This installment of “Notable Internet Marketing Articles” includes, among other topics, engaging customers with authenticity; a comprehensive guide to LinkedIn for Business; and sage, non-technical advice on search engine optimization.
“Everything I Really Need to Know about User Experience I Learned in Sunday School” by John Boykin, UX Magazine, February 25, 2014
Local businesses often get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of online marketing tactics and forget about the power of good user experience. This article presents nine lessons and how they can be applied, to make it easier for you to focus on your customer and look at your site for ways to improve usability and the customer experience.
“The Best Way to Suck at Marketing – Whiteboard Friday” by Rand Fishkin, The Moz Blog, February 14, 2014
In less than nine minutes, learn how to build long-term success and loyalty by marketing with authenticity and creating relationships. This video will make you take another look at your marketing and more importantly, your approach and interactions with your customers.
“The Science of Storytelling & Memory and Their Impact on CRO” by Ankit Oberoi, ConversionXL, February 21, 2014
If you need people to convert, use stories. Stories are powerful and create opportunities for visitors to identify or react similarly to the person in the story. Learn how to use storytelling during the different stages of the marketing funnel to improve your customers’ conversions and how to make people remember your product or service, even months later.
“The Blogger’s Meal Plan: 5 Secrets for Well-Balanced Content” by Rebecca Hiscott, Mashable, February 18, 2014
Getting the right balance in your blogging content is cleverly illustrated in this infographic that compares blogging to eating the right food groups in the proper amounts. You’ll see suggestions on how to provide a mixture of how-to posts, case studies, research, light-hearted content, and bold statements throughout the week. This infographic will help in your planning of your blog posts – whether you do them weekly or on less frequent basis.
“Writing for Search: Where Meta Tags Meet David Ogilvy” by Benjamin Spiegel, ClickZ, February 24, 2014
It’s time for local businesses to revisit their websites’ title and description (meta) tags — i.e., the headline and brief description that appears in the search result pages. As Google moves more toward semantic search, keyword stuffed title and description tags won’t work as they once did. Based on advertising pioneer’s David Ogilvy’s rules for advertising, the author suggests ways to implement these practices in today’s digital world, keeping in mind that title and description meta tags have character limits. Also, relevant keywords should be in the title and description based on the content and the intent of the visitor.
“Can You Resist Clicking These 3 Headlines? (One is So Good I Had to Copy it)” by Jerod Morris, Copyblogger, February 26, 2014
If you need clicks, write good headlines. Follow the advice in this article and you will be well on the way to gaining more readerships for your blog and getting people interested in what you have to say. My favorite sentence in the article is “Use your headline to tell people exactly what problem you’re going to solve or exactly what solution you’re going to provide … and the clicks will stream in quickly and clearly.”
“8 UX Tools Every Digital Marketer Needs in Their Toolkit” by Erin Everhart, Search Engine Watch, February 26, 2014
Low cost or free tools are included in this list of eight tools and services that will help make sure that your website is easy to navigate and understand. One of the first rules of usability is that you are not your customer. You might understand them and be able to perceive what they need, but as a business owner or marketer, you have a built-in bias and the best way to see how your site is perceived is to test it with actual customers or people who are good representations of your targeted audience.
“Increasing Local Reviews: Integrating Offline Marketing Tactics” by Prashant Puri, Search Engine Journal, February 18, 2014
According to this article, 88 percent of visitors are influenced by reviews. By using some offline marketing tactics, you can make it easy for customers to leave reviews for your business. As a local business, it’s becoming increasingly important to get these reviews as Google is showing star ratings (via schema markup) in many of its search result pages.
“The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn: The Webinar [Video]“ by Jason Miller, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Blog, February 24, 2014
This 60-minute video will show you how to better incorporate LinkedIn into your overall marketing strategy. Tips include how to use company pages and updates, how to share information visually, and various social media marketing tactics to increase your brand awareness, build your personal and business’ credibility, and generate leads and business.
“5 essential tactics for long-term local SEO success” by Myles Anderson, BrightLocal Blog, February 19, 2014
Local businesses need to make sure that their local search strategy is up-to-date and intact. If you’ve been doing local search for a while, this list may not be new. But it still serves as a good reminder of tactics that provide the foundation to local search: Google+ Local profile optimization, geo-targeted pages, blogging, review strategies, accurate citations and implementing a simple social strategy. Included in the article is links to various resources for more in-depth information.
“Facebook will restructure its advertising platform into campaigns, ad sets, and ads on March 4? by Emil Protalinski, thenextweb, February 26, 2014
On March 4, Facebook will change its advertising campaign structure with the intent of making it easier for advertisers of all sizes to organize, optimize, and measure the success of their ads. This article provides a quick overview of how it will work.
“SlideShare: Content Marketing’s Happy Medium” by Heidi Cohen, Heidi Cohen actionable marketing guide, February 25, 2014
Have you created a presentation about your product or service for a presentation and then wondered if you could reuse this asset and share it with others? With a bit of planning, some adjustments and these actionable steps, you could share and promote your presentation on SlideShare and meet a whole new audience. Includes examples and case studies.
“When The Best SEO Move Is To Kill The Site” by Eric Ward, Search Engine Land, February 25, 2014
Many local businesses either work on building links to their website themselves or hire an outside consultant. Link building is one of the most time-consuming activities as it takes effort – valuable content and research and has value if done correctly. Unfortunately, many local businesses have fallen prey to unethical SEOs who are offering quick links via link farms, paid links, and guest posting with no unique, valuable content. Often, the offer to provide links comes with a low price tag and the unsuspecting website owners thinks they are getting a bargain. This article discusses what to do when a site has lost rankings due to a manual penalty from Google for unnatural linking.
“SEO Traffic 2014: Your One Stop Reference Guide for Non-SEOs” by Ana Hoffman, Traffic Generation Café, February 4, 2014
Local business owners often say to me “Google changes the rules.” How can the regular businessperson keep up? This guide takes you thru the important aspects of SEO and explains it in a non-technical manner, offering additional resources. The guide includes creating big content, Google semantic search, optimizing on-page factors and content, why Google+ is important and shouldn’t be ignored, authorship and schema markup, link earning, and mobile SEO.
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