Friday, 30 October 2015

5 Google Analytics Features You Probably Don’t Use Enough (Or Haven’t Even Heard Of)

There’s no question that Google Analytics is an essential tool to understanding your digital audience. It allows you to dig deeper into the types of content they interact with, the platforms they engage on, and the path that leads to a conversion. Businesses large and small can take advantage of these benefits, giving them the data to adjust their marketing plan as needed and make the best use of their budget.

In 2014 over two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies utilized Google Analytics as part of their data collection and marketing strategies, a 6% increase from 2013. Across companies of all sizes, over half of businesses utilizing web analytics software rely solely on Google Analytics. Despite competition from Adobe, Webtrends, and many others, it’s hard for these data providers to stack up to all that Google Analytics offers (let alone for free at the basic level).

It’s hard to believe, but Google Analytics has already been around for 10 years! Despite the fact that we’ve had access to such valuable data for all these years, there are constantly new or updated features and reports hitting the platform.

While regular Analytics users are probably well-versed in the “Audience” and “Acquisition” reporting tools, there are so many other features that tend to go untouched or unnoticed. These are tools that could completely transform how you manage your digital presence moving forward. Even if you’re among the most avid of users, here are five Google Analytics features that you may not be as familiar with.

1. Weighted Sort

When analyzing how your web pages are performing, it’s easy to sort the table by bounce rate or by the number of pageviews. You simply have to click that attribute’s heading and you’re good to go. However, just sorting by one factor or another doesn’t give you the whole picture. Organizing the pages by bounce rate won’t necessarily put your pages in order by traffic volume, but sorting by pageviews won’t take bounce rates into account.

This is where the Weighted Sort option can help. This feature allows you to see which pages have both a high traffic volume and high bounce rate, identifying where a good majority of your missed conversion opportunities may lie. To do this is really simple. On any table, click the “Bounce Rate” column header to sort the rows. Then, click the dropdown next to “Sort Type” and choose “Weighted.” The first web page you see in the list is likely the first place you should start when evaluating both design and content elements of your site, as it has one of the highest bounce rates as well as pageviews.

google-analytics-weighted-sort

Figuring out why users are leaving your site from this place is crucial. Are they unsure about next steps for contacting you or making a purchase? Are they turned off by the layout or design of your website? Or have they simply found all of the information they need at this time? Utilizing the Weighted Sort option is an important first step to making these discoveries.

2. Site Search

Practically every website nowadays has a search bar for users to narrow down what they are looking for and expedite the search process. Not only is having this feature available to visitors important, but acknowledging exactly what they’re looking for and why is equally valuable. The Site Search feature in Google Analytics can help you understand all of that. Through this tool, you can see which products or services are most important to your audience as well as whether or not your website is easy to navigate.

To start using Site Search, go to the Admin section of your account and click on “View Settings” under the website you would like to begin tracking.

view-settings-google-analytics

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.

site-search-settings-google-analytics

Search parameters are the letters or words that precede a query in the URL. For example, a search for Google Analytics-themed blog posts in Kissmetrics’ search bar brings you to http://ift.tt/1oIgpXs?s=google+analytics, so the search parameter would be the portion that is highlighted. All you have to do is enter those characters into the Query Parameter section, and everything but the specific search terms will be filtered out when you go to view the report.

Once the tool is turned on and tracking, you’ll find your data under the Site Search segment of the Behavior section. You can filter the data by unique search terms, time spent on the site after a search, and the number of pages viewed following the search.

behavior-overview-google-analytics-navigation

This will help give you greater insight into the typical paths your visitors take once they’ve searched for a particular product or service, helping you better organize your website’s content and personalize future marketing efforts by understanding what a user is looking for.

3. Remarketing Lists

Remarketing is a valuable tactic in a marketer’s arsenal, allowing you to reach back out to potential customers that didn’t convert the first time around. Whether your initial marketing message was off, they didn’t gather enough information to make a decision, another company was recommended to them, or they weren’t in a buyer frame of mind yet, remarketing is your second chance at converting them into a customer. It’s a great way to make the most of the audience you have, without having to invest more into your marketing budget to attract an even wider pool of consumers.

The Remarketing Lists feature in Google Analytics works together with your AdWords account to help you build lists of prospects that you can target with future campaigns. That being said, you cannot utilize this feature without having an active AdWords account.

To get started, go to the Admin section of Analytics and click on “Remarketing” under the Property column.

remarketing-google-analytics

Then click “Audiences” in the dropdown that appears to begin creating your own custom audiences. You can either let Google select your audience through a Smart List, or you can create your own based on new or returning users to your site, as well as those who visited a particular page, completed a goal, or made a purchase.

audiences-google-analytics

Once you’ve created one or more audiences, you can then add them to future ad campaigns in AdWords. Google Analytics does limit you to 2,000 remarketing audiences per account, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll reach this threshold.

4. Funnel Visualization

Within the “Flow Visualization” section of Google Analytics, there are several reports that shed light on the specific path each user takes through your website to ultimately end up at their final destination. You can see where visitors may have abandoned their original path to pursue something else, went back to a previous page to get more information, and where they bounced from your site (and most importantly, if a conversion was recorded).

