SEO Tips for Bloggers

All serious bloggers are interested in building a large community of enthusiastic readers, and this is why SEO is so critical to your success. Without good search visibility, people who are interested in your content, but don’t know you, may never find you.

SEO best practices are primarily driven by Google, and change frequently. This post, which lays out 50 important SEO tips for bloggers, features a lot of links to Google instructional pages. These Google links will enable you to bypass outdated or incorrect SEO advice that unfortunately permeates the web.

Besides being ever changing, SEO is complicated and technical. These 50 tips, while important, just scratch the surface. What tips can you add to the list? 

SEO Strategy

The following five points offer some big picture guidance for your SEO activities. Perhaps a sixth point would be, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Great SEO requires balance: pay equal attention to onsite and offsite optimization opportunities.

1. Content quality is your primary onsite SEO consideration.


2. For keywords, user intent is a major consideration, since the most valuable traffic to your site comes from users who are interested in doing business.


3. Think visibility rather than rankings, because rankings vary from user to user, and users look for search results based on content type (images, news, etc.).


4. A steady increase in organic search traffic growth is usually the best indicator of strong SEO.


5. For link building, quality is more important than quantity.

Blog Post Setup

Your blog posts not only have to interest human readers – they also need to be constructed so that Google can find them, read them and appropriately display them in search results. Even brilliant content must be optimized in order to find its largest potential audience.

1. The post URL should default to display the post title.


2. The post title (H1 tag) should default to be the post Meta title tag.


3. The post title should include keywords, preferably at the beginning of the title.


4. Post titles should always be unique and relevant to the content.


5. WordPress users should use the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin or the  All in One SEO Pack.


6. Always write a unique and catchy Meta description tag, with a call to action if applicable, for your post, as it will attract more click-throughs.


7. Read this page from Google with extreme care for a foundational working knowledge of key SEO content considerations.


8. Include prominent social media share buttons in the post template, as social shares are correlated to rankings.

Site Structure

Many blog themes from WordPress and other CMS platforms are SEO-friendly right out of the box—but how you set them up, modify them and maintain them makes a big difference in Google’s ability to find and rank your blog’s content.

1. Avoid long blogrolls on the sidebar, because site-wide outbound links can reduce rankings.


2. Do not participate in link exchange programs.


3. Internally link relevant posts on your blog, but do it selectively.


4. Avoid keyword-optimized anchor text for outbound links unless they are extremely relevant and flow naturally within the narrative.


5. Use Google Webmaster Tools to identify and fix broken links and other SEO-unfriendly site issues.


6. Have your own domain.


7. Have all versions of your blog resolve to the www.domain version.


8. Use Custom robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling pages you don’t want indexed, such as off-theme content.


9. Improve page loading speed by upgrading hosting, clearing your cache, compressing images and other techniques.

Content Composition

Going back five years or so, SEO copywriting involved a lot of precise rules about how and where to display keywords in a blog post. Today, Google is smart enough to interpret a post’s theme and relevance without strict adherence to these rules – which is great news for bloggers who want to focus on human readers!

1. Original content generally outranks duplicate content by a wide margin.


2. Don’t overuse keywords in post text.


3. Keywords in subheads, italics, bold or within ordered and unordered lists have slightly more power than keywords in plain text.


4. Word counts aren’t as important as they used to be, but all other things being equal, longer posts rank better than shorter posts.


5. Your first SEO priority is to write useful, relevant and authoritative content for human readers, because that is what Google is looking for.


6. To develop new post topics and SEO opportunities, review analytics regularly to identify popular new keywords and strategic long tail keywords.

Onsite Images And Video

Image and video search are segmented search options on Google that can attract a tremendous amount of traffic. If you are in a visual business, such as graphic design, or any type of business where customers may want to view images or video of what you do, then image and video optimization are essential.

1. Use relevant keywords in your image’s file name.


2. Write descriptive alt text for images in plain sentence format.


3. Write useful and interesting image captions, because they keep visitors on your page longer.


4. Follow Google Webmaster image publishing guidelines.


5. Follow Google Webmaster video best practices.

Google Authorship

Traditionally, Google primarily associates content with the site on which it is published. Google Authorship is a fairly new program that associates content with its author. In time, we will probably see high authority authors outrank low authority authors, making it important for bloggers to start participating in Google Authorship program now.

1. Actively participate on Google+ and in the Google Authorship program.


2. Since original content is immediately indexed and ranked on Google, write original, useful and keyword–rich content on your Google+ posts.


3. Link your Google+ profile to all blogs and sites you write for following these instructions.


4. Whenever possible, link your guest authors’ Google+ profiles to your blog.


5. Use an appealing Google+ headshot, as it will be displayed in Google search results.

Offsite Activities

When your blog is linked to from high quality, relevant sites, it tells Google your blog’s content is authoritative, meaningful, useful and interesting. Establishing and maintaining a solid link profile is probably the single most important SEO activity you can engage in.

