Best Traffic Tips

Archive for November, 2009

Video blogs very effectively grab the attention of web surfers. Adding video takes your blog to the next level of technology. While there are many sites online where you can upload videos to share with the public, having your own video blog keeps you in control of your content, and any advertising that may go along with it. Here are some things to consider if you want to start your own video blog.

Hosting a video blog requires quite a bit of server space, which can make it difficult to get started. You can, however, adapt the available free blog platforms for video blogging with just a few additions. You want to consider the quality of your videos and whether your current equipment can deliver that quality. You may also need to be able to edit your videos before posting them to your blog.

Video blogs can be more labor intensive than a text-based blog. It takes more time to process and upload a video file than it does to dash off a quick bit of text. The possibility of slow loading times of the files on your video blogs could also turn off some visitors.

Some things can’t be described with mere words. Before you decide to pursue a video blog, consider if it is the best way to express your message.

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Posted by randfish

First off, I hope everyone among our US (and expat) readers had a great holiday weekend, filled with tryptophan and football (I know mine was). Second, I’m very excited to announce that SEOmoz PRO is launching our first ever webinar on Thursday Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London/UK). We’ve heard from a number of our members that they’d like to do some live reviewing of strategies and recommendations and get questions tackled in this format. I’ll be running the webinar personally, but I haven’t quite decided on a topic, and that’s one thing I need your help with.

Below is an embedded Google form (they’re pretty spiffy) with three short questions. We’ll use your feedback to help determine the content and format for the webinar, as well as gauge interest level.

We’ll have another blog post in the next few days announcing details (based on your requests + votes), as well as an email to all PRO members with a registration link.

Of course, if you have anything to add in the comments or any recommendations, we’d love to hear from you there, too. If this webinar goes well, we’re certainly planning to make it a monthly event for PRO members, and possibly offer some free webinars to the entire community. A future subject that folks have been asking about is training on the SEOmoz toolset – that’s something we want to do, but we have some changes + additions coming in January, so we’ll get those released first, then follow up.

Thanks for your feedback and happy holiday season! 

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Blogs are the easiest sites to set up, and it doesn’t even have to put a dent in your wallet. Customization is simple with free templates, themes, widgets, and plug-ins for just about every blogging platform available. You add the content, set the font, pick the colors, throw in a few fancy graphics, and presto, you have a web site as unique as you are up and running.

Installing every free blog accessory that you can find isn’t necessarily a good idea though. While it may be tempting to add a traffic stats widget, a snazzy background, an ornate font, and a cluster of flashy animated gifs to your blog, this kind of plan can easily backfire. How? It takes focus from the blog posts, which is the reason why your visitors are there in the first place. It also can slow down the loading of your site. Not everyone has the patience to wait for a site to load if it takes longer than a few seconds.

Research the free blogging tools that are available so that you can make an informed decision about what to add to your blog. Choose only the options that will truly be useful and informative. A visitor counter can add a “wow” factor, but is it really useful information to your readers? Does that flashy background improve the appearance of your blog, or is it distracting? Your blog readers want information, and they want to be able to find it quickly and easily on your site. Too many additions can make your site look cluttered and disorganized.

The key to getting the most from free blog tools is being very selective with what you install. Be realistic about assessing what kinds of blog accessories will improve your site. Even a blog tool that doesn’t cost you any money may not be an asset in the long run.

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As retailers across the country hope to start the holiday shopping season with a BANG! today, I enjoy the day after Thanksgiving as a
time for planning the following month. It’s probably one of the few days of the year that
you can actually think about the end of the month, and then the end of
the year.  And, it’s pretty quiet on the work front too.

 Yes.  I am working today.  And, yes, it is Black Friday.  Why won’t you find me in line with the thousands of other shoppers looking for a super-duper bargain? Because, quite simply, I hope to tie a big red bow on the actions necessary to have a successful December.

