How to Get Started with Link Building

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Guest Post by Marianne Pratt

What good is your website if nobody sees it?

Links located outside your website give people an opportunity to click through to your pages.  Your website may naturally attract some incoming links, but deliberately working to create them will boost your results much sooner.  Link building is an ongoing and painstaking process, not a one-shot deal.  And while volume is valuable, quality is even more important.
You want lots of incoming links because they build traffic.  They also give you credibility (or “authority”) with search engines, important because off-page SEO is a major factor in raising your overall and page rankings.

We’ll talk here about specific link building techniques, but in the end other sites will only agree to link to you if you have useful, fresh content — something good at your end worth finding. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, SMB Marketing

How to Qualify Leads and Prospects

December 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Success in sales requires mastery of a specialized skill set. Getting in the door, identifying leads and prospects, how to qualify leads and prospects, selling the product or service, and closing the deal. Problems anywhere along the pipeline can potentially kill the deal. But if a sales team neglects to qualify their prospects, they don’t really know if their lead has any vested interest in what they are selling, and if that is the case, valuable time will likely be wasted.

How to Qualify Leads and Prospects:

There are a two methods of how to qualify leads and prospects; the traditional approach and the digital approach. The traditional approach is hands on and requires an understanding of your customer demographics, and digital qualifying means using PPC, SEO, and social media. The most successful sales teams know that the biggest gains come from using both.

Traditional Demographic Analysis: Just like a great reporter, knowing  how to qualify leads and prospects requires the ability to answer the following questions:

Who? Who is interested, who has an obvious (or urgent) need, who has the money to make a purchase, who is able to influence my prospects. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, SMB Marketing

Online Marketing Tools: Raven Tools

December 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“Geeks helping geeks,” is their model, and boy is it true! Raven Internet Marketing Tools is an online platform that helps users quickly research, manage, monitor and report on SEO, social media and other Internet marketing campaigns. Its collaborative, multi-user features and fast, professional reports make it the software choice of thousands of online marketers worldwide. Based in Nashville, Raven Tools offers services to track your brand’s social media performance and reach, monitor rankings, build reports, and much more.

Why Does Your Brand Need Raven Tools?

1. Tracking takes time!

When companies engage in social media platforms, they have a variety of sites to choose through. Positioning your brand on social media sites is difficult enough, let alone tracking it! Raven Tools lets you download reports with trends from Google Analytics and metrics from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Monitor your keywords as well. Not only is this huge for PPC needs, but it allows you to monitor keywords in many languages which caters to international businesses! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, Social Media

Social Media Analytics Starts with Google Analytics

November 7, 2011 By 3 Comments
Just like with every new trend—there are skeptics and devoted followers.  Social networking is a marketing tool that has skyrocketed to importance and popularity with SMB marketers in the last decade.  Devoted followers appreciate the creativity, wide range of outreach, and yet low cost that using sights such as facebook and twitter allow. This marketing tool has settled comfortably into SMB’s routines and has become an asset to their overall marketing strategy.   There do, however, remain some skeptics—many of these skeptics stem from the fact that few SMB’s have discovered how to effectively calculate the numerical value of this new marketing tool. 

Nathan Linnel, of Search Engine Watch, laid out four steps in which companies can use Google Analytics, a free tool used to generate statistics which analyze a website’s visitors, in order to find the ROI of social media. Through Google Analytics, some tracking customization, as well as your social media team’s meticulous attention to detail, you can in fact calculate the ROI of the social media trend.

Use Google Analytics and generate calculations to sway those old-school naysay marketers in these four steps:

Step 1: Learn from Hansel and Gretel, Leave a Trail [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, Social Media

The Unmistakable Art of the Good Sale

November 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Nicole Qualiteri The Wrong Kind of Sales Guy

Sales. Take in the word for a moment. It’s a word that often conjures up the above image, an image of cheesy deceit, over-exaggerated promises, a do-or-say anything mentality in order to get the “win”. The dough. The cash money.  Get the lemon off the lot, and if you can do it for more money than it’s worth–all the better, right?

Unfortunately, “sales” is a dirty word. This image of dishonest enterprise permeates our cultural understanding of the business, and –for those of us in the field—creates not only boundaries but stereotypes that foster a constant mode of overcoming on the job.

“Are you in sales?” The exasperated voice asks on the other end of the line.

“Not interested.” Followed by an immediate hang-up.

“He doesn’t take sales calls.” I appreciate the honesty?

But for every ‘no’ that gets dished out, my contention is that businesses can be truly be missing out. On not only the leveraging system that competing businesses must comply with in order to stay afloat, but possibly a product that could actually help their business.

The truth about sales is that a good salesperson does the following:

1) Researches the company. When a good salesperson calls a company, it’s because a need has been identified. If they’re lucky, their marketing team has done this for them. But—even with a great marketing team—the salesperson is the one picking up the phone.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools

The Cheapest and Easiest Marketing You’ll Ever Do

October 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

Child using a megaphoneAs marketers, we spend loads of time, money and effort working to create new leads for the top of the marketing and sales funnel. At first glance, this makes perfect sense – the more people you put into the top of your funnel as leads, the more will ultimately come out of the bottom as closed deals.

