SEO Werkt!

Here’s what we included in this week’s One Social Thing daily email. Scroll to see the social media and content marketing articles you need to know.

To get One Social Thing delivered to your email each day, please subscribe below. If you find a social media or content marketing story you think is a must-read, tweet it out with the #OneSocialThing hash tag. If we use your idea in an edition, I’ll send you a signed copy of my book.

Thanks! – Jay

What was the big issue of the week for you?

About the Lisa Loeffler:

Lisa Loeffler is Research & Analysis Lead at Convince & Convert. She is also founder and principal of Genuine Media, a marketing agency that helps clients build their individual and brand reputation through social media.

One Social Thing Wrapup – Week of July 16 is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

I’ve been pretty tough in the past about the garbage that gets sold to real estate agents, sent to real estate agents and marketed to real estate agents in the name of growing their business and expanding their reach and visibility.

So, in the interest of balance, I’m compelled to share two recent articles that I think are excellent resources for real estate agents — and might even have some wisdom for other small business owners, too.

7 Tips to Transform Your Marketing for Realtors

I like the message in No. 5, Eliminate one-size-fits-all marketing, but I’ll quote from No. 4, which is titled Stop spending money and time on things that are just “kind of working.”

If you are just getting one or two calls off something you are spending money on, it’s time to stop and re-evaluate where your dollars are being spent. So many agents I know spend literally hours putting together a listing flier because they reinvent the wheel every time they get a listing. Be diligent with your time.

Highly recommend the full article — it’s good stuff.

Real Estate Link Building: Post-Penguin

Another article from InmanNext. Ben Fisher expands on a theme that Wil Reynolds covered at Seer Interactive — do sh*t real companies do.

Real companies aren’t writing low-quality content and submitting to article directories. They aren’t spamming blog comments across the Internet for a backlink. They are creating value and building relationships!

Start by writing something of value that can help the consumer, which will build relationships with them, as well as others in the real estate industry.

If Google’s Penguin update helps reduce the amount of real estate-related blog comment crapspam that I get on this blog, than yay Google. Hopefully a lot of real estate agents will take that advice to heart and focus on long-term, scalable link-building strategies with real value rather than the “get as many links as we can by any means necessary” strategy that seems to have dominated for years now.

So there you go … two solid articles with real estate marketing advice. It’s out there!

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Two Good Marketing Articles for Real Estate Agents (Stop the Presses!)

Here’s what we included in this week’s One Social Thing daily email. Scroll to see the social media and content marketing articles you need to know.

To get One Social Thing delivered to your email each day, please subscribe below. If you find a social media or content marketing story you think is a must-read, tweet it out with the #OneSocialThing hash tag. If we use your idea in an edition, I’ll send you a signed copy of my book.

Thanks! – Jay

What was the big issue of the week for you?

About the Jay Baer:

Jay Baer is a hype-free social media and content strategist & speaker, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

One Social Thing Wrapup – Week of 6/4/2012 is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

Here’s a post from the archives. Although written a few years ago, it’s still very relevant today.

We all understand the importance of article marketing to help generate traffic, building reputations and brand awareness, but are you making the most of your content? What follows is a post outlining 7 ways article marketing can improve your profits:

Writing articles and marketing with articles is one of the best and fastest ways to market your business.

Don’t believe me? OK then, I’ll prove it. Here are seven ways you can benefit from articles.

1) Articles quickly position you as an expert in your field

 

Writing articles sets you apart from your competition. You never have to say “Listen to me, I’m an expert!” Your articles do that for you, because articles increase your “expert-ability.”

2) Articles can become an army of 24/7 salespeople

 

Once you have an article published, especially on the internet, you will achieve a 24 hour, 7 day a week, 365 day a year international sales team working specifically for you and your business.

3) One article can have many uses

 

In other words, leverage. Just one article can be used as a free report, a newsletter feature, it can become part of an online e-course, part of a book, etc.

4) Articles spread the word about your business and your services

Articles, especially when submitted online have a very long shelf life. They can be picked up by anyone at anytime and anywhere.

5) Marketing articles is simple, easy and inexpensive

It costs you nothing to write an article (apart from your time). It also costs you nothing to have it listed on article directories such as EzineArticles.com. Imagine what it would cost you to pay for that kind of exposure and publicity.

6) Articles can help you build a mailing list

Once you have a few articles out there, prospects will begin to flow in. These will build into a mailing list worth its weight in gold which can be used over and over again.