Primarily, I hope to forecast the expected number of workable leads for the 32 HubSpot sales people on our team. With the Service Level Agreement (SLA) our team has in place with Sales, and it would be fantastic if we could exceed the number we’ve committed to with them.  What a great way to end the year and begin the next one with a pipeline filled with prospects! 

How do we achieve our SLA?  It’s not easy, and with at least three new sales people joining the company each month, the SLA grows incrementally because we’ve agreed to make sure that every sales person – no matter how small – gets a certain number of leads to achieve their quota.  That gives the Marketing Team a quota to achieve.  And that quota requires planning. 

The HubSpot Get Found Team works very hard to create remarkable content for our
blogs, newsletters, web pages, and other communication outlets such as
SlideShare, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook…the list is almost endless. All their valuable content forms the link bait to drive visitors, contributing to the valuable source of organic sales leads that convert to customers at a very high rate.  

The Convert Team continues to focus on the lead generation plan that will  optimize the number of leads we will create for the Sales organization.  We’re responsible for finding opportunities that turn HubSpot thought leadership content into workable leads, opportunities and customers. 

What’s in store for December lead generation?

* A fantastic thought leadership webinar, featuring HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella and his new book on Social Media. 

* More webinars, featuring HubSpot speakers, with MarketingSherpa, Web Marketing Today, the AMA, and WebMarketing123. 

* Special offers – featuring the HubSpot founders’ book on Inbound Marketing – extended to subscribers of RainToday, Debbie Weil, Jill Konrath, Ardath Albee and MarketingProfs. 

* And, we have several nurturing emails going to our customer and prospect lists, offering product demonstrations, and HubSpot application review sessions featuring our bevy of speakers, all under the auspices of our Product Evangelism guru, Kirsten Knipp.

Each of these individual marketing efforts requires a special Landing Page associated with it.  Why?  HubSpot knows that conversion increases with a form, a call to action and a very strong offer.  We often tell people that of the hundreds of landing pages we have created – on average – convert around 27%.  As a benchmark, that is a noteworthy percentage of visitors to leads. 

For the many marketers HubSpot talks to, the single greatest obstacle to creating landing pages is a lack of resources, and oftentimes the resource is in-house. In a prior marketing position, I either spent $500 with my agency to get a landing page for my press release, my Adwords campaign, my email program or I went with out a valuable conversion opportunity.  Forget IT, it would take weeks to get anything and then it would not be what was needed. 

With HubSpot we can create landing pages on the fly (comparatively) to take advantage of conversion opportunities…well, opportunistically.  And, we track every single one of the metrics.  The offer, the form, the visitors, and the conversion rate.    

There are many variables we consider for landing pages in an effort to increase conversion rates.  And, we try them all.  Again and again, in an effort to find the magic that will get us one more lead.

What about shorter copy length?  Could it be a simple page with few graphics?  Will we offer a single landing page versus a multi-step page?  Should we consider utilizing an aggressive sales language or go for the soft well?  What if we wrote bulleted copy instead of paragraph copy?   All of these ideas play into the goal of increasing conversion rates. 

A small increase in conversion rates can mean a large increase in the number of workable leads for the sales team.

At HubSpot, because the marketing team uses the HubSpot software for their programs, we’re able to simply create landing pages that enable us to perform all sorts of tests on conversion rates so the relationship between testing and performance is critical to success – for the marketing team and for the sales team.

Yes, it will be a very good December for our sales organization.  Because, we’ve planned, we’ve considered, we’ve discussed, and we’ve agreed to a workable objective via our SLA. 

These are the things we think about every day, but today I have to wonder…will Sears or Toys “R” Us ever have a Black Friday that lets me get leads at a whopping discount?  That is one bargain I’d definitely get in line for at 3 AM.

Inbound Lead Generation Kit

Learn how to generate more inbound leads using SEO, blogging, and social media. Download the free kit for tips and tricks to drive more leads and business to your site.