But here’s the problem: For just about every market segment, the top of the funnel (awareness & interest) is incredibly crowded and cluttered. Businesses are sending scads of emails, running display ads, exhibiting and trade shows, and every other marketing tactic under the sun to get prospects into their funnel. And most of the people they market to aren’t interested in the product/service they sell and don’t care, so the majority of the money and effort is wasted trying to find that small percentage of prospects that do care and are ready to buy.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, SMB Marketing, Social Media

Lead Nurturing Best Practices

October 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Guest post by Kathy S.

In a survey by virtual event company Unifair, 66% of all marketing professionals surveyed cited lead nurturing as their number one priority, with brand recognition and customer retention finishing a distant second and third at 17% and 16%, respectively. With Inbound Marketing proving to be extremely effective in delivering pre-qualified leads to sales teams, it is not surprising that nurturing has become the main focus. But not all lead nurturing approaches are effective; some are downright offensive. So it is critical to establish and follow a system of lead nurturing best practices.

According to DemandGen Report, a scorecard for sales and marketing automation,  lead nurturing is defined as “The process of building a relationship by conducting an informative dialogue that helps qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing — and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time…” Are your company’s led nurturing practices consistent with this definition? If your answer is no, read on to learn  lead  nurturing best practices:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, Social Media

How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

October 7, 2011 By 2 Comments

Shopping Cart AbandonmentGuest post by Marianne Pratt

The sale is so close . . . almost to the finish line . . . and then it just slips away.  Shopping cart abandonment is frustrating, costly and worrisome.  Industry statistics show this year’s overall abandonment rate is 60-70%. Attracting traffic to your website costs money.  It’s imperative that you minimize shopping cart abandonment in order to protect your advertising investment and maximize revenue and profit.  You need a strategic plan to specifically address this problem.

Easy navigation and a simple process will smooth the way for shoppers, thereby increasing your sales conversion rate.  Here are some things you can do:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools

How to Market Your Business With Video

September 20, 2011 By 1 Comment

Check out Trada’s other posts in our online marketing series: How to Market Your Business on Facebook, How to Market Your Business on Twitter , How to Market Your Business With a Blog , and  How to Market Your Business with Video. If you’re looking to learn more about marketing with video, join Trada on Oct. 20 for a webinar -Right Brains on Demand: Crowdsourcing Video.

Nothing is more intimidating in online marketing than marketing with video. Marketers are wary of all the equipment and technical expertise required and often shy away. No other form of social media marketing is tells a better story than video (case in point: see Trada’s intro video). There are billions of searches on YouTube each month, and it’s important to have content that resonates.

If you find yourselves one of the timid marketers when it comes to video marketing (I know I am), please read below from advice from the experts on how to get started.

Meet the Experts:

  • Ben Ruedlinger of WistiaBen Ruedlinger is the VP of engineering of Wistia, which is video hosting for businesses. Along with his job title, Ben also helps with marketing, customer support, and beer acquisition. You can find him on Twitter at @Ruedlinger and @Wistia.

 

  • Chuck Lepley of OrbotixChuck Lepley is a Colorado native who spent 6 years in Los Angeles as a TV Producer before returning to Boulder to pursue an MBA degree in Marketing and Entrepreneurship. In L.A. he was a TV Producer for shows like “On-Air with Ryan Seacrest” and networks including E! and FOX. Chuck now works as the Marketing Manager for Orbotix (Orbotix.com) – the company behind Sphero. Follow him on Twitter at @chucklepley and check out Sphero’s videos.
  • Drew Frey of Snow.comDrew Frey runs all things social media for Vail Resorts, suffers from a crippling case of FOMO, and avoids ketchup and mustard at all costs. Follow him on Twitter personally @frewdrew and see him in action at @snowdotcom. Check out SnowDotCom’s videos.

 

  • Peter LaMotte is President of GeniusRocket a creative agency based in Washington DC.  First hired by GeniusRocket to run their marketing, Peter eventually became President of the company at which point he changed the business model from a crowdsourcing company running video and design contests, to a creative agency powered by the creativity of vetted professional community. You can find him on Twitter at @peterlamotte and @geniusrocket.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, SMB Marketing

Writing the First Post of Your SMB Blog

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Guest post by Clare Tischer

Sitting down in front of that flashing cursor and composing your first blog post for your business might seem overwhelming. Where do you begin? Who do you address? Why bother? Why are you asking yourself so many questions? These are all valid concerns. Establishing a consistent blog for your business can be beneficial long-term if you make the commitment to attentive posts and helpful content.

Find and know your audience.

Ta-da! You’re on stage on the internet!   [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Tools, SMB Marketing
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