If you are like me and enjoy reading about the latest trends in conversational marketing, I would recommend visiting Conversational Media. It’s a site that aggregates top news/blog feeds about conversational marketing and social media. It pulls in feeds from Shel Holtz himself, Andy Beal, Chris Heuer, Emily Chang, John Battelle, Stephanie Agresta and Jeremiah [...]
It’s actually really simple if you think about it. While the term “conversational SEO” does sound cool and everything; it’s nothing more than thinking strategically about the way you (as marketers) have online conversations with your customers. By employing the basic fundamentals of SEO (on-page optimization); whereby you use key terms that you are [...]
I recently discovered the below image from Deborah Schultz’s blog where she wrote about the importance of relationships and its impact on branding. I agree with her position that it’s not necessarily about marketing but how you relate to your customers.
To me, this is a clear representation of how social media differs from that [...]
While focus groups and research are valuable methods to learn about market insight, online conversations are a great way to gain real-time feedback about your products and/or services. It’s immediate, more cost effecient, and I would argue that the conversations are more authentic.
In focus groups – and I know this because I participated in a [...]
Yes, that’s right and I hope you are listening! You see, I just left your restaurant and twittered my network (via my cell phone) about my experience there. And then when I get home, I am going to go online to YELP and write a review about you. I hope for your sake, that [...]
I just finished up reading Search Marketing Standard magazine (a great read by the way and I would recommend it to all my friends and colleagues); specifically a few articles/interviews about social media marketing. In an awesome interview with Cameron Olthuis about the State of Social Media Marketing, he talks about achieving front page [...]
Read this eBook now – Customer Service: The Art of Listening and Engagement through Social Media, written by Brian Solis. You can download for free (PDF or Word). It’s short, sweet and gets straight to the point.
One of the key takeaways was what many refer to as conversational marketing. Here is Brian’s take from [...]
If you write good content and find that when publishing your post could go into more than one category, what do you do? Do you tick each of the relevant categories boxes? I am sure your readers would appreciate it if you did tick each of the relevant categories. You cannot second guess your reader. They may place this article in the WordPress tip category, or the blog plugins or perhaps even the blogging tips.
Unfortunately, when you tick more than one category box you run the risk of having your post placed in the duplicate content pile by search engines. As they crawl your pages they read each post in each category. Use two categories for your post and the spider reads it twice - hello - duplicate content.
There is a plugin available that puts a stop to the duplicate content issue. It works by placing a ‘noindex, follow’ into the robots meta tag for each of the offending pages. A simple cure for a potentially big problem.
Blog plugins like this are everywhere, they are just difficult to track down sometimes. This plugin is available from the SEO Logs along with all the information needed to download and install. You can check out other blog plugins from our wide range of articles and blogging tips.
Blog marketing, web site marketing; it is all marketing. I am often amused to see ’specialist’ proclaim that internet marketing requires special skills that only those from within the online marketing industry can do. What a load of ####.
Marketing is marketing. Some of the tools used may require some specialized training, however the general principles of marketing still apply. It doesn’t matter whether you are using old fashioned (but still popular) print media, radio, television or any other form of marketing, it is still marketing - in this case, using the internet.
I am prepared to accept that once you have decided on your marketing strategy and the message you are trying to deliver, you may then use specialist to create some parts of the campaign - television crew, radio sound recordist or print layout artist. Likewise with the internet, you may employ a graphic artist to design a banner, or a programmer to write the software or pages, the actual campaign itself will have been designed by a marketing specialist.
When deciding on a blog marketing campaign, think first of marketing. Design a good marketing strategy then look at how you can deliver that campaign - online is not always the only way. You product, service or blog should drive the marketing campaign.
If you start to think online first and what methods could be used to deliver your campaign, you run the risk of letting the marketing vehicle drive your campaign and not the product. This could limit the effect of any blog marketing campaign and result in a waste of marketing funds.
When it comes to blog marketing, let the blog drive the campaign, don’t let other factors unduly influence your campaign.
The best blog design is one that is easy to navigate, easy to use and easy to read. A fancy blog design may look great but if the reader finds navigation difficult or the text hard to read, all that work will have gone to waste.
Some designs only need a minor tweak. I was asked by a friend to look at his blog recently to find out why he had such a high bounce rate (over 90%). The first thing that struck me was the header image, it consumed the whole opening screen. For a lot of visitors, they land on that page and don’t know what to do next. The opening graphic, being so large, also took a while to load.
The quick fix was to reduce the graphic in height by 50%. This allowed the page to load faster and of course brought the content and menus above the fold. His bounce rate is now down to around 70% - still high, but much better that the 90%. He was fortunate, his graphic allowed for 50% reduction in height without degrading the overall effect. It is rare to have an easy fix like that.
I see a lot of blogs that are far to complicated. A simple design is all that is needed. If you are looking to deliver information then that information should be your primary focus and the blog design should focus on that as well.
For blogs that are intended to produce income, your design should focus on leading your readers to your income streams. Leave the fancy designs to the blogs that are created for fun and pleasure.
Blog design - keep it simple and keep it focused on what the blog is there for.