The Funnel Visualization report focuses on how your Goals perform overall, measuring conversion rate over time. This feedback allows you to further analyze the Goals that you’ve set for your company in Analytics, and determine whether they meet the mark or should be reevaluated. To find this tool, go to the Conversions dropdown and click on “Goals.”

funnel-visualization-google-analytics

You can view each Goal’s conversion rate over the course of a day, week, or month, allowing you to zoom in on the impact of a particular campaign or see how your efforts have worked throughout the month. Looking at the sample graph above, you can see that the goal of “Request Consultation” peaked towards the end of the 7-day period on September 27th.

You should compare this to your marketing efforts on that specific day to dig into why you saw this spike. Did you promote a new blog post or product offering on social media? Did you send out an email to your subscriber list? What was it about that day that stood apart from the rest of the week? Since the 27th fell on a Sunday this year, maybe that was the best time for consumers or business owners to take the time and fill out your contact form. The Funnel Visualization report is a great way to get your marketing team talking to see what strategies have the greatest impact on that particular goal.

This feature also helps you see which Goals are working well and which ones may need to be reconsidered. From this point, it’s helpful to make a pit stop at the Goal Flow report to dig deeper into why certain goals are more effective than others. You can choose items from six categories: Acquisition, Advertising, Behavior, Custom Variables, Social, and Users. This helps you laser in on user behavior broken down by traffic type, actions completed on your site, social network, or even custom factors that you identify.

goal-flow-google-analytics

In this example, you can see that the majority of the “Request Consultation” goal completions can be attributed to organic traffic, and email had almost no impact. This is a clear indication that your website content and SEO strategies are proving to be effective, while you may want to take a look at how you’re approaching email marketing. Starting off with the Funnel Visualization report to get an initial look at your Goals and then digging deeper with Goal Flow will allow you to ensure that your priorities are in line to convert visitors into customers.

5. Trackbacks

It’s so easy to get caught up in the search and website elements of Google Analytics that you might forget that there’s an extremely valuable section dedicated to social media and its impact on SEO. The Social segment can be found within the Acquisition dropdown, allowing you to see how your social media presence drives web traffic and ultimately conversions. The Trackbacks feature takes a look at everyone who has linked to your site’s content, whether it’s a blog post, piece of downloadable content, or even one of your services pages.

trackbacks-google-analytics-navigation

What’s most helpful here is that you can see how many sessions on your website resulted from that particular link or how many times the same URL has linked to you, separating more passive users from those that are truly engaged with your content and message. For example, if you see that an industry publication has linked to one of your ebooks multiple times, that could indicate the potential for a future partnership. Maybe they would be interested in having you contribute a guest post to their blog, or they have a tool or piece of content that would be useful to you.

Regardless of the industry you operate in, partnerships are vital to making a name for your business and standing out as a thought leader. Whether it’s an opportunity to share content, services, or to co-sponsor an industry-related event, link building continues to prove its importance in both SEO and business in general. Don’t miss out on these individuals or companies who are taking note of what you have to offer; they could lead to valuable business propositions.

Keep Up With What’s New

Google Analytics is constantly adding new features and enhancing old ones, making it difficult for even the most experienced of users to keep up. It’s important that you take some time to look around your account every so often and see what’s new. You’ll likely stumble upon a feature that you never knew existed, perhaps even some of the examples above. From simply sorting current data in new ways to setting custom goals and analyzing sources of web traffic, there’s a seemingly endless number of ways to put Analytics to work for your business. And don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all to gain the insight you’re looking for. If you’re able to zoom in on a specific target market or goal that is top priority, you can cater your approach accordingly.

Are there some new or lesser-known Google Analytics features that you’ve recently discovered? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

About the Author: Kim Speier is an inbound marketing specialist at Mainstreethost, a digital marketing agency in Buffalo, New York. She frequently writes about social media, content marketing, user experience, and web design for the Mainstreethost blog. Connect with Kim on Twitter at @krspeier.



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10 Tips on the Inventive Mind from the World’s Best Thinkers

What advice would the world’s most gifted minds have to say on invention?Related Articles
  1. The Importance of Cultivating an Inventive Mind
  2. Benchmark Presents: Email Marketing Best Practices and Trends
  3. New Complaints Can Come from Stale Email Campaigns (Part 3)


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Is Anyone Actually Looking at Your Mobile Ads? And Other Mobile News

Welcome back to the The Friday Five. Every Friday we'll curate five relevant and recent articles on one specific topic and present them here for your viewing pleasure.

The topics will include but not be limited to:

- Mobile marketing
- Social media marketing
- Cross-channel marketing
- Content marketing
- Marketing automation
- Data

So be sure to check back in every Friday because the fact is that no matter how hard you try, you cannot possibly read or know about every article that's on the Internet. So sit back and allow us to do the curating for you. 

This Week's Friday Five: Mobile

How Can Marketers Be Certain Their Mobile Ads Are Actually Getting Seen?

Having addressed marketers' concerns about desktop viewability (ads that are actually seen by consumers) in 2014, the Media Rating Council is now in the hot seat to provide guidance on mobile advertising. In May, the MRC made its first statement on mobile viewability, saying that smartphone-size ads need to be measured differently than desktop ads. Five months later, however, marketers are still waiting for an industry standard for chargeable impressions to buy ads against, even with the MRC's promise to address the issue by the end of the year.

