Internet Marketing Strategy 2.0

Peep Laja, a conversion optimization expert at Markitekt, has an excellent illustrated guide at ConversionXL guiding you through over 20 of the most common mistakes made when designing landing pages. 

For each issue Peep provides a real-world example with a screenshot and relevant commentary at what you should pay attention to.

Instructive. Good curation. 8/10

Full guide: http://conversionxl.com/21-ways-youre-screwing-up-your-landing-pages-and-what-to-do-about-it/#. 

While they may cost a few thousand dollars if commisioned through an agency, curated music playlist appear to be an emerging approach for big brands to develop a closer relationship with their fans.

From Nissan, to Juicy Fruit, Telus and Mr. Clean, there are already several large brands who have been investing in compiling dedicated music playlists to engage and stay in contact with their customers and potential ones for hours at a time. 

Songza (available only in the US and Canada) is one of the pioneering music distribution platforms monetizing this approach.

My comment: DJs and music experts may have yet to witness the opportunity to become fully part of the communication and marketing process of big brands by curating all of their marketing-related music needs.

Check out this article to learn more about it: http://www.6smarketing.com/blog/songza/ 

InfoBark is a web app which makes it extremely easy to create simple horizontal bars that contain a specific text, offer, or clickable call to action and which can be instantly embedded ad published inside any web site, article or post.

Infobark allows you to fully customize the text, colors and background of the "information bar" you are going to create and lets you save and create more than one bar.

Infobark also tracks impressions, clicks and conversion rates allowing you to monitor its effectiveness in real-time.

Free to use.

Try out now: http://www.infobark.com/

If you want to monitor new inbound links to your site, including their value, linking date, anchor text and more Majestic SEO has introduced recently a free-for-all service that any owner of a verified domain can use on his own site.

With SEOMajestic you can also see where there are new broken links on your site. At times these happen just because the page you are linking to on another site has reorganized and its page addresses have alla changed.

To access this free service you need to verify your own site either by including a text snippet in your home page meta tags or via Google Authentication.

The PRO version, simply extends the powerful capabilities offered by SEOMajestic to the service of analyzing the link profile of any web site. Not just yours.

More info: http://blog.majesticseo.com/development/site-explorer-goes-free/

Sign-up + try: https://www.majesticseo.com/account/register

Home: http://majesticseo.com/

Chris Spooner has some good and well-illustrated advice on how to effectively use sign-up forms on your web site. If your subscribers are lagging behind you will find here some practical advice on how to improve immediately on this front.

You may need a little graphic design help, but the author himself could be a resource if he did what he has so clearly illustrated in this article.

Little details make a lot of difference.

Useful. Illustrated 8/10

Full article: http://line25.com/articles/how-i-increased-my-subscriber-rate-by-10x-overnight

My personal belief is this: in the near future, if you want to stand out in your niche, get a serious following of passionate fans and build a strong credibility for yourself, you will need to do something better than just writing blog posts (however good they may be).

"Recently Martin Laetsch, Act-On’s Director of Online Marketing, presented a webinar covering the 10 most important rules for successful search engine optimization.Not all of them are 100% new, but they’re all critical keys to success. ...You can catch up with the whole on-demand session here."

In this article the focus is specifically on rule n.1: Create content with your audience in mind.

Rekha Mohan writes: "The main point to all this is: create content people want to share. People like sharing interesting information; it builds credibility, creating the image that the sharer is in the know, and consistently sharing good information increases your audience.

Good information also helps visitors and increases your authority on a subject – use white papers, case studies, fun facts, educational material, research results, thought-provoking blog posts, how-to articles, top 10 lists, and more to share your information in innovative and easy-to-read ways."

Very good reminders for anyone having doubts about what's best to do in the near future, to gain extra visibility and reputation, on any content web site.

Rightful. 7/10

Full article: http://www.business2community.com/seo/the-10-new-rules-for-seo-0518641

Excellent advice on how to deal with influential people to get them to help you, from long-time technology analyst, blogger and startupper Marshall Kirkpatrick.

(Marshall has recently launched a new web app, that focuses exclusively on helping you find who is really influential in your areas of interest. The app is called Little Bird and you can go and request a free trial on the site.)

