How to Use Video Content as Link Bait for SEO [Tutorial].

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How to Use Video Content as Link Bait for SEO [Tutorial].

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Video can provide four distinct values for SEO. Rich Snippets can improve your click-through-rate, a presence on social video platforms can improve your brand awareness, product videos on commercial pages can help to increase conversion rate and lastly, video can be used to increase the number of links and social shares back to your site. In this post, I’m going to focus on the last of these and explain the methodology behind using video specifically as link bait.

There are essentially only two ways in which people commonly link to video content:

1) Link out to the page – when the page offers a credible source of information, entertainment or features resources that will be valuable for the audience of the site linking out.

2) Embed the video – When the video adds value for the audience within the specific context of the page in question.

Because the motivations behind the links in these two examples are distinct, so are the strategies you can implement in order to successfully build them – you can either create a “linkbait page” that will garner links through recommendations in a traditional manner or you can produce a video that you will outreach to people with the aim of getting them to embed it on their site. In this post, I’m going to explain the form of the content and the technical implementation required for each strategy.

Creating a “Link Bait Page”

Video is a media type, a form of content delivery, rather than a “type of content” as such. As the old adage goes, “form follows function” and this is exactly the approach you should be taking when building out content for link bait purposes. While video may be part of the sum, the page itself is the overall creative and so your task should be thought of “building a content driven mixed-media page”, rather than building a “video” per se.

An example of this approach executed successfully is The Simply Business Guide to WordPress, where a series of videos are interspersed with links to articles and presented in a step-by-step interactive flowchart. While the videos themselves are reasonably useful, the real value is in the structure and presentation of the page – which drives links rather than the YouTube videos themselves. This type of content gets links because it is a useful resource for those unfamiliar with WordPress and meets the need of educating a non-technology savvy business owner audience about creating a website.

Creating a Video That Others Will Embed

If someone embeds a video on their site – it has to be because they want their readers to stop looking at their own content and spend time watching yours instead. If you’re a company trying to build your presence and reputation online, rather than individual promoting the latest humorous cat video, this means that your content has to be exceptional. Mediocre isn’t going to cut it.

With video, exceptional does not necessarily mean that the production quality has to be ground-breaking, but rather that the content must meet the needs of a specific user base and do so exceptionally efficiently and creatively.

This could be as simple as providing a tutorial for something that others’ have been unable to work out – or it could be an exceptionally creative way of delivering a message that provokes thought or action. Video infographics are a typical form factor for this kind of content, and generally work best when the video and audio tracks counterpoint each other to deliver a multi-layered narrative.

Hosting and Outreach Strategy

If you’re building a multi-media web page which utilizes video as one of the form factors – then the hosting methodology ultimately doesn’t matter. If the video isn’t valuable outside of the context of the page (as with the Simply Business example – the value is the curated guide and step-by-step process), then few individuals will choose to link to a specific video – rather preferring to link to link to entity as a whole. Your outreach process will broadly consist of contacting site owners for whom the content will be valuable and asking them to link out to it.

Conversely, If you’re trying to get links to a specific video – then the hosting platform you use matters a great deal.

When people embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo or any other social video platforms, they don’t typically link to the domain of the creator in the process, but instead the profile of the user on the YouTube/Vimeo domains. This is fantastic for the platforms themselves, but clearly sub-optimal for any business trying to do SEO and build links back to their site in order to improve rankings. Whilst these social video platforms are a fantastic way to seed your content and get it in front of a wider audience, you don’t want the likes of YouTube taking your link equity.

10 Steps to Maximize the Use of Video as Link Bait

I therefore recommend the following hosting and outreach methodology for this kind of video linkbait.

1. Self-host your videos (or use a secure third party provider) and put it in a big frame (I recommend 720 x 405 for most desktop sites) on a dedicated page on your site.

2. If you’re using Vimeo Pro, Vzaar, Viddler or any other platform which allows you to publish your video outside of your domain – turn this functionality off for now

3. Create a custom embed code for your video, using the following free tool. So the video has an “embed” call to action at the bottom of a page (NB ensure the in-built “embed” button is turned off for any hosting platform you may be using, as this typically won’t include a text link back to your site)

4. Include social share buttons on the page, with a custom message specific to your campaign (depending on your video hosting platform, you may also need to disable the standard social buttons included with the player and include customized versions separately)

5. Outreach to sites who may be interested in linking to your video, ensuring you include the above embed code within the email (to make it easy for the outreach target to link to you)

6. 3-4 months later, or once the return from your outreach work has dried up – put the content on YouTube, Vimeo and any other social video platforms relevant for the content you’ve created.

7. Seed the content socially and try to get as many shares and links as you can to the YouTube/Vimeo versions of your video.

8. After the buzz dies down from this – mark the content up “private” on YouTube and set up domain restrictions on Vimeo (so it stops working for anyone who has embedded it).

