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August 22

Having Clear Desired Outcomes Makes Blogging Easy

Blogging and writing educational content for a website is often looked at as a dreaded task. It's on par with many people's excitement to go for a run after work! The problem is, much like the run, you know you should be doing it, but you still don't. If there's one thing that will truly help you start and continue blogging on a regular basis, it's having clear outcomes you are trying to achieve from blogging. I don't mean the general outcome of more website traffic. I mean specific outcomes. Notice I said outcomeS, plural. Increasing website traffic might be one of your outcomes, but you should be more specific than that. When it comes to website traffic, your outcome should be more along the lines of increasing organic search traffic from Google, for a specific list of keywords, by a specific percentage, over a specific period of time. If your outcome is to get more website traffic, you've succeeded if you get 1 more visitor than you did last month. That's not success. Defining ...

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August 20

Generate, Then Guide Leads Down Our Sales Funnel

On the web, we have a unique opportunity that doesn't exist with traditional, interruption marketing. We can not only generate, but also guide leads down our sales funnel and score them into a qualified lead that sales can work to close. This aspect is often overlooked with small businesses looking to generate leads online. It's just as important to help guide newly generated soft leads down your sales funnel based on where they are in the buyer's journey for your industry. Let's briefly talk about this notion of a buyer's journey and how it impacts the sales funnel. Every consumer, whether B2B or B2C has a common set of steps that they take from the time they identify that there's a problem or desire that they have to the time that they make an actual purchase. Inbound marketing allows us to market to our leads based on where they're at in the buyer's journey. I plan to write more detail on the buyer's journey in the future, but for now this simple explanation will suffice. We can ...

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August 15

How To Find Out Who Is Using Content Marketing In Your Industry

I bet you've said it... yep, you. You've made the dreadful mistake of saying no one in your industry (competitors, vendors, etc...) use content marketing yet. No one baits in high quality prospects with valuable content they've written in hopes of generating leads... OH REALLY!?!?!?!? I'd be willing to bet with a little Googling we can prove you wrong. You just need to know how to start looking. Here's a quick way to do some competitive research on who is using content marketing in your industry.

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August 13

Sales Down? Start Generating Qualified Leads With Marketing!

The first step to solving a problem is recognizing you have one. The second step is identifying the exact problem you have. If your sales are off, inconsistent or non-existent you may think you have a sales problem. This is often not the case at all. Most likely, you have a marketing problem. By most definitions of marketing, your efforts should generate leads for your sales process. Could the same person at your small business be in charge of both processes? Yes. Especially for a small business. If your sales are struggling or you are simply looking to increase your market share, you need to refine your sales process, but you absolutely MUST focus your efforts on generating qualified leads through your marketing efforts. You may have the best closer in the business working for you, but if this salesperson gets garbage leads sent to them, they won't be the closer they could be. Some Signs You Have A Marketing Problem It Seems Like No One Is Buying Right Now Someone is buying. They ...

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August 12

What is Ongoing SEO and Why is it So Important?

SEO (search engine optimization) optimizes your website to rank well in the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! SEO is imperative to online success because of the following statistics (courtesy of Search Engine Journal): 70-80% of users ignore the paid ads, focusing on the organic results. 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate. SEO is not a one-time endeavor that your business can check off a list and never have to worry about again. Instead, it demands continuous attention to reach its maximum potential and to remain an effective tool for your business. This is where ongoing SEO comes into play. Ongoing SEO analyzes the results of the services initially provided to make sure they are working. Many firms use tools like Google Analytics, MySEOTool, Moz tools, and more to review their activities and then use them to provide ...

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August 08

The 5 Best Inbound Marketing Articles From This Week

My oh my was it a good week for getting some inbound marketing education! Here are the 5 best inbound marketing articles from this week: How To Repurpose Marketing Content The incorrect assumption by many small businesses that are just getting started with content marketing, that all of their content has to be unique keeps many SMBs from getting started. While you certainly need a good volume of unique content, you should also have an ongoing effort to repurpose the content you create. For example, you write a series of posts on your blog surrounding a certain topic. Could you combine those posts into a longer form piece of content like an ebook? Could you take an ebook that you've created and do a youtube video or infographic on the topic? Additionally, you have the option of updating a piece of content you've previously written to account for industry changes. The bottom line here is that you can re-use your content assets online and offline. Article By WH & Associates in Los ...

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August 07

The Path To A Small Business Website Conversion

A website conversion takes place when a visitor to a website takes the action the website owner wants them to take. This action could be anything from starting a real time chat or downloading a valuable piece of content to submitting an RFQ (request for quote), making a donation or completing the buying process through ecommerce. To make your website a lead generating machine, you need to understand the path to a small business website conversion. Step 1 - Quality Website Traffic If you want to generate quality leads, you need quality website traffic. Yes, quantity can be important, but the quality is even more important. We tell our clients that it would be better to have 1000 quality visitors that are actually interested in their offering than have 2000 visitors that have little to no interest in their offering. Through small business SEO, search engine pay-per-click advertising and/or social media paid advertising, you can really hone in on your ideal buyers and generate quality ...

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July 30

Effective Inbound Marketing Is NOT A Project

The majority of our clients are small businesses with no full time marketing staff. In fact, many do no marketing at all. That's why when they look to redesign their website and improve their SEO, they look at it like a project. They think they will give it their focus for a couple of months and it will be behind them, "running" in the background, "hopefully" generating leads for them. Like most things in life, effective inbound marketing, the kind that generates leads and helps to grow a business, is not a project that you do once, and then set it and forget it until the next time you decide to focus on it. Effective Inbound Marketing Is Not A Ron Popeil Product Inbound marketing should be an ongoing effort that is on any business owner or executive's regularly reviewed processes. Why? Because you won't always be able to rely on those core clients that pay your bills. When one of them goes in a new direction and picks your competitor over you, do you want it to be because they did a ...

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July 23

4 Simple Web Marketing Metrics To Measure

One of the biggest differentiating factors between web marketing (inbound) and radio, TV, newspaper, billboard, print, (outbound/interruption) etc... is the availability of EXACT data on how your marketing is performing. This can also pose a challenge though. With so much data available, it's easy to get lost in the weeds. For small businesses, just knowing 4 simple web marketing metrics will keep you well ahead of your peers when it comes to measuring performance and adjusting to improve. Are there many, many, many, many more metrics that you could/should measure? Absolutely! My point here is that most small businesses don't even know these 4 simple web marketing metrics for their efforts. Start here and customize/add to them over time. 1 - Organic Search Traffic To Your Site - SEO Traffic When we ask most small businesses how their search traffic is performing, most of them don't even know where to look to find that out. They know their site isn't performing for them, in that they ...

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July 18

Curated List of 4 Great Web Marketing Resources This Week

Feeling guilty that you didn't read any web marketing resources this week? No worries, we've compiled some of our favorites to give you some weekend reading material. Enjoy! Google Will Now Detect if a Website Won’t Work on Your Device, Warn You Have you ever tried to view a website on your phone and found the experience to be really bad? Yes, you have, don't lie. Google is now helping it's Android brethren by giving you a warning in the search results to let you know if a site won't work right on your phone. For now, they are focused on flash sites. Don't be surprised if that extends to non-flash sites in the future. Responsive design anyone? Thanks to Kellex at Droid Life for the great update. Infographic - Smart Ways To Combine Content Marketing With SEO One of the great things about content marketing is that it doesn't live in a silo. It feeds so many other tactics!! It's great when you get more mileage from a time investment. This infographic shows all of the channels for content ...

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How to Audit your Online Marketing

If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?

Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.

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