Sunday, August 31, 2014

Digital #Marketing 101: This is Why Your Website is Not Converting by @Rocco_Zebra_Adv

Many companies today get frustrated when their digital marketing plans fail. Forums and LinkedIn conversations are filled with business owners trying to understand what’s wrong with their campaigns. Too often, people forget sales and conversions are just the tip of the iceberg in a long and complex system called the sales funnel.

This article will focus on explaining what makes a successful online marketing strategy and will hopefully help you increase the return on your marketing investment.

Is Your Online Marketing Strategy Well Planned Out?

Online marketing strategies serve as the engine of a business. They should generate qualified leads via your website, which means making a mistake can affect your long-term success.

Your online marketing strategy needs to include but won’t be limited to:

Targeted SEM campaignsEffective SMM strategiesWhite hat SEO techniquesTop notch email marketing campaignsRemarketing on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..

Once you have a good plan in place, don’t forget to create an optimization plan. It is extremely important to set up a system that allows you to tune up based on statistically relevant data.

What Are The Competitive Advantages of Your Business?

Finding out your competitive advantages doesn’t very long. By answering a few questions, you can determine what you have to offer that your competitors don’t. The most difficult part is identifying which competitive advantages will make the difference in the decision-making process of your potential customers.

Try to answer the following questions while looking for your competitive advantages:

What makes your business so unique?How does your service compare to your competitors? Where are you better than them (and vice-versa)?Why should customers contact you and not somebody else?How easy is to replicate your competitive advantage? Can competitors develop it easily?

Overall, a good competitive advantage is unique, difficult to imitate, and valuable to the customers. The more valuable and difficult to imitate it is, the more people will be willing to pay a premium price for your service.

How Effective is Your Website?

Many companies know their website could be improved, but figure it is good enough to generate leads. Most of the times, this is an excuse for a failed marketing plan. The real story is most marketing campaigns are harmed by bad websites.

This issue is very complex and both the website and the marketing can be a problem.

When it comes down to the website, you must ask the following questions:

Is our website reflecting the competitive advantage of our business in a proper and clear way?Is information easily accessible? Users love to find what they are looking for RIGHT AWAY.Is our website easy to navigate?Do our pages load fast enough?Are we constantly a/b testing the site for improvements?

Imagine your website as a store in a mall. You can have the best walk in traffic, but if you are failing to convert this qualified traffic, it is time to change the way you are selling your merchandise.

Common best practices include:

Making sure users understand who and what you are about in the first 10 second of the navigation. You will improve your bounce rate and increase engagement on your site.Test each step in the process to obtain a sale or a lead. In case of a lead generation site, you have to test the content and layout of the landing page. In case of a sales oriented site, you need to test several parts of the funnel (landing page, order page, and any other additional page).Connecting your website to all of your social media to add credibility and a personal touch to the website.Is Data Affecting Your Decisions?

Data is a gold mine. The more data you have about your website and marketing activities the better off you are. How can you use your data to improve performance? First, find out what sort of data is relevant to your business and move forward from there.

Generally, the most useful data is:

Where are your sales are coming from? Are you generating sales via mobile or desktop? Is there any referral site generating a good amount of conversions?Segment data by gender, age, location, device and source and learn what’s most profitable. You can also use this information to run highly segmented remarketing campaignsIdentify marketing campaigns with low time on page and high bounce rate and optimize them.Test to find out how a website change affects the performance of your website.

The more you test the more you will learn. Take advantage of data.

How Does it All Play Together?

All of the steps I just discussed contribute to creating a successful website. Here is a graph connecting the dots for us:



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Pinterest Introduces A New Analytics Platform For Business Users by @mattsouthern

Pinterest often hears from businesses who change their product and marketing strategies based on insights learned on the platform, the company stated in an announcement.

In an effort to continue to help businesses improve how they work, Pinterest has introduced a new analytics platform. The new analytics platform is said to be smarter, and capable of providing meaningful insights about what your customers are interested in.

A few of the key features of Pinterest’s new analytics platform include:

Traffic and engagement metrics: See what people interact with most from your Pinterest profile and website, and how much traffic your site gets when you add the Pin It button.Audience insights: Insight into the people who engage with your business and what else they’re into.Advice for driving further engagement: Based on how people engage with your content, Pinterest will provide advice on how to increase impressions, clicks and repins.

We’ve gotten lots of great feedback about our analytics tool, and we hope this new version helps you improve how you do business—whether it’s updating your product offerings after seeing what’s popular on Pinterest, or changing how you pin based on what’s trending with Pinners.

