SiteProNews |
- What Is The Most Effective Way To Measure Your Blog’s Success? – A SPN Exclusive Article
- Use SEM to Generate Organic Leads – A SPN Exclusive Article
- Can You Make a Great Impression in Seven Seconds? – A SPN Exclusive Article
- 5 Tips on Making the Most of Your Contact Forms – A SPN Exclusive Article
- How Webinar Marketing Can Help Your SEO – A SPN Exclusive Article
| What Is The Most Effective Way To Measure Your Blog’s Success? – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 18 Jul 2011 08:04 AM PDT 
Depending on the nature and the purpose of your blog, the metrics that you can use to successfully measure your blog’s success can be varied. Fortunately, there’s a host of sophisticated tools that’ll help you achieve the results you want, whether your blog is a personal outlet or a business blog. What Is Your Blog’s Purpose? Your blog’s purpose has a great deal to do with how you can measure its success. Is your blog a personal outlet, a place for you to share your thoughts, desires and opinions with like-minded folk? With this type of blog, the determining success factor is the quality of its content. You can measure the success of a personal blog by tracking readership, evaluating comment rate and tracking where your blog is being discussed and followed. Personal blogs can become enormously popular and can even transform into businesses. Many of the present-day business-related blogs were once personal blogs. With mounting traffic, revenue options are explored and it doesn’t take long before the blog’s success has to be measured using different metrics, such as conversion, retention, income stats and so on. A Step By Step Process To Measure Your Blog’s Success Whether your blog is for personal or business purposes, you can use this step by step model to measure success. 1. Define Goals If you have a business blog, define your website’s goal and your company’s goal. If your blog is personal, define your goals for engaging in it. Finally, define what you think should be your audience’s goal in consuming your content. Determine what you want your blog to achieve, as follows: * Do you want your blog to raise awareness of a particular issue? * Is your blog meant to showcase and sell your product and service offerings? * Is your blog meant to generate a conversation around certain specific topics? Based on the goals that you define, you can set up measurement metrics and measure your blog’s success accordingly. 2. Measure Reach Comments are good and let you know that your blog is being read. However, unless you have a reasonable volume of comments over time, it’s hard to measure your blog’s reach using the comment rate alone. Rather, measure the reach of your blog via shares, page views, number of new visitors and traffic volume. Check how many people are actually viewing your overall blog, and then find out how many people are reading individual posts. * Evaluate your blog’s overall readership over time to get a solid sense of your blog’s reach and growth. * Evaluate the readership of individual posts to know the kinds of posts your viewers like to read and how often they like to read them. * Track the sites where your blog posts are reposted and how often this occurs. You can track this metric using a tool such as Google Alerts. * Staying on top of the growth of your RSS subscribers over time will let you know how popular your blog is and how your committed readership has grown over time. * Use Google Analytics to evaluate where people are hearing about your blog. Are people following your blog on Twitter, or Facebook? Are your email subscribers forwarding your newsletters? Google Analytics can track traffic sources, giving you the metrics you need to evaluate your blog’s reach. 3. Measure Acquisition Rates Measure acquisition rates by checking visitation rates by new visitors, pages viewed and time spent on your site. Start tracking response rates to your Ads and promos. This will let you know how your advertising dollars are being spent and in which area your dollars are being wasted. By measuring acquisition rates, you can generate good leads to convert into paying customers. Tracking your response rate allows you to figure out cost per lead. You can arrive at customer acquisition costs by tracking how many leads turned into a sale. Use a tool such as Google Adwords or Google Analytics to define goals and track response rates. If you are using a Google Adwords campaign, you can use the same tool to measure cost per customer acquisition, or cost per lead. 4. Measure Conversion Rates Depending on the nature of your blog, your conversion rates will give you the most effective success measurement metric. Identify and measure all the activities that lead to a goal in a conversion chute. * How many of your readers click links to your website? * How much time do your visitors spend on your website and which pages do they most visit? How much time does the average visitor spend on specific pages? * How many readers click your Ad links? * How many of your readers subscribe to your newsletters? * How many of your readers choose to follow you on Twitter and Facebook after reading your blog? * If you are a product