Read the full article on AdWeek

Mobile video ad spending triples in 2015, and that’s just the beginning

Mobile video has tons of momentum. It more than doubled from 2013 ($720 million) to 2014 ($1.5 billion) and is predicted to reach $6 billion by 2018, which would put it at about half of all online video spending. Those are huge figures, and what’s amazing is that they may be way too conservative. A new study by AppLovin and AppsFlyer, mobile marketing and mobile attribution companies, examines data from over one billion devices worldwide and found spending on mobile video ads has actually grown from 23 percent of mobile ad spending to a whopping 66 percent of total ad spend. That’s a 190 percent increase in just a few quarters.

Read the full article on Venture Beat

Mobile Messaging For Marketers 101

If you’re a consumer-brand marketer, you’ve no doubt given thought to running a marketing campaign or having a presence on a mobile messaging app. After all, every consumer is increasingly using mobile messaging as their portal to mobile. It’s sticky and lends itself to repeat sessions, boasting the highest retention and engagement rates of other apps on average.

Read the full article on Tech Crunch

Report: Mobile To Dominate Programmatic Advertising, Leave Desktop In The Dust

Digital ad forecaster eMarketer is asserting that the majority of US display advertising dollars will be bought through programmatic channels by 2017. Furthermore, most of that will be mobile. A new report from the company estimates that mobile programmatic advertising will be worth roughly $9.33 billion in 2015, capturing 61 percent of all programmatic display ad spending in the US. By 2017, eMarketer says, mobile programmatic will be worth $20.4 billion vs. $6.34 billion on the PC.

Read the full article on Marketing Land.

Mobile Augmented Reality Market for Marketing and Advertising in APAC to grow 

Augmented reality is an emerging technology that permits the overlay of computer graphics on the real world. It includes scanning the physical, real-world environment and enhancing/augmenting it by adding virtual computer-generated information. End-users can make use of this technology through applications developed for mobile devices. It involves blending digital content with the physical world. Augmented reality is being extensively used for marketing and advertising by enterprises. Although the adoption of this technology is low in APAC, it is expected to increase during the forecast period.

Read full article on Market Watch



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3 Resources to Help You Build Outstanding Online Courses

Copyblogger Collection - craft superb online courses

“Choosy moms choose Jif” is one of my favorite taglines, for peanut butter or otherwise.

The product’s message stands for more than just peanut butter.

Jif paints a subtle picture of an elite group: choosy moms. Choosy moms only buy the best food for their children.

Any mom who aspires to be part of a group of selective moms would value what Jif represents and feel good about purchasing the brand of peanut butter.

When you turn your educational content into an online course or membership site, how can you communicate to your potential students or members that you have the knowledge that will help them become the people they want to be?

This week’s Copyblogger Collection is a series of three handpicked articles that will show you:

  • How to structure and sell your natural expertise
  • How to attract students who want to learn from you
  • How to create a valuable lesson plan that sells your online course and motivates your students


How to Structure and Sell Your Natural Expertise

learning-management-system

Chances are, you’re extremely knowledgeable about a certain topic.

Whether you know a ton about an industry you’ve worked in for years or a fun hobby you’ve mastered, at some point you might want to document your expertise and teach others.

But how do you organize your ideas and find the right technology solutions that help you distribute your lessons to students?

In How to Structure and Sell Your Natural Expertise, Pamela Wilson shares the first steps you need to take, so you realize that building an online course isn’t just a lofty dream — it can easily become a reality.


5 Reasons Why It’s Practical and Profitable to Share Your Expertise Online

profit-from-your-expertise

If you’re still not convinced about the benefits of teaching an online course, Amy Harrison is here to guide you with 5 Reasons Why It’s Practical and Profitable to Share Your Expertise Online.

Amy tells a juicy story about her own experiences teaching in-person classes and teaching online.

I won’t spoil it for you, but here’s a snippet of her wisdom:

Until they master cloning, you can’t scale your live workshops and profit.

I’ve had the pleasure of running many workshops that I absolutely loved. Even so, I was capped at the number of training days I could physically do each month.

Anyone who trades time for money has this limit, and in addition to limiting your revenue, it can also make you susceptible to the small business ‘feast or famine’ cycle.


How to Create a Valuable Lesson Plan that Sells Your Online Course and Motivates Your Students

online-course-lesson-plan

It’s time to get down to business.

Fortunately for you, Henneke has outlined How to Create a Valuable Lesson Plan that Sells Your Online Course and Motivates Your Students.

If your lesson plan describes unparalleled value for your students, it naturally sells your course for you.

Thought-provoking stuff here.

Check out Henneke’s article to find out exactly how to craft a remarkable lesson plan.

Smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital products and services

Ready to create your own online course or membership site, but you need more educational resources?

Our brand-new Digital Commerce Institute is designed to give you the in-depth education you need to build a profitable digital company.

Until November 6, 2015, we’re offering Charter Membership access to our online Academy and our live 2016 Digital Commerce Summit at an exceptional price.

Head over to Digital Commerce Institute to learn more about our special limited-time deal!

About the author

Stefanie Flaxman


Stefanie Flaxman is Rainmaker Digital's Editor-in-Chief.

The post 3 Resources to Help You Build Outstanding Online Courses appeared first on Copyblogger.



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How to Grow — The 2 Types of Growth (FS134)

We all want to grow our thing and we all need to do a bunch of work to do it.

(Note: by “thing” there I’m referring to your product sales or blog or podcast or something.)