1. Guest blog on relevant and authoritative blogs to build inbound links.


2. Invite relevant and authoritative bloggers to guest post on your blog, to build social shares and traffic.


3. Be ultra-selective in pursuing directory listings, as they are generally not an effective way to build inbound links.


4. Avoid building links by publishing content on article banks.


5. Avoid building links by publishing non-newsworthy press releases.


6. Review your link profile, removing bad links, fixing broken links and updating good links to conform to best practices.


7. Optimize your YouTube channel and videos by following these instructions.

SEO Agency Red Flags

Many bloggers partner with SEO agencies or freelancers in order to cover all of the bases noted above. There are a lot of tremendously talented people to choose from – but there are also some that bloggers would be wise to avoid.

1. Avoid agencies that promise #1 rankings or tons of free links.


2. Avoid agencies that don’t have a documented, transparent description of their methodology.


3. Avoid agencies that don’t provide detailed reports of activity and/or results.


4. Avoid agencies that won’t provide client referrals.


5. Avoid agencies that speak in an overly technical way or have other communication shortcomings.

That was a lot to digest, but when it comes to SEO, it’s still just an appetizer. What SEO tips can you share?

Guest author: Brad Shorr is Director of B2B Marketing for Straight North, an Internet marketing agency headquartered in Chicago. He is an experienced content strategist, respected blogger, and SEO copywriter. Connect with him on Twitter @bradshorr.

SEO Tips for Bloggers

The Blogging Power of Markethive

The moment you join Markethive you have instant setup of your own “Viral Blog” ready for you to begin posting content and marketing your business, product, service, or even personal content. You’ll be up and running the moment you set up your account!

1. Multiple BLOG accounts (platforms)

You will have the ability to create many blog accounts (via groups), mix up different contributors and published multiple blog contents for multiple WordPress accounts. That has been specifically created to include powerfully effective sales psychology built into them. This will ensure you convert visitors to your site into PAYING customers at the highest levels.

This multiple blog capability can also create additional unique content to spread further into the Internet. With Groups your reach expands exponentially.

Individual friends and groups can be combined to create unique content that can easily be published to your WordPress, Joomla, blogger.com, etc. blogs with Markethive Widgets and Plug Ins.

With a group of 100 members, aside from the massive shared content, with a Group membership of 100 where we will assume each member has about 5000 social net friends and contacts in their respective Social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

These are huge numbers as we estimate just the Social reach of 500,000 add to that each members back links via their social networks but assuming each member has 2-3 WordPress blogs the legitimate white hat back links occurring also reach astronomical numbers.

Now add to that a small coop to publish a real paid for Press release and you start to understand the startling advantage Markethive has just regarding Markethive’s blog platform and link manifestation.

 

2. Built in “Viral Broadcasting”

Other members of Markethive have the option to “follow” your blog(s) and options as to how. They can choose to be alerted in the social network alerts in their Markethive Dashboard

They can choose to have your post published to their Markethive News Feed.

They can choose to have your new posts broadcasted to their Facebook news feed(s) both their personal feed or their many Facebook pages.

They can choose to have your posts broadcasted to their Twitter feed.

They can choose to have your post published to their share an update on their LinkedIn account

They can choose to have your post broadcasted to their Markethive Blog (Groups or Personal)

This guarantees you get the most exposure from every post you make, and compels readers to quickly share your content with ease and excitement. This means even MORE traffic to your blog, and MORE potential for sales or exposure.

 

3. Advanced “Viral Commenting” System

Your blog comments will show up in real time and inspire even more “digital” conversations on your site. Remember, rave reviews, lively comments, and more helpful content are what people crave on your blog. There is NOTHING more powerful than the “social proof” coming from other people commenting on your blog, and we’ll help you to easily get LOTS of it every time you post.

Combined with the commenting system is the broadcasting ability as well. When commenting, you can also choose the option for your comment to push to your Markethive Newsfeed, Facebook, Twitter and LinkediN, includes the link back to your profile page and the blog.

 

 

4.SEO Tool

Keyword management for better search engine results.

Research and analysis tracking allows for continuous improvement.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, choosing the right keywords is the most important step. Selecting the wrong keywords will lead to bad results so it pays to learn how to perform a strategic keyword analysis so you pick the right ones. Generally speaking your goal is to identify keywords with:

A) The highest search volume possible.

B) The lowest competition.

C) Those that accurately relate to your business.

High search volumes and high competition often go together (but not always… look for sweet spots!) Typically you're looking for low competition keywords that still have good search volumes. So long as the keyword relates to the content on your website your "bounce rate" will be low and the traffic will stick.

The Keyword Analysis tool is designed to help you keep track of your research results as you perform your strategic analysis. There are a variety of external tools and systems that are helpful in evaluating keywords, however the statistics tracked by this system are found using Alexa and the Google Keyword Planner.

This will multiply how many people actually FIND your blog! (Marketers pay from hundreds, to thousands of dollars every month for this service—you get it for FREE!)

Peace of Mind For You!

You’ll never have to worry about installing anything, setting anything up, or “customizing” anything, unless you want to add your own header and company logo to your blog. We’ll handle all of the rest for you! Our skilled programmers work around the clock to ensure your blog is always viewable and available for your customers.