affiliate blog, how many of your readers are clicking links to product reviews and product sites after reading your blog? * How many of your leads are resulting in a sale? Based on this metric, what is your lead-to-sale conversion rate? 5. Measure Retention Rates Using retention rates, you can estimate the present and future growth of your blog and its related business. * How many of your first time visitors are returning visitors? * How many existing customers or visitors do you have, versus new visitors? * How often do new visitors view content that’s mostly meant for existing visitors and customers? * How many existing visitors or customers post comments, make return purchases or contact customer service? David Smith works for conversion rate optimization company Invesp and helps businesses in improving conversion rate of their online marketing campaigns. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Use SEM to Generate Organic Leads – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 18 Jul 2011 07:45 AM PDT 
Both marketing channels are essentially trying to achieve the same goal – generate leads and increase sales revenue. When properly implemented, just about everything you do for SEO can be coordinated with your pay per click campaigns, and you can drive targeted traffic to your best and most profitable content using PPC. Combining PPC and SEO enables companies to maximize return on investment, provide consistent messaging, and jump start efforts that may have been slow to take off. For newly developed brands or companies, marketers can use PPC to buy targeted traffic while the site gains search engine authority through SEO. At the point in time when your site has established its online reputation and built links and traffic flows, you can shift your strategy so that PPC becomes more of a complementary tactic. Design Your Pages for People – Not Search Engines This refrain is the go-to line of advice from Google’s Matt Cutts. Certainly, it is a safe phrase designed to summarize what your should do to boost your site’s SERPs, without disclosing Google’s secrets. If you have recently adopted ppc advertising after exhausting your seo ideas, buying traffic can be cathartic. PPC advertising is expensive. When you are charged for every click, you must rack your brain to maximize You can learn a lot about SEO by understanding PPC, and vice-versa. For instance, someone who has extensive experience with PPC can learn a lot regarding improving their quality scores by learning basic SEO basic best practices. Unified Messaging Many companies delegate the tasks of SEO and PPC to separate individuals. If this is the case in your organization, you should understand that both marketers are not competing with each other, are on the same team, and that their message needs to be unified. Both share the responsibility of driving traffic and generating leads. Communication is essential to ensuring that both marketers are utilizing similar phrasing and language. Again, the goal is the same, only the routes used to get there are different. Social Media & Direct Links It’s no secret that social graph metrics now play a key role in SERPs. By purchasing traffic, you increase the exposure of your website, and increase the opportunities for users to “like” your page, tweet your content, or directly link to it. While social media recommendations, tweets, etc., are all the rage of late, direct links are still the most powerful avenue to boost your site’s rankings. Search engines treat backlinks from other sites as a recommendation of your site’s quality. The same is true from social media, only with an added twist. Google now includes pages recommended through social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google’s very own +1, in search results for users. While this is still in its infancy, it stands to reason that recommended links experience a higher CTR than regular results, and thus, generate more leads. CTR and Direct Search Google’s algorithm has hundreds of components. Most SEOs believe that a site’s organic click through rate and volume of branded searches for your site are among factors Google looks at when ranking your site. By increasing the overall volume of traffic to your site, you are bound to see an increase in users searching directly for you. Double Rainbow! …or close enough, and it does mean something. Once your site has been indexed and ranks for your coveted keywords, you will begin to reap the benefits of valuable double links. A double link occurs when your organic listing appears on the same page as your ppc advertisement. Users will often see both listings and perceive your content to be relevant. Obviously, you would prefer if the user clicks on the free link, but even a click on your paid listing will improve your ad’s quality score, and reduce costs in the long run. Still, if possible, try to Conversion Data Increasing the total volume of traffic to your site can give you a better idea of which keywords actually convert into leads and sales. By using SEO alone, you are limited to data surrounding the keywords for which you have a high rank. You naturally have pre-conceived and biased notions of what the best keywords for your business may be. Often webmasters and marketing coordinators are surprised when they discover leads generated by keywords they once deemed irrelevant. Adam Shore coordinates marketing for an offshore call center in the Philippines, while living in Massachusetts, USA. His expertise includes lead generation, data entry outsourcing, virtual assistant services, customer support, and appointment setting. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Can You Make a Great Impression in Seven Seconds? – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 18 Jul 2011 07:33 AM PDT 
