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| The Noob Guide to Online Marketing (With Giant INFOGRAPHIC) Posted: 09 Feb 2011 12:18 AM PST Posted by Oli Gardner This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. “Get me to page 1 of Google, while emailing our customers a bi-weekly newsletter, engaging influencers on Twitter, maintaining a captive Facebook audience, capturing new leads, and putting out 3 blog posts a week.” Harsh? Yes. Familiar? Definitely. Everything a Non-Marketer Needs to Take a Business from Zero to Hero Online What you are about to read might be a little shocking. Why? Because it’s so freakishly long. It contains a 6-month action plan for marketing your business online and if you can read it all in one go you’re a hero or a raging insomniac. I’d recommend bookmarking it to use as an ongoing reference guide. Let the story and the course begin... A typical marketing storyline You’ve just been put in charge of “Internet marketing” at your new sweatshop startup (don’t worry, I live there too - replete with rusty sewing machines and fake Nike stitching patterns). What do you do? Where do you start? There are so many elements to online marketing that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s much more than just one job. At the very least it’s 8 distinct disciplines. I know because I try to do them all and I’m stretched to my limit. With that in mind, I’d like to present you with:
It takes a lot of work - although not as much as writing all this - so no whining please. In order to be successful you have to plan for the long haul. Read it, absorb it and put it into practice. Also remember to give a shout out on Twitter (using the hashtag #noobmarketing) as you progress through your marketing marathon (and join the discussion with other noobs). Landing Pages as Marketing Glue The Wheel of Marketing
The new darling of the marketing community still gets grumbles from the old-schoolers. Ignore them for they know not what they say. SMM is a massive topic, so for the noob guide we’ll focus on a few key platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. And a few key strategies: developing a style and how to convert your social traffic. #1 - Claim your brand
Email can be tough and unforgiving compared to other online mediums (once you hit send, your message is committed to the ether, never to be undone - except through the use of the apologetic “I screwed up” follow-up email. Instead of talking about writing emails, I’ll focus your noob experience on cooler concepts like drip campaigns - which can make the difference between an actively engaged audience and a legion of prospects who’ve forgotten what you do. #4 - Choose an online email provider
How do you do email marketing if you have no one to email? That’s where lead gen comes in. We’ll discuss methods for growing your email lists by writing eBook’s, presenting webinars and simply by asking people to follow your blog. #6 - Set up a Feedburner account to capture & track RSS readers
I have to tread carefully here as the SEOmoz community is probably the most engaged and knowledgeable SEO crowd on the planet (yes I’m sucking up). Here I cover some of the techniques that I’ve used to be successful at managing my organic search and building a natural ecosystem that encourages link building success. #8 - Set up Google Webmaster Tools
Think of 5 lanes of traffic driving across a bridge. This is your inbound traffic (often paid for) wanting to cross boundaries just to reach you. If your intended destination page isn’t optimized for their specific needs, you may as well knock 2 lanes out of the bridge and let the cars fall into the river. CRO is all about making sure the other side of the bridge leads to optimizeville, where there’s only one thing to do and it's really obvious how to do it. #26 - A single purpose and CTA for every page
There’s a reason analytics is represented by grey in the wheel. It’s dull. Until you get it right that is. Analytics contain so much hidden awesomeness, that when you get it hooked up everything else becomes much easier - including getting buy-in from management to do “fancy-pants” things like CRO above. #10 - Set up a Google Analytics account
Content isn’t king anymore - it’s more like the emperor. Content is the start, middle and end of your online marketing story and is critical to virtually everything you do. By the end of this course you’ll be writing on your corporate blog, guest blogging, writing eBooks, getting your publishing schedule organized with an editorial calendar and even attempting the mighty infographic. #13 - Start a corporate blog & give your knowledge away for free
PPC is the fastest way to get instant traffic to your site. However, it's hard to do well, so we'll wait until month 3 to tackle it. The majority of Google’s AdWords users go bust on their free $100 voucher with nothing but a sour taste in their mouths. I’ll give you some tips on doing it right and a back up plan for letting the experts take over if you can’t figure it out. #28 - Create a Google AdWords account YOUR 6-MONTH MARKETING ACTION PLAN
Getting started is all about establishing your network base. Registering accounts and defining your style (always a good idea before you start yammering in a tone unbefitting your brand). This might well be the busiest month of the course, but that’s how it should be. Take your excitement and enthusiasm and kick things off as fast as you can. The sooner your infrastructure is in place the sooner you can start marketing your business - and that’s why we’re all here.
