Well this is it everyone, our last blog post of 2010. It's been a good year for our blog, we've made quite a few changes and worked to bring you as much valuable information as we can. Hopefully you find this last post just as helpful as the rest and you'll keep coming back for more in 2011!

We post a lost of slideshare presentations in our web marketing digest posts. This presentation from Rashmi Sinha called the "Slideshare Zeitgeist 2010" shows slideshare's top presentations for 2010, and analyzes the characteristics of the most popular ones.

This post from CNN discusses Pete Cashmore's (the CEO and found of Mashable) opinions on the tech winners and losers of 2010.

This idea is from a communications company in Brussels and it encourages people to use modern web technology to make strangers' lives a little better.

This post from Karine Joly's Blog shows some examples of the best higher education holiday cards. It's worth taking a look to see what higher education is doing to thank their students, prospects, and friends this holiday season.

This is one of our last posts for 2010 and since we've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks talking about the New Year and what changes and challenges it's going to bring to web marketing, we thought you might all find it helpful if we gathered together some of the posts we found most useful when preparing for 2011.

This post from the Webmaster SEO Tips blog gives a good analysis of how you can prepare your marketing strategy for 2011 including: finalizing your advertising and online strategies, optimizing your website, implement Google Analytics and organizing your online data.

This post which discusses 4 major marketing trends for 2011 (direct marketing, social metrics, shifts from tactical to strategic marketing, video marketing) has some strong statistics and insight into the challenges and opportunities these trends pose.

Mashable wrote this excellent post on their predictions for mobile marketing in 2011 and another one with their predictions for web development in the New Year.

The key areas that "internet marketers should concentrate on for 2011" is an important issue for many organizations with 2011 fast approaching. This post from the Marketing Pilgrim blog lists some of them including: choosing strategy over action, going back to the basics, spreading the wealth and re-evaluating the role of consultants.

For all of you product marketing and management professionals, this post from the Canadian Marketing Blog discusses the major trends facing product marketing and management for 2011.

This post from Steinar Knutsen's blog gives a detailed description on how you can plan SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) goals for your marketing in 2011.

These posts barely scratch the surface of the ones available to help you wrap your mind around what online marketing will look like in 2011, but these are the ones that we found helpful and interesting, hopefully you do too!

Image by Amir K on Flickr.

Alright, with the new year coming up fast, us B2B marketers need to get our priorities in place, and what better (and more seasonal) way to do that, then to create some good old fashioned resolutions for the New Year? Every business is going to have their own resolutions that relate to their individual business goals, but here are a few that we think are important for most organizations to take into consideration in 2011.

1. Optimize calls-to-action. Your calls-to-action are what convince your visitors to convert on yours goals. They are not  some insignificant aesthetically pleasing aspect of your website’s design. Testing and improving your calls-to-action is a crucial aspect of your conversion rate optimization and 2011 is a great time to start really getting the most you can out of them.
2. Expand social media horizons. Just in case some of you aren’t aware, there actually are more social sites than Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. We suggest you use them, especially since there are hundreds of niche social sites where it will be much easier for you to become and influencer due to lower competition. Sounds good right? 
3. Finally recognize that SEO is more than just on-page optimization. For those of you planning new websites, incorporate your SEO from the beginning! Your SEO needs to be a part of your design, build, content and website optimization strategies and it needs to involve design concepts, content creation, off-site promotion and link building. If your website doesn’t currently take this stance towards SEO, it’s time for a change in the New Year. 
4. Implement a content management system (CMS). If you don’t already have a CMS in place this is a must for 2011. In today’s fast paced internet space it is almost impossible to remain relevant and current if you’re not able to quickly and easily update your website. A CMS offers this capability and many newer ones also include marketing automation and email marketing functionality as well. Let 2011 be the year that you make your website the most effective it can be! 
5. Move away from Flash! HTML5 was a big topic of discussion in 2010 and its adoption is going to be a big star in marketing in 2011. As Steve Jobs has said when discussing why many apple devices don’t support flash, “We don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology,” so why are you? We’re not saying that Flash is dying out, that’s not the case at all, we’re just saying that there is now a viable (and SEO-friendly) competitor and it’s definitely worth taking a look at. If you want to read a little more about the differences between flash and HTML5 take a look at this great blog post  from VentureBeat which we first read about on Douglas Karr’s Marketing Tech Blog.
6. Focus on engagement rather than your number of followers. Engagement is more important that the number of people you have following you. We know that all of you have heard that before, and maybe most of you even agree, but we also know that you still jealously monitor the slowly (or quickly) increasing number of people who befriend you on social media sites. 2011 is the year that you really should begin to BELIEVE that engagement is more important. Remember, most of those people are only barely interacting with your content. One solid, outspoken fan is much more important for your business then hundreds of mediocre followers. 
7. Re-evaluate your goals and mission. If you’re marketing goals are specific and targeted enough, then they should be frequently updated. Developing new goals that are relevant to your business is a good way to consistently improve your online marketing and track your improvement and sometimes those goals will end up encouraging you to take a look at your current company mission and re-evaluate if it still speaks to the real strengths of your business. 
8. Stop procrastinating! This is resolutions actually applies to all the ones that have come before it on our list. Stop talking about your goals (or even reading about them on blogs like this one) and start implementing them. Whether your resolutions are on the list above or not, talk is cheap, getting doing! 

