You probably already know that quality back links are the currency you need to earn Google’s trust and to achieve higher search engine placement. But how do you get them? Despite the fact that most SEOs say link building is their least favorite activity, getting quality back links might be easier than you think. Here are some tips to get your link building campaign started.
• Give testimonials for products and services you enjoy—As businesses continue to look for ways to build trust with their online shoppers, a growing number of websites are publishing testimonials from satisfied customers. Is there a product or service that you really enjoy? Submit a testimonial to the company with your name and a link to your website. There’s a good chance they’ll place it on their website and give you a quality back link.
• Guest post on other blogs—The benefits of guest blogging are numerous. First, whenever you have a guest post published on another blog, the blog owner will give you a link back to your website (tip: Try to use keyword-rich anchor text in these links). But guest blogging is about more than just link building. It also exposes you and your company to a new audience, and it helps position you as an expert in your field.
• Get interviewed on a podcast—Like blogging, podcasts have significantly increased in popularity as they’re an easy way to engage and inform your target audience. No matter what industry you’re in, you can rest assured there are dozens (even hundreds or thousands) of podcasts dedicated to it. Reach out to the owners of these podcasts to see if they’d be interested in allowing you to share your expertise with their listeners. Once again, this will earn you a back link, and it will establish you as a leading expert in your industry.
• Have your press releases picked up by quality outlets—With the advent of free press release publishing sites, every company can easily publish press releases online. If optimized properly, these press releases tend to rank well, and they can be effective for link building. But you should also set your sights higher. Don’t just settle for having your press release published on a free site; try to get it picked up by well-respected news sources as well. A link from a major newspaper or trade journal will be of far higher quality than one from a press release distribution website.
• Examine your competitors’ back links—If you’re looking to launch a link building campaign, it’s only logical to see what the competition has done. Analyzing your competitors’ back links is as simple as going to Google and typing “link:www.yourcompetitorssite.com” Chances are, you’ll find they have links on websites that you can get a link from too.
• Submit your posts to blog carnivals—Blog carnivals are essentially online magazines that pull content from the best blogs in their niche. There are blog carnivals on every topic imaginable. Find a blog carnival that covers your industry, and submit your best posts to them. If your post is republished, you’ll reach a wide audience while earning another quality link.
• Look for mentions of your company without links—Have you performed an ego search lately? An ego search is where you “Google” your name or the name of your company. You might be surprised at what comes up. One thing you’ll probably find is that your company is being mentioned on a website without a link back to your site. If this is the case, contact the webmaster with your web address so they can add the link.
Which link building tips would you add to this list? Share your best strategies in the comments!
As the demand for internet marketing services continues to increase, so too does the number of unqualified service providers. The internet is overflowing with internet marketing “experts” who spread misinformation, confusing those who are interested in building a profitable online presence for their business.
Here are the 7 most common internet marketing myths I come across.
1. Internet marketing is expensive—You don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to start building a profitable online presence. There are several inexpensive things you can do right now to immediately grow your online presence and to attract targeted traffic to your website.
2. You need a flashy website to be successful—While a flashy website might make the designer pat himself on the back, these designs rarely lead to an increase in sales. Sure, a professional-looking design is important, but what really makes a quality design is one that adheres to web usability best practices, contains simple navigation, and is laid out cleanly.
3. Internet marketing isn’t good for B2B services—Over $650 billion was spent on online B2B transactions in the U.S. alone last year. Spending continues to grow in spite of the recession. If you offer services to businesses, a strong online presence is essential to your success.
4. High search engine rankings mean high sales volume—Getting decent search engine placement is only half of the battle. What you do with that traffic is what’s really important. Your landing pages need to be designed to maximize conversions. Otherwise, visitors will just click the “back” button on their browser as soon as they land on your site.
5. Social media is a waste of time—A growing number of companies are finally starting to see the light, realizing social media marketing isn’t just a passing fad. When done properly, social media marketing is an effective way to increase brand awareness, build links to your website, learn more about your target audience, and enhance your credibility with consumers.