To avoid having your brand name taken by someone else (brand squatters with an egg avatar that are only followed by their moms are everywhere), you should set up branded accounts on the important social networks as soon as possible. Visit the following sites to claim yours, and do it today:
NOOB INSIGHT: Facebook is trickier than the rest as you have to complete a few other steps before you can be granted a branded vanity URL. I’ll explain the necessary steps in tasks #30 and #32).
2. SET UP YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT
Design a branded Twitter background: The new Twitter is considerably wider than it used to be (you'll notice a lot of branded backgrounds are covered up which looks a little silly), so the primary left side branding area of your background needs to be very slim. For screen resolutions of 1280px (fairly commonplace these days) - you are limited to roughly only 108px for the core part of your branded background design and messaging. More details on background designs for the new Twitter. If you have a little more space (customers with larger screens), you could stretch to about 200px and do something like Shopify has done - notice how they’ve balanced their top green stripe to align tidily with the Twitter app layout.
They also do a great job establishing social proof by showing the logos of big name brands that use their platform. Set up your profile: Describe your core value proposition in your profile description and add a link to your website in the available slot. You should use a few choice keywords in your bio as this will help people to find you via Twitter search. Photo or logo for your avatar? If you representing your company on Twitter then how you use your logo for your Twitter avatar will depend on how many people in your company will be public representatives of the account. If it’s just you, you could go with your own photo or try combining a small version of your logo beneath your photo. If you’ll be sharing the role of chief tweeting officer, then it’s best to go with the logo by itself. The typical method for identifying who’s talking is to add your initials to the tweet - for me (Oli Gardner) I’d use ^og. In the past I used just the logo, but for a more personal touch (as my name has become better known in the landing page industry) I'm trying out the photo/logo mix as shown below.
What do you think of this approach? NOOB INSIGHT: Nobody trusts accounts that have the default Twitter egg avatars. Change it immediately. It doesn't need to be perfect - just throw your logo or face up there on day 1.
3. HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY - DEFINE YOUR STYLE Ideally you will be creating content via your blog, which gives you the starting point of a conversation, or at the very least, something to talk about and share. There are a three main categories of communication. Your choice of approach will come down to how much of an expert you want to be on a subject, and how busy you want your content stream to be.
NOOB INSIGHT: Give your writing room to breath - Leave about 20 characters at the end of your tweets to let people retweet it without having to edit your literary work of short art. (Retweeting often entails inserting RT @yourname into your text which takes up some space). What's your style? What kind of style do you enjoy following? What worked for someone you'd like to emulate? You can't fake awesome, but it helps to define your intentions a little before you start pushing your personal and company brand. At the end of the day, it's best to do what comes naturally to you. "Authenticity rules" as they say.
4. CHOOSE AN ONLINE EMAIL PROVIDER If you’re thinking “Really? I have to open yet another account with another 3rd party?” - then the answer is yes. Why? Because you only have two other options: build an in-house system or use Outlook/Gmail. The first makes you responsible for deliverability rates and CAN-SPAM compliance issues and the other has none of the power or flexibility to maintain lists and is not designed for serious marketing. Trust me, if you’re going do email marketing - go with the pros. It doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. If you are just starting out, Mail Chimp is great for modern online businesses and is free until you reach a certain size. It also includes powerful segmentation tools which will help to separate your messaging in the future, once your lists and customer base grows. If you are a designer (or have a design based audience), you might want to look at Campaign Monitor as they have crafted a service specifically targeted at designers. I’m only mentioning a couple of providers off the bat because the choice is overwhelming. Consider this list of online ESP’s (email service providers) as evidence of the time you could waste comparison shopping. Side note: if you have some really specific feature requirements, you do want to make sure your chosen provider is equipped as switching providers down the road can be a pain (I’ve done it 3 times already).
5. CREATE A BRANDED EMAIL TEMPLATE Some of the templates that come with email providers are okay, but very plain and simple. If you upgrade to a paid plan you often get more sophisticated templates. These too will suffice for a while. But ultimately, you want to have a branded template. Take a day and design a palette and brand-related layout for your emails - you don’t have to be perfect - but lay it side by side with your homepage and see how well it relates. Is it enough just to have your logo and the right typeface? Only you can determine that. Check out the great template samples from Campaign Monitor - perhaps one is close enough to your core brand elements to make some simple tweaking suffice.