There are many people who use what is referred to as ‘The Rule of 7′ in many facets of their lives and business. The number 7 comes up an incredible amount of times in everyday life. What’s so special about the number seven? We have the Seven Wonders of the World, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, and the seven days of the week? What about the 7 tips for a better (insert your favorite topic here). Why are there only seven numbers in everyone’s phone number? There is no real concrete reason why the number seven so heavily influences our lives. In 1956, psychologist George Miller, after extensive study, wrote a paper entitled, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”. In his study, he equated seven to the maximum number of information segments that humans can process at any given time. While his view on the subject is somewhat contested in various circles, it does raise some interesting questions and ideas. Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist who took some of George Miller’s ideas and ran with them in the realm of social psychology. In his book, “Tipping Point”, he says, “as human beings we can only handle so much information at once. Once we pass a certain boundary, we become overwhelmed.” He then goes on to recount some of Miller’s research and comes up with that boundary being near six or seven points maximum. What we do know is that seven is an important number. So, if we use the ’seven second impression’ time limit as our benchmark in the design and presentation of your website’s homepage and navigation, then how do we make the best use of those seven precious seconds? Since we’re discussing the enigmatic number seven, let’s create seven guidelines to use: 1. Simplicity Simple, yet attractive works well. Unique and creative doesn’t have to mean complicated and overwhelming. Many times too much action and information on a homepage becomes overwhelming, causing people to click away quickly. Many website designs feature seven main operation/navigation buttons (coincidence? Nah!). 2. Purpose What is the purpose of the site? Make it immediately clear. “Great taste – Less Filling” is the idea here. Lean and mean. In the spirit of simplicity, get right to the point with the site’s message. Where do you want to take a site visitor? Make it abundantly clear. 3. Consistency in Layout Make sure that your site’s layout remains consistent from page to page. People get frustrated when they have to search how to go from page 3 back to the home page. Ensure that your navigation process is simple and consistent throughout the entire site. Make sure that everything you incorporate into the site revolves around being user-friendly and interactive. Research your competitor’s sites, find out what they are doing right, and do it better on your company’s site! 5. Professional in Content While you may be considered the most knowledgeable person about your company’s products and services, you’re ability to write perfect prose may be questionable. It’s always a good idea to hire a writer to create your site’s content. Or, if you want to generate the message yourself, consider hiring a proofreader and/or editor to review the text for the site. It’s in poor taste to have an excellently designed website that is full of run-on sentences, misspellings, and improper punctuation. Create a completely professional package by making sure your content is written correctly. 6. Test the Site Yourself Put yourself in the position of a potential customer/site visitor. Use the site from their point of view. If the site is set up to process orders, then go through the entire order process. Make sure it is error free, not confusing, and transitions smoothly throughout the whole process. Ask other people to use the site and review it for you. Asking for outside help can sometimes bring to light issues that you may have never noticed on your own. Try to use a broad cross section of people to review the site. In doing this you will get a good snapshot of the effectiveness of the site. These seven guidelines are not all inclusive. There are other things that rank highly in importance too for ensuring you get the most “bang for your buck” in the precious seven to ten second opportunity you have with a visitor to your company’s website. However, these are seven extremely critical components that should always be considered. Color Card Administrator is the parent company of PrintBusinessCards.com and several other innovative Real Estate Business Cards website, we’re eager to share with you what it is we do. Give us a call today at 858-522-9335 or email at Author@CardAdmin.com for Online Business Cards. We look forward to discussing your comments, suggestions, or hearing any ideas for future article topics you may be interested in regarding business cards design or business card management. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| 5 Tips on Making the Most of Your Contact Forms – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 18 Jul 2011 07:13 AM PDT 
