marketing With Visual Content
Visual content is awesome. It grabs your audience's attention, it's quick to consume, it's shareable, and for those for whom writing is a bigger nightmare than those dreams where you're late for school and don't have any pants on, visual content is a nice alternative to keep your content creation machine chugging.
Most people don't have any trouble coming up with ways to integrate visual content into, say, their social strategy (or maybe they do, which is why we're covering it in this post for good measure). But you should be thinking about the role visual content plays in all of your marketing channels -- from social media, to organic search, to your email marketing. Ready to learn how to integrate visual content in your marketing channels? Let's get started!
Alright, we're going to ease you into this visual content integration stuff by starting with social media -- I mean there are social networks that were built exclusively around visual content (I'm looking at you, Pinterest)! So this should come pretty naturally to you.
So let's start with Pinterest, the social sharing platform through which one can share images by pinning them to a pinboard that others can then share, or 'repin,' to help get that visual content spreading. If you're a business who creates visually stimulating products or offers services that yield something beautiful, I bet this seems pretty intuitive to you -- hairdressers pin pictures of amazing hair 'dos, clothing resellers pin pictures of hip ensembles, etc.
But what about B2B organizations? Or companies that do something kinda, well, boring? Take a cue from companies like GE and even us here at HubSpot. GE uses Pinterest to tell a visual story of their history, pinning pictures of how their products have evolved through the years and even getting users involved, running a #GEInspiredMe campaign that drives user-generated content. And HubSpot? That company that sells marketing software (yawn)? We pin a mix of marketing-related content -- data visualizations, infographics, and ebook covers -- along with pins that represent our brand in an out-of-the-box way, like you might find on our boards "Fun Orange Things," and "Things With Spots."
So no matter your organization, you can find a way to leverage Pinterest for your business -- just be sure to include links on all of your pins that lead back to a product or landing page of some sort so all of that Pinterest traffic can actually turn into leads and transactions on your website!
When it comes to Facebook, this year's Timeline update for business pages proved that Facebook intends to take its product in a more visual direction. Marketers have an opportunity to show their visual content chops right away with the new (much larger) cover photo -- and if you're looking for some inspiration, we've rounded up the best Facebook Timeline cover photos out there.
But the new layout provided more opportunity for visual content creators than just an expanded cover photo. With the ability to 'Star' and 'Pin' content, you can actually expand posts of visual content so it takes up more space on your page Timeline.
And according to an internal Facebook study, that's something you might want to do; page posts that include a photo album or picture can generate 2X more engagement than other post types. And more engagement means Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm will feature you more prominently in your fans' news feeds, further expanding your Facebook reach. So get creative! Post memes, cartoons, infographics -- even pull from your Pinterest account -- to keep your Facebook page chock full of the visual content your fans love.
If you're trying to find an opportunity to integrate visual content into your Twitter marketing, you may be thinking ... post twitpics! Well yes, you certainly can (and should!) upload pictures to your tweets, but the thing is, they don't display in streams unless a user actually clicks through to view the picture. So the biggest bang for your Twitter buck is using the customizable elements on your Twitter page to make your Twitter presence more visually-driven.
In addition to letting you upload a super cool user picture, Twitter allows for the customization of your page's background. For those followers who make it to your page, you can greet them with an aesthetically pleasing, branded, and even lead-generating background image. In fact, we've compiled our favorite examples of backgrounds on Twitter to help you get your creative juices flowing. And if you're not sure how to customize your Twitter background, well, we've got a post for that, too!
Still, given that most tweets are simply read out of individual users' feeds, it's important to focus on integrating visual content into your tweets themselves. This technique goes hand-in-hand with another extremely visual social network ...
Instagram is a mobile application for iPhone and Android that offers easy editing and social sharing of camera phone photographs. Since tweets are comprised entirely of text, linking to Instagram photos provides some refreshing visual content to break up the monotony. Check out the screenshot below of the HubSpot Unicorn's Instagram feed, which tells more of a story about the HubSpot brand than words ever could.