6. SET UP A FEEDBURNER ACCOUNT TO CAPTURE & TRACK RSS READERS Feedburner is a tool for managing RSS subscribers. To get started, you’ll need a Google account, then follow these steps:
Your goal is to get people to subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog, and there are two ways to do this:
There are some cool free RSS icons at Iconspedia and more details about RSS concepts can be found in this post about RSS from Smashing Magazine. Show off your subscriber count (when it’s high enough)
7. GATHER EMAILS FOR A PRODUCT LAUNCH
If you are about to launch a new product or service (particularly an online one) you should be gathering leads (typically email addresses) so that you have a base of interested people to market to leading up to your launch and at launch time. Getting the lead
Tips for an effective coming soon page
Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. Such as when you are getting 404 errors (pages not being found), and who is linking to your site (which is good for some of the link building exercises we’ll get to later on). It’s also a good place to verify that your XML sitemap has been submitted correctly and that your pages are being indexed (so people can find them). Follow these steps to get up and running:
Watch a simple video introduction to GWT that covers some of these steps and more.
9. RESEARCH AND DEFINE YOUR CORE ORGANIC SEARCH KEYWORDS This is a massive topic that would usually be taken up by at least one chapter of a book, but as I’m trying to keep it short and give a noob style overview, I’ll simplify it to one of the core purposes behind how and why you’d choose some of your core keywords. The core organic search keywords (or phrases) are what you want to optimize your pages for so that people searching for those terms will find you. There are two main components at play here: optimizing your pages for these keywords (making the content on the page relevant to the keywords), and getting inbound links to your pages with link anchor text matching (or semantically related to) the keywords - which tells Google that someone else recognizes you as an authority on your subject. As with all of the SEO tips I provide here, you will find much more detail elsewhere on the SEOmoz blog - and hopefully in the comments below if I get anything wrong :) To quote Rand: “Chances are that at launch, you won't even be targeting many of these searches with specific pages, but if you build the list now, you'll have the goal to create these pages and work on ranking for those terms. As you're doing this, don't just choose the highest traffic keywords possible - go for those that are balanced; moderate to high in volume, highly relevant in terms of what the searcher wants vs. what your page/site offers and relatively low in difficulty.” And see this post for more tips - Choosing the Right Keyphrases
10. SET UP A GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT Your first analytics task is to set up a free Google Analytics account. There are paid analytics services available, but when you’re getting started, Google Analytics is the best tool to use. Watch this simple video for help getting your account set up.
11. ESTABLISH CONVERSION GOALS AND FUNNELS Conversion goals are the actions you want your site visitors to take. Examples of conversion goals are:
To get started, examine your website and make a list of all of the actions you’d like to track. Then you need to add these goals to your Google Analytics account. If the actions are based on a sequence of steps, you need to set up what’s known as a funnel. Once you have your goals and funnels set up, you can add them to your dashboard for easy access (discussed later on in #20).
12. ANNOTATE IMPORTANT EVENTS IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS When you get traffic spikes (from a great blog post, PR event, press coverage etc.) add an annotation note into Google Analytics so you can remember the reason for the surge at any point in the future. Not only is this good for historical tracking, but deeper analysis of the data during these spikes can point to potential opportunities and future direction decisions - if you can recreate events that produce a high degree of success then you can make a business case with analytical backing.
How to add an annotation NOOB INSIGHT: Adding these notes tells a great story of the events in your company’s history. If you make it big, you'll be seen as a hero for recording it all for the giant posterity poster that gets put on the wall just before you get bought out for billions.
13. START A CORPORATE BLOG & GIVE YOUR KNOWLEDGE AWAY FOR FREE Rule #1. To do marketing, you need to have something to market. This is especially true when it comes to content. Creating a corporate blog provides the following benefits:
Read this post to get some inspiration for types of blog post that you can add to your calendar. Wordpress is the most popular blog platform and you will find a detailed guide to getting started quick at http://onenightsite.com/ (note that some of the content is a bit out of date - but the steps are still relevant). NOOB INSIGHT: Blog from the start - Don’t wait until you have a launched product to start your blog. Start it on day one and try to write about things your future customers will find beneficial.
14. SUBMIT CONTENT TO SOCIAL HUBS Getting traffic when you’re starting out is often the biggest challenge new companies face. To get a traffic boost, write a great blog post and submit it to social content sites such as Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, SERPd and Mixx. The community then votes for your post if they like it. If you can get this right it’ll be a source of valuable traffic. Each site has a different audience and naturally likes different types of content. The best way to learn is to see what types of content are being consistently voted up and try to shape your own ideas to fit the desired format. This could be using the right structure (such as a list post - x ways to blah blah) or including an infographic (discussed below). NOOB INSIGHT: Don’t submit crap for the sake of it as it won’t get any votes and you risk being booted from the system for flooding it selfishly, and don’t only submit your own content. Try to become a useful and generous member of the community by submitting other great content you find.