What he suggests is to invest in building long-time, high-value relationships, by using the tech tools like the one he's created, to get to know more about the people you are interested in, before you reach out to them.

The more you know who they know, what they like as well as what they have written and what brands and people they are not aware of, the easier it will be for you to reach out and provide useful information, insight and advice to them.

Rightful. Correct. 8/10

Full post: http://getlittlebird.com/2013/05/i-found-the-leaders-in-my-field-now-what/

Sharing images with quotes, or using them for your Facebook or Google+ cover has become an effective method to provide fans with a visual symbol that represents one of their ideals, something that they deeply connect to and that they want to carry and wave to others as their own "flag".

The consequence of this is that appropriately selected images and texts, that truly represent the "spirit" of the community, receive much more "likes" and are instinctively shared by a much higher percentage of fans compared to other types of social status updates.

Here are three great free tools to create such visual "social flags" in a matter of minutes:

1) QuotesCover.com - it provides you with tons of ready-made quotes, provers and citations that you can further edit and personalize - it lets you customize fonts, positioning, background image, and throws in some nice touches as "soft-focusing" the background, adding drop-shadows to your text, or emphasizing specific words. Output ready also for status updates, e-cards and prints. Ad-supported. 9/10 - www.quotescover.com

2) ReciteThis.com - it helps you find a relevant quote by providing you with a number of preset genres, it makes it easy to edit it and then it offers a set of 33 pre-designed "visual cards" from which you can pick the one you like best as a support for your selected quote. You can preview the look of any pre-designed card with your quote by simply hovering your mouse on any such card. Ad-free. 7/10 - www.recitethis.com

3) Quozio.com - it allows to grab any text from any web page or to type your own quote, before offering a set of 38 predesigned templates that integrate a background photo and a particular font for your text. You can test and preview all available designs and then select the one you like the most. Ad-free. 7/10 - www.quozio.com

If you are looking for a landing page builder app, theme, plugin or software, I can't recommend enough this comprehensive guide by Shane Melaugh, to some of the best landing page Wordpress themes and landing page "generators" out there.

Nine different tools are closely reviewed and their pros and cons clearly identified. 

Finally a comparison table and a written set of recommendations from the author provide a clear-cut view of which tools can provide the best and most cost-effective solution.

My comment: Excellent, professional reviews and objective analysis make this a truly useful guide for identifying a good landing page builder. Although several other lesser-known but quite effective landing page builders are missing from this guide (Unbounce, Leadpages, KickOffLabs, PageWiz, Lander, InstaPage among others) the information provided in this guide is priceless and can litreally save you lots of hours of research. 

Good review, analysis and comparison. 8/10

Full guide: http://imimpact.com/optimizepress-compared/ 

Excellent advice, in this short but content-rich interview published by Ebyline. In it, John F. Doherty, head of one of the top SEO companies in the US, shares ten key tips about marketing, SEO and where to start, that can be of good help to new online startups.

The advice and suggestions provided are simple, straightforward and easy to read, thanks also to the good formatting style of the article.

Some of the best tips shared, focus on:

- what's the first step to take to market one's own company online

- how to create a social media following when you have none

- how to compete with established companies in the SERPs

- how to avoid the top four reasons for which Google penalizes a site

among several other ones.



Useful. Rightful. Clear. 8/10

Full article: http://blog.ebyline.com/2013/08/interview-with-john-doherty-distilled-ny-director-seo-for-startups/

The Keyword Suggestion Finder from SEOChat is an excellent keyword - keyphrase discovery tool that can delivery useful results in a matter of seconds.

What the tool does is to list for you related keywords and keyphrases, down to three levels of depth, for ny keyword "root" or keyphrase that you will provide.

Each level expands on the preceding one by offering more specific keyphrases related to the ones found at higher level.

Final data can be freely downloaded as an .xls file.

Excellent tool for anyone doing content marketing, SEO, Google AdWords campaigns. Fast, easy, effective.

Works only in English.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://tools.seochat.com/tools/related-keywords-tool/

If you are looking for a way to become less dependent on SEO to keep your web site visibility on search engines, a new approach, promoting a radically different approach to conquer the search engine result pages, is emerging. 

