3 Must-Test Areas for Lead-Generation Websites

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Lead generation sites are different than ecommerce sites. They usually sell services rather than products. The services are typically “considered purchases,” involving more research than most consumer products. And the buying-shopping-consideration cycle of a prospect is often far longer than typical ecommerce products.

All of those factors affect what areas and ideas you should consider testing first. With that in mind, here’s a prioritized list of important areas to test.

via 3 Must-Test Areas for Lead-Generation Websites – by Jeff Sexton.

Why You Shouldn’t Abandon Email Marketing for Social Media

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Social Media or Email Marketing – what works better for online marketing? Should they be used together or are they purely mutually exclusive? The question to these answers is not as simple as it may seem. More and more email marketers are joining the social media bandwagon to cope with digital marketing revolution. I believe that to be a successful online marketer, you need to use the best of both worlds – email marketing as well as social media.

via Why You Shouldn’t Abandon Email Marketing for Social Media | Smedio.

10 Ways to Optimize Your Email Newsletter Landing Page

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  1. Spell Out the Benefits: On the landing page, clearly list why someone should sign up for your enewsletter.
  2. Show Them a Picture: Show a sample picture of what they will be receiving what does the email newsletter look like?.
  3. Link to a Sample: Link to a sample enewsletter and have that sample open up in a daughter window don’t take them away from the landing page.
  4. Sign Up is Above the Fold: If prospects have to scroll down to get to your signup area, there is a problem.
  5. Bring the signup above the fold.No More than Five to Seven Fields: Less fields = more likely prospects will sign up. Only ask for the fields you truly need.
  6. More…

via 10 Ways to Optimize Your Enewsletter Landing Page.

24 Eye-Popping SEO Statistics

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  1. Content marketing rocks. Marketing Sherpa reports distribution lead to a 2,000% increase in blog traffic and a 40% increase in revenue.
  2. 70% of the links search users click on are organic.
  3. 70-80% of users ignore the paid ads, focusing on the organic results.
  4. 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.
  5. GroupM states “when consumers were exposed to both search and social media influenced by a brand that overall search CTR went up by 94 percent.”
  6. Search and e-mail are the top two internet activities.
  7. Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages. And companies with more indexed pages get far more leads.
  8. Inbound leads cost 61% lower than outbound leads. An example of an inbound lead might be from search engine optimization. An outbound lead might be from a cold call.
  9. 81% of businesses consider their blogs to be an important asset to their businesses.
  10. A study by Outbrain shows that search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%

via 24 Eye-Popping SEO Statistics | Search Engine Journal.

Posted in SEO

5 Free WordPress Plugins To Supercharge Email Subscribers

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When it comes to getting readers to subscribe to your email list, it’s important to use some creativity as well as to give your readers frequent opportunities to subscribe to your email list. If the only thing your doing to get subscribers is a small sign up box in your sidebar or at the end of your blog post, there’s still plenty of creative opportunities to reach out and engage with your readers.

I want to introduce you to a couple of free WordPress plugins that you may not have heard of before and can help supercharge your email subscriber list. All of these plugins have some neat features and will give your readers multiple opportunities to subscribe to your email list.

via 5 Free WordPress Plugins To Supercharge Email Subscribers | Make Money Blogging Online.

Email Marketing with Mailchimp

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Well, if you are thinking “I use my list on Outlook!” we need to have a serious talk! Outlook is not meant for email marketing. Outlook will simply send out the exact same message to everybody on the list without any personalization, and it offers no tracking whatsoever. A proper email marketing system is able to send out one email per recipient, but trough an entire list. It can individualize each email (for example, the email can start with “Hi Susan..” instead of “Hello,”). So then, what do we use?

via Email Marketing with Mailchimp | Brixwork {real estate} Blog.

The “Rebirth” of Email Marketing (as If it was ever dead)

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It’s become a bit of a cliché to say that email marketing isn’t dead, as if people were bailing on their email clients à la the mass exodus from Friendster and MySpace and authors like myself are proclaiming an Easter miracle. We all know that there’s value in being able to connect to the one place we check more religiously than our social channels. Email is not dead, nor has it ever been, but it has definitely taken a backseat as far as headlines and tweets go. But is the backseat designation justified?

via The “Rebirth” of Email Marketing (as If it was ever dead) via @PostAdvertising.

What Is Negative SEO? The Rise of Competitive Google Bombing

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Negative SEO – have you heard this term before? To be perfectly frank, it’s new to me as of this week. “Google bombing” has been around for years, a kind of hack using links and anchor text to manipulate the search results as a prank – the famous example being a biography of George W. Bush returned as the first result for the query “miserable failure.”

But negative SEO is a slightly different animal. It’s the practice of trying to destroy your competitors’ rankings in the SERPs – for example by purchasing large amounts of spammy links to the site, damaging their link profile. (You may recall that some people suspected JCPenney was the victim of just such a scam.)

Is this possible? Are nefarious SEO tricksters pulling it off? Yes, according to a case study featured in the forum TrafficPlanet. Poster “Jammy” writes: “Pixelgrinder and I conducted a little experiment on whether negative seo was possible in the current climate – we felt it was important to know whether it was possible for a site to be negatively affected completely by outside influences.”

via What Is Negative SEO? The Rise of Competitive Google Bombing | WordStream.

Posted in SEO