15. BOOKMARK YOUR CONTENT ON DELICIOUS Delicious is a social bookmarking site that lets people keep their bookmarks in a consolidated online location (as opposed to being stored in the web browser on your computer). Bloggers, researchers, PR marketers (and general users) use Delicious as a research tool to uncover great content. You should get in the habit of submitting all of your content to Delicious and tagging it with relevant keywords so that people searching for content will find you. Social proof plays a role here once again, as the number of times your content has been bookmarked is displayed (giving people a reason to believe it’s quality content once the number climbs). For this reason you’ll want to set up your blog so that others are prompted to bookmark your content (which helps them remember you and bumps up your bookmark count too). Here’s an example of searching for the tag “landingpages” on Delicious:
Here you see search results broken down by bookmarks I’ve made myself and the highest ranked results from the rest of the community (along with a count showing how many people have done it in total). It also shows what tags have been used to classify your content, which you can use to explore further or just gain some insight into how your readers are describing you.
In month 2 we’re going to make some architectural decisions to focus your organic search efforts, set up reporting for your key business KPI’s, establish a communication path for your new email subscribers and start growing your Twitter network. We’ll also learn how to get your blog readers to share your content for you and get organized with an editorial calendar. 16. BUILD A FOLLOWING ON TWITTER You will gain followers over time by doing the following things:
You can try visiting this link to follow relevant people - http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow (note: this might only work when Twitter has built up some knowledge of who you follow, who follows you and what you are saying - so you might need to wait a while before using this). There are also directories where you can find people by category like twellow.com. Use Twitter search to look for interesting conversational topics relevant to you or your business and follow some people that are currently chatting about them. Remember to stop and engage in conversation too - it’s supposed to be social. NOOB INSIGHT: Don’t believe or listen to people who have “secrets for how to get a massive following on Twitter” it’s all bs. 17. SET UP A DRIP CAMPAIGN FOR ACQUISITION, EDUCATION & RETENTION Not all of your leads (potential customers) are ready to commit when you first meet them. It can often take several interactions before people reach the point where they are comfortable to convert. This could be due to timing, need for extra research, or it could be that cluttered inbox’s or just being busy distracts people from taking the time to read your message. This means that you want to stay top of mind so that when the time is right, you’ll be the company your leads think of. A great way to do this is to set up what’s called a “drip campaign”. A drip campaign is a series of emails that are designed to guide your prospects closer to your conversion goal. Typically, they are set up to send out emails automatically after someone opts in to receive your content (which is why they are also often called autoresponders). Examples of how to attract someone to opt in to your drip campaign would be:
Drip campaigns for retention Most email service providers have a drip (autoresponder) feature. Typically, they will be able to provide you with a sign-up form that you can place on your pages. Mail Chimp wrote an interesting article on the subject.
18. ARCHITECT YOUR BLOG FOR SEARCH - CHOOSE TARGETED CATEGORIES When you set up the blog for your site, keep the key phrases you chose earlier in mind when creating your main blog categories. You will want to create content that’s targeted and focused on these primary categories so that the category pages (where all the posts from that category live) can be developed over time to be important hubs of content on these subjects. Most category pages are just lame old listings of the 10 more recent posts. What you want to do is add extra static content to this page (to go with the ever changing dynamic list of posts) that makes it feel like a microsite in it’s own right (for the humans) and has lots of juicy keyword rich content for the search engines. Think about adding the following:
19. USE SEOMOZ CAMPAIGNS TO TRACK YOUR SEARCH PROGRESS I’m going to plug what to me is the most awesome of the SEOmoz pro tools - campaigns (campaigns are just one of the many tools you get as a pro member - but the one that tipped me into handing over my credit card). If you’re going to invest any cash into your SEO activities, I’d start with this. It’s a great way to organize all of your core keywords and keep track of how they are ranking in the search engines in a centralized place. It also crawls your site and spits out reports of what you’re doing wrong (awesome!) and here’s the best part: suggestions for how to fix them (more awesomer!). If you’ve been here before you probably already know this - but cos of the power of social media and SEO a lot of you will hopefully be arriving here as first time visitors - so go check out the pro tools and the pro tour. There’s a risk free 30-day money back guarantee so not much to lose. There, that’s my sales pitch over. Oh wait - go check out Unbounce.com too. Come on, I just wrote over 13,000 words here :)
20. ADD CUSTOM REPORTS TO YOUR GOOGLE ANALYTICS DASHBOARD Google Analytics is a powerful but complex tool. Most people don’t have time to spend hours digging into their data and typically only require a few key metrics for their reporting needs. The first step here is to figure out what you want to report on - perhaps pick your top 5 KPI’s (Key Performance Metrics), and create a report for each. The important part here is to add the report to your dashboard, this saves the setup and structure of your report “query” so that you can access the data from one overview screen whenever you need to produce a marketing report. To get you started I’ll walk through an example. Here my goal was to produce a report showing “organic search from Google - excluding branded and paid search”. The reason I want to exclude branded search is that I want to discover how “true” organic visitors are interacting with the site without being influenced by those who had already heard of our brand (Unbounce in this example). I also want to exclude paid search (like AdWords traffic) so that I can report on that separately for a paid search ROI report.