9. Outreach to all the people who embedded/linked to the YouTube/Vimeo versions of your video, explaining that this link now doesn’t work and ask them to link to the version of the video on your site instead. You won’t get a 100% return from this, but most of the leads will be fairly strong – as after all, they’ve already linked to your content.

10. If your video is still relevant and valuable six months down the line, then you can always rinse and repeat steps 6-9

Ultimately, the core principles behind using video as linkbait successfully are simple:

1. Allow form to follow function: only use video as your medium when it’s the best way to tell the story in question

2. Carefully target your audience: create something that’s going to be valuable to a specific group of users around the web

3. Avoid leaking link equity – Ensure you minimize the amount of links pointing to domains outside of your own.

Make no mistake, getting these three things right consistently is not easy and it can take many attempts to see a reasonable return on investment. If one element is missing, the campaign will inevitably fail to deliver, but the rewards are there for those with the creative nous and technical understanding to give it a go.

Author: Phil Nottingham

Courtesy of www.reelseo.com

Facebook’s Graph Search: what does it mean for marketers?

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For everyone in the digital marketing industry, the big news of the day is the launch of Facebook’s new Graph Search.

In a nutshell, the new tool allows you to search for people, pages, businesses and other services based on the information shared by other Facebook users.

Dodgy name aside, it’s an exciting announcement that might cause a few worried conversations at Google.

But what are the opportunities for marketers, and is it going to kick off a new race to drive up the number of ‘likes’ for brand pages?

To shed a bit of light on some of the key issues, I asked several search and social media experts for their views…

1. What do you see as being the main opportunities for brands?

Matt Owen, Social Media Manager at Econsultancy

Active outreach will be at the forefront of everyone’s minds, but this will largely come down to privacy settings.

If brands can reach out directly to individuals then there’s potentially a huge payoff, but also a massive opportunity to spam, which could lead to more users upping their privacy settings.

I can’t see Facebook being particularly tolerant of this behaviour though, so I imagine the main opportunity will be to more accurately target ads and updates based on very specific bio information, rather than just area, gender, etc.

If Facebook can provide a genuinely accurate ad targeting system then the payoff will be far better.

I can certainly see the opportunity for local search increasing massively. If Facebook can also integrate this properly across mobile then it could be a huge threat to Yelp! And Google’s business listings. I’m sure that restaurant reviews by people you know would carry far more weight than anonymous ones.

Kelvin Newman, Strategy Director at SiteVisibility

I think the biggest advantage for brands is this is going to surface people who have liked you in the past to their friends more frequently.

This is good news because often someone will have liked you, but then not really interacted with so your brand will never appear in the newsfeed.

Now that connection lives on and potentially helps you appear in searches more frequently, so it certainly increases the value of dormant ‘likers’.

Interestingly though, content created by brands, such as photos, won’t appear which does seem an oversight.

Robin Grant, MD at We Are Social

If Facebook evolves Graph Search beyond the current limits of ‘People, Photos, Places, and Interests’ and in turn users warm to it, it could succeed and therefore become relevant to brands.

This would mean that Facebook’s sponsored result ads would become more relevant for advertisers, and ultimately it would mean that raw fan numbers would be much more important to brands (or more accurately, the number of fans they have that match the profile of their customer base), as to appear in Graph Search results a brand will need to have a friend of the searcher as a fan.

It would also make it essential for retailers, or any business with physical locations, to maintain Facebook place pages for each of their branches.

Will Francis, Director at Harkable

The product looks to be of immediate benefit to location-based brands such as shops, restaurants, etc. – ‘where do my friends go for pizza?’ – and content providers such as publishers and film studios – ‘what films do my friends like most?’.

It will be interesting to see how the product comes to be used and how brands exploit those common uses to appear in users’ search results.

2. Is Facebook’s data accurate enough for searches to actually be valid? i.e. does the average user actually keep their profile information up-to-date?

Matt Owen:

I think for brands this is a good thing, as they’ll be encouraged to provide more relevant business information, which in turn should improve the user experience.

Currently I’m often forced to scroll through 50 results to find the right one, even if I’m looking for a specific brand by name.

On a personal level, if professionals are encouraged to use it as a data mine, then we could see a resurgence in Facebook as the social network.

Twitter’s search has never been the most reliable when looking for contacts, so the ability to search by bio keywords would be incredibly useful. It might be something that LinkedIn should also be concerned about.

That said, my own ‘about’ info contains far more references to Martinis than it does Econsultancy…

Kelvin Newman

I’d expect the data to be sparse for most people, but that might not be such a bad thing for Facebook, as it might give people the little nudge to tend their information up-to-date.

And also don’t underestimate how much data is created frictionlessly, i.e. if you’ve got Spotify connected to Facebook (check out https://www.facebook.com/music) most of that data is being created frictionlessly and could potentially be informing Search Graph.

Robin Grant

Users in their early 20s may have a circle of friends that will be providing enough data for Graph Search to be useful.