6. Once I achieve good search rankings, I can stop trying—Wrong. Just because you have top search engine placement for your keywords doesn’t mean you can take your foot off the pedal. The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and updating their results to provide their users with the most relevant results possible.
7. Quantity of traffic is all that matters—Traffic stats are what the snake oil internet marketing salesman almost always hide behind. They show clueless clients how they’ve exponentially increased the traffic to their site, convincing them that they’ve done their job. Here’s the thing: anyone with even the slightest knowledge of internet marketing can increase traffic to a website. That’s not what matters. What matters is the quality of the traffic you attract. What’s the point of tricking a bunch of people into viewing your website who have no interest in your products or services? Quality of traffic and conversion rates are far more important than quantity of traffic.
What other internet marketing myths have you heard? Share them in the comments.
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Every day, tens of thousands of new users sign up for a Twitter account. If you’re new to Twitter, you want to make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot, looking like a complete Twitter Noob. That’s why you need to avoid these 7 mistakes.
1. You only update once a week—Building a successful Twitter presence requires consistently providing quality content to your followers. Remember, it’s called “social media.” It’s all about establishing solid relationships. You can’t expect to build relationships or credibility by Tweeting rarely.
2. Every Tweet is a pitch for your company—Just because you’re using Twitter to further your business doesn’t mean every Tweet should be an advertisement for your company. Self-promotional Tweets add no value to your followers and it’s completely the opposite of the concept of social networking.
3. You don’t have an avatar—Seriously, nothing screams “Noob!” like the default brown Twitter avatar.
4. Every Tweet says “Please RT”—Asking for a ReTweet on every post completely negates the purpose behind “Please RT.” Only ask for RTs when it’s for something truly important. Otherwise, people will begin to completely ignore your requests and eventually you.
5. You don’t interact with anybody—I’ve already said it a couple of times in this post, but I’ll say it again: It’s called “social networking.” Sending out a bunch of one way Tweets will get you nowhere fast. You need to spend time networking with others, interacting with your followers, and laying the groundwork for useful relationships.
6. Your bio is non-descriptive—Many times, the bio in someone’s profile is what convinces me if I should follow them or not. So, make sure your bio describes who you are and what you do. Include relevant keywords that your target audience would look for.
7. Auto responding to new followers—Sending out a canned auto reply every time someone new follows you is impersonal and a little spammy (especially if your auto response is a pitch for your products and services). If you don’t have the time to personally send a short DM or @ Tweet to your new followers, then instead focus on getting to know them over time.
What other mistakes to Twitter noobs make? Add your favorites in the comments.
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If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times: Social media is a waste of time. There’s no way to measure your results. Plus, it’s just a fad. This is the rallying cry of social media skeptics in the business community. And you know what? I agree with them…to an extent.
Let me explain.
Social media is a waste of time if you blindly jump into it without knowing what you’re doing. And you can’t measure results if you don’t create a strategy with goals for tracking your progress. And because you’re doing it all wrong, you will get tired of it, making it a passing fad for you.
So, this all leads to the question: How do you do social media right? It all starts with building a social media plan with goals and a strategy for reaching them.
Step #1—Set your goals
You know why most businesses give up on social media? Because they don’t really know what they want out of it. And since they don’t know what they want to achieve, their social media campaign isn’t moving toward anything.
Setting goals is essential to being successful with social media. Realistic social media goals include:
• Improving customer service
• Building brand awareness
• Increasing website traffic
• Creating more referrals for your business
• Earning more backlinks
• Getting to know your target audience better
• Soliciting new ideas from your target audience
You could add a dozen more items to this list, but the point is to set a goal before you do anything else.
Step #2—Do some research
Before you start Tweeting away, hold your horses for a minute. The next thing you need to do is some research to figure out which social media outlets will be most effective for reaching your goals. This means you need to determine which social networks your target audience uses, how other companies have used social media successfully, which social networks are a waste of time for your niche, how long it will take to start seeing results, and how you’re going to track your progress.