Now you can get a quick overview of the metrics you consider most important without having to repeat these steps every time.
21. SET UP AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR One of the keys to a successful content strategy is having an editorial calendar. It can help keep you accountable to deadlines and organize your schedule. You’d be surprised at how few work days you actually have left when you account for everything else you need to do as part of your overall marketing strategy. Think of it like the content equivalent of a “bucket list” (which is a list of things you want to achieve before you die - and can be a great wake up call that you need to get off your ass and start doing things). As a simple example, perhaps you’d set up your calendar to achieve the following:
A brilliant approach to setting up a publish schedule is explained in a post by Russell Sparkman.
22. ENABLE SOCIAL SHARING MECHANISMS Add simple sharing tools to your content so that people can easily share it. If you use Wordpress (or similar blog software) there are hundreds of great plugins that make it simple for people to submit or vote for your content on the social hub sites (discussed earlier). Use sharing widgets for Twitter, Facebook and Delicious so that your readers can market on your behalf. These sharing buttons/widgets perform two roles for you.
Facebook Like button
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/
Delicious button
Wordpress plugins for social sharing Sexy Bookmarks provides a simple general set of sharing buttons - a good place to start (set it up to appear at the end of each blog post).
Month 3 introduces the concept of conversion rate optimization starting with focusing every page of your website on a single call to action and creating landing pages for great pay-per-click success. We’ll also start to develop your subject matter expertise by creating your first ebook (which you’ll use for lead capture later on).
Figure out when your target consumers are most active online and schedule your Twitter time accordingly. You can schedule your tweets with a tool like Hootsuite or Timely if you’re not going to be awake or available at that time. Remember though, that Twitter is a social medium, so try not to schedule tweets for times when you’re not around to converse (if the tweet is conversational in nature). As a starting point, 9am PST is a great time to tweet. Reason being that it coincides with multiple times when people are actively unfocused on work and might be hanging out on Twitter instead. This time encapsulates:
Dan Zarrella has some excellent insight into the best times to tweet.
“Buy our peanuts! They’re the best in the world!!!” Segmentation is all about targeting your customers with communication that's relevant to them. It can be a fairly complex process to get your customers added into your email program based upon different demographic, psychographic and software usage behaviourial patters - and it’s even more difficult to ensure that you move people between lists when their status changes (from being a free customer to a paying customer, someone who has bought 5 items versus 20, or whether they would appreciate a birthday gift consisting of poisonous nuts). Given the complexity of this subject, you have to start somewhere, so try to draw some distinction between your customers: either by procession through the sales process (new, interested, registered, purchased, etc.) or simply by free vs. paying (online service SaaS model) or male vs. female (for marketing a clothing line). When you start thinking about a new email campaign, break it down by the different groups you want to target within your list and segment them into different lists or subgroups to make your communications more targeted. The folks at 3WeeksToLive put together a great video about segmenting your email campaigns. (Note: it mentions my company too, but the part you want to pay attention to is the Mail Chimp email segmentation bit at the end).
25. ANSWER QUESTIONS ON LINKEDIN & QUORA We'll get into some other ways to leverage LinkedIn later on. But to kick things off I want to talk a bit about using LinkedIn and Quora to draw people to your site. This is different that regular lead gen (where you are collecting emails). In many ways it's a mixture of organic inbound marketing and lead gen. By answering people's questions you can change someone with a question into someone who you have established a dialogue with - this lets you communicate with them in the future (usually through internal messaging systems). Do this right and you’ll be come an established expert in your field. You want to be seen as someone who regularly answers questions and answers them authoritatively - never just give a meaningless response. Always be original and only answer if you have something valuable to say. To find some questions to answer, log in to your LinkedIn account and visit this page. Quora Quora.com is essentially a Q&A site that lets you engage in conversation by answering questions posed by the community. Set up your profile to define your area of expertise and you can also automatically follow conversations on relevant topics. One of the benefits of Quora is that the content is all public and indexed by Google, making it an important avenue for establishing a nice trickle of organic traffic. This also means that your Google Alerts will pick up any mentions of your brand - alerting you to conversations you should be a part of. To extend your reach on Quora, connect it to to your professional Twitter and Facebook accounts (shown in the screenshot below) - this will quickly build a following (just like on Twitter) so that people will be notified of your answers, potentially bringing them back to your site as a result (or at the very least keeping them in your sphere of influence and maintaining your position as a thought leader).
