Social Media Marketing Case Studies: Learning Moments and Key Takeaways From #SMBMSP76
Here at TopRank Online Marketing, we believe in the power of collaborative learning. Our team members’ backgrounds in diverse aspects of marketing; including PR, communications and SEO; allow us to work together to manage all aspects of digital marketing for our clients, including social media marketing. However, the social media marketing industry is unique, in that the majority of social media expertise is learned from experience: either ours or that of our peers. That’s why we love attending industry events to get the scoop on creative new social media…
Online Marketing News: Twitter Gets Curating, Happy Birthday Pinterest!, Facebook Gets Riffing
The Evolution of Keyword Research Tools [Infographic] – Keywords, phrases and topics are at the heart of search engine marketing. In a sense, words are the backbone of the Internet because without them, websites wouldn’t likely exist. Every website is built on “keywords” and topics. Check out this infographic to see how things have changed over time. Search Engine Journal Link Encoding Goes Mobile With Deep Links From Bitly – As the market for apps gets more saturated, tracking impressions across platforms becomes harder. Companies like Facebook and Google have been competing to bring the best solution for tracking deeplinks. This …
Not Happy With Your Business Blog Performance? Try These 5 Tips:
For many companies, blogging is akin to content marketing. Of course there are many other content marketing tactics besides blogging, but because of the ease of publishing, promotion and optimization, it’s one of the more popular ways to connect with customers through content. And yet there are challenges for many of the businesses that rely on blogging as an essential part of their content marketing mix. If you’re not happy with the performance of your business blog, here are 5 basic, yet often overlooked steps for making your blogging more effective. 1. Revisit Your Blogging Goals Of course…
Best Practices for Video Marketing on Social Networks from Cisco, SAP & Bally Switzerland
Driven by consumers’ insatiable appetite for video content, video marketing has become an important part of social media marketing. With platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram launching their own video applications, videos can be optimized for success beyond web pages and YouTube to where customers are actively seeking, consuming and sharing video content: social networks. Whether you’re a video marketing pro, or unsure of where to begin, here are several useful tips for launching video marketing campaigns on multiple social networks. But first… Is Video Marketing Really Worth It? Internet users have been watching videos to entertain or inform themselves for decades, but…
The AwesomeWeb Story – Investing, Business Partners & Making It Happen
Today I have a special announcement… I want to introduce you to a project I have been working on for quite some time: It’s called AwesomeWeb. You go to AwesomeWeb to find the best designers and developers who could’ve started working on your project yesterday. AwesomeWeb was created out of a need. I wanted to hire great designers and I wanted to connect my readers with great designers. Since I started this project, I’ve built it from scratch twice, moved three times, and four years have flown by! But it’s finally here. The Beginning… I started working on…
How The Founder of TaskUs Went From Zero to 1500 Employees in 5 Years
In 2009 and armed with only a couple grand, Bryce Maddock opened the first TaskUs office in an old building on the floor above an elementary school in the Philippines. Since then, he’s grown TaskUs to more than 1,500 teammates providing customer care and back office support to 60 of the world’s most innovative companies. His company is committed to invest at least $25 million in the Philippines over the next three years, so that he can fulfill their mission of bringing meaningful employment to as many people as possible. It’s their goal to employ 10,000 Filipino people by the end of 2017. Bryce Maddock Interview – CEO of TaskUs …
15 Best Practices for Responsible Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design is not just a matter of squeezing and stretching. It’s about delivering one website countless ways depending on the width of the screen. What to add? What to remove? How to prioritize what’s most important? What are the implications for search rankings? And how do you do all of that with just one code base? It truly takes an expert to responsively code a website. So we asked Tim Cross, one of AwesomeWeb’s finest responsive web designers, to give you insight on what it takes to build a proper, responsible, and responsive website. Whether…
Brewing Online Success With Kombucha – Dave Lindenbaum Interview