You should also spend time gathering as much information as you can about how to leverage social media for business success. Learn about social media etiquette, mistakes to avoid, and the ins and outs of the various social networks you plan to use.
Step #3—Create an action plan
All right: You have your goals, and you’ve done your research. It’s time to draft a plan for making those goals a reality.
• Schedule time for social media—This haphazard approach of using social media for your business will never cut it. You can’t send a few Tweets here, forget about it for a week, log on and send out some more Tweets, write a blog post, disappear for another week, and repeat. Like anything else in your business, you need to schedule time each day for putting your social media campaign to work. Not only will scheduling time make sure you’re consistently using social media, but it will also reduce the amount of time you waste as you’ll stay focused on the task knowing you have just a certain amount of time allotted for it.
• Build your network—It’s called “social media” for a reason. You need to be social, and you need to build relationships. A powerful network is crucial to achieving your social media goals. For example, if your goal is to solicit feedback from your target audience, they’re much likelier to provide this feedback if you have a relationship with them and they know who you are.
• Stay consistent—Using social media isn’t going to propel your business to the next level overnight. Social media success requires a long-term commitment to cultivating relationships and gathering the right information. Don’t get frustrated if no one seems to care about you after the first week or 2; it takes time.
• Track your progress—This is the most important part of your social media plan. Depending on what your goals are, you need to find a way to track them. For example, if your goal is to build more inbound links to your website, you need to constantly track how many links are pointing at your website from the time you started your social media campaign until now. If after a few months you see no increase in your backlinks, you need to move onto the next step:
• Adjust plan as necessary—Are you not progressing toward your goals the way you hoped you would? That’s okay. Instead of giving up, take a step back and figure out what adjustments you can make to kick start your progress.
Are you using social media for your business? What are your keys to social media success?
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Post by Eric Brantner
At its best, copywriting is a way to connect with your target audience and to motivate them to take action. At its worst, it’s a way to alienate potential customers and to severely damage your brand. How can you be sure your copy doesn’t fall into the latter category? You can start by avoiding these highly overused and annoying techniques.
• Ellipses—I see this most often in email marketing messages. The copy will go something like this: “We’re your all in one shop…for everything you need…from bicycles to watermelons…and everything in between…all at low prices…all guaranteed to satisfy…so you have nothing to lose…and everything to gain…conveniently located…so you can get in and out…come shop with us today!” Do you see how annoying this is? I understand the point of ellipses is to insert pauses, making the content more conversational, in theory. But when I read through a paragraph full of these, I often lose track of what the main point is, and I forget what I read by the time I reach the end. There’s nothing wrong with using ellipses, just don’t overdo it.
• Quotation Marks—Everybody hates the guy who does air quotes, right? Just as “annoying” as him is the “writer” who does the same thing when he “over-quotes”, like, “everything.” See what I did there? Yeah, it’s annoying, and more importantly, it distracts readers from the main message of your content.
• Strikethroughs—We get it, you’re an annoying pain in the @$$ clever and oh-so-snarky.
• Bolded Text–By now, we all know online readers tend to scan content rather than read it word for word. As a copywriter, I’m all for making content easier to scan. One way to do this is by using bolded text to highlight the main points of the copy. Unfortunately, this is another technique that’s very easy to fall in love with and to overdo. Look, if every other sentence has a bolded phrase, it defeats the purpose. Bold sparingly, my friends.
*Bonus: This isn’t really a copywriting technique, but it’s still a word that gets overused.
• The word “that”—The word “that” can almost always be eliminated from a sentence without changing the meaning. It typically improves the flow of the copy as well. Here’s an example: “The keywords that you choose that will earn you the top search placement that you want.” Get rid of the three uses of “that” and the sentence will be fine as is.
What copywriting (or just writing in general) techniques bother you most? Share them in the replies.
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