 

5. WordPress Plugins by Markethive

When we set out to build Markethive, we recognized WordPress to be the world leader in Blogging platforms. We will never dispute that nor attempt to overcome or replace WordPress.

Our goal is to make WordPress better with our blogging platform and CMS enhancements. Case in point is our WordPress (Markethive) plugin(s). We have several but this plugin is designed to import and manage your content you produce on Markethive into your one or multiple WordPress blog(s). Without Markethive, to manage a (blog cloud) portfolio of many WordPress on multiple domains with unique content on each of them for different agendas and markets, especially with a moderate to large team of content producers becomes a literal nightmare.

Why WordPress Is The Best Website Platform

There are many different ways of creating a website, you can purchase industry standard software like Dreamweaver and take courses to understand how to use it, or you can use content management software such as WordPress that allows you to quickly and easily get a website live within minutes. This is one of the many reasons why WordPress is the best website platform for beginners and professionals alike.

With WordPress, you are getting a system that takes minutes to install on your server, and then access to thousands of free and paid themes. Your website will look professional from the moment you start. Furthermore, there’s a wide range of plugins and widgets that can easily be applied to the site to make it more user friendly and interactive.

And the only skills you need are the ability to write, click the mouse button and add this stuff in. It really is easy to add content, it’s just like posting on a forum really, and has a very low learning curve. But, because of its flexibility, you can be as basic or advanced as you feel, and as you grow to learn more about it, so to will your site grow and utilize new concepts and designs being created for WordPress.

Here’s some other great aspects about the WordPress system:

WordPress is Open Source:

This means it is free, other people can easily create themes, plugins and so on for you to use with it, and it is completely flexible.

WordPress is Quick to Setup:

This means you can focus on having several websites and easily be able to maintain them all without having to create them all from scratch. This is particularly useful if you are getting into internet marketing for example. You can have many websites set up for different products you are selling.

WordPress Gives Multi User Functionality:

Are you a small business or organization that requires more than one person to add content to the site? Again, WordPress can help. It enables the site owner to set up users for them to post to the site. What’s more, certain privileges can be applied to these users so they only have access to posting content, and therefore not be able to mess around with the functional side of the site.

Website and Blog All-in-One:

Although WordPress is set up more as a blogging platform, it is still very easy to configure it to be a standalone site, with a blog attached. There are many plugins which make this even easier to do, and so any small business or organization can have a website and blog created in a couple of hours that looks great, and is ready to go.

Backing Up and Security:

WordPress is very easy to back up, and there are many secure plugins to choose from to make it more secure than it already is.

These are just a few of the most important reasons why WordPress is the best website platform, but there are many more. It’s major advantages are the low learning curve, and speed of having a site up and running. If you are a person who needs a website, but has little time and money to set one up, then WordPress is your friend. It’s a fantastic system used by millions of people across the globe.

 

6. MH Blog Swipe

Markethive blog system allows you to make your content available to the entire public population within Markethive, or Just to your friends or just to members in all the Groups you belong or a selection of them or just one (your choice) or private so no one can Swipe your blog.

Why? There are many sound reasons for this.

• Curating: Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. Markethive offers features to it’s groups you create. Groups are platforms for blogging.Simple set up a Curating Group for yourself and Swipe the blogs in Markethive as a collection of content you may want to use in your publications.


• Proofing: You may have a group of members that want to edit and rewrite your content. Trust me,this is an active phenomena in Markethive. Produce a blog and you will get many critiques so I just offer to them to swipe it, edit and change it as they see fit then let me know. If I like it, I swipe it back. Another option is to actually have a proof reader on staff and do the same procedure.


• Cocktails: With Markethive’s ability (feature) to create unlimited Groups each with a different cocktail of content curated, aggregated or from multiple Group memberships, the options to produce unique content for unlimited WordPress blogs controlled from within Markethive is unlimited.


• Then there is the learning curve. I have personally mentored newbie bloggers who just couldn’t or wouldn’t take the first step. In many a live webinar, I would quickly assemble a viable blog article, the instruct the students to Swipe my blog post, then in the webinar they would edit, alter, upload and download images, creating an altered blog result of their own.
  

  I have witnessed new bloggers after this type of training go from poorly and rarely produced blog posts, to 1-2 dynamic and excellent on topic blog posts daily. In other words, Markethive is now churning out a new breed of excellent and dynamic bloggers.

Website Widget

The widget can appear on your blogs, sites, social networks to promote a simple easy registration into the Markethive via your account, by passing your Profile page. Sets off your selection of autoresponders via the Authorized email of record, totally avoiding spam.

Markethive Blog platform

Markethive’s Inbound Marketing platform delivers a blogging system built for the beginner, sophisticated for the intermediate and an extremely powerful platform that advanced professional bloggers will appreciate. The system is designed for the easy development of a complete blog system, yet advanced and easily set up to be the engine that powers your WordPress blogs. The email system also creates subscribe accounts for your blogs and capture pages and simplifies the email notifications of a new blog publication via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Goggle+ and Markethive news feeds.