But most of us don’t realize there are 2 kinds of growth. Understanding the difference between the two will help you figure out what you should work on to grow your thing.

We’ll walk you through the two kinds of growth and help you make decisions, answering questions like:

  • What kind of growth is "best"?
  • Do I have to use both?
  • Plus several examples of real life growth projects.

How you think about growing your business can lead to burnout. Let’s nip that in the bud and help your business flourish. Enjoy!

It’s better to listen on the go!    Subscribe on iTunes 


How you think about business growth can lead to burnout. Nip it in the bud.


Show Notes

10 Business Archetypes: How to Choose a Business Model That Makes Sense (and Money, FS091)

Try Fizzle’s 9 Stage Roadmap for Free — we’ve got an entire section of the roadmap dedicated to growth.



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Thursday, 29 October 2015

How to Put Eyes on Your Content on Day One

The day has finally arrived!

You’re ready to launch your site off into the endless expanse of the internet. You content is polished and beautiful, your site delivers an amazing user experience—after all, there’s no point in driving traffic to a site that no one will like!

You wait, ready to answer any comments, thank everyone who shares your content—and spend all day refreshing your site stats, as a tiny trickle of people come and go, with barely a word to say.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Sure, everyone starts at the bottom, but that doesn’t mean you must start at zero. There are ways to make sure your reach is as large as it can be from that first day—and the faster your start, generally, the faster your rise.

So how do we go about making sure your site has the absolute best debut it possibly can?

Assess Existing Assets

Starting Big

You probably recognize the name Neil Patel. If not, he cofounded Kissmetrics, and has since created several very successful blogs. He clearly works harder than most people, and he knows his trade, so chances are good he would have found success regardless of his base. That said, the name recognition, authority, and readership he gained from working here on Kissmetrics probably didn’t hurt, right?

neil-patel-12-thousand-views

Chances are your first article won’t generate 12,577 views the month you launch your site.

The bigger you want to build a skyscraper, the wider and deeper you have to design the base. Likewise, if you want to build a huge following quickly, the best thing to do is to start with as many people as possible looking at you.

Starting out, you probably don’t have a blog with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to pull from, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything at all.

Today, almost everyone is active on some sort of social media, and most of those who aren’t make up for it by having friends out there in the real world. It’s worth saying, don’t be obnoxious about it, but most of your friends and acquaintances well be happy to give you a boost if you ask them. Your primary goal out the gate is to get people signed up to your email list, because that will bring people back, and your secondary goal is to convince them to share your content, because that will bring new people in. Even a few dozen or hundred people will make a big difference in the short run. We’ll get into why in a minute, but for now let’s talk about how.

Where to Amass Followers

First off, if you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of conversion, it would be a good idea to read up a bit. Your goal here is to create that wide base to build off of, so you get the most out of every post. Different networks offer different advantages, and you can certainly, if you don’t have time for setting up and growing all of them, mix and match to focus on those aspects you believe will be the most important to your specific situation.

Facebook Friends

Facebook is great for starting a site out, especially your first, because they let you invite people to join your business/fan page, where you’ll hopefully have a nice conversion button to take them to your site. User engagement with your posts is higher on some other platforms, but no one else lets you bug people in quite as direct and friendly a way as Facebook. Better yet, people are used to getting invited to random things, so they’re not going to hold it against you.

Likely you’ve already seen the big problem with this, though, which is the nature of your social network on Facebook. Simply put, your friends, family, and acquaintances are not likely to be your actual target market. That’s okay, because, hopefully, a few people in their networks are.

Don’t underestimate the value of joining Facebook groups in your target area, either. These are often very active, but overlooked and underutilized by major players, meaning you only have to compete with other little fish for attention. With any luck, you’ll make some new friends struggling with the same issues you are, and help each other grow into medium-sized fish.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is a fickle beast. Unless you’re very good or very lucky, you will probably see only a trickle of traffic from this site. Even tweets that do very well from a retweeting perspective tend to have low conversion.

Somewhat ironically, given that it’s such a large and impersonal site, what Twitter is best used for early on is building relationships. Follow and reach out to established authorities in your niche. Not only are you genuinely likely to have interests in common, but many are happy to offer advice and support, and a single share of your content from a known authority can open you up to dozens or hundreds of new connections.

To put it another way, your focus on Twitter isn’t bringing floods of people to your site, it’s about bringing a handful of the right people.

Google Plus

Google Plus is another oddball. It might be important for SEO rankings, you need a profile on it, but it’s so convoluted in some respects that it’s hard to grow yourself there. One particularly great thing about it is that anything you share on G+ is almost instantly indexed.

I don’t know entirely why Google Plus is such a mess. Part of it is no doubt the learning curve for G+; while most social media platforms have a clear and obvious thing they do, G+ is trying to be everything to everyone. They want to handle the comments on your blog, they want to merge with your YouTube channel, and so on, so it’s not clear entirely what you’re there for at first glance.

Most of the people who use it fall into one of two categories:

Power Users: These people really get a lot done with G+. They’ve taken the time to figure out how to take advantage of its strengths, and they’re reaching other experts. This, oddly, makes G+ a great place for interacting with other people who are serious about what they’re doing.

Jeff-Bullas-google-plus-account

Jeff Bullas’ Google+ profile has almost thirty thousand followers and is closing in on four million views.