However, it seems likely that for most users at the moment that won’t be the case, and there just won’t be enough data in your social graph.

Will Francis

Some data is more accurate than others, with ‘likes’ for brands and products fairly patchy while photos, tagging and basic profile info is more reliable.

So we’ll find users initially gravitate to the searches that are most reliable and we may even see people become more diligent about updating their profiles and reflecting their lives even more faithfully online.

3. Will it kick off another race for ‘likes’ among brands so they show up more in search?

Matt Owen

It’s certainly possible. I’ve never been convinced about Facebook promoting the value of a ‘like’, simply because many businesses (Econsultancy included) don’t scale that way.

Of our own 10,000–odd fans, it’s unlikely that many of their friends are also digital marketers. Brands will need to think more deeply about who they approach and why, which should ultimately help improve the current state of measurement and ROI.

I think Facebook will need to be careful not to create a closed-loop search. Of my friends, very few share my taste in music, so searches that are based on their preferences won’t be relevant.

On Facebook people do tend to search with intent (“Virgin Atlantic” rather than “Cheap Flights”), so being well ‘liked’ will certainly be a factor for many companies to counteract this.

Kelvin Newman

Initially as the system lacks data you’ll be able to reap the rewards on merely having lots of likes just to appear on searches, but it won’t take long for there to be competition, and once that competition is in place the order in which results are returned will become important.

This order will presumably be more sophisticated than simply who has the most likes.

My gut feel is that it will probably work in a similar way to the Newsfeed Edgerank algorithm which is based on Affinity and the Weight; so priority will be given to businesses with strong interaction from people you are connected to or businesses you’ve interacted with in the past.

Robin Grant

If Graph Search takes off, then it’s certainly possible. Although, brands should remember though that even in this instance, it’s not about raw numbers of fans, but the number of relevant fans.

Will Francis

Once brands work out the metrics and overall uses of the system there will certainly be a new set of targets that become prioritised, and agencies will need to be ready to realise these new opportunities to gain visibility and engagement with consumers.

4. Will it result in an increase in spam requests if people are easier to find?

Matt Owen

I’m sure it will, but only at the level of spam tweets. There will always be a few unscrupulous (or uneducated) marketers out there blasting spam, although in the main they’re too useless at it to target properly anyway.

I’d expect to see a rise in friend requests from people I’ve never heard of, but as mentioned it really will depend on whether or not pages can contact directly, something I can’t see happening.

It’s more likely you’ll see a rise in irrelevant ads as Facebook tweaks its settings after launch. I’m sure I can rely on my existing friends to share enough spam as it is…

Kelvin Newman

If LinkedIn is anything to go by, yes! But that’s most likely to affect the tech recruitment sector and eligible singletons.

However in the announcement they talked a lot about Facebook being about meeting new people as well as staying connected to existing friends, so Facebook probably see that as a good thing.

Robin Grant

Possibly, but I think in this instance Facebook is only replicating what LinkedIn’s search already provides, so perhaps we’ll just see those spam requests spread across networks.

Will Francis

Facebook was keen to stress that privacy functions would be at the heart of the new product, with users able to define what does and doesn’t turn up in search results.

We know from past experience though that most users don’t bother tweaking these settings and it’s likely there will be (yet another) minor backlash when people start receiving spam friend requests.

On the flipside, we may see Facebook do what MySpace did and what Google+ Communities is doing well – connecting strangers around common interests.

Along with becoming the world’s social knowledge engine through Graph Search, this seems a natural progression in Facebook’s unstoppable march towards its domination of the web.

Author: David Moth

Courtesy of www.econsultancy.com

25 Elements That Make A High Quality Website.

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25 Elements That Make A High Quality Website.

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Many aspects of web design are very subjective on the surface. Should we use a shadow on that text or a solid border? Should we use this image on our homepage slider or that one? However when it comes to making a truly high quality website, there is a method to all the madness. Whether it’s the color scheme, layout, use of specific images, or placement of calls to action, a truly high quality website built by a marketing focused company has everything in a certain place for a specific reason.

Now I won’t claim to have all the answers — I along with any marketing focused web designer am still learning through trial and error, A/B testing, and meticulous data scrubbing. However over the years, I have learned a thing or two about what truly makes a high quality website. Here are 25 website elements that I have learned are critical to truly having a quality, marketing focused website.

Element 1: Clear Navigation:

A website needs to have a clear navigation menu. That navigation menu the majority of the time falls on the top of the webpage in the form of a horizontal bar, not because web designers are lazy, but because this is where people expect it to be. It needs to be easy to navigate a website. Yes, cool designs are fun and unique, but at the end of the day if the user can’t figure out how to navigate your website they’re going to bounce.

Element 2: Multiple Navigation Menus:

Clients often struggle with determining what to highlight in their navigation menu, so we often revert to having multiple navigation menus in the form of vertical menus or horizontal sub-menus. We understand many businesses are extremely complex, so if you’re in a complex industry, a complex business, or have an extremely large website, multiple navigation menus depending on what part of the site you’re on will be critical in assisting visitors with finding what they’re looking for.