Easily grow your social reach into the millions! It’s that Powerful, It’s that  Simple, That’s Markethive.

Dominate with Inbound Marketing

Entrepreneurs always work hard to create an innovative product or service, but often count on standard seller marketing for sales. But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Recent reports suggest that 90% of today’s shoppers skip marketing pitches, to research online before they buy, and over 50% check user reviews before making a decision.

Markethive is the first and only social network integrated with a powerful intuitive inbound marketing (automated marketing) platform. Built for the entrepreneur, small business, and network marketers. Markethive is totally free and generates it's revenue through advertising like Facebook and Linkedin. Markethive even returns up to half the advertising revenue back to the subscribers that join the affiliate program.

If tools like email auto responders (better than Aweber), blog platforms (makes WordPress even better), press release co-ops (Real PR.org professional releases) capture page widgets (plug ins for WordPress, simpleleadcapture.com,etc., plugins and pages, broadcasting tools (like Hootsuit), live conference rooms (like GoToMeeting), traffic portals (like Veretekk had) and additional arrays of powerful tools, workshops and mentoring webinars, interest you, then you need this platform!

 

Thomas Prendergast

CMO Markethive, Inc.

The Blogging Power of Markethive

Customer Centricity Illustrated

Current Customers

Current customers are a valuable source of information. They entered the market for a solution like yours, made a decision to purchase your solution and now use it on a regular basis. Their feedback should be highly valued by the marketing and product management teams.

 

Churned Customers

Like current customers, churned customers bought from you but they ended the partnership. They may be even more valuable sources than current customers. Their rationale for ending the partnership can provide valuable insight into mistakes that were made or gaps in service.

 

Lost Deals

Lost deals are prospects who evaluated you, but elected not to do business with you. The decision must be respected, but it’s important to understand the reasons why. After an opportunity closes, request a win/loss call to better understand the research and decision-making rationale.

 

Current Evaluators

Evaluators are a tough group to speak with for obvious reasons: they’re still evaluating you. It’s not easy to convince a sales rep that you want to interrupt their opportunity for research purposes. But observing prospects as they evaluate is like watching Laird Hamilton size up a wave as he gets towed into it—there’s no substitute for seeing it live. Act like a fly on the wall and listen to the discussion. You’ll get real-time feedback on what prospects and your sales reps say.

 

Potentials

The toughest population to talk with may be your addressable targets that aren’t even in the market for a solution yet. Their feedback is important because they’re likely to be your next set of evaluators. The best place to start is by asking your sales team for their cold leads, those silent companies that rarely respond to marketing programs. They’re the ones that attend trade show sessions but won’t set foot in your booth. To open them up, try saying “I’m not trying to sell you anything and couldn’t even if I wanted to.” Who knows? Your cold lead might even warm up a bit.

 

The same ingredients that make a good surfer—patience, persistence and humility—are also critical to marketing success. Your market is bigger and stronger than you are. Although you can’t control it, you can learn about it by interacting with the market‘s constituents: those who have bought from you, those who are considering buying from you and those who haven’t bought from you yet.

 

Raving Fans

How to Turn Average Customers into Raving Fans

Even though your customers are happy with your product and service, you can still go the extra mile if you’re willing.

Delighting your customers will help you build stronger relationships, turning your average customers into actively engaged promoters of your business. They’re the ones who not only sing your praises, but they’re also shouting your name from rooftops to the world. And it’s not difficult to transform your customers into brand advocates at all.

Make a Great First Impression

Your parents probably told you first impressions were pretty important – and they were right! You always want to put your best foot forward when customers come knocking, which is why you should make it ridiculously easy for them to get in touch with you. That way, they’ll be able to reach out and get started.

Once you’ve unlocked that achievement, start thinking about what makes your company stand out.

Make sure you’re not only communicating these features of your business, but living them out every day. When you do, it’ll encourage more of your customers to leave positive reviews online, which might sway new people to engage with your business as well.

Another way to make a great first impression is by connecting with your audience on social media. Get involved in the conversation your customers are having. When you’re more invested, they will be, too.

Provide Incentives

Creating a remarkable experience for your customers may seem difficult at first, but providing a small gift might help get the ball rolling. Could an eBook or coupon code help sweeten the pot? Absolutely. Your customers will be more likely to sign up if they’re getting something extra in return. The pinnacle is a great affiliate program that shares the revenue. How about 50% of your ad revenue like Markethive does? Awesome!

Provide incentives for your prospective customer when they sign up. You’ll be surprised how far a small gift can go.

Swag is also a great way to acknowledge your awesome customers and make them feel valued. If a customer can’t stop talking about how great you are, whether it’s through social media or referrals, say thank you.

Here at Markethive, we’re are all about the swag. If a particular interaction really knocks our socks off, you can be sure that something fun is on the.

Be Responsible for the Entire Experience

Always remember that your customers made a choice, and they chose you! So, consider the ways you can go above and beyond for them and reward their loyalty. Not only will they feel appreciated, they’ll be reminded of why they picked you in the first place. A simple thank you message can go a long way towards letting your customers know you appreciate their business.