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Posted by great scott!

Happy belated Thanksgiving my American moz-Comrades, and welcome to Black Whiteboard Friday (and just Friday to everyone else)! 

This week we’re looking at analytics. No, not the normal stuff you probably pay attention to, but a few sneaky little metrics that can give you some great SEO insight.  Since it’s now officially the "Holidays," I’m not going to reveal too much; rather, I’ll let the video serve as an early gift, ready to be opened! Suffice to say, prepare to start looking at your referral traffic, abandonment rates, browse rates, and more in a whole new light

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Analytics for SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Since it is Black Friday, I want to remind you of some killer deals that are still available for you or your favorite SEO!

There’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! We’ve only got about a dozen passes left, so you should probably hurry. SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal (and if Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010).

You’ve also still got 10 days left to get super-low release pricing on the brand-new SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics six-disk DVD set! Until December 6th, you can get this killer new series for 20% off and Free Shipping anywhere in the world. Hundreds of people have already ordered and supplies are limited, so take advantage while the price is low, and this limited-edition set is still available.

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NOTE FROM THE PRODUCERS: Special Thanksgiving Episode of the show TODAY (Wednesday, November 25) at 1:00pm EDT. Click here at 1:00pm ET today to watch the show live.

Episode #67 – November 20, 2009
(Episode Length: 27 minutes, 35 seconds)

Intro

• How to interact on Twitter: @mvolpe @karenrubin and @DanZarrella with www.HubSpot.tv in your tweet.
• Subscribe in iTunes
• Thanksgiving episode on Wednesday at 1PM!
• Everyone is always welcome to come to the office for the live audience.
• Mike has a mustache for Movember! Support him at www.MikeVolpe.com/cancer
• Karen is a Wild Web Woman! Vote for her here!

New Guest! The Wonderful Dan Zarrella!

• He’s an author now! The Social Media Marketing Book
• www.DanZarrella.com
• “Social Media and Viral Marketing Scientist” what’s that mean? How did you get started doing all this?
• Big month for Dan…..

ReHashing ReTweeting

• Twitter’s New Retweet Feature Makes Quality, Unique Content Even More Important for Marketers
• ReTweets are associated with the original tweeter, not the retweeter
• You only see retweets for people you are following
• You can no longer personalize retweets, they are posted verbatim
• Marketing Takeaway: It’s even more important now to be the originator of the content, not just the retweeter.

Blogger Takes Heat for Comment Moderation

• Follow up: The vulgar comment & the school
• Kurt Greenbaum of St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s wrote an article about the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten.
• Commenter
  left vulgar comments twice, Greenbaum realized from commenter’s IP that
  it was from a local school. Contacted the school and sent over IP
  details.
• Commenter was a teacher and resigned when confronted by Principal.
• Marketing Takeaway #1: There is no such thing as an anonymous comment.
• Marketing Takeaway #2: This social media thing is still new, think twice about your actions.

Digg Blending Advertising and Content

• Digg CEO: Content as Advertising
  
• “Instead
  of the standard billboard or whatever you read on the Internet, we’re
  going to create ads – and we do create ads – that are literally
  content, so if you click on it you read an interesting story or
  article, and you put branding next to it. And we get literally get 100
  times the click-through rate of what a typical ad would get, so that’s
  good for advertisers.”
• Marketing Takeaway: Content performs better than sales promotion, and content can help build brands.

Forum Fodder

• Sheila Domingue What is the best way to find the top blogging sites for your area of interest?
• Technorati
• Google Blog Search
• BackType
• Twitter Search (Look for Tweets with links to blog articles) -
• Blog Grader Search (In Beta, might be a bit buggy right now)
• (And HubSpot’s social media monitoring!) 
• Add your comments here: 

Marketing Tip of the Week: Your customers are there…your competitors are there … why aren’t you there? Buy The Social Media Marketing Book!

Closing

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

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