Element 3: Easy To Find Objectives, Clear Calls To Action:

The content that falls in the site’s main navigation menu should contain the core pages of the website. This doesn’t necessarily need to be the traditional “Home, About Us, Sign Up, & Contact Us” but rather is unique to your business and industry. We recommend having a clear contact button and clear service/product button in the navigation menu, and often times we’ve found that less is more when it comes to navigation. Sites that have easy to find objectives in the navigation menu tend to convert and perform better than those with cluttered navigation menus or navigation menus with endless drop downs.

Likewise, clear calls to action are extremely important. This isn’t just on certain pages, but rather throughout the entire website. The homepage, blog pages, category pages, sales pages, and every page on the website exists for a purpose and needs to have a clear call to action to properly funnel traffic to where it needs to be.

Element 4: Site Search:

Every single website needs an easy to use and accurate search feature. Many sites have a search feature, but they return terrible results or worse yet don’t work at all. Often times a content management system or e-commerce platform will come with a strong search feature, but if your business has an extremely large site or is an extremely large e-commerce store, the importance of a quality search feature becomes increasingly important. Custom search bars can be utilized, predictive search can be incorporated, or Google Site Search can be utilized to provide quality search results within a specific website.

Element 5: Core Content Highlighted (Cornerstone Content):

Often times businesses have fantastic pages outlining their business, their processes, and core information about why they’re the best, but its hidden. Every business should have a value proposition explaining why someone should pick them over another company, and that should be considered the business’ cornerstone piece of content. That piece of content should be well written, clear, concise, and highlighted properly in the overall web design.

This is more important in certain industries, especially service based industries or industries where the product/service is virtually a commodity, but no matter what the nature of the business it’s important to have a strong value proposition that is properly worked into the website’s structure.

Element 6: Thought Out Contact Process:

How many times do you find a website contact form that doesn’t ask for your phone/email? Or a contact form that is so long you feel like you’re applying for a second mortgage? Or the worst — you have to dig and dig and eventually Google search for the contact page for a company.

Every website needs to have a clear contact process with a simple contact form. That form should ask for Name, Email, and Message. Optional fields are phone number and a drop-down for Reason for Contacting. Anything beyond that needs to be collected on a secondary form or after you contact the new lead as the shorter and sweeter the contact forms the greater the chance they’ll be filled out. This is always a struggle with business owners as they want to ask 15 questions in a contact form, but in reality a marketing focused site will have a short contact form.

Element 7: Blog/News Area:

Every website needs a blog/news area. You don’t want a blog/news area, you say? Well, if you want a quality, marketing based website then you’re getting one. Let’s be realistic, anyone who knows anything about online marketing knows how critical a blog and news area is. Not having a blog/news section to a website is basically like not even having a website these days — seriously.

In addition to actually having the blog/news area is the importance of updating this critical section of the website, but we’ll touch more on that in another element.

Element 8: Information About Your Company:

If I’m searching the web, stumble upon a new company, and can’t find out anything about that company, I will likely leave. It’s important to post information about the business . This consists of information about the company’s history, the management team, employees, location, structure, and any other important or unique information about the company. Not only is this good information to have, but it also helps build trust in the company and helps show the company is established and not a fly-by-night operation.

Element 9: Testimonials & Reviews:

Every website needs testimonials and reviews. I don’t care if its a SEO company, a car dealer, a dental office, or a trash collection company. Every website needs testimonials and reviews to build trust. Let me throw out a little statistic I learned through another website I own — years ago we didn’t have any testimonials or reviews posted, and we had about an 11% contact rate on the site. After we added testimonials & reviews, that soared to 17% and our close rate on those that contacted us went up dramatically.

Ideally a video testimonial is the best, however a text testimonial with an image or on stationary from the individual is nearly as good. And if you can’t get those, then a simple text based review is still far, far better than having nothing at all.

Element 10: Case Studies & Data:

Much like testimonials and reviews, every website should also contain case studies and data. Many business owners say “I don’t have any case studies or data” and our response is “Because we haven’t put any together yet”. No matter what industry you’re in, you can put together some sort of case study or other business specific data. Doctors can publish success rates, an e-commerce site can publish customer satisfaction surveys, a law firm can publish their success rates or work on a specific case, and so on. No matter what industry you’re in, working with a good marketing focused individual can help you come up with case studies and data to publish on the website to establish yourself as an industry authority.

Element 11: Quality & Unique Content:

This is key. Your website is essentially two things: images and text. We’ll talk about the images later and the text now. Every website should have high quality, unique content that was either written in house or written by your web design/copywriting team. This content needs to be clear, concise, and focus on helping inform your website visitors while funneling them to your goal. This content is one of the most important elements of your website and is one of the things that will ultimately decide if a visitor becomes a “bounce” or a “conversion”.