And of course, commit to providing remarkable support so they can get help whenever they need it. Just remember, keep it simple, timely and concise, and you’ll do fine.

If you find that a certain customer is really going the extra mile (think rooftop shouting), consider ways you can thank them for it. Try spotlighting a current customer on your blog (these stories are great customer testimonials!), or giving them a shoutout on Facebook or Twitter. Just remember to ask before sharing their stories – some people might not want the public acknowledgement.

Measure Their Delight

So how can you tell if you’re delighting your customers? If you’re doing a stellar job across the board, you’ll notice it in business growth.

But, if you’d like something a bit more concrete, many businesses will measure their Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric is tracked by asking your customers one simple question:

How likely are you to recommend [your business name here] to a friend or colleague?

Your customers are then broken down into three groups: promoters (someone who actively promotes your business), neutrals (someone who uses or engages with your business, but doesn’t promote you) and detractors (someone who actively speaks out against your business).

This kind of information is super handy, as it provides concrete information that can help you gauge how your customers really feel about you. You can look for patterns as you peruse their replies, and focus on ways to improve on anything that stands out. If your detractors repeatedly complain about an issue they’re having with one of your products, you’d definitely want to look into ways to change it.

Continue the Conversation

Your customers are the people who stand behind your business. As Bette Midler says, they are “the wind beneath your wings,” so be sure to give them the remarkable experience they deserve.

Markethive

Join the Revolution

 

Customer Centricity Illustrated

Customer Centricity Illustrated

Current Customers

Current customers are a valuable source of information. They entered the market for a solution like yours, made a decision to purchase your solution and now use it on a regular basis. Their feedback should be highly valued by the marketing and product management teams.

 

Churned Customers

Like current customers, churned customers bought from you but they ended the partnership. They may be even more valuable sources than current customers. Their rationale for ending the partnership can provide valuable insight into mistakes that were made or gaps in service.

 

Lost Deals

Lost deals are prospects who evaluated you, but elected not to do business with you. The decision must be respected, but it’s important to understand the reasons why. After an opportunity closes, request a win/loss call to better understand the research and decision-making rationale.

 

Current Evaluators

Evaluators are a tough group to speak with for obvious reasons: they’re still evaluating you. It’s not easy to convince a sales rep that you want to interrupt their opportunity for research purposes. But observing prospects as they evaluate is like watching Laird Hamilton size up a wave as he gets towed into it—there’s no substitute for seeing it live. Act like a fly on the wall and listen to the discussion. You’ll get real-time feedback on what prospects and your sales reps say.

 

Potentials

The toughest population to talk with may be your addressable targets that aren’t even in the market for a solution yet. Their feedback is important because they’re likely to be your next set of evaluators. The best place to start is by asking your sales team for their cold leads, those silent companies that rarely respond to marketing programs. They’re the ones that attend trade show sessions but won’t set foot in your booth. To open them up, try saying “I’m not trying to sell you anything and couldn’t even if I wanted to.” Who knows? Your cold lead might even warm up a bit.

 

The same ingredients that make a good surfer—patience, persistence and humility—are also critical to marketing success. Your market is bigger and stronger than you are. Although you can’t control it, you can learn about it by interacting with the market‘s constituents: those who have bought from you, those who are considering buying from you and those who haven’t bought from you yet.

 

Raving Fans

How to Turn Average Customers into Raving Fans

Even though your customers are happy with your product and service, you can still go the extra mile if you’re willing.

Delighting your customers will help you build stronger relationships, turning your average customers into actively engaged promoters of your business. They’re the ones who not only sing your praises, but they’re also shouting your name from rooftops to the world. And it’s not difficult to transform your customers into brand advocates at all.

Make a Great First Impression

Your parents probably told you first impressions were pretty important – and they were right! You always want to put your best foot forward when customers come knocking, which is why you should make it ridiculously easy for them to get in touch with you. That way, they’ll be able to reach out and get started.

Once you’ve unlocked that achievement, start thinking about what makes your company stand out.

Make sure you’re not only communicating these features of your business, but living them out every day. When you do, it’ll encourage more of your customers to leave positive reviews online, which might sway new people to engage with your business as well.

Another way to make a great first impression is by connecting with your audience on social media. Get involved in the conversation your customers are having. When you’re more invested, they will be, too.

Provide Incentives

Creating a remarkable experience for your customers may seem difficult at first, but providing a small gift might help get the ball rolling. Could an eBook or coupon code help sweeten the pot? Absolutely. Your customers will be more likely to sign up if they’re getting something extra in return. The pinnacle is a great affiliate program that shares the revenue. How about 50% of your ad revenue like Markethive does? Awesome!

Provide incentives for your prospective customer when they sign up. You’ll be surprised how far a small gift can go.

Swag is also a great way to acknowledge your awesome customers and make them feel valued. If a customer can’t stop talking about how great you are, whether it’s through social media or referrals, say thank you.