Filling out a patient form in a doctor’s office is like applying for a mortgage these days. Home phone number, work number, cell number, full contact info for your closest relatives, social security number, job title, on and on and on. Equally offensive is having to fill out multiple forms with this same information or to have to answer these questions after already having filled out the forms. As a marketer, I understand the need to collect data. But, in my mind, if you’re going to ask someone for a certain piece of information, you’d better have a legitimate reason to need it. After leaving several messages at my home phone number, a doctor’s office complained that I was difficult to reach. I responded that I work during the day and that if they needed to reach me, they could have used either the work number or the cell number in their file. That’s when they said: “Well, some people don’t like us to use those numbers.” Which gets me to tips for website contact forms. Tip #1: If you’re not going to use the information you’ve requested, then don’t ask for it!! Your website contact form is a great tool for generating qualified sales leads. With a few pointed questions, you can determine pretty easily which leads are serious and which ones are just wasting your time. However, it’s important that your contact form ask just enough to be able to properly steer the lead to the right department or salesperson; going much beyond that threatens to annoy the prospect at the least and, at worst, can cause people to abandon the form, and your website, entirely. Tip #2: Don’t ask questions on your contact form that your prospect can’t answer. Contact forms generally are going to be filled out by people who have no prior experience with your company, products or services. Because of that, your prospects may not know exactly how to describe what they want in the terms that your company would use. For example, if you sell machinery called the Pro-Master I, Pro-Master II and Pro-Master III, it might make sense to have a question on your form that says: “I would like additional information on:” with check boxes for each of the three pieces of machinery. More than likely, prospects will check off all three because they don’t know enough about any of them to make a determination of which machine is best suited for them. And, in the process, you’ve likely annoyed them by asking them to know enough about your machinery to make that determination. A better way to word this would be: “Please send me information about your Pro-Master machinery line.” Tip #3: Don’t assume that all people who fill out your contact form read your whole website. Many Internet users are skimmers, not deep readers, so chances are that the folks who fill out your contact forms have only looked at your site long enough to compel them into filling out your form. They’re not interested in reading all 300 pages of your website, they want to talk to someone to get their questions answered. That’s a good thing! Tip #4: Give prospects information in the way they requested. Folks who fill out contact forms generally do this to avoid phone calls. They want to be able to evaluate your company’s information on their own, before initiating a direct conversation. But, sometimes, the reason they fill out the form is because they don’t want to have to navigate your phone system to get to the right person. On your form, ask whether they would like to be contacted by phone or by e-mail, and then follow up in that manner. It will put your prospect at ease and make them feel that you understand them. This doesn’t preclude you from doing a follow up phone call once you’ve e-mailed out the requested information. Tip #5: Treat a contact form like a phone call. I’ve always been amazed at retail establishments that will have a client standing in front of them wait while they answer a phone call. Shouldn’t the person who walked in your door two minutes ago get first priority over a ringing phone? Similarly, it’s best not to make your contact form prospects wait several days for information they’ve requested. Contact forms should be treated as you would an incoming phone call. Process them in the order they arrive as efficiently as possible. You want to be sure that the prospect receives the information they requested before they forget that they ever sent the request. Angie Charles is President of Pilot Fish, a search engine optimization (SEO) firm and website design company located in Akron, OH. Pilot Fish specializes in helping business-to-business clients get found online. For more information or help with your b-to-b website, visit Pilot Fish at http://www.pilotfishseo.com. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| How Webinar Marketing Can Help Your SEO – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 17 Jul 2011 10:00 PM PDT 