And likewise, this content should be unique for three reasons: First off it needs to be unique for SEO purposes due to Panda, secondly it needs to be unique so you don’t look the same as your competitor who you stole it from, and third it needs to be unique because it’s just the right, ethical thing to do. Don’t copy content from someone else, rather take the time to formulate quality, unique content for your website that represents the quality you strive for at your business. It is an investment in the website that will pay off.

Element 12: Fresh & Updated Content:

Unique, quality content isn’t enough anymore, it needs to be fresh and updated. This comes in two forms: overall content as well as blog content.

Overall content should be updated and changed as needed. In some industries, copy can stay on the page for years. If a product/service is extremely static, the content may remain the same for years which is fine. But in the majority of businesses, things change constantly. New products/services are introduced, changes are made to existing products/services, and other elements may change from time to time. Make sure someone routinely goes through the website to make sure all the content is fresh and updated to reflect the current state of the business.

And secondly, blog content needs to be fresh and updated. Companies should blog an absolute minimum of once per month. We prefer if they blog at least once per week, and ideally companies would blog as often as humanly possible. Companies with a blog that hasn’t been updated for months are going to have a higher bounce rate and convert much poorer. And likewise blog content attracts links, social following, and long tail traffic, all of which will assist with the website’s ultimate goal: Driving new business to the company.

Element 13: Marketing Based Content:

And lastly, content needs to be marketing based. Many business owners and content writers know very little about marketing or selling a product/service. They’re great at what they do, but not so great at marketing what they do. The content on a website shouldn’t be dry, boring, and lifeless, but rather it should encourage the visitor to want to learn more or purchase the product/service.

Yes, this is easier in some industries than other, but when you have a passionate business owner, a good copywriter can extract information from them that can be lively and leave the visitor wanting to learn more.

Element 14: Clean Coding:

Many websites have terrible coding. When a web developer (or search engine) views the coding of a site, they can often tell extremely quickly how well a site is coded. Why is this important? For starters it’s important so the website displays properly, more importantly its important so the website is easy to change when needed, and perhaps most importantly its important so the site loads quickly. Having website coding that is messy is like that big tangled bunch of cords we all have hiding behind our desks, whereas a nice clean website is like having a glass desk with a laptop and just one little power cable leading to it.

Element 15: SEO Friendly Coding:

This is one of my biggest pet peeves, when a business hires a web designer who doesn’t have a clue about SEO. As a company that offers both SEO and web design, this is pretty high on our list of critical website elements. SEO friendly coding means many things, including but not limited to proper headings, proper titles, proper placement of coding in the HTML structure, clean and concise coding, ability to change SEO related elements, ALT/title tags, and much more. It takes an extra step sometimes to make a website SEO friendly, but the end result always pays off for the business.

Element 16: Great Graphics & Images:

We mentioned earlier that a website is essentially two things: images and text. We already went on and on and on about how important the text is, how about the images? If you think about it, the images on a website and color scheme of the site are really what ultimately grab your attention or not. A site that has fantastic content but terrible design/graphics isn’t going to do any better than a site with terrible content but great design/graphics. In my opinion they’re both needed, and having good, high quality graphics, images, and design help show that your business is credible, offers a high quality product/service, and enhances the usability of the site.

Element 17: A Unified Design:

Ever see a website with a great header/navigation bar but the rest of the site looks like an after thought? Often times web designers spend a great deal of time on things like the header and homepage, and put very little thought into the interior pages and footer. It’s important to have a unified design on the website, and this means that every page and every element of every page is unified (using the same style, fonts, color scheme, etc.). A site with a well thought out, unified design truly will do better, look better, and give visitors a better first impression of your business.

Element 18: Seamless Transitions:

It drives me insane when a website is coded in one platform, the blog is in another, and the e-commerce platform is in a third, and all of them have a different “theme” or design to them. It makes the business look “cheap” — it’s like going to a restaurant and part of the room being carpet, the other part tile, and the third part concrete. Websites can become very complex very quickly, which is all the more reason to work with a professional web designer to make sure you identify the best solution for your situation to ensure seamless transitions across all elements of the website.

Element 19: Cross Browser Compatibility:

This is extremely important these days. Gone are the days of having one web browser to design for, and in comes 2013 with dozens of different browsers by different companies that all render a little differently. Make sure your site is designed for cross browser compatibility and tested in multiple browsers before launch. This will help ensure that everyone sees what they should be seeing and can easily navigate and utilize the website without technical errors. This is also important if you have an old website as it likely isn’t displaying properly in a majority of web browsers today.

Element 20: Smart Phone Friendly:

I know very few people these days who don’t own a smart phone, and out of everyone who has a smart phone I can almost guarantee the majority of them use it to visit websites from time to time. A website doesn’t necessarily need to have a mobile version anymore (in my opinion dummied down mobile sites infuriate visitors more than anything since they can’t access your full content/site) but you should have either a responsive website (one that scales to the device size) or a website that renders properly in tables and mobile devices. This will continue to be more and more important as time goes on, and if you have an old website there’s a great chance it doesn’t work right in smart phones or tablets.