Here at Markethive, we’re are all about the swag. If a particular interaction really knocks our socks off, you can be sure that something fun is on the.

Be Responsible for the Entire Experience

Always remember that your customers made a choice, and they chose you! So, consider the ways you can go above and beyond for them and reward their loyalty. Not only will they feel appreciated, they’ll be reminded of why they picked you in the first place. A simple thank you message can go a long way towards letting your customers know you appreciate their business.

And of course, commit to providing remarkable support so they can get help whenever they need it. Just remember, keep it simple, timely and concise, and you’ll do fine.

If you find that a certain customer is really going the extra mile (think rooftop shouting), consider ways you can thank them for it. Try spotlighting a current customer on your blog (these stories are great customer testimonials!), or giving them a shoutout on Facebook or Twitter. Just remember to ask before sharing their stories – some people might not want the public acknowledgement.

Measure Their Delight

So how can you tell if you’re delighting your customers? If you’re doing a stellar job across the board, you’ll notice it in business growth.

But, if you’d like something a bit more concrete, many businesses will measure their Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric is tracked by asking your customers one simple question:

How likely are you to recommend [your business name here] to a friend or colleague?

Your customers are then broken down into three groups: promoters (someone who actively promotes your business), neutrals (someone who uses or engages with your business, but doesn’t promote you) and detractors (someone who actively speaks out against your business).

This kind of information is super handy, as it provides concrete information that can help you gauge how your customers really feel about you. You can look for patterns as you peruse their replies, and focus on ways to improve on anything that stands out. If your detractors repeatedly complain about an issue they’re having with one of your products, you’d definitely want to look into ways to change it.

Continue the Conversation

Your customers are the people who stand behind your business. As Bette Midler says, they are “the wind beneath your wings,” so be sure to give them the remarkable experience they deserve.

Markethive

Join the Revolution

 

Customer Centricity Illustrated

Customer Centricity Illustrated

Current Customers

Current customers are a valuable source of information. They entered the market for a solution like yours, made a decision to purchase your solution and now use it on a regular basis. Their feedback should be highly valued by the marketing and product management teams.

 

Churned Customers

Like current customers, churned customers bought from you but they ended the partnership. They may be even more valuable sources than current customers. Their rationale for ending the partnership can provide valuable insight into mistakes that were made or gaps in service.

 

Lost Deals

Lost deals are prospects who evaluated you, but elected not to do business with you. The decision must be respected, but it’s important to understand the reasons why. After an opportunity closes, request a win/loss call to better understand the research and decision-making rationale.

 

Current Evaluators

Evaluators are a tough group to speak with for obvious reasons: they’re still evaluating you. It’s not easy to convince a sales rep that you want to interrupt their opportunity for research purposes. But observing prospects as they evaluate is like watching Laird Hamilton size up a wave as he gets towed into it—there’s no substitute for seeing it live. Act like a fly on the wall and listen to the discussion. You’ll get real-time feedback on what prospects and your sales reps say.

 

Potentials

The toughest population to talk with may be your addressable targets that aren’t even in the market for a solution yet. Their feedback is important because they’re likely to be your next set of evaluators. The best place to start is by asking your sales team for their cold leads, those silent companies that rarely respond to marketing programs. They’re the ones that attend trade show sessions but won’t set foot in your booth. To open them up, try saying “I’m not trying to sell you anything and couldn’t even if I wanted to.” Who knows? Your cold lead might even warm up a bit.

 

The same ingredients that make a good surfer—patience, persistence and humility—are also critical to marketing success. Your market is bigger and stronger than you are. Although you can’t control it, you can learn about it by interacting with the market‘s constituents: those who have bought from you, those who are considering buying from you and those who haven’t bought from you yet.

 

Raving Fans

How to Turn Average Customers into Raving Fans

Even though your customers are happy with your product and service, you can still go the extra mile if you’re willing.

Delighting your customers will help you build stronger relationships, turning your average customers into actively engaged promoters of your business. They’re the ones who not only sing your praises, but they’re also shouting your name from rooftops to the world. And it’s not difficult to transform your customers into brand advocates at all.

Make a Great First Impression

Your parents probably told you first impressions were pretty important – and they were right! You always want to put your best foot forward when customers come knocking, which is why you should make it ridiculously easy for them to get in touch with you. That way, they’ll be able to reach out and get started.

Once you’ve unlocked that achievement, start thinking about what makes your company stand out.

Make sure you’re not only communicating these features of your business, but living them out every day. When you do, it’ll encourage more of your customers to leave positive reviews online, which might sway new people to engage with your business as well.

Another way to make a great first impression is by connecting with your audience on social media. Get involved in the conversation your customers are having. When you’re more invested, they will be, too.

Provide Incentives

Creating a remarkable experience for your customers may seem difficult at first, but providing a small gift might help get the ball rolling. Could an eBook or coupon code help sweeten the pot? Absolutely. Your customers will be more likely to sign up if they’re getting something extra in return. The pinnacle is a great affiliate program that shares the revenue. How about 50% of your ad revenue like Markethive does? Awesome!