Autoposters: These people set their blogs to autopost to their G+ page and have never, ever, been back. This is almost everyone who could be described as a beginner, novice, or casual blogger.

In other words, most people either get a lot from it, or nothing at all. If you’d like to jump into getting the maximum from Google’s own take on the social network, start with the basics, and work out from there.

Pinterest and Instagram

This is a wildcard. If you are operating in a visually engaging niche, Pinterest and Instagram are both incredibly powerful. If you happen to be able to create small montages of eye-catching images, Instagram is possibly the easiest social media network to gain a big following on.

Pinterest doesn’t amass followers as quickly, but has been show to have a high conversion rate compared to most other social media platforms. In other words, if you can get people to look at your stuff on Pinterest, there’s a relatively high chance they’ll follow it to your site.

On the other hand, if your niche doesn’t lend itself to pretty pictures, these sites will be of somewhat diminished value to you. It’s also important to note that while both Instagram and Pinterest rely primarily on visual content, they are not created equal. Pinterest is a great place to share infographics and other more complex posts, while the structure and culture of Instagram reward collages and photographs more strongly. Including infographics in your articles is a great way to expand the reach of your content on that platform.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been making big, and very overdue changes lately with how they deliver content. It now functions as something of a hybrid of Facebook’s News Feed and Tumblr, where you have a feed delivering content generated or shared by people you follow, as well as items LinkedIn thinks you might like – or was paid to show you.

One aspect which has not yet been overhauled, but is hopefully on the list, is the groups feature of LinkedIn, which is reminiscent of the forums that have existed on the internet since nearly the beginning. Like-minded people can gather together, create topic threads, and discuss those topics, to their hearts’ content. It should be an extraordinary tool for outreach to your target market, but in its current iteration is just a kind of okay one. By posting often, and linking to good content (yours and others’) you can usually bring in a pretty steady trickle of new people, with a relatively high conversion rate to subscribers, since they’re already interested in what you’re talking about.

The good news is that LinkedIn is the absolute easiest network to grow your network on. Everybody is there to, digitally speaking, exchange business cards.

The first step to creating a big following is to contact people you actually know. LinkedIn will then help you out by importing your contact lists and so on. You want to get about one hundred followers, so you look like a real person rather than a bot. Of course, one hundred people is way too small a number to really expand the reach of your content, so you’ll want to acquire more followers.

What should you do next? Well . . . This is sort of bad form, so don’t tell anyone I told you to do this, but what you should do is use the “People you may know . . .” feature to send out invitations to connect to as many people as you can. Target peers in your field in and your target audience—you want shares from the former and clicks from the latter.

Once you have five hundred friends on LinkedIn, your count simply shows as 500+ and you never have to send out a request again to grow your network, because you’ll get a steady stream of requests indefinitely.

Is this abusing the system a bit? Absolutely. Is it the best way to get something valuable out of LinkedIn? As far as I’ve been able to tell.

Other Websites

One of your biggest assets isn’t social media at all. Do you have any friends with blogs or websites? Acquaintances? Cousins of friends of friends?

Ask them to link to your new site, even just a mention. This will help you rise through the SEO page rankings by growing your domain authority.

If they have a more popular site, this can really translate to a huge bump.

Guest Posts

Even better than a link, reach out to people and ask for a chance to guest post. Many sites will be happy to extend at least the opportunity, and if you do it far enough in advance, they’ll be happy schedule the articles for your site launch or soon after. This is a three-fold win for you. It raises your domain authority, and it sends people your way, which is great. The big thing it does, though, is give you an opportunity to interact with the users of the other site, answer their questions and create rapport.

In fact, commenting on other blogs and websites is another great way to gain followers!

Many of the people you interact with (assuming the interactions are positive) will check out your own site. Even if they don’t, though, they’ve got one more reason to remember your name. If you’re showing up on a number of sites, they’ll see you again and again, and they’ll start thinking of you as someone whose advice is sought. An authority. Someone to pay attention to and follow.

Just remember to write insightful comments. Generic comments like “hey great post” won’t help. Since a lot of commenting systems allow readers to rank (thumbs up/down) comments, it becomes even more crucial to write something that will get the attention of readers. If you have nothing to say, don’t write anything.

There is some debate over whether the value of guest posts is deteriorating, but they certainly remain invaluable to sites in their early stages.

Don’t be afraid to ask

How do you get guest posting opportunities? You ask. Ask on Twitter or through email. However works, but do ask. Most sites, even relatively low traffic ones, get many, many, requests for guest blogging opportunities, but if they know you’re a real person, and you can show them you’ll do a good job, then at least a few of them will likely acquiesce.

This isn’t about taking the internet by storm, it’s about opening a door. As your name recognition increases, you’ll get more opportunities—that’s a long term concern though, and we’re talking about putting eyes on the page on day one. What you’re doing by guest blogging is diverting a tiny portion of as many larger sites’ traffic as you’re able to towards your own site. Many small streams make a river.

It should probably go without saying (but won’t) that your social profiles should be polished. You want to be wearing the digital equivalent of a nice suit, so that you look professional. Perfect formatting and grammar are necessary. The picture you choose is also important – people will judge you by this. Choose a professional photo – something you’d put on a resume.