26. A SINGLE PURPOSE AND CTA FOR EVERY PAGE
A landing page that is dedicated to one story/promotion/offer/product, has one goal and one call to action, is going to convert your advertising traffic more effectively that most homepages that are designed with multiple users, goals, and traffic sources in mind. TRY THIS: Check your landing pages NOOB INSIGHT: Your customers can't handle moe than one message at a time. Read this post on focused marketing messaging to learn more about simplifying your pages.
This is where content marketing, lead gen and email marketing start to make sense. We already establilshed that if you want to start building a list of business leads for email marketing, you need to do lead gen. To do lead gen effectively you need something to give away. Enter the eBook. An eBook is typically a PDF containing a short piece of expert advice on a given subject that your potential customers would find valuable. When starting out, it’s a great way to procure some interest, traffic (sharing via social media etc.) and a reputation for knowing your stuff. An example process for writing content
UBER NOOB INSIGHT: Forget the lead capture!
28. CREATE A GOOGLE ADWORDS ACCOUNT This is a boring and somewhat obvious step, but AdWords can be a complicated system to use. To get started, follow Google’s step-by-step guide to get your account up and running.
29. SEND TRAFFIC TO LANDING PAGES - NOT YOUR HOMEPAGE!
Why is your homepage bad? Because it’s designed for more general communication and naturally discusses more than one thing - which means it will fall short of matching up to your ad. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so you should check out this infographic which discusses the concept of why landing pages are better than your homepage for PPC.
In month 4 we shift focus away from Twitter to develop a presence on Facebook that's designed to convert visitors into fans. We’ll use landing pages to gather new business leads in exchange for your knowledge (including the eBook you wrote in month 3). We’ll use analytics and a scorecard to identify and improve the weakest parts of your website. We’ll explore free and paid traffic by learning some advanced PPC techniques and starting to write guest posts on sites that can send you targeted customers.
30. CREATE A CONVERSION ORIENTED FACEBOOK FAN PAGE
Designing your Facebook landing page
You can see from the Red Bull example below that they are doing the same thing:
Creating the tab for your Facebook landing page
Click the “Options” link below the navigation as shown below:
Then click “Settings” and change the “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else” to be the tab you created in the last step. In the example below, I chose “Welcome” for the Unbounce account.
Setting up a vanity URL for your fan page NOOB INSIGHT: In the realm of conversion centered design it's not rude to point. So be brutal in your intent and SHOW & TELL people what you want them to do on every page that matters.
31. CONNECT YOUR BLOG TO FACEBOOK A Facebook page with no activity doesn’t send a very good signal to the people you are hoping to engage. You can ensure a consistent stream of social content flowing through your news feed by connecting your blog to your Facebook account. A good way to do this is to use the Networked Blogs Facebook app. Add their app to your Facebook page by clicking the “Add to my page” link (shown in the image) and following the instructions.
Now whenever you create a new post on your blog, a link to it will automatically appear on your Facebook wall. Aside from making it look busier, it's also an extra way that people will be exposed to your content on a regular basis.
You should try to get an initial base of fans on your page for a couple of reasons:
To do this, take advantage of your existing networks: invite your friends, family and anyone you have on your existing personal Facebook account. Get the rest of your company to do the same and you'll hit this threshold really quickly. As soon as you have 25 fans - visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ to set up your vanity URL.
33. GIVE SOMETHING AWAY IN EXCHANGE FOR CUSTOMER DATA
You absolutely must use a landing page for this, to ensure that your visitors are focused and don’t wander off to do something else. If you need some inspiration for how your landing page should look, check out this great example of a lead gen landing page. It’s very important to remember that any request for data is a barrier to entry, and your success has a direct correlation between the size of the form and the size of the prize. Is it a fair exchange? A/B testing the amount and type of information you are requesting can yield the optimal point of friction that balances quality lead data with a high quantity of leads. NOOB INSIGHT: Are you ever going to fax someone? Didn't think so. Take all unnecessary form fields away and enjoy higher conversions.