Element 21: Good User Interface/Content Management:

A website used to be a collection of HTML files that only your web developer could edit, however today the vast majority of websites are built in some sort of content management system. Make sure you pick a content management system that fits your needs and has a good user interface. What does that mean? Well, it depends on your business. If you regularly want to update your page content and blog content, WordPress is a great choice. If you need to be able to have a portfolio to display your images, then a customized gallery in WordPress is a good choice. There are numerous content management systems out there (WordPress being the most popular and our favorite) and it’s important to work with your web developer to identify what you need to change the most often so they can build and modify the user interface to facilitate your needs.

Element 22: Opt In Form:

Email marketing is critical in lead nurturing for both product and service based businesses, and every website should have an opt in form for email marketing. No, it shouldn’t be “thrown” onto the page somewhere just to be there, rather it should be designed to fit the look of the site and incorporated in a well thought out location. Some sites use the footer, others use the sidebar, and others use pop-ups, it all depends on how important email marketing is to your business (and in nearly every business it should be pretty darn important).

Element 23: Feature Rich Add-ons:

Make sure your website has all the elements you need! This sounds like a no brainer, but if you can benefit from having an e-commerce platform then opt to spend the few thousand more on having your developer set it up! You’ll make that money back after a few weeks or months of having the platform in place. If you’re spending the time to re-do your website, don’t cut corners on the functionality and add-on elements of the site, it will just leave you feeling like something is missing after the fact and will also leave you not earning as much as you potentially could through the site.

Element 24: Easy Traffic/Conversion Tracking:

Building all these great elements on a website will be useless if you can’t track the traffic. Whether a 3rd party software or Google Analytics, it’s important to have some sort of traffic reporting software in place to monitor critical website metrics. And likewise it’s also important to setup goals and events to track contact form submissions, e-commerce sales, and email opt ins through a website to understand what marketing channels are delivering the best ROI.

Element 25: Personalized For Your Business:

Sounds crazy, but a lot of businesses use template websites that aren’t customized for their business at all. These look cookie cutter, generic, and make the business look cheap. Have a website that your business can be proud of, that is customized for your niche, that is unique to your company, and that your competitors are envious of. Your website is the first impression the majority of your customers/clients will have, make sure your site represents your business well.

And there you have it — the 25 elements that truly make a high quality website stand apart from a mediocre website. These elements will not only help make the website look good, but more importantly well help the website fulfill it’s number one purpose — to help your business make more money.

Now, as a small business owner, you might be saying to yourself ”That’s all great, I would love to have those 25 elements, but we simply cannot afford it” and I would argue that you’re 50% right, you can’t afford something, but what you can’t afford is continuing without having these elements on your website. A true high quality website will pay for itself hundreds of times over and over again.

Author: Brendan Egan

Courtesy of www.simpleseogroup.com

Rethinking Email Marketing.

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With companies caught up in social media, it can be easy to forget about email marketing. Email marketing gives companies a unique channel to broadcast their company and content.

However, not all companies execute email marketing correctly. One of the biggest mistakes they make is they think of it as a sales channel. They charge right out of the gates with the intention of selling products, instead of providing value to customers and occasionally promoting.

Let’s take a second look at email marketing and dive into some tips and counter-intuitive thinking…

Asking Questions and Having Goals

Like any new venture, it is necessary for a business to ask questions and have goals. Questions like:

Why should we do this? Does it need to be done?

What do we hope to get out of this?

What would success look like?

What is the cost?

What milestones should we set?

Who will be in charge of it?

Once you have questions like this nailed down, you can then figure out if these approaches are right for your company, and if so, use some of the tips provided in this blog post to help guide you through the process.

How to get Subscribers

A newsletter is nothing without subscribers. To build your email list, you’ll need to put a signup form on your website. Many companies will leave this email signup form on a landing page or their blog.

It’s common for many websites to tell how many subscribers they have. Hubspot says to join over 54,000 subscribers.

Others will tell you how often the emails go out.

Notice how they also emphasize the “FREE” in the headline. Notice the wording and color of buttons companies are using. They emphasize the word “free”. Check out the wording and coloring for the buttons:

Subscribe (Navy Blue)

Join Us (Red)

Join (Green)

Yes, Sign Me Up (Blue)

Sign me up (Blue)

Sign Up (Light Green)

Details matter, so it’s important how you choose your words and colors that you use. Test combinations and see if one converts better than the other.

Some websites have multiple newsletters.

In my opinion, it would be beneficial for companies to tell how often emails go out. It’s helpful when the prospect knows what to expect. You can also show what previous newsletters look like.

Whatever message you choose and wherever you choose to place the newsletter signup (preferably homepage and/or blog), the key is to get the emails opened.

Email Open Rates

Many factors can influence email open rates, some of which are out of your control. One factor you can control are your titles.