7) Articles let you stay in touch with clients and sell more products

We know that it can take from 5 to 8 contacts or more for new prospect to be ready to become a client. Articles allow you to stay in touch with prospects and provide them with quality information.

This list of 7 is just the tip of the ice berg. Article writing and article marketing will boost your business. Why not give it a go?

This guest post is by Bamidele Onibalusi of YoungPrePro.com.

Let me be straightforward with you: I’m no email marketing expert and I don’t plan to be soon. But email marketing is just so important to my blogging that I can’t ignore these very important techniques.

If you’ve been following Darren for more than a few months now you will have noticed how much emphasis he places on email marketing for bloggers and how important it is for his business. The same is the case for most top bloggers I know.

Email marketing is also an integral part of my own blogging business and as a result, the moment I notice something wrong with my email marketing, I look for ways to fix it. Almost ever tips I’ll be giving in this article I discovered by accident; some I discovered by reading the results of others and testing them for myself.

Here are three practical ways bloggers can get more from their email marketing efforts—instantly!

1. Always use a linked call to action

The first step is to always use a call to action in your email. It took me a long time to discover this, but the moment I did there was a difference in my results.

I know you might have already read a lot of email marketing articles about calls to action, and are already thinking you’re getting it right. But before you skip this section you need to realize that there is a difference between a “call to action” and a “call to action“.

The basic idea of a call to action email is to focus your email on getting subscribers to take a particular action, and including text that encourages them to do so.

A mistake most people make, though, is to use a call to action and then paste the link below the call to action.

That was what I used to do, too, but I recently started linking my calls to action text to the specific link I want subscribers to click, and I saw an increase in clickthrough rates of over 50%.

In other words, instead of using a call to action like “Visit YoungPrePro to learn more at http://www.youngprepro.com“, I changed the text to something like “Visit YoungPrePro to learn more!” And that increased my clickthrough rate by over 50%.

One thing I used to worry about, though, is the fact that some of my subscribers will get the text version of my emails and won’t be able to click on the link. In my own experience, the number of such subscribers is very few and the results you will get from an active call to action will far outweigh those lost opportunities, so there’s no need to worry about that. If you want all your subscribers to get your messages, you can include a sentence asking people who receive the text version of your message to read it online in HTML.

Also, make sure your emails only contain one call to action. When it comes to email marketing, giving people too many options won’t be effective so make sure every email you send is only centered on one action you want the subscriber to take.

It’s okay to include two links in your emails as long as they’re focused on the same call to action. The more you’re able to remind subscribers about the action you want them to take, and the easier you make it for them to take that action without having to scroll down or up, the better.

In other words, it’s okay to include your linked call to action more than once in an email, as long as they lead to the same page.

2. Use a custom email template

I know, there has been a lot of debate about this online, and the majority are in support of sending a text-based email, mostly due to the fact that there are text-only subscribers on their lists. But in my own experience, switching to an HTML email template increased the results I’m getting. I’ll explain!

One major problem I recently started to notice with my email list were high unsubscribe rates—even if I sent an email packed with value. I started to wonder what was wrong.

The problem was that most people are unsubscribing because they’d forgotten who I am—and it doesn’t help if they don’t receive any email from me in almost a week. Even though I never intended for an HTML template to help, I was surprised by the results.

On average, with text-based email I get around eight to ten unsubscribes per email, but with a custom HTML template that figure has reduced to two unsubscribes.

Most people will think this is a fluke, and has something to do with my message, but let me explain the idea behind it.

Having an HTML template that is designed the same way as your blog template helps reinforce your brand to your subscribers. As a result, no matter how long it’s been since you sent your last message, they will remember you once they see that template. Text-based emails can also get boring—especially when you consider the fact that most people get dozens of them daily.

Having a custom HTML email template helps you stand out—it places your brand in your subscribers’ inbox and ensures no one else can copy your approach.

One important consideration, though, is that you should make sure your email template is a custom one, not the default one most ISPs provide you with. The main effect of the template is to remind subscribers of your brand—and their reason for subscribing—whenever they open your emails. So your email template must be exactly the same as your blog design.

3. Don’t use shortened links

Link shorteners like bit.ly and tinyurl.com are becoming increasingly popular, and why shouldn’t people use them—especially since they make links handy and easy to track?

The problem with link shorteners is that their advantage is their disadvantage. Instead of having to include one ugly long link in an email you can easily shorten it to a few letters and enjoy the ability to track clicks to it.

The problem is that email spammers also know this, and are now abusing link shorteners. They send spam emails to people who never subscribed to their lists, using shorteners to cloak their links and track results. As a result, most of the popular link shortening services have been blacklisted by email servers.