“Kombucha” Dave Lindenbaum helps people brew “The Tea of Immortality” aka Kombucha. His website is dedicated to everything kombucha and as it turns out, he’s quite the internet marketer. Here’s why you should listen to Dave: In a relatively short amount of time, he’s turned a passion into profits and reaches thousands monthly by leveraging social media, blogging and eCommerce. His website getkombucha.com is ranked the #1 kombucha website, based on customers…
Josh’s Fan Page Funnel Case Study – $100,000 in Sales in 7 Months
Before Fan Page Funnel 2 Products: When Josh Dunlop first came to us, he was running a small photography blog and trying to make a little money on the side with it. You’ve probably been there, or are there now, you’ve got 2 products, they cost around $100 bucks each, maybe $97.00, we like that number here, you blog a bit, post things to social media, and read a couple of blogs about making money online. The big problem here is that that is far from sustainable, you and Josh still need your day jobs, you labor over your side projects when you’re supposed to be eating lunch and dinner. It’s just not there yet. Trying to relaunch: What Josh did next is what…
Daniel Cid Interview – Defending 250,000 Websites From Hackers Every Month
Daniel Cid has spent well over a decade securing people’s websites, so they don’t have to. The Founder/CTO of Sucuri specializes in intrusion detection, log analysis (log-based intrusion detection), web-based malware research and secure development. He’s known for creating the free open sourced OSSEC HIDS (Intrusion detection system) and founding Sucuri. He’s also the co-writer of the Host-Based Intrusion Detection book. Here’s Why You Should Listen to Daniel: Sucuri defends against 33M+ monthly attacks. Protects more than 250k+ of his clients websites per month. He’s fixed several …
Stanley Tang Interview – From Best Selling Author At 16 To A $57 Million Investment At 22
Stanley Tang is a devout entrepreneur who’s been creating businesses since he was a kid. We first interviewed him when he became a best selling author at 16. His latest project, DoorDash is a tech startup doing restaurant food delivery. A Stanford graduate, he and three other students founded DoorDash because they wanted food delivery in areas where it wasn’t previously available. Their mission is to empower small business owners to offer delivery in an affordable and convenient way. Currently restaurants from more than 30 cities in the San Francisco Bay Area are taking …
Your Shopping Cart Sucks – 10 Reasons You Should Switch to SamCart
It’s been a long time coming, but SamCart is finally open to the public! For months, even years, we weren’t 100{0e584ec94eaa64d073763ee1dc286a1f4d0f941424b1448bbfd01af7d90f9475} satisfied with our shopping cart solutions. We tried everything from Clickbank and PayPal to JVZoo, you name it. But none of the solutions gave us exactly what we needed. We needed to setup and run split tests with the click of a mouse, we needed to be able to quickly create and list products, we needed to be able to create upsell funnels and needed to provide affiliates with custom affiliate links… Nothing covered …
10 “Fill In The Blank” Email Subject Lines (That Made Me The Most Money)
Question: Did you know that email marketing has an ROI of 4,000{0e584ec94eaa64d073763ee1dc286a1f4d0f941424b1448bbfd01af7d90f9475}? Unbelievable, isn’t it? That jaw-dropping statistic is straight from the Direct Marketing Association, the world’s leading independent organization for data-driven marketers. According to their research, email marketing delivers a whopping $40 per dollar spent. But that’s not all… Email marketing CRUSHED everything else: Mobile, $10.51 per dollar spent Social media, $12.71 per dollar spent Display, $19.72 per dollar spent And search, $22.24 per dollar spent So – Despite the rumors that “email is dead”, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality… Email Marketing Is The ULTIMATE Online Sales Tool But it’s not as simple as that. Have you ever stared at your screen …
Course-Correction and Your Half-Year Resolutions
Course-Correct We are half way through the year. How are your new-years resolutions working out? Are you closer to achieving your goals? A lot of my coaching clients feel bad when I ask this but I want to encourage you to not feel like a failure if you have not achieved all that you had planned to do by now! Course Correct You will have heard the phrase “a pilot is off-course 90{0e584ec94eaa64d073763ee1dc286a1f4d0f941424b1448bbfd01af7d90f9475} of the time“. I’m not sure if that is strictly true but it helps illustrate that you can …
How to Solve the “Creativity Problem” and Stand Out in a Crowd
I think everyone has the capacity to be creative, but if you listen to some pundits it seems creativity is something only bestowed on an elite few. The fact is, the word “creativity” itself can cause a lot of creative resistance, and make people feel that the bar has been set too high for them. Relax. Being creative does not mean you have to be the next Shakespeare or Leonardo Da Vinci! In fact, I imagine you don’t have a creativity problem at all. Creativity is not scarce What does creativity mean to us in this context? For most people the goal would…