Provide incentives for your prospective customer when they sign up. You’ll be surprised how far a small gift can go.

Swag is also a great way to acknowledge your awesome customers and make them feel valued. If a customer can’t stop talking about how great you are, whether it’s through social media or referrals, say thank you.

Here at Markethive, we’re are all about the swag. If a particular interaction really knocks our socks off, you can be sure that something fun is on the.

Be Responsible for the Entire Experience

Always remember that your customers made a choice, and they chose you! So, consider the ways you can go above and beyond for them and reward their loyalty. Not only will they feel appreciated, they’ll be reminded of why they picked you in the first place. A simple thank you message can go a long way towards letting your customers know you appreciate their business.

And of course, commit to providing remarkable support so they can get help whenever they need it. Just remember, keep it simple, timely and concise, and you’ll do fine.

If you find that a certain customer is really going the extra mile (think rooftop shouting), consider ways you can thank them for it. Try spotlighting a current customer on your blog (these stories are great customer testimonials!), or giving them a shoutout on Facebook or Twitter. Just remember to ask before sharing their stories – some people might not want the public acknowledgement.

Measure Their Delight

So how can you tell if you’re delighting your customers? If you’re doing a stellar job across the board, you’ll notice it in business growth.

But, if you’d like something a bit more concrete, many businesses will measure their Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric is tracked by asking your customers one simple question:

How likely are you to recommend [your business name here] to a friend or colleague?

Your customers are then broken down into three groups: promoters (someone who actively promotes your business), neutrals (someone who uses or engages with your business, but doesn’t promote you) and detractors (someone who actively speaks out against your business).

This kind of information is super handy, as it provides concrete information that can help you gauge how your customers really feel about you. You can look for patterns as you peruse their replies, and focus on ways to improve on anything that stands out. If your detractors repeatedly complain about an issue they’re having with one of your products, you’d definitely want to look into ways to change it.

Continue the Conversation

Your customers are the people who stand behind your business. As Bette Midler says, they are “the wind beneath your wings,” so be sure to give them the remarkable experience they deserve.

Markethive

Join the Revolution

 

Customer Centricity Illustrated

Topics in Mobile Redirect Issues Part 6: SSL- Redirect to Mobile Redirect-Problem & Solution

Glenn E. Fleming, MD, MPH, Contributor, MarketHive

(Reposted from Patrick Sexton, https://varvy.com)

There are four common types of redirects that affect how your users and Google see your mobile pages. Each of them is bad for performance (speed). They include:

            * Initial Redirect – canonical (www.example.com vs example.com)

            * SSL-Secure Pages Redirect

            * Redirect to Mobile Version

            * Content-Driven Redirects

Content-Driven Redirects

Problem

Content-driven redirects are not required to display a page. These redirects have been added because mobile and desktop versions of a given webpage may not display the same content.   Thus, some mobile pages are redirected to other locations.

Bottom-line: Content-driven redirects are more of a design issue rather than a technical issue.

Solution

The use of content-driven redirects should be avoided if possible. The solution here is to utilize responsive web design. This will ensure that both website versions (mobile and desktop versions) display the same content with no need for a content-driven redirect.

Topics in Mobile Redirect Issues Part 6: SSL- Redirect to Mobile Redirect-Problem & Solution

Get Found using Inbound Marketing

Get Found using Inbound Marketing

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide advice for building your own Inbound Marketing machine- a requirement for most businesses today.

The web has forever changed people’s buying habits. Instead of needing to rely on sales people to send them information, buyers now have Google and other search engines to research products, find competitors, and see how other people rate those products in blogs and reviews. Furthermore they are greatly influenced by individuals that have emerged as experts in particular subject areas who use social media to get their messages across.

This sea change in buying behavior requires vendors to re-think how they go to market, and optimize to make sure that they will get found by buyers using search engines, blogs, reviews, and social media. The term Inbound Marketing was invented by the crew at Markethive (When they were Veretekk), when they developed the techniques and technologies that are needed to get found by buyers, and to make sure that the reviews and blogs around your industry segment cover what you are doing. (Markethive provides great software tools, plus education to help you automate Inbound Marketing. The founder, Thomas Prendergast has written many great  books on these topics (dating back as far as 20 years ago) “Automated Marketing”, Customer Centricity”, Building a Better Website”, “The Power of the Social Network in Search Engines”, Conference Room Advantage”.

Markethive produced this great humorous video that highlights the hopelessness of the old techniques of the Outbound Marketing moron:

As further evidence of this change in buying behavior, I was recently talking to the CIO of a large pharmaceutical company, and he told me how he hates spam emails from vendors, and how he had developed a canned email response to them. I asked him to forward me a copy of that email, and have excerpted a couple of paragraphs from it that quite clearly describe the carnage:

“Please understand that I get dozens of these types of messages a week. I simply do not have time to read them, dig into them, follow-up on them, or reply to them. The most effective solution to this problem is for me to ignore the messages, which is what I usually do. …

… Finally, a small comment. As a customer, I find this type of approach to sales to be largely annoying to me and unproductive for you. We learn far more about what we want to purchase by searching the web, looking for customer references in blogs and forums, word of mouth, and by finding white papers on your site that concretely describe solutions to problems we are having.”