And since Instagram was recently acquired by Facebook, don't forget to apply those cool sepia-toned filters to some of your Facebook images, too. Think about it -- you're on the road filming a case study, you snap a picture of you and one of your favorite customers with the Instagram app, and upload the photo to your Timeline with a quote from your customer that shows how awesome she thinks your company is. Not some bad, on the fly visual content, eh?
Of course, we can't complete our discussion of visual social networks until we talk YouTube. Yes, visual content includes video, too! YouTube let's you create a mix of educational, how-to type content, entertaining content, and even slightly promotional content that addresses what your leads need at any stage of the sales cycle. We do it all the time -- we have YouTube videos on our HubSpot channel that teach you about marketing, silly music videos that make you laugh, and case study videos that highlight our customers' successes with HubSpot software.
The beautiful thing about YouTube videos is that, in addition to being easily shareable over just about any other social network you can think of, they're also easily embeddable into other channels (hello, blog content)! In fact, let's get into how visual content can be integrated into your blog right now.
Your blog and offer content are likely two of the biggest lead generators you have working for you. And since both will frequently find their way into your other channels -- email marketing, paid media, organic search -- taking them visual is key to making them even more intriguing than they already are.
When it comes to your blog, the easiest thing you can do is ensure that every single post has at least one relevant image. That first image is critical, because if you're sharing your blog content on social media (you are sharing your blog content on social media, right?), that image will be automatically pulled into the update. And if you read the previous section of this post, you know how important visual content is for driving social engagement!
But you know what? The more the merrier -- images (relevant images, of course) break up the monotony of text, and make it more likely your reader will reach the end of your blog post without feeling bombarded by a cacophony of characters. And if that's where your call-to-action resides, it's even more important to keep your reader's attention until the end. In fact, you can even create entire blog posts around visual content. We do this at HubSpot all the time, featuring infographics, compilations of marketing charts and graphs, and even inbound marketing cartoons as blog posts. In fact, we even indicate that the content within the blog post is visual by using brackets at the end of the post titles, like [Infographic] or [Cartoon] because we know our audience's affinity for visual blog content. I think you'll find periodically incorporating this type of content into your blog will be a welcome break from the text content your readers used to consuming.
If you're creating blog content, you should be creating offer content to go along with it -- you know, that content that lives behind the landing pages your blog visitors convert on? You may be used to creating offers that are more text-based, like ebooks or whitepapers. But these documents don't have to be (nay, shouldn't be!) pages and pages of copy. Use visuals to break up this content and make it more visually palatable for the reader. Take a look at one page from an ebook of ours, An Introduction to Lead Nurturing:
This page only has 150 words on it -- but that's a conscious decision. Because to help illustrate the point being made on the page, a data visualization is incorporated that not only makes the page easier to read, but helps support the claims being made in the copy.
You can also incorporate visual content into your offer content even more deliberately by creating offers that are entirely visually-based. As an example, we recently released an ebook, 55 Brands Rocking Social Media With Visual Content, that is comprised almost entirely of visuals. So although this offer is an ebook, it has actually transformed the ebook into a piece of visual content itself! Alternately, you can simply leverage offer content formats that are inherently visual by nature, like videos, slide shares, and data compilations.
Much like a blog post, including a relevant image within your email helps break up the monotony of text -- but visual content can play a more central role in your email marketing strategy than just eye candy.
The biggest opportunity to leverage visual content in your email marketing is with a visual call-to-action. Your emails should be succinct, doing everything they can do point the reader towards your call-to-action so that email send can generate clicks and conversions; and the fact is, text links within an email only go so far. We've written an entire post that shows you how to create a visually compelling call-to-action, using bright, contrasting colors and fully embracing the bigger is better mentality -- take a look for the nitty gritty details you need to make your email marketing CTAs pop.
