A Step-by-Step Guide to Driving 10,000 Visitors a Month Through Pinterest

 Social media can be a great traffic source for almost any online business. But which network is right for you? For most businesses, it makes sense to start with the largest networks. No matter how narrow your audience is, it’s very likely you’ll find members of that audience active on these networks. This means that most businesses should start with one of the following: Facebook Pinterest Twitter LinkedIn Although they are all huge, they are very different networks. The best one for you will depend on your customers, your niche, and your marketing preferences.  Pinterest is the second biggest driver of referral traffic by a large margin. Despite that, it doesn’t get as much attention as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. This is mainly because it’s a unique network. Every single post on it is an image (with a short optional description). Pinterest can be an amazing traffic source as long as you can create some sort of visual content in your niche. And although it takes so
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Beyond Responsive: Design and Development Trends for Adaptable Marketers

A friend of mine recently asked me to review and explain a series of site recommendations sent over by a well-known digital marketing agency with roots in SEO. We talked through the (generally good) recommendations for content and search optimization, and then we got to this: * Mobile accounts for 53% of your traffic. We recommend building a mobile-friendly responsive website. Google recommends using responsive design so that your site looks good on all devices, and it may help increase mobile rankings. And that was it. A bullet point that says build a responsive site is like getting a home inspection back with a bunch of minor repairs and a bullet point that says, Also, build a new house with modern specs. We, as professional marketers, need to realize that this advice is not good enough. We re not helping anyone with broad statements that give no guidance on where to start or what to think about. Google might recommend responsive, but that doesn t mean it s the only option or that i
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Why Google Rewards Re-Publishing – Whiteboard Friday

It s a fact of life: we get better at what we do with time. Do you use that to your advantage when it comes to your site s content? Whether you re riding the wave of a successful post or improving what you ve done before, republishing is something that should be on your mind and your to-do list. And what s more, Google will actually reward you for doing it! In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the how and why of republishing, helping you set goals for yourself and your content.
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A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an Autoresponder That Subscribers Can’t Wait to Open

Email autoresponders are the holy grail of marketing. You set up a sequence of emails once, and you’re done. Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of people will get exactly the same emails from you, in the same order. This allows you to create an unbelievably consistent level of service. Perhaps the most underrated benefit of autoresponders is that they exist within email marketing, the most profitable channel of marketing. Capterra found that every one dollar spent on email marketing resulted in $ 44.25 of revenue. So, not only can autoresponders save you a lot of time, but they can also be extremely effective in driving profit for your business. Of course, there are two sides to everything, and autoresponders are no exception: they have some limitations. If you don’t understand these limitations and take appropriate action, you will end up with autoresponders that suck. Remember that an autoresponder is just a tool. It’s how you use it that counts. One marketer can ac
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Million Dollar Content – An Analysis of the Web’s Most Valuable Organic Content

As much as we like to debate content vs. links, sometimes great content just seems to dominate. I don t mean to say that great content doesn t get great links, or that the purposes of creating great content is not to get links, but simply that some content on the web seems to shine through the SERPs. Content might not be king, but it has lot of sway in Google s kingdom. After sifting through tons of SERP data to find million dollar answer boxes (answer box results that rank at the top for keywords driving millions of dollars in traffic), I decided to dig deep to find content just like it across the web. But I wanted to do something different, something harder. I wanted to find content that didn t have huge Domain Authority. Sure, it is easy for the Wikipedia s and YouTubes of this world to rank for huge keywords, but what about the little guy? Are there any pieces of content out there bringing in millions of dollars of traffic coming from domains with Domain Authority around 50 or low
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Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won’t Work – Whiteboard Friday

A concept we ve covered regularly is what we call flywheel marketing, where the organic traffic, shares, and links you get from publishing one piece of content makes it easier for later pieces to see some success. One of the key pieces of that flywheel is the ability to get those social shares, and based on a recent study, we re ready to admit it: We were completely wrong about that key piece. In today s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why, and that the real value may lie in engagement. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we re talking about an assumption that I think many of us have made over the years. I know I have. In fact, I ve amplified that. I might have even covered it on Whiteboard Friday. Thanks to some research that we ve done together with BuzzSumo, as well as some research we ve seen from our correlation study this summer, yo
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5 Techniques to Get 5 Stars: How to Get More (and Better) Online Reviews

Everywhere you go, you see reviews. Whether it’s a physical or digital product, if it’s worth talking about (in good or bad ways), it has reviews. Some of this feedback is simply comments on blogs and forums. But mostly, reviews exist on large e-commerce sites where companies sell their products. The most important thing about reviews is that people care about them. About 30% of Internet users check out reviews on Amazon before buying a product. And that’s just Amazon. Another 13% head to Google. Before, people would ask their friends about products. But now, they rely on online reviews. People trust reviews to inform them about their decisions, and reviews play a huge role in people’s purchasing decisions.  Although there’s no way to definitively say that reviews are good for business, just about every study or anecdotal case suggests that they are. For example, Capterra analyzed the effect of adding reviews for software products and found that conversion rates increased
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Beyond the SEO Plateau: After Optimizing Your Website, What’s Next?

It s a near-universal experience for consultants and in-house SEOs who ve worked on numerous organic search campaigns. The first 3–6 months (longer if the site is very large or complex) of any SEO effort is almost always exclusively dedicated to fixing mistakes, improving existing issues, tweaking and tuning the sub-optimal, and generally closing the gap between what exists now and current best practices. The beautiful part of SEO is that, once completed, these efforts can have ongoing and compounding benefits for months or years to come. The newly accessible and optimized pages start earning rankings and traffic, which beget more links, more personalization-biasing, more exposure, more sharing, and more business. If you ve got competent content & dev teams continually checking items off the list (and not creating many new ones), slowly the list of actionable, low-hanging fruit dwindles. I like to call this the SEO plateau. Click for a larger version The existing parts of the site h
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Social SEO Simplified: How to Optimize for the “Other” Search Engines

 Do you want to compete with the best SEOs in the world? It might be fun, but chances are you’ll either get crushed or have very slow success. But that’s exactly what you’re doing when you try to rank for keywords on Google. Sure, you can go after long-tail keywords to avoid the sharks, but you’ll still have some decent competition. But what if you could go back in time when SEO wasn’t so evolved? You would be able to rapidly rank for terms and grow your organic traffic. And although I can’t help you with time travel, I can help you find similar scenarios in the present that could deliver far better results than your current SEO strategy. What am I talking about? I’m talking about spending less time focusing on Google. Why? Because that’s where 99% of SEOs spend their time. I’m talking about taking advantage of ranking for the “other” search engines—the ones on social media sites. I’ve seen very few marketers and SEOs take full advantage of these opportunit
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Why Meaning Will Ultimately Determine Your Brand’s Content Marketing Success

In 2009 Fletcher Cleaves was a top high school football prospect ready for the next level, eager to do in college what he d done in high school: rack up yards as a running back. But before Cleaves could realize his dream of playing at the next level, a texting, distracted driver plowed into the car he was driving, forever changing his life s trajectory. Today, Cleaves, paralyzed from the chest down as a result of the accident, serves as a tragic reminder of something as seemingly harmless as texting and driving can alter lives. It s impossible to watch the video below and not immediately realize three important facts: Texting and driving is a big deal. This young man was unfairly robbed of his future. This big brand nailed the messaging. Telecommunications brands (and airline companies) enjoy some of the worst customer service ratings on the planet. And to make matters worse, their core messaging via print, radio and online ads is equally atrocious, doing very little to make would-be
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