Remarkable Content is King

A key part of getting found is making sure you show up on the first page of a Google search. The lazy marketer’s approach to doing this is to purchase Google Adwords, and pay by the click (referred to as SEM, Search Engine Marketing). However 85% of people ignore the paid ads, so to be really effective, you will need to perfect your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills.

SEO requires you to develop great content that your buyers will find sufficiently interesting, different or insightful, that they will want to remark on it. (The authors of Inbound Marketing refer to that as remarkable content.) When your readers remark on your content on-line, using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc., they spread the word virally to other readers and broaden your reach. These comments lead to links back to your site, which lead to ever increasing page ranking in the search engines.

 

To be successful at this, you will need to keep the content fresh.

Traditional web sites don’t work in this regard, as they don’t change frequently enough.

What is needed is a blog that you update regularly.

 

Your blog cannot simply be a sales pitch for your product, but needs to be about topics that your buyers care to read about. The tone could be educational; or humorous; or controversial. But above all it needs to be highly engaging and relevant to them – i.e. remarkable.

When you post a new blog entry, you will see your site traffic surge for a few days, then die back to a level slightly higher than before. The more you post, the faster your traffic will build. But in the end, it is the really great articles that you post that will have the most impact.

And meritocratic blog system like Markethive (actually only Markethive) produce all of the above in a simple atmosphere of massive content curation that is immediately reward or rejected, building amazing content is King results, or something like that.

Once you have interesting content, you can use social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. to get the word out (Uh ummmm again, Marketing simplifies this to a level of excruciating results, but then like EST (You remember EST Erhard Seminar Training), you need to experience. No word, even from me, can truly do it justice.). Your goal is to get other bloggers to link to you, and to have people tweet about your content.

An interesting thing about a marketing department that focuses on Inbound Marketing: it will place a high value on people that know how to write and develop content that draws in an audience. A silver lining to the damage that the internet has inflicted on the publishing industry is that there are plenty of very talented journalists seeking employment, and they possess the perfect skills for this job!

SEO versus SEM

Like most of things that are good for us in life, SEO requires work and patience before it will payback. So it can be tempting to take shortcuts, and just use SEM (paid search ads). However if it is done right, the results will continue to build, and you will start to build your own audience, and own your own traffic.

We have also seen that the cost of paid search increases as the need to scale the lead volume grows.

The Power of Free

Another extremely powerful way to create inbound traffic and qualified leads is to use a free product or service. A great example of this is the The entire Inbound Marketing Platform (Valued in excess of up to $10,000 per month) service from Markethive. (If you haven’t tried this, I recommend giving it a try now. It will only take a few minutes to join.) Markethive has a couple of interesting attributes that are worth studying:

 

It is free of charge.

It takes very little work by the customer to get some very valuable results

 

It provides its results in the form of a score out of 100. Human beings are very competitive, and when they don’t get a good score, they want to find out how to improve their score. That leads them to wanting to find out more about Markethive which can help them improve their score.

It allows them to compare themselves to their competitors. All businesses care about how they are doing relative to their competition. If they are doing worse, this is a powerful motivator to drive them to change.

Think hard about your audience and whether there is an opportunity to build a similar free web service that would draw them in, and provide great value.

If you are interested in learning more about how Free products and services can help your marketing, please refer to this section: The Power of Free.

Building your reach

Once you have great content and possibly a free product/service, you will want to find ways to drive the maximum traffic to that content. In the last couple of years we have seen some powerful new tools emerge to help with this process in the social media space. Get yourself accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and join in the conversation. (For Twitter, I also recommend downloading the Tweetdeck application.) Start by listening. Watch what people are talking about in your topic areas, and take note of their interests. Once you have an idea of how the conversation works join in. Be careful not to take a sales stance to promote your products, as that will rapidly lose you your audience. However you can draw your audience in with short url’s (Another one of Markethive’s great free services) that link to your blog posts and other non-sales oriented content.

This short paragraph is not going to be enough to fully educate you on the ins and outs of using social media to build your audience, so if the topic interests you, I recommend going here to learn more:

Internet Marketing Webinars (see the calendar in Markethive after you join for free of course).

Influencer Campaigns

In every product area, there are usually already influencers that write the most about that area, and have the largest audience that follows them. To conduct a successful social media campaign, you will want to identify those influencers, and reach out to them to get them to write about your product/service.

To get them to pay attention to you, you will first need to understand what they care about. Read their blog posts and tweets, and try to get inside their minds. Try to determine what appeals to them, and what has clearly turned them off. Then prepare your pitch, and use social media to engage with them.

You will then want to monitor the results by tracking their blog posts, links to the articles, tweets, etc.

For more information…

Inbound marketing is a rich topic area that would take more than a single article like this to describe. For more information, consider yourself a friend of Markethive:

Markethive

Thomas Prendergast

CMO Markethive Inc.

 

 

Get Found using Inbound Marketing