But you can take visual content one step further by actually telling a story through visuals -- not copy -- in your emails. Take a look at how UncommonGoods did just that, highlighing for-sale products as they told a story about how those products might play into a customer's life.
We've compiled the best visual content out there to help inspire your visual content and email marketing integration -- just read our post, "Feast Your Eyes on These 9 Examples of Beautiful
Finally, you can even give your video content some extra promotion by featuring it in your email campaigns. While you shouldn't embed emails directly within an email message (not all email clients have the ability to play videos within emails), you can take a screenshot of your video, superimpose the triangular "play" button we all know and love from online video content, and simply link your video to the page on your website on which that video lives!
If you're interested at all in SEO, you're interested in how your content ranks in Google. Well, how your visual content ranks is just as important as how your text-based content ranks! The problem is, search engines don't read images too well. Hmph.
Don't worry! There's recourse for visual content creators! Google's crawlers look for certain attributes of your visual content to be able to "read" it and index it in organic search, accordingly. What you have to do is give Google's crawlers the right information about your image so that can be done. We've written a guide to help you optimize images for Google search that you can read in it's entirety, but here are the highlights:
The only image file types you should use are BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG.Your image file names should use words that describe the content of the image.Use image alt text to describe the image.Provide context for the image in the page's surrounding text, if possible.Submit an image sitemap.Use descriptive anchor text when linking to images.
When you follow these steps for, say, an infographic on unicorn feeding habits, you can ensure your infographic is not only indexed in search, but is considered as a result in the SERPs for queries about unicorn feeding habits! And remember, the competition isn't quite as stiff when users are searching in the "Images" part of Google (as opposed to "Web"), so you could be getting even more love from searches of that nature when your visual content is well-optimized.
How do you leverage visual content in your marketing channels?
Image credit: duh.denise
Image credit: sabianmaggy
A Simple Cheat Sheet for Using Pinterest for Marketing [Infographic]
By now, you've probably heard something about that new social network called Pinterest. In fact, there's a good chance you've heard a bit about it directly from us! And now with more than 10 million active users according to AppData, it's difficult to ignore Pinterest's explosion in popularity.
But grasping how to use any new social network for business always comes with a learning curve. So to help you get started using Pinterest for marketing, the folks over at Socially Sorted and Mookoo Design pulled together the following infographic, "The 10 Commandments of Using Pinterest for Business," which guides you through best practices and tips for putting Pinterest to work in your social media marketing strategy. Think of it as your own Pinterest marketing cheat sheet!
Are you using Pinterest as part of your social media marketing strategy? How effective has it been for your business?
When to Use Static vs. Dynamic Lists in Email Marketing
In email marketing, the success of your messages is largely dependent on the quality of your list. And although we've talked a bunch about list segmentation and list health on this blog (have you taken our email list sniff test yet?), there's still more you should understand about lists. (Who knew the topic of email lists could be so darn extensive?)
What we're referring to in this post is the concept of static lists vs. dynamic lists. Do you understand the distinction? It might sound simple, but we're surprised by how many marketers really don't know the difference -- and when to use one or the other, for that matter. We'll keep this lesson to the point so you can once and for all understand what distinguishes one list from the other, and start applying the right uses of each to your email marketing programs.
Quite simply, static lists are, well ... static. These lists consist only of contacts you've accumulated up until the point when you create the list, and they remain unchanged unless you manually add or remove contacts. Static lists can either be created using contacts that already exist in your database, or through a manual upload to your email tool. Typically, they're created through the latter method, as oftentimes they consist of contacts that were gathered through offline methods or other online campaigns not connected to interactions on your website. HubSpot's email tool, for example, allows users to create static lists in both of these ways, as you can see from the screenshots below.