It is being called New SEO.

From obsessive keyword analysis and inbound linking focus the new SEO approach focuses on higher quality content and greater attention to audience engagement and relationship building.

The accompanying infographic from Positionly eloquently illustrates the key differences between the traditional way of doing SEO and the new approach.

"The old way of thinking about SEO meant that analytical and mostly technical knowledge was given an edge.

New SEO should prize analytical and mostly marketing knowledge."

Rightful. Useful reminder. 7/10

Original article and infographic: http://socialbarrel.com/sustainable-and-algorithm-proof-new-seo-methods-for-2013/52145/

If you have long been wondering which are the most important factors that affect how your web site is ranked inside Google search results (SERPs), here is a very comprehensive infographic by Search Engine Journal which visually summarizes the top 200 variables that likely affect your Google ranking.

The factors are generally derived by referring to Google official guidelines and announcements and even more on pragmatical analysis, testing and voting by SEO experts, like in the case of SEOMoz famous "Ranking Factors" online resource.

In this case the author of the infographic (Brian Dean) unfortunately does not disclose how and from where he has pulled together the information he has so nicely curated into this infographic.

The over 200 factors presented are aptly grouped in ten areas:

1. Domain Factors
2. Page-Level Factors
3. Site-Level factors
4. Backlink Factors
5. User Interaction
6. Social Signals
7. Brand Signals
8. On-site Webspam factors
9. Off-pag Webspam factors
10. Special Algo Rules

These factors have been changing quite significantly over the last two years and they are continuously being improved and refined, with old ones being gradually de-emphasized, and new ones being added and increasing in importance.

Useful reference. 7/10

Full infographic: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/infographic-googles-200-ranking-factors/64316/

If you keep investing time on optimizig your site for Google, or investing in link building efforts of all kinds I suggest you give a good read to this article.

Wriiten by Awini Anburajan on Buzzfeed: "Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013...

...While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

BuzzFeed tracked traffic referrals to over 200 publishers in the BuzzFeed Network, a group of sites that carry BuzzFeed's tracking code and include the Huffington Post, Daily Mail, NewsweekDailyBeast, Time, Sports Illustrated, Us Weekly, and Rolling Stone. Collectively the sites represent an audience of more than 300 million people globally.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period.

While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%."

And check this: "In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers."

Are you ready for this?

Insightful. Informative. Must-read. 8/10

Full article: http://www.buzzfeed.com/aswini/where-did-all-the-search-traffic-go

Jake Sorofman, Research Director at Gartner, highlights in his blog the key traits of effective online communication:

1) It’s human: it speaks with a conversational voice, from one human being to another. Thought isn’t hidden behind stilted corporate speak, chest-thumping claims and pompous language.

2) It’s neutral: perhaps not wholly objective, but it holds fire on the hard sell in favor of issues-centric storytelling that supports a brand’s point of view without always making the brand the hero.

3) It’s simple: attention spans aren’t what they used to be and competition for that limited attention has reached a fever pitch.

4) It’s visual: It’s also easier to consume when you’re already up to your eyeballs in dense text.

5) It’s curated: you don’t have to create all of your own content. Leverage happens when you organize and annotate third-party content that helps tell your story or sell your point of view.

6) It’s conversational: communities talk back to sustain the dialogue in the form of comments, reviews, ratings and new content of their own that defends or argues against your point of view.

7) It’s organic: it’s published fast, often in response to unpredictable moments."

My comment: I think that most of these seven points are pretty accurate though I personally do not think that being neutral and simple are always strengths when it comes to effective online communications.

I guess it depends on the situation, but, in my humble view, I will likely favour more companies and individuals that a) take a stand and a side on important issues and b) that are not concerned with providing simple, superficial, easy-to-consume content.

Being organic, as intended here, is also something that in my eyes will not be a key absolute advantage point for companies, but it can definitely be in many cases a plus point.

Good points. Rightful. 8/10

Original article: http://blogs.gartner.com/jake-sorofman/forget-big-data-here-comes-big-content/

Gartner's 2013 Social Marketing Survey:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/digital-marketing/social-

marketing-survey.jsp

(Image credit: Creating content - Shutterstock)