To get started with Pinterest’s new analytics platform first make sure you have a business account. Then go to analytics.pinterest.com to see the new analytics. For further information, check out Pinterest’s Help Center.

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Saturday, August 30, 2014

Twitter Opens Up Its Analytics Dashboard To All Users by @mattsouthern

It has been a good news day if you love social media analytics. First, Pinterest introduces a new analytics platform, and now Twitter opens up its analytics dashboard to everyone.

Last month Twitter launched an analytics dashboard that was akin to having Google Analytics for Twitter. It did everything you would want in a Twitter analytics tool, such as measure the performance of all your tweets, track how many people viewed your tweets and clicked on your links and so on.

Except there was one problem, only advertisers and verified users had access to it.

That has all changed now, as Twitter engineer Ian Chan broke the news in a tweet that the analytics dashboard is open to everyone:

Absolutely thrilled to open up access to http://t.co/wcU6oj9hFM to EVERYONE. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

— Ian Chan (

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Sitemaps Best Practices Including Large Web Sites

Fabrice CanelAugust 28, 2014August 8, 2014426shares4CommentsOne of the key Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies for web sites is to have high quality sitemaps helping search engines to discover and access all relevant content posted on that web site. Sitemaps offer this really simple way for site owners to share information with every search engine about the content they have on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawling algorithms (ie: crawlers, robots) to find it.

The Sitemaps protocol defined at www.sitemaps.org, is a now widely supported. Often web sites and some Content Management Systems (CMSs) offers sitemaps by default or as an option. Bing even offers an open source server-side technology, Bing XML Sitemap Plugin, for websites running on Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows® Server, as well as Apache HTTP Server.

Best Practices if You Want to Enable SitemapsIf you don’t have a sitemap yet, we recommend first that you explore if your web site or your CMS can manage this, or install a sitemap plugin.

If you have to, or want to, develop your own sitemaps, we suggest the following best practices:

First, follow the sitemaps reference at www.sitemaps.org. Common mistakes we see are people thinking that HTML Sitemaps are sitemaps, malformed XML Sitemaps, XML Sitemaps too large (max 50,000 links and up to 10 megabytes uncompressed) and links in sitemaps not correctly encoded.Have relevant sitemaps linking to the most relevant content on your sites. Avoid duplicate links and dead links: a best practice is to generate sitemaps at least once a day, to minimize the number of broken links in sitemaps.Select the right format:Use RSS feed, to list real-time all new and updated content posted on your site, during the last 24 hours. Avoid listing only the past 10 newest links on your site, search engines may not visit RSS as often as you want and may miss new URLs. (This can also be submitted inside Bing Webmaster Tools as a Sitemap option.)Use XML Sitemap files and sitemaps index file to generate a complete snapshot of all relevant URLs on your site daily.Consolidate sitemaps: Avoid too many XML Sitemaps per site and avoid too many RSS feeds: Ideally, have only one sitemap index file listing all relevant sitemap files and sitemap index files, and only one RSS listing the latest content on your site.Use sitemap properties and RSS properties as appropriate.Tell search engines where our sitemaps XML URLs and RSS URLs are located by referencing them in your robots.txt files or by publishing the location of your sitemaps in search engines’ Webmaster Tools.Scaling Up Sitemaps to Very Large SitesInterestingly some sites these days, are large… really large… with millions to billions of URLs. Sitemap index files or sitemap files can link up to 50,000 links, so with one sitemap index file, you can list 50,000 x 50,000 links

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Google To Stop Showing Authorship Information In Search Results by @mattsouthern

Last month we reported that Google would be removing Authorship pictures from search results. Now it has been confirmed by Google’s John Mueller that Authorship information will be removed from search results entirely.

The decision was made to drop Authorship information because the information was not found to be overly useful to searchers, and at times has even detracted from the search results.

Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.

While it’s unfortunate to see Authorship information going away, it really should not make a difference to site owners. Since Authorship didn’t help to increase traffic to pages, then site owners shouldn’t notice a decrease in traffic going forward.

Something Mueller notes that Google will continue to focus on is Schema.org structured markup: “This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.”

Google first started implementing Authorship around the time as the launch of Google

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Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Google’s Search App Is Now Truly Multilingual

See Amit's Top 10Google Made 890 Search Improvements In Last Year#GoogleFailWhat Happens When Knowledge Graph Goes BadSubscribe to SearchCapSUBSCRIBENewsSEOSEMLocalRetailSearch EnginesSocialHomeMobileGoogle’s Search App Is Now Truly MultilingualUsers can select up to five languages for simultaneous recognition.Greg Sterling on August 21, 2014 at 4:29 pm More

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Monday, August 25, 2014

Sponsored Message: The Future of Link Building

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