Of all the types of email a marketer can send, static lists are generally good for one-off email sends, email campaigns that you run infrequently, and for lists of contacts that don't change often. Here are a few examples of when you'd want to use a static list in your email marketing:
Event Registrants, Attendees, or No-Show Lists: No one can travel back in time to register for or attend your event in the past, right? That's why event lists tend to be ones that remain static. You might use these lists to send follow-up information or content post-event, whether it's an in-person event or an online one like a webinar.Staff Lists: Do you send a quarterly newsletter to your company's board of directors? How about an internal one to your business' employees? These are lists of people that don't typically change often, and you'll probably also have to manually update them anyway.Trade Show Lists: Did you snag some prospects' contact information from your presence at a trade show or another industry conference/event? This is a great use case for a static list upload.Dynamic email lists, on the other hand, are lists that constantly evolve as certain criteria are met. This criteria could include a specific property (e.g. contacts from a specific state or contacts from a specific industry), members of other lists (i.e. a list combining other lists!), or contacts who completed certain landing page forms. New contacts get added as they meet the criteria set for the list, and furthermore, dynamic lists will also remove people who no longer meet that criteria. Get it? Dynamic. These lists are powered by data and intelligence that can be collected by your marketing software or CRM as well as through interactions contacts have on your website, such as downloading content or visiting certain web pages. Dynamic lists are also critical for slicing and dicing your database into various segments for more effective and relevant email marketing.
You'll need to consult your email software provider to see if dynamic lists are part of its services available to you. To understand how they work, below is an example of a dynamic list in the making in HubSpot's Contacts and Email tools. In our tool, we call these dynamic lists 'Smart Lists.' Here, we’re generating a segmented list of contacts who have Twitter follower counts of 1,000 or more. Once this list is established, as more of our contacts’ Twitter follower counts grow and meet that 1,000-follower threshold, the list will also grow. In addition, any contact whose follower count dips below 1,000 will automatically be removed from the list. So if we wanted to put some extra social media promotional muscle behind a particular piece of content or marketing offer, we might use this list to send an email to the contacts in our database with the greatest Twitter reach.
Dynamic lists are best used for email campaigns in which you plan on sending email more than once to a certain list of contacts that changes and gets updated frequently. As time goes on, your dynamic list would automatically adjust to your changing volume of contacts. This saves you the time from creating a new list every time you want to email that segment and keeps the list fresh and up to date in real time. Here are some examples of when you'd want to use a dynamic list in your email marketing:
Free Trial Users: Use a dynamic list to send ongoing tips about how to get the most out of your company's free product trial. This way, new contacts who start a free trial get automatically looped in the next time you send an email of tips to this list.Block Lists: Dynamic lists can also be used to suppress certain contacts and protect recipients from receiving too many emails. For instance, you could create a dynamic list of anyone who has already signed up for an event, and block that continually updating list from future sends designed to promote the very same event.Interest-Based Lists: Create an evolving list of everyone who downloaded content on a particular topic, then make sure your emails to that list match that interest category.
When it comes to dynamic lists, the possibilities really are plentiful -- and powerful. Just think of all the very targeted email you could send!
In what ways are you using dynamic lists to improve email segmentation?
Image Credit: adamentmeat
How to Make More Money From Existing Customers With Marketing Automation
Many businesses focus on bringing in more and more new customers; but the fact is, most of us aren't in a one-and-done situation. Nope! We've got more products that might strike your fancy, additional services that would make you squeal, and who knows what we'll roll out in the future!
Why, then, are current customers such an under-marketed to segment of our databases? One reason might be for lack of scalable marketing campaigns that can be run; luckily, marketing automation makes all of that way easier. You just need to have the right triggers -- and the right responses to those triggers -- set up to capitalize on prime revenue-generating opportunities. And today's your lucky day, because this blog post is going to give you seven of 'em.
Ready? Set? Let's make some (more) money.