In other words, using one or more of the popular link shortening services will increase the chances of your email not getting delivered to subscribers’ inboxes.

AWeber recently published a list of the link shortening services that have been blacklisted, and where they were blacklisted, so make sure you check it out!

If you don’t want long links in your emails, you might want to create your own link shortener, or always link your calls to action to the actual links you want users to click.

Instant results

Email marketing is still the most effective way to get your message across to your readers, especially as a blogger. Here I’ve shared three tips that gave me an instant boost in my email marketing results.

What other email marketing tips do you think we should know? Share them with us below!

Bamidele Onibalusi is a young blogger and writer who helps people learn to write for traffic and money. Visit YoungPrePro.com to learn what he has in stock for you and also follow him on twitter @youngprepro.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Better Email Results … Instantly!

It’s been a tradition on this blog to review the best content marketing articles/posts from the past year.  To be fair, we do this completely based on traffic to each post.

I’ve been covering the content marketing industry via this blog since April 26, 2007 (my first post). The title of that post was “Why Content Marketing?“. At that time, most people didn’t even know what content marketing was.  Almost 600 original posts later, and the majority of the marketing population is keenly focused on the content marketing revolution.  Thanks to each of you for keeping this revolution going, and how we can turn our customers into brand subscribers through compelling and relevant content.  Here’s to a fantastic 2012.

And now, your most popular content marketing articles over the past year.

Chief Content Officer Job Description

This original post and the corresponding job description template for the Chief Content Officer position stole the show in 2011, adding more than 10,000 visitors to the ranks. I used the comments from the original post to put together the final crowdsourced description – a valuable tool for any marketer or content strategist. Thanks to everyone for making these posts possible.

LEGO Club Magazine & The Power of Print

Over 4,000 crazy visitors loved this case study on LEGO Club magazine, perhaps one of the greatest all time examples of print content marketing. We still enjoy getting LEGO Club magazine in our homes (even though LEGO decided to shut off their LEGO universe product, which I believe was a horrible marketing decision).

The Angry Birds Formula to Content Marketing

Still one of my favorite “fun” posts, and a game that I still enjoy playing on occasion.  We can learn a lot of content marketing magic from paying a bit of attention to Angry Birds.  Get your free tips here in this post (well, at least over 3,000 others did).

The Skinny on Groupon’s Content Strategy

How does Groupon create the sheer amount of content they do, in a way that is engaging AND sells more product?  Well, search no more.  This post, from an analysis of managing editor Brandon Copple’s presentation at the 2011 Confab, tells you exactly how Groupon does it, from staffing to style.  Thanks to the over 2,500 who engaged in this little piece of content marketing magic.

Your Klout Score – Why You Need to Care Now

There was probably no other post that was as divisive as this one on Klout.  39 comments and 300 tweets from individuals all over the world…some loving Klout, some hating Klout, and some just not sure.  Well the controversy remains, Klout has become a force that all marketers must continue to monitor.  Let’s see what 2012 brings.

Thanks to everyone for a magical 2011.  I’m looking forward to an even more amazing 2012.  And, if you have a chance, be sure to check out these 2012 content marketing predictions from the CMI community.  Well worth 10 minutes of your time.

Small business web marketing may be getting a whole lot smaller.  As mobile usage grows, more and more organizations will start thinking about the possibility of having a smaller web presence – a mobile one.

This is an example of a Mobile-Specific Site

Mobile sites can mean more sight by current and potential customers. It’s a good time to start thinking about building a mobile presence into your web marketing plan.

I just wrote an article that served as an introduction for what a business owner must know about mobile websites on small business web marketing website www.WilsonWeb.com (great website for web marketing articles!) in an article I wrote called Introduction to Mobile-Friendly Websites.

In the Introduction to Mobile-Friendly Websites article, I address the important points to understand before going down the mobile path:

1. Mobile Apps Versus Mobile Sites

2. Mobile Site Options
a. Mobile-functional
b. Mobile-optimized
c. Mobile-specific

3. Marketing Benefits of Being Mobile
a. Boosts to search engine ranking
b. Improvements in customer service
c. Competitive edge

No matter what size your organization is, it never pays to think small when it comes to service…but when it comes to mobile sites, small may be the new big.

Check out the Introduction to Mobile-Friendly Websites article and stay tuned, as in I will drill deeper into the specifics of mobile site design in my next article.

Web Marketing Related Posts:

1. Reasons To Consider a Mobile Website
2. Mobile Marketing: Putting Your Brand in Your Customer’s Pockets