4 Pieces of Advice to Help Your Small Business
You might have noticed a bit of a gap in posting here. Well, I have still been writing, just over at the BMO Bank’s Small Business site: I am writing about how online tools and techniques can grow your business. Check out my most recent articles and let me know what you think! 4 Key Lessons All Sales People Can Learn From Grandma What Google’s Changes Mean To Your Business (And What To Do About Them) How To Grow And Maintain Strong Business Networking Relationships – Part 1 How To Grow And Maintain Strong Business Networking Relationships – Part 2 29 Blogging Business Survival Tips5 Essential Skills for Today’s Online MarketerYour Best Foundation for a Sustainable BusinessThe Simple Route to Generating Sales Leads with Your…How to Make…
How to Get Paid for Free
How do you convert browsers to buyers? One of the key ideas behind being an Authority Blogger, or “Content Marketing”, is that you put out lots of educational material that ordinarily people would be willing to pay for. How do you turn that free stuff into profit? The thing is, while we KNOW this works, a lot of people get stuck on the HOW. They put out tons and tons of free material and never quite reach the “getting paid” part. I was toying calling this post “Thriving…
Your Best Foundation for a Sustainable Business
Would your business survive burning down? What would you do if your business burned to the ground? If you had to literally start over, would you be able to cope? What would your approach be? I have been falling behind with my workload lately. You just have to look at my posting frequency to see that I have been dropping as many plates as I manage to keep spinning. I’m busy. That’s a great problem to have, …
How to Avoid Cold-Feet Killing Your Progress
Cold Feet Can Kill Your Productivity Today, I want to talk about what happens when you give in to your fears. I want you to learn from my mistakes so you can have the courage to do what you need to. I have a lot of fears. That’s just part of who I am. I’m risk-averse, and I tend to focus on mitigating the risks I perceive as a priority, rather than focus on potential gains. (I’ve written about fear before, check out this post in particular where I tell the story of nearly drowning. It’s a fan-favourite). My dumb cold-feet mistakes Sadly, …
The Secret Element of Successful Marketing Campaigns
Remove friction from your marketing Why can Brian send one email from the Copyblogger email list and make 6 figures? Is it list size? Yes, scale obviously comes into it, but if someone else had Copyblogger’s list they wouldn’t necessarily get the same result. So what is the crucial factor that makes the difference? Is it Authority? Yes, of course that’s a factor, but there is more to it. More than seven years went …
Is it Just Business? How to be Professionally Human
Have you ever worked with someone who uses the phrase “It’s just business“? Or played a game with someone who, after cheating, back-stabbing, lying or just being a jerk, said “It’s only a game“? How did that make you feel? Did you respect the person more, or less? Did you trust them more afterwards? When someone is an aggressive, shouting, mean bully, do you say “Well, that’s just how they are. A straight-talker!“. Last night I…
5 Essential Skills for Today’s Online Marketer
Skillz. I haz em. What are the most important skills for an online marketer, blogger or professional? I am going to list my response to that, but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments. I’m intentionally keeping this one short so you can dive in and tell me where I am wrong! This post came about because I was just asked this question in email, and after responding briefly, I couldn’t get the question out of my head. After pondering on it, I realised it’s not quite as simple as it first seems. I realised that some of these are traits you are born with, but can develop, and others you can simply learn…
29 Blogging Business Survival Tips
What does it take to be successful in blogging as or for a business? My friend Al from Coolest Gadgets contacted me for some quotes to use in a presentation he has coming up, and as usual, I gave him way more material than he could use. Rather than let it go to waste, I have written it up here as an article. These aren’t the only lessons, but they are a start. If you like them, check out my article from 2008 that has 41 tips about the blogging side of things. Revenue generation Don’t put off the revenue side of your business…
Want to Know What Makes Content Truly Successful?
What is the secret to getting your content read, shared and acted on? Is your content really useful versus just well-written? Why do some writers get real results from their articles, while other writers work just as hard, or harder, and don’t seem to get noticed? Of course there are many reasons, but a key reason that I see over and over again is what I call the “Hot Potato” effect. Before we get into what that is, let’s talk a little bit about what good content is, and what kind of content you might want to…