One of the simplest ways to use marketing automation to generate more revenue from existing customers -- especially for ecommerce companies -- is to reference their past purchases. Some businesses invest in sophisticated recommendation engines like you see on Amazon, while others simply set up manual triggers to get the job done. Whatever your approach, think of what your current customer might like to buy based on what they've already bought from you.
For example, if someone purchased a subscription to an online SEO service, perhaps they'd be interested in getting some one-on-one consulting that helps them use that service more effectively. We've all been there, after all -- companies buy their monthly subscription, have no time or inclination to figure out how to use it, and all that cash is wasted. Plus, it's likely that customer is going to cancel their subscription once they realize they've never actually made use of the service. So why not squash that problem up front by setting up an automatic offer for anyone purchasing that service that promotes the paid consulting service you know from experience many customers like to buy along with their subscription?
Utilizing past purchase information isn't limited to selling complementary products or services, either. You can also do some detective work, looking at what other similar customers have purchased in the past to identify buying patterns. For example, let's say you resell books, and you have a handful of customers who purchased a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Well, what have other customers who purchased Frankenstein in the past tended to purchase? Maybe you notice a pattern -- an overwhelming majority also buy The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. It would behoove you, then, to set up an automation campaign in which you promote Poe's works, because you know customers of this type have a propensity to purchase Poe's writings!
Having clear insight into your customers' behavior when they visit your website provides opportunity to run some pretty creative revenue-generating automation campaigns. You may be used to stalking what your leads do when they visit your website, but remember, current customers have the potential to exist in two states -- customers, and leads! Let's take this customer as an example: they visited a pricing page and even downloaded a pricing guide!
Alright, what do we do? Well, what is someone visiting a pricing page and downloading pricing information typically a sign of? Just like any other lead -- whether they're a current customer or not -- it's a sign of someone who is interested in your company's solutions to their problem. So what do you do next? Why, you use this behavioral trigger to send them an automated email asking if you can interest them in a demo of your latest feature release, or perhaps a free consultation that would teach them how to implement that new feature into their marketing. This is a simple, scalable way to use software to nurture customers that raise their hand and indicate interest in buying even more from your company.
Many companies have a strong sales culture backed by a powerful marketing machine -- but they're letting revenue slip through their fingers because they're slacking on the services side. In other words, they can generate a ton of leads and convert them into new customers, but they aren't so good at keeping them. Companies facing this problem are losing revenue both in opportunities to upsell and increase the lifetime value of the customer (because customers are displeased with the product or service they've received and are thus unlikely to buy more), and in the investment in sales and marketing costs to acquire the customer.
But what are we expected to do, call every single customer and give them some TLC? That's not a scalable solution. Just like we don't expect you to cold call every eligible lead in your database to see if they're interested in buying your product or service, you don't have to give every single customer one-on-one attention. What you can do, though, is use triggers to identify who does need a little extra TLC, and use automation to contact and nurture them.
For example, many companies have a scoring system to denote how happy (or unhappy) a customer is -- a common system is NPS, or net promoter score.
Use your CRM to denote which customers are in the red -- if someone has a score of 6 or lower in their customer record, it should trigger a campaign that invites them to book some time with a senior member of your support staff; or heck, if you're a small business, maybe even with the owner or founder! You can position it as an opportunity to get feedback, and to diagnose the specific problems that customer is facing. This is when one-on-one time with support staff is a good investment ... so you don't lose the revenue you're generating from them as customers, the potential revenue you could generate from them in the future, and all of the investment you've put into acquiring them as a customer.
Piggybacking off of the last point, there are probably some customers who aren't actively unhappy with your company ... but they're not exactly singing your praises, either. Often, customers who are neutral about you feel that way because they just don't realize how awesome you are yet. Remember our SEO subscription example from the beginning of this post? Those who bought a subscription to that SEO service and didn't use it that much will probably fall into that neutral zone, but they could be made to absolutely love your company.
How can you use automation to turn those neutral customers into your biggest advocates? Make them successful. And how do you make them successful? Educate them!