Why Leveraging These Platforms Matters

I did promise to tell you why all this matter. Well, in all honesty it’s not critical that this all happens on day one. That’s just what this article is about, and there’s no reason you can’t have it all ready to go, so why wouldn’t you?

Blog growth tends to be happen slowly, if the blog’s doing well. You have ten in month one, twenty in month two, forty in month three, and so on. Give or take, of course, there isn’t some industry-standard growth curve. That said, you’ll have some average rate of conversion of visitors, and the more visitors you convert, the more visitors there will be to convert, so things gain steam. In other words, if you’re going to grow at all, in two or three years it won’t really matter whether you started with one subscriber or one hundred, because you’ll have thousands. However, there’s a big difference between a three month growth curve starting with one, ten, and one hundred followers.

Let’s look at a very simplified growth rate of 10% per month for twelve months.

Starting with ten followers, you’ll end the first month with thirteen, and the year with thirty-three. Starting with three hundred thirty. The math on this isn’t exactly hard. At this arbitrary growth rate every subscriber you have at the start is an extra tenth of a follower each month.

Does it really work this way? Of course not! This example is simple, and reality doesn’t have time for simple. Your growth will probably follow something close to this pattern at first, after that, things get complicated. At some point you’ll hit plateaus or viral spikes, and there will be good months and bad.

The point is, the more people you start with, the faster you’re going to grow if you’re doing everything else right. And that’s why we care about starting strong.

Followers are just the start, though, because, “. . . if you’re doing everything else right,” is a very big if.

Test All Tech

You’re going to have some technical difficulties. It’s going to happen. Still, it’s better if you don’t shoot yourself in the foot at the start of the race.

Technical difficulties can break a launch, and often do

Make sure everything is working. I can’t give you a real checklist for this, because it’s a big, complex topic, and since there are so many ways to build, host, and run a site, anything specific I wrote would be 90% irrelevant to everyone who read this. That said, there are some basic items which should be in the forefront of your mind.

Make sure your site works for all major browsers

Even Internet Explorer. There are very few things more frustrating when designing a site than making something very cool and discovering that it works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and . . . not Internet Explorer, because if one browser is messing up, it’s always Internet Explorer. IE is still the browser of choice for about 10% of the internet (which is millions of people). So, if you don’t support it, that’s ten percent of your potential market, poof, gone. Maybe that’s worth it to you, maybe it’s not, but be aware.

Ensure Everything Works Properly on Mobile

More and more people are visiting sites from mobile devices, so it’s very important to make sure your site renders properly on these devices. If they have to pinch and zoom or try to adjust your site so that it is readable, it will leave a bad impression and most visitors will likely leave and never come back again. Even worse, it hurts your SEO with Google. Use Google’s mobile friendly test to make sure your site works properly.

Get Open Graph Working Correctly

You know when people share an article on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and there’s a catchy image that appears? That’s no accident. Their Open Graph is working properly.

Make sure key features work

Like I said, I can’t really give you a definitive guide, but there are some critical growth opportunities that you’ll lose if you don’t have the following features working: comments, follow, share, and subscribe.

Fully Integrate Your Social Media Platforms

Speaking of following and sharing, since you have gone to the trouble of growing your potential readership through social media from the outset, it would probably be a good idea to make sure your site can properly leverage these media. This is another good reason to grow your following in advance, as you’ll have to set up the various accounts to connect them to your site anyway.

Make sure all the buttons work. Seriously.

So speaks the voice of painful personal experience! Make sure every single button you have on the site actually does what it’s supposed to be doing. Don’t just assume it will.

Make it Easy For Users To Give You Their Email Address

Remember, the prize bit of user engagement (aside from actual sales) is the email subscription. You don’t want users to leave without giving you their email. Look at Kissmetrics. What’s the first thing you see in the top left, right where your eyes look when you start reading the page? A box for your email and name . . . and this is a site which is all about the science of conversion. What does that tell you about how important email subscriptions are?

kissmetrics-blog-email-signup

Easy signup process

So make sure they can give you their email address! Any funnels you have for convincing people to give them to you are well constructed, but also don’t put up any barriers; if the user wants to skip your pitch and just commit, don’t force them to click through a million reasons why they should do exactly what they were already planning to do.

And make it clear what they’ll be getting when they sign up. An email every time a new post goes live on your blog? Will this be everyday, a few times a day, once a month, etc? Make it very clear before they signup. And, of course, tell them that you’ll never spam them (assuming you won’t).

Ensure all content is optimized to share easily

This is another tricky one, because “optimized to share” is different for different platforms, and, also, changes for each platform from time-to-time. While individual platforms change what sizes and types of content look best only rarely, with all the platforms out there, it’s a pretty constant trickle.

What you want to consider are the sizes of the images, the length and content of your excerpts, and the length and content of your titles. There are other aspects to consider, but basically you should put some real though into making people want to click on whatever stub you’re showing them.

Keeping track of those details is a huge headache, but luckily there are sites dedicated to doing just that.

Observe Some Simple Best Practices

There are a few more miscellaneous things you can do to really maximize your return on investment right at the start, simply by avoiding missteps.

Don’t include content which will anger people unless that’s what you’re going for.

Making people angry is actually a great way to make money, judging by the number of big sites which seem to specialize in it. That said, don’t do it accidentally. What a mess that is. Just think before you post.