Most people receive over 100 emails a day (including email from work). Needless to say, it can be difficult for people to open your newsletter if it has a boring title.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when crafting your email titles:

Don’t make it about you: “It’s not all about you” may be frustrating to hear, but it’s important to keep in mind. Subscribers probably like your brand, but avoid sending out your latest press release. Product launche emails are a good idea as long as they’re not sent out too often. You should outline some kind of benefit for the reader in the email subject line.

Here is a bad title with no benefit for the reader:

“Our company, XYZ Widgets, just passed Widgetry Inc in Sales”

A title like this will likely garner a less than stellar open rate because it makes the email about the company, not about the reader.

Here’s a better one:

“How Widgets Inc increased sales by 5% with this simple greeting”

The reader will feel compelled to open the email because it’s about benefits for the reader.

Tell a story: People love to hear stories. Many of the best newsletters will lead with a story as the headline/title. For example, if you sell nutritional advice or supplements you wouldn’t want to write “How Jim lost 100lbs in 2 months” as that would wind up in the spam box and/or be totally ignored. Instead, go for “How Jim’s 2 week vacation lead him to lose 10lbs.” This sounds much more like a casual story and less like a spammy “magic pill” weight loss story.

Make it exciting: Part of having a helpful email means giving the reader actionable advice. It all starts with the topic. When writing the topic, ask yourself “Will the user know what they can do?” Maybe pass your title to a few colleagues and ask, “Without opening it, do you know what you can do in this email?” Give descriptive words when writing your title. For example:

Boring:

“How XYZ company increased their email open rates from .5-2.0%”

Improved:

“How XYZ company tripled their email open rates.”

“What XYZ company did to improve their email open rates by 300%”

1.5% is not an exciting number. In fact, it’s rather depressing to think of such a small open rate. By giving words like “tripled” or “300%”, you’re polishing the title up a little bit.

Here’s another example:

Boring:

“Why I like the new Ford Taurus”

Improved:

“How Ford just made Toyota’s job much tougher.”

“Why the Ford Taurus will become America’s best selling car.”

“Why the new Taurus will add $10 billion to Ford’s bottom line.”

“Why I like…” is not exciting. Unless you’re really important, no one is going to care what one person thinks about a car. These improved titles think bigger and beyond the writer. It makes you think there will be real analysis in the email instead of just an opinion.

Keep it short: Almost everywhere you have to keep your message short. Billboards shouldn’t be more than 7 words, slogans shouldn’t be long, Twitter has their 140 character limit and SMS limits you to 160 characters. So what about email? The rule of thumb for subject lines is 50 characters. Remember, people get a lot of emails everyday and long subject lines may not get read. Do your best to keep it as short as possible.

Avoid spammy words: “Free”, “Act now” & “Limited time” all should be avoided in your email subject. Not only do people see these words everyday, they also correlated with spam. If you’ve ever seen a late night infomercial, you’ve undoubtedly heard these words many times. Be more creative and thoughtful with your titles. Hubspot has a great list on spam trigger words.

Consistently have great content: A great title helps, but if your email has bad content then that reduces the chances that they’ll check out your newsletter next time. Or worse, they could unsubscribe. We’ll get into how to write great content later.

Rethinking the Welcome Email – A Case Study

MarketingShepra featured a company that increased their CTR by 450% by changing their welcome process. Instead of one long welcome email, Savvymom sent three welcome emails spread over ten days (one email every 10 days). They also did a few other tactics which increased engagement. Here’s a quick synopsis:

1) Savvymom gathered user feedback and found that moms (like most people) tend to experience email overload. So they decided to send three welcome emails. All three messages gradually introduce them to the Savvymom website. They had a list of the latest content that Savvymom spent the most time working on. From there, they narrowed it down to get the content that was most enjoyable to the Savvymom readers.

2) They personalized the content to fit with how the user signed up for the newsletter.

3) Savvymom made it pretty and emphasized important elements of the email.

4) Had a format fit for scanners and; kept the call-to-action above the fold. They also kept the design similar to their website, knew who their audience was, portrayed the correct images to them and made sure the email was viewable on all devices.

5) At the bottom of the newsletter, Savvymom had a few visual links that went back to their website. These links were not related to the email subject, but rather general advice and content in their niche. To give a separate example, if you sell outdoor equipment and your email subject is about water bottles, the bottom links would be links to content about surviving in (enter season) months, instructional videos, or any other content on your site. These links make one last attempt to get the reader to click on something in your newsletter.

In short, doing three welcome emails improved their CTR and on one of those three emails, improved their open rate versus the original welcome email. They also improved their long term engagement.

Segmenting Your Email List

Segmenting your email list is important because it works. By segmenting your marketing emails, you are sending out more relevant emails. You can segment by geography, interests, behavior, Klout score and more. Typically you should use segments based on your business goals. For example, if your company is holding an event or speaking in Chicago, you can segment your list to just let people in Chicago know, instead of emailing your entire list. Or if you see a trend that 5% of your readers click on a certain item or download a white paper, you can segment to those people and send them content similar to that.