Send automated emails to those who fall in that neutral zone with educational materials targeted to the problem they're trying to solve with your product or service. Let's continue with the SEO subscription example from point #1 to demonstrate this point. Perhaps a customer is using your online SEO service to track their keyword rankings, but they never spend time using another meaty feature of yours that lets them track how many inbound links they're receiving, and from which websites. That's kind of a huge miss -- only focusing on on-page SEO is going to yield pretty dismal results, after all. That's an opportunity for you to send a triggered email that reintroduces them to the importance of off-page SEO, and show how your link tool helps them be more successful with it.
Now your customer learns about a feature they may have never realized even existed, and how to be successful with it. Identifying opportunities like this is how you turn a 'meh' customer into a 'holy-cow-I-love-this-company' customer. And holy cow customers don't tend to leave your company. They tend to buy more from you ... over, and over, and over!
We've covered how to use automation to make miserable customers happy again, and how to make customers who don't care one way or another about you actually give a hoot. But are there opportunities to use automation to generate revenue from current customers? You bet your buttons there are, and we've already touched on it a bit! You just need to use different triggers this time around.
Happy customers are the ones who are most likely to buy from you again, so you should certainly be sending them those upsell and cross-sell trigger emails we talked about earlier. But you can also rely on those happy customers to refer new business your way, especially as you release new products and services. Start by treating them like the special people they are -- when you've got a new product line coming out that aligns with their past purchase history, send them a preview to get in on the pre-sale. Or if you've got new add-on service they'd clearly be interested in, tell them they're part of the elite, beta group that gets to try it out first and provide feedback. Give them some red carpet pricing, or a little discount as a thank-you for their feedback. Then, take it to the next level and give them referral codes to send to friends, family, colleagues, whatever, to get the word out about your latest release.
Now not only have you hooked this power-user segment of your customer base, but you've also empowered them to get others in on the hoopla. And you've done it all with the lowest-risk segment of your customer base -- because they're already thrilled with you, you've positioned this as a request for feedback, and even if your newest release doesn't strike their fancy, they love you enough that your credibility won't take a nose dive. Best case scenario, you upsell your current customers and they refer new business your way; worst case scenario, you get some excellent feedback that helps you improve your product or service. Not too shabby for a few measly automated emails, eh?
Certain business types and industries have high seasons, and low seasons ... and their budgets typically follow a similar calendar. That means there are times of year that your customers have more cash than the average bear, and you probably want to be the place where they spend it. So take a look at your database -- what industries and business types are represented within your customer base (or hey, you can do this for your leads, too!) that could stand to receive an upsell campaign?
For example, you might want to segment out and develop an automation campaign triggered for companies looking to offload cash before the end of their fiscal year. Or perhaps you have some customers that represent school districts -- they're going to be looking to buy before the fall, and your automation campaigns should be triggered to coincide with that timeframe. This type of information can also be gleaned over time through communications between customers and your services, sales, and support staff. As you get to know your customers better, you'll learn details like this that, when equipped with a proper field set up in your CRM, can be added quickly and then pulled for future automation campaigns of this nature.
Many businesses have realized the power of channel accounts -- why do all the selling yourself when others can do the selling for you? Just like you should work to make your customers more successful with your product or service, you should use automation to make your channel accounts more successful at selling for you. Because the more successful they are, the more successful (read: more revenue) you are!
End of the month looming? Send an automated email with new coupons and incentives that may help them close some deals that are on the fence. Start of a brand new month? Emails should be prepped that provide the new marketing collateral they can use to help advance sales. New pieces of content being released? Your channel accounts should be getting emails immediately informing them of what these pieces of content are, and how they can help them in the sales process to close more deals. Keep your channel accounts just as in-the-know as your internal sales force, and you'll see them pull in more and more deals in your behalf, too.
What other opportunities are there to use marketing automation to generate more revenue from your existing customers?
Image credit: Hello Turkey Toe
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