34. RATE YOUR PAGES WITH THE CONVERSION SCORECARD
It can be a fun exercise to have a few different people from your company rate the same page. Any differences in score will give you some good talking points (or an argument). NOOB INSIGHT: If you are consistently scoring under 8/20 then I think you might need some expert help. Depending on your budget, you could try these fine folks to improve your conversion rates: Bryan Massey, Rich Page, Naomi Niles, Wider Funnel & Conversion Rate Experts.
35. DISCOVER UNDER-PERFORMING AREAS OF YOUR SITE It’s time to do a quick review of your site to see which areas are working and which aren’t. The most important areas of your site were defined earlier when you set up your conversion goals and sales funnels (#11). Look at the reports for each goal/funnel and watch out for the following:
Your goal here is simply to use your analytics software to uncover insight into the weakest links and establish some priorities for your optimization efforts.
Writing guest posts is the idea of submitting content to be published on another company’s blog and is one of the best ways to accomplish some important content marketing goals:
Starting out can be tough as you need to have established yourself as a good writer before people will let you loose on their blogs/sites. For this reason you should focus on your own blog for the a while and ensure you are creating very valuable and high quality content. This is going to be your writing resume that will open doors in the future. As you become a successful guest poster, it will be easier to gain access to the high profile blogs. If you’re an expert in a field of internet marketing then the YOUmoz blog concept is a great way to try and break into the guest posting arena. Reason being that the community will decide whether or not your content is valuable enough to be promoted to the main SEOmoz blog. This bypasses the often time consuming editorial processes that exist on many sites.
Analogously, guest posting is sort of like the collaboration in a music video - where you see “featuring <insert your name>” in the title. You achieve credibility by association which brings brand exposure and recognition to your name. Think of it as a marketing wingman who has a VIP backstage pass to your target audience.
If you drive all of your ad groups to the same destination page your chance of a tightly matched message will be greatly reduced and your quality score, cost per click and conversion rate will all suffer as a result. Using a separate landing page for each group allows you to tailor the experience and messaging for each ad group without compromising the others.
[From Wikipedia] Quality Score is a variable used by Google, Yahoo! (called Quality Index), and MSN that can influence both the rank and cost per click (CPC) of ads. The simplest way to improve your quality score is to ensure the primary content and headline of your landing page is very closely related to the phrases you are using in your ads. An exercise in message match and quality score
In month 5 we switch our social efforts to professional network LinkedIn. We’ll look at ways to make the dull task of link building a little more organic and painless. Big this month is the introduction of A/B testing; we’ll use this to make your emails more effective and bring landing pages in to improve virtually every other aspect of your promotion specific marketing. Finally, we’ll learn how to gain buzz and industry exposure by writing about others.
39. START NETWORKING ON LINKEDIN LinkedIn is a massive social network based entirely on business professionals. There are several techniques you can use to extend your reach, including: Join groups on LinkedIn Ask questions on LinkedIn
NOOB TIP: Just like an emoty Facebook fan page or an empty restaurant, an inactive group is lame. Check out this two part article on creating and managing a LinkedIn group: part 1 - part 2.
Some email providers allow you to run A/B split tests on your emails. This is a great way to find out the types of trigger and branding your customers respond to. It’s often tempting to aim for exciting subject lines but more than often simple works better (and does a better job of avoiding spam filters). At the end of the day, testing allows you to see what works best. There are many things you can test in your emails including:
Read this excellent article on email a/b testing written by Mail Chimp.
Link building is sooooo awesome. Wait a minute, no it’s not. It’s the dullest job anyone involved in SEO can ever do. Sadly it’s also uber important to your success. In a nutshell, you want people to link to your website, ideally with keywords strongly related to the subject matter you are talking about. One of the biggest reasons content marketing (such as having a great blog) is so important is that you have a higher chance of people linking to your content based on the topic of the post, rather than just your brand name. Ranking #1 for your brand name is critical, but usually quite easily done. It’s the other keywords/phrases that you chose earlier on that you want people to use as the anchor text when linking to you. For example, the first line below gives my site some love for the term “landing page examples”, whereas the second gives more weight to the brand name. Check out these awesome landing page examples from Unbounce. So there are two important aspects to a basic approach to link building.
Step 1: Discover inbound links You can also discover inbound links by checking Webmaster Tools, but the most reliable place to check is the Yahoo Site Explorer.
Add your site, then click explore and hit -> InLinks. It’s the best way to figure out who’s linking to you, which leads into part 2 where we optimize these links.