Don’t get too fancy

Bells, whistles, buttons, video intros, etc. There is always a new next big thing, and it’s okay to indulge now and then, but you should, especially right at the start, be focusing on strong fundamentals. You look better sinking one from the free throw line than barely missing ten from the half court.

Don’t mislead

Honesty, honesty, honesty. If people don’t trust your brand, you are sunk. You’ll be shopping for office space on the lower deck of the Titanic. So don’t be sketchy. Even if it pays off immediately, it will hurt you in the long haul.

Don’t Spam

People are trusting you with their time, their contact info, and their attention. Don’t abuse it, simple as that. Treat their time as your own. If you’re good about it almost all the time, most people will forgive you when you slip up.

Project Professionalism

This is sort of an extension of everything above. Perception is important. If you want to look like a business authority, maybe use an “about me” photo featuring yourself in a type of suit that doesn’t begin with any of the following words: swim, jump, gimp, or birthday.

An exception would be the word “space”. If you’re an astronaut, play that up.

Have a Post Bank Saved Up Prior to Launch

Start Your Organic Rise

Okay, let’s touch on the organic search results, because you should start building your domain authority right at the start. We’ve already mentioned how to position yourself to squeeze out lackluster competitors, but there are a few more things to consider.

Ensure your content is at or above the quality of top competitors in your niche.
I won’t go into this too deep, because everyone who’s even sort of an expert in internet marketing and SEO has already written an entire post on it, but the best way to rise in your niche rankings is to find searches where the top result is mediocre or worst, and answer the same question better.

Write several articles on topics related to your niche.

You want to have several articles, perhaps half a dozen, populating your site right at the word go. This way, anyone who arrives has few things to read or share—and, better yet, link back to. But take your time with writing. To write something truly insightful and useful is a lot of work. Quality over quantity.

Establish (and Keep) a Schedule.

One of the biggest predictors of whether or not a site will grow is whether or not someone keeps creating new content on a schedule. Now, this probably isn’t a perfect correlation, because the people who are busy creating content are also the people who are going to be working hard at all the other aspects of making a site fly.

Advertising

How much depends on your budget, but let’s be honest here, advertising is still an amazing way to bring people in, and expand your reach. Services like Outbrain are specialized for content.

Always Be Learning

Creating great content that gets shared and has great SEO is tough. It requires a lot of learning and practice. Don’t expect to know it all from the start. Begin with reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Read it and live it.

It’s also worth reading up on Bing’s guide to building quality content and even Wikipedia’s guide to writing.

Additionally, spend time learning why other sites rank well and are well-respected. What do the New York Times, The Atlantic, and even Pitchfork have that gets them the respect, authority, and traffic? Know what makes good content and what makes bad content.

Conclusion

This is all a lot of work, I know. Running a site is a lot of work.

Momentum takes awhile to accrue—that’s both the pleasure and the pain of it, but, generally speaking, if you follow these guidelines, you’ll have tilted the ground in your favor. All you have to do now is push as hard as you can, as long as you can, to take advantage of the friendly terrain. There’s no road to easy success, because, if the road is easy, you’re going to get lapped by all the people giving it their all.

What advice do you have to help people put eyes on their content from day one?

About the Author: Anja Skrba has been blogging for over five years. You can find her at FirstSiteGuide.com whereshe shares tips on blogging basics and trends.



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Jonny Rants His Sinuses Clear About Social Media Strategy

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What happens when we become so focused on new social media tactics that we lose sight of our goals?

We all have a finite amount of time and energy. Every moment that we spend on social media is a moment that we aren’t spending producing our shows.

Should we be spending all of our time on our shows or are we better off using Pareto’s 80/20 Principle, which states that 20 percent of our efforts gives us 80 percent of our results? Of course, it depends.

Today on The Showrunner, hosts Jerod Morris and Jonny Nastor go further than that and help you define a strategy for social media, rather than tactics that could distract you from your larger mission.

In this episode of The Showrunner, Jerod and Jonny discuss:

  • Jerod’s success with posting his Primility Primer videos to Facebook
  • The difference between strategy and tactics
  • Why Chris Ducker is going all-in on Periscope (and Michael Hyatt is stopping his daily scopes)
  • Why you need a North Star to guide your work
Click Here to Listen to
The Showrunner on iTunes
Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM
About the author

Rainmaker.FM


Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Jonny Rants His Sinuses Clear About Social Media Strategy appeared first on Copyblogger.



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Critical Mistakes that are Hurting Your Membership Site

mn-membership-sites-7

In the seventh part of The Mainframe’s membership series, hosts Tony Clark and Chris Garrett reveal the mistakes membership site owners make that harm sales, customer experience, and reputation.

Listen in to get all the details.

In this episode of The Mainframe:

  • The deadly sales issues that are costing you revenue and word of mouth
  • Why your membership is not retaining customers like it should be
  • What prospects are really looking for in your membership site and marketing
Click Here to Listen to
The Mainframe on iTunes
Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM
About the author

Rainmaker.FM


Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Critical Mistakes that are Hurting Your Membership Site appeared first on Copyblogger.



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How to Create Videos and SlideShare Presentations that LinkedIn Loves

ml-video-slideshare-linkedin

Listen in to The Missing Link as two expert guests share how you can create videos and SlideShares that work for LinkedIn.

It’s easier than you think to create visually appealing videos and SlideShare presentations from the content you’ve already created.

Your content is worth more when shared in different formats.