Here are 3 ways you can use webinar marketing to help your SEO before the webinar takes place: 1. Create a Unique Landing Page Chances are you schedule your webinars well in advance. Start the sign-up process early by designing and launching a landing page for your webinar. This unique landing page can rank in the search engines for keyword “webinar,” so make sure your take the time to properly optimize it. This includes developing Meta tags and a Meta description, creating a unique URL structure, optimizing the content and so forth. You want people to find this landing page! Once you have an actual page built, it can be indexed and rank in the search engines. This makes it easier for people to find and sign up than if you just added a snippet of content to the bottom of another page on your website. 2. Social Promotion Let people know you are holding a webinar! Send out a Tweet, a Facebook update, post it to LinkedIn Groups you are a member of, and any other social network you may be on. Include a link to the landing page and call-to-action encouraging your network to sign up today! And don’t forget to repeat… one Tweet isn’t enough; it is going to get lost in the shuffle. If you have the right programs, you can schedule out social profile updates. Depending on how often you regularly post content, have the link to your webinar landing page go live 2-3 times a week (maybe even more!). You can also promote your webinar in a company newsletter if you publish one, or just send out an e-mail blast to your mailing list. Make sure you include Share buttons so others can pass the landing page link along to people in their social networks. 3. Promotional Blog Posts and Press Release A week before the webinar is scheduled to take place, write a promotional blog post announcing it. Include a brief overview of the topic to be presented and who the information would be beneficial for. Incorporate the landing page link (both through anchor text and the full link) into the content of the post. Don’t forget your call-to-actions! The same day the promotional post goes live, you can also have a prescheduled press release go out. This will help build awareness as well as links for your webinar landing page. You can also use webinar marketing to help your SEO during the webinar itself: If you have a Twitter account, develop a hashtag (stylized by #keyword) for the webinar. Encourage attendees to Tweet during the webinar itself and share key pieces of information as they come up. If you get enough people Tweeting, your hashtag might even turn into a trending topic! Having that hashtag will also help if anyone is searching Twitter during your webinar for related information. At the end of the webinar, encourage attendees to connect with you on your social profiles. Drop in a slide with the appropriate links. Here are 3 ways you can use webinar marketing to help your SEO after the webinar takes place: 1. Re-use the Landing Page Don’t scrap all the work you did! If you think you might ever hold another webinar, keep the page around. As it ages, the page will build a stronger trust with the search engines. Since you promoted that page specifically, it probably has a decent portfolio of quality, inbound links as well. That link juice doesn’t have to get lost and you don’t need to 301 redirect it to a new landing page for a new webinar. Unless you have to change the URL, you can just change the content to reflect the next webinar. 2. Record and Share the Webinar Let your attendees know that you are recording the webinar and that it will be available as a resource for them to keep. People like having a reliable source of information on-hand. You can share the webinar as a video (complete with audio), or just publish the presentation itself as a stand-alone document. If you don’t limit who can access the published presentation, people will link and share that as well, helping your SEO. 3. Write a Recap Post Just like you wrote a post promoting the webinar, why not write a recap post? You can include an outline of the presentation, any comments or questions you got from attendees, as well as a link to download a copy of the presentation. While the webinar in itself can be incredibly valuable for building your brand and reputation, there is a lot more added SEO value to be had. Don’t let such valuable content go to waste! Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing a Boston SEO and white hat link building company. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-350-4365 or nick@brickmarketing.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
You can measure your blog’s success using the right metrics for your blog type and purpose. For example, you can determine the success of a business blog based on the number of clients the blog earns for the business. An affiliate blog site’s success can be measured based on its affiliate sales and an industry blog’s success can be measured based on its subscriber rate.| You are subscribed to email updates from SiteProNews Recent Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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