42. A/B TEST YOUR LANDING PAGES
A/B testing allows you to remove conjecture from these types of decision and is the basis for any conversion rate optimization strategy. It let’s you pit different pages against one another in a contest or experiment to see which performs (converts) the best. There are many tools available that aim to make this process simple:
You know you want to run a test, but what exactly should you test? A little bit earlier (#34) we used the landing page scorecard to help you figure out what you should be changing on your page. Refer back to this when you conceptualize and design an alternative page for testing. NOOB TIP: If you aren't using standalone landing pages yet and don't really know how to make a landing page that converts well you might want to read HOW TO: Create a landing page design concept in 10 minutes.
Another great way to do a gut check on your landing pages is to run a 5-second test. The theory here is that most visitors only spend about that much time on your page before deciding to stay or leave. In other words, you have to get your sales pitch in one ear and hopefully not out the other in a fraction of the typical elevator ride (where an elevator pitch is more like a 30-second spew). To run the test, find a relevant guinea pig (ideally someone from your target market who hasn’t been exposed to your brand before) and sit them in front of a computer. Flash your page up on screen for 5-10 seconds then take it down again. Ask the user what the page was about. If they didn’t “get” your value proposition or understand what the page is asking you to do, then it needs to be simplified. Cool tool: FiveSecondTest.com lets you run these tests online in front of their user base.
Here’s a simple but effective tip. By writing about others - and giving them a nicely optimized link - you will place yourself on their radar and garner some goodwill in the process. There are four main ways that people will become aware that you wrote about them:
This is a great way to establish relationships with other companies or develop rapport with important online influencers. A Side benefit of writing about others
In our final month we get to some more advanced marketing techniques. We’ll learn how to be plugged into live conversations about your brand and business segment, how to utilize social contest rules for viral potential and how to get feedback from your customers right at the critical point of conversion. We’ll end things by segmenting every inbound marketing channel for improved measurement and optimization opportunities and learn about the power of infographics as a way to gather links. 45. STAY IN THE CONVERSATION: LEAVE TWITTER TABS OPEN FOR “LIVE” SOCIAL INTERACTION What are the most important keywords that would spark a conversation about your business’s core purpose? These will often be very close to the keywords you choose for your organic search and PPC campaign strategies. Pick a few of these, plus your own brand name and open a new browser tab for each. Then do a search for that term in Twitter and just leave the search results open in that tab.
This allows you to be “always on” and catch the conversation in real-time as it happens. You’ll see that the tab title will be prepended with a count of new messages like this: “(x) Your term” as shown above. As soon as you see a conversation or comment occur, you can jump in and engage with people that are actively talking about you or your area of subject matter expertise. NOOB TIP: Make it easy - Bookmark your favourite Twitter searches and add them to your browser toolbar for easy access.
The viral nature of a contest is in part to do with the value of the prize, but also the manner in which you facilitate and enforce the sharing of your contest page. A clever way to encourage sharing, is to make it part of the entry process for the contest. Examples include:
For an example page, you can see a contest landing page I created last year.
There are many ways to input ideas and theory into your optimization efforts: analytics, expert review, experience, and of course a couple of pinches of conjecture for good measure. What’s missing from this list? User feedback. User feedback at the point of conversion
NOOB TIP: Talk to your visitors
The graphic below shows how using a separate landing page for each source of traffic allows you to tailor the content and message while simplifying testing and measurement. The results from a segmented approach to marketing can help you decide which channels don’t work (and should be canned) or how much you should budget for each channel to maintain an appropriate ROI.
Infographics are exactly like they sound, graphics with information on them. Often presented in the form of stats, but really they can be any self contained unit of visual content. An obvious example is the one at the top of this blog post - although they’re not generally as gigantic as that. Infographics have the benefit of being very popular and very sharable. People also bookmark them for reference, and people like to write about them and collect them into “roundup” posts making them excellent link bait. Some examples of marketing infographics
Flowtown is great at this.
Now that you’ve got your feet wet with PPC, you might be a natural and are acquiring customers at an acceptable price. But if you find that the click through rate of your ads isn’t as high as you’d like (everyone would like a higher click through rate right?), then it’s worth considering bringing in some ad experts. Trada is a PPC marketplace where a crowd of experts can help you with your campaigns and the folks at BoostCTR “Guarantee better text ads or your money back!” So you’ve basically got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Give it a try. GRADUATION DAY!!!!!!!! I hope you learned a lot from this course and that you can use it as a resource as you start or continue your journey from online marketing noob to internet marketing expert. Remember to give a shout out on Twitter (using the hashtag #noobmarketing) and share this with your friends and colleagues. A FINAL NOTE - LET'S GET A COMMENT FEST GOING!
If you have ANY questions about any step in the course, have at 'er in the comments and I'll do my best to answer. Cheers |
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