Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr
Tumblr is catching on fast! With 6.6 million users, New York based Tumblr says they’re adding 25,000 new accounts a day and serving up 1.5 billion page views.
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Thanks @jacirusso for this great suggestion! This nifty little tool recommends photos, related articles, tags, and in-text links for your blog articles. Just copy/paste your content and they do the rest.
5 Steps to Express Inbound Marketing
I’m calling this the express inbound marketing because marketers always tell me they just don’t have time to do everything they want. I give them ideas on little things they can do with the time they have, but they’re always pushing for a task list. You asked (and you all know who you are), so I’m answering.
Here’s the 5 step process every B2B marketer with limited time should follow to get inbound marketing success. The rate at which you complete these steps will determine how quickly you’ll see success (a.k.a. do it more and you’ll get more out of it, do it less and it will take longer to see results).
Step 1 - Create a compelling offer
This should be a truly compelling offer - not a contact sales form, request more information, or free consultation form. It needs to be something that your target audience will find valuable. If you can help it, this compelling offer should not mention your products or services at all. It should help your key market solve a problem they have. This can be things like a guide, kit, whitepaper, webinar, slide presentation, article, or video.
Examples: Website Re-Design Kit or New Homeowner’s Guide to Purchasing Insurance
Step 2 - Put it on a landing page
Create a landing page with a form that encourages visitors to give you their contact information in exchange for this compelling offer. When creating the form fields be sure to think about how much information your target audience is willing to give up to get your offer. If you ask them for everything but their social security number just to download an article, they’re probably not going to fill out the form - and neither would you! The number of form fields often highly correlates to the conversion rate of that landing page.
Step 3 - Write a blog article to promote the offer
Now, go to your blog and write an article that promotes the compelling offer you just created. Using my examples above, good blog posts might be titled, 5 Simple Steps to a Website Re-Design or What Every New Homeowner Should Know about Insurance. Then, create a call to action (ideally a graphical button, but text will do) at the bottom of your blog post and link it to your landing page.
Examples: Thinking of Re-Designing Your Website? Download the free Website Re-Design Kit to help you get started.
For more helpful tips, check out the New Homeowner’s Guide to Purchasing Insurance.
Step 4 - Promote the blog article to your network
Go out and promote this blog article to your network. Post it to Twitter, your Facebook and LinkedIn status updates, the news section of relevant LinkedIn groups you’ve joined, look for LinkedIn and Yahoo! Answers to respond to, and send out an email to your database. Don’t be shy, but don’t be spammy either. Look for relevant places that your target audience might be spending time online and go there first.
Step 5 - Analyze and repeat
Now that the heavy lifting is complete it’s time to analzye the results. See how much traffic your efforts brought in and the number of leads and customers that resulted. You should also track to see if you increased the number of blog subscribers, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook fans and so forth.
What did you learn? What could you do differently next time? Now, go do it and share your experiences below!
Inbound Marketing: It Takes Time or Money
Inbound marketing is hard. But, it’s not hard because you need to be a genius to understand it (come on, it’s not rocket science). The concepts are pretty clear - create remarkable content, optimize it for the search engines, promote it to your audience, and create opportunities for conversions with compelling offers, then analyze and repeat. It’s hard because it takes time, energy and creativity.
The number one complaint I hear from marketers is, “I don’t have time to do it.” My response - “well, I guess your company just doesn’t need any more leads then.” That usually gets their attention, but they still say they don’t have time. So what are these marketers doing? They’re attending trade shows, planning events, writing press releases, and buying ad space - activities that aren’t helping their bottom line. Marketing has often been thought of as an expense for most companies, when in reality, it should be a revenue generating department.
So, my advice to marketers who say they don’t have time for inbound marketing - outsource. Gone are the days when a marketer can work for a company who creates a product they know nothing about. Marketers need to be content creation factories. You know what I’m talking about…you’ve seen those marketers who work for silicon chip manufacturers or engineering firms or biotech companies who have no idea what their company actually does. How can they be thought leaders? How can they create remarkable content?
The answer is, they can’t. So they should find others who can and then start learning. Learn by reading blogs, marketing books, attending webinars, downloading whitepapers and articles. Become an inbound marketing expert because your job and your company depend on it.
Do Meta Keywords Matter?
With Bing taking over search for Yahoo and MSN Live there has been a lot of talk lately as to whether or not meta keywords will play a role in on-page SEO.
Yesterday, Google officially published an article on their webmaster blog stating they “do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.” Matt Cutts had eluded to this on his site for some time, but now it’s official. In fact, they say they haven’t included it in their ranking for years.
My colleague Mark found an article from Bing’s webmaster blog that suggests they may include it in their ranking algorithm. Well, at least they suggest we not ignore it entirely.
The tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.
So, what would my suggestion be? For now, here are a few tips:
- Use no more than 8 to 10 relevant meta keywords per page
- Use singular and plural versions of keywords
- Include common mispellings if they exist
Bing also gives some great tips:
- Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the and description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
- Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
- Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list
Do you have any other tips for writing your meta keywords?
Photo credit: tiagodoria
Thank You For Your Comments !?!
I was pretty behind on my RSS reading so when I woke up at 7:30am today (yes, on a Saturday), I opened my Google Reader and found over 700 new articles. Slowly I made it through them and actually found some really great articles I was inspired to comment on. I wrote out these very nice comments and then got this staggering message:
Thank you for your comment. It will appear after the moderator approves it.
Thank you for my comment!?! I just spent 10 minutes out of my busy day to write a thoughtful and intelligent comment on your blog and contribute to your community and you won’t even post my comment!
Well, I’m an internet marketer and I know how this goes. Companies are afraid that people will leave negative comments about them. Personally, I say get over yourself. If your company isn’t strong enough to take the criticism or maintain transparency then you shouldn’t be blogging. That’s what blogging is about - stimulating conversations with your community. It’s not much of a community if the conversation is only one-sided.