Segmenting takes a lot of time and work, but it can pay off in the end.

Writing Great Content

You must be helpful in your email newsletters. Think about email newsletters as a book or a movie. Rarely does someone read or watch a movie to hear promotions or information about a company (unless it’s corrupt). Your newsletter is the same. Provide some kind of benefit for the reader. Helping them can go beyond their personal finances; think about the unique value that you as a brand can provide.

For example, if you’re a social media consultant, you’re newsletter should consist of tips for engaging with users, answering recent FAQ (i.e.: is Pinterest right for me?) and the latest stats and research on social media. You could also feature a company or two that are using social media in the right way.

The content must also be relevant. You must also know your audience. Markingsherpa reports that 4 out of 10 subscribers press the spam button on newsletters simply because the content is irrelevant. One survey showed that 63% of respondents unsubscribe from e-mails to avoid irrelevant messages that were sent too often.

Having a Call-to-Action

Your call-to-action should be above the fold and clear.

On top, Amazon shows recommendations. Then there is “Learn More” button featuring organic snacks. All of this is kept above the fold, so I don’t have to scroll down to see it.

Environmental group called 350: there are four links, with the middle one telling the user to “click here”. All four of these links direct to the same website. The author of the newsletter is hoping readers just click on a link, he gives multiple options, all of which send the reader to the same site.

When writing your call-to-action, you have to tell them what you want and give them a reason why. Don’t be vague. Political organizations are very good at this when emailing supporters. Here’s one from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign:

This well-formatted newsletter gives two bold sentences, both of them asking to donate money. It’s very clear what they want from the reader. A call-to-action near the top and a call-to-action near the bottom.

Romney’s campaign has to call-to-action, one button that asks to donate, clearly well above the fold. The other one, below the fold, asks for a donation.

Best Time To Send Out Emails

The best day(s) to send out emails appear to be Tuesday or Wednesday. The best times appear to be a little after noon. You’ll always hear conflicting info and advice, so it’s best to test it for yourself.

What To Do When People Unsubscribe

When people unsubscribe, this is a great opportunity to get feedback.

When a reader unsubscribes, ask why and get their feedback. If it’s because you email too often, that may be a hint that you should give readers an option to receive email a little less frequently. You should give readers this option at the bottom of every email you send (i.e. link that says, “Send me these emails less frequently”) and on the unsubscribe page. This could help save you from losing them as a subscriber. One survey showed that 41% of respondents are open to receiving less email rather than totally unsubscribing.

If it’s because the emails they were receiving were irrelevant, then you may want to start segmenting and ask them what kind of content they were looking for.

Should You Bother A/B Testing Email Headlines?

Since most email campaigns use a different headline each time a campaign is sent out, how beneficial is it to test headlines? The only thing you really get out of testing email headlines is you get an idea of what language leads to more opens and conversions. It’s not like testing a home page headline that will be used throughout the year. And you don’t really need to A/B test headlines to get a good idea of what language works with what email.

What’s probably more important, is to A/B test your email layout, call to action text and button colors. Chances are you will be using the same layout and button styles in each email you send out. So testing these elements will give you much more beneficial insights. This is obviously a more effective use of your “testing time”.

Don’t Just Test, but Compare

Here at KISSmetrics, we constantly urge you to test every marketing activity you engage in. But that can lead to very microscopic, laser focused analysis. At some point, you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. How are all your marketing campaigns doing? For instance, is email marketing as effective as Pay-Per-Click advertising or SEO? Do you have the budget, and perhaps even more importantly, the time to continue to run email marketing the way you are currently doing it? Is it even producing a return for your business?

We would never advise to completely shut down your email marketing activities, but sometimes it might be wise to scale it down or make adjustments as to how you are going about it to make sure it’s beneficial for your business.

When NOT To Do Email Marketing

For years marketing experts have been pitching the benefits of email marketing and how to get more out of your campaigns. But the real question is: Are you ready to commit to a regular email marketing routine? One of the worst things you can do is start an email marketing campaign and then stop it, returning to it at random intervals throughout the year. Your email marketing list will hit more spam boxes and become much less effective if you don’t keep a regular frequency.

One easy way to see if your business is ready for email marketing is to start blogging. If you can keep a regular blogging schedule, chances are you can keep a regular email marketing schedule. If you can’t keep a regular blogging schedule the effects are far less damaging than losing steam on an email marketing initiative. Another nifty thing about blog articles is that they can also be used as content for your email marketing campaigns (or as backup material). In essence you can kill two birds with one piece of content!

Email marketing is not something all businesses should do. As mentioned, you must start with what you want to get out of it. If you’re only goal is to push sales, you have the wrong intentions and won’t be successful. Focus on making great, relevant content first.

Author: Zach Bulygo

Courtesy of www.blog.kissmetrics.com