So, you’ll want to listen closely to this episode to learn valuable information you can put to use right away.

Scott Skibell, a valuable member of The Missing Link LinkedIn group, shares why video is so important for deepening your connection with your audience.

Scott explains how to get started, the costs, what types of videos you can create, and much more.

Think you need expensive video equipment to make great content? Take a look at what you can accomplish with just your iPhone …

But wait, there’s more!

Our very own Pamela Wilson delivers the start-to-finish process of choosing your content to present on SlideShare, resources for choosing the best images, all the way to some ever-important call to action tips and tricks.

This article — The 3-Step Journey of a Remarkable Piece of Content — converted to SlideShare has more than 31,000 views (and counting)!

You can check it out here.

And then check out the number of views on this article about writing a damn good sentence as a SlideShare presentation.

Seeing the benefits?

In this value-packed episode, Scott Skibell and Pamela Wilson share practical tips and tools to get you started today with repurposing your valuable content into video and SlideShare presentations on LinkedIn.

It’s time to add this incredibly powerful visual element to your online presence!

In this show, you’ll learn:

  • Why video works so well for your online presence
  • How to get started creating videos
  • What types of videos you can create
  • The most important element of video
  • Why the “Rule of Three” is critical
  • How to choose content that will easily convert to SlideShare
  • Where to get your images (plus resources)
  • How to guide your audience exactly where you want them to go
Click Here to Listen to
The Missing Link on iTunes
Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM
About the author

Rainmaker.FM


Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post How to Create Videos and SlideShare Presentations that LinkedIn Loves appeared first on Copyblogger.



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The Importance of Cultivating an Inventive Mind

Whether it’s a brainstorm or a big pitch, problem solving, or being quick on your feet to respond to a client, you need to train your mind to be inventive and adaptive.Related Articles
  1. Your Business Mind on Fiction: The Theory of Mind and the Benefits of Good Fiction
  2. The Employee Mind Map: 4 Steps to Bridge a Widening Gap in Employee Disengagement (Part 2)
  3. The Employee Mind Map: 4 Steps to Bridge a Widening Gap in Employee Disengagement (Part 1)


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How to Use Data as a Competitive Advantage

Big Data, in short, has gone mainstream. But that raises an important question: If everyone is “data-driven” in both theory and action, how can businesses carve out meaningful competitive differentiation through their use of information? What room exists for real commercial advantage when everyone in the marketing ecosystem is advancing from the novice to expert stages of their respective data maturities?

The above is an excerpt from the foreword of the white paper Data as Competitive Advantage. Oracle Marketing Cloud worked with the Winterberry Group, the IAB, Dun & Bradstreet, Accordant Media and AddThis on research that highlights how a combination of businesses – agencies, brands and publishers alike – are using “data” in their marketing businesses as well as their perceptions of what’s working and what could be better. Most of the individuals who responded to this research have used a Data Management Platform (DMP) within the last three years or less, which represents rapid growth! 

Given the rate of adoption and interest, we helped produce this research as a way to better understand how the marketplace is considering “data” and how we can better address the needs of the marketplace through our own technologies and services. That said, here are a few of the key takeaways from the Data As A Competitive Advantage white paper:

  1. Use of audience data represents competitive advantage, but only for sophisticated marketers and publishers. In addition, basic business drivers that meet core revenue attainment goals are what are still prioritized, over audience data use that “may” have business value, but are not necessarily guaranteed. 90% said there was “some” business value and 74% of the executives who contributed to the paper said that accountability was “the” metric needed to grow topline revenue and that is what matters most. 
  2. Data practitioners understand the value of using 1st party data – the data most organizations already have access to, but it is still nascent with only 52% of these users having seen “value” in the use of 1st party data activation. 
  3. Advertisers continue to see value in open market RTB sources, but are concerned about “private data market” exchanges. This signals the rise of private data exchanges or “walled gardens” as we say and the question regarding how to optimize cross-channel capabilities with limited line of sight or access to the right data to inform customer experience (and business outcome) through these private exchanges. 
  4. Attribution is still the beacon that all marketers aim to ensure their programs have across channels. That said, the efforts to fully measure and have an end to end attribution program are still widely yielding “mediocre” results for most marketers.
  5. Operational and organizational agility is now being recognized as something that has to be addressed for businesses to transform and embrace a data-driven philosophy.
  6. Industries are still leaning on technology providers, like Oracle, to make tools that “pull it all together” so that it is easy to embrace and use the data systems that exist – in the multitude of locations and systems that they exist in. 
Why is a Data Centric Business Model Adopted?

All of the above points suggest that while there is much greater appreciation and understanding for what becoming “data driven” can mean for a marketer, the practice is still largely nascent and the understanding for how to use specific technology to address specific use cases is still being assessed by most marketers with varying degrees of success – due to operational items, organizational and potentially even technology providers.

So, while some more sophisticated marketers have tried and succeeded with becoming more data driven, the success hasn’t been widely repeatable and the results have yet to be consistent. 

We continue to provide guidance to our customers about “how” to consider “data” success in their own unique organizations and knowing what will work, who will champion, and what success looks like before any technology decision is made. Enabling data success in any organization requires so much more than technology alone. 

Download Data as Competitive Advantage and see for yourself the role that data plays in driving competitive business advantage across a range of advertising, marketing and digital media use cases.



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