Have a happy New Year everyone!

Image by Sally M on Flickr

Happy Holidays Everyone! In the spirit of the season, today's web marketing digest post is filled with holiday themed web marketing items including two infographics, a post on the best and worst advertising and marketing agency Christmas cards.

This first infographic, from Mashable, shows the demographics and economics behind holiday gift giving.

The next infographic from Daily Infographic shows the "Holidays by the Numbers" and includes fun information on popular technology and facts. Did you know that there are 50 million christmas trees sold in the US each year and 250 catch fire in someone's home?


This post from Adweek gives their opinion on 2010's best and worst agency holiday cards. There are some beautiful examples of creativity and originality--as well as some frightening examples of what you shouldn't do.

Happy Holidays to all of you. Have a great weekend!

As 2010 comes to a close, we'd like to look back and share with you some of our favorite posts of the year. This year has been a big one for Marqui's blog. After completely redesigning our website and blog in early 2010, we really wanted to work to provide you with a solid repository of resources for all of your web marketing needs. Hopefully you feel like we've succeeded and we look forward to continuing to provide you with quality insights and information on the web marketing space in 2011!

6 Ways to Optimize Landing Pages and Capture More Leads
11 Best Practices for Web Form Design
Website Redesign How to: Building a SEO Strategy
Top Website Design Trends for 2011
Web Design to Encourage or Discourage User Behavior
Website Usability Planning
7 Effective Higher Education Website Designs from Around the World
10 Tips for Writing Killer B2B Web Copy
How to Use Your B2B Blog to Improve Lead Generation
5 Marketing Lessons Learned from the World Cup 2010

Hopefully these posts give you an idea of what we've tried to achieve here over the last year!

Image by Hellojenuine on Flickr.

In the past, organizations were in charge of their brand. They controlled the way that customers experienced their company and their impressions of their organization. In today’s marketing economy, the companies are no longer the ones in charge. Sure, brands can control things like their logos, their messages, their colors, all of the tangible aspects associate with their company, but they no longer have control over the emotional aspects of their brand identity, in other words, their customers’ brand experiences.

Many companies still try to (and believe that they can) completely control their customers’ experiences with their brand. Unfortunately, that is a misguided opinion. The customers are the ones in control. The web allows consumers to communicate with each other all over the world, in a matter or moments, in ways which are completely out of reach for brands. Those brand opinions, which can be both positive and negative, aren’t condoned, regulated or even accessible most of the time to companies, and that means that organizations need to adjust the way that they deal with their customers to accommodate this new level of brand experience which is completely beyond their control.

So, what does managing brand experience in this new marketing sphere entail?

1. Listen. Listen nowadays involves monitoring what people are saying about your company in a wide variety of areas on the web. Depending on your target audience, your customers could be talking about you on social media sites, through blogs, forums or social bookmarking sites, but no matter where they’re interacting, it’s important that you have a good idea of what’s being said. Understanding the way that your audience feels about your company is the first step to improving their brand experience and optimizing it for improved marketing ROI.
2.  Determine your best level of engagement. Just because you know what’s being said (whether it’s positive or negative) that doesn’t mean that you have to respond to everything.  It’s important to be engaged with your audience, but you need to have a plan for when you respond, how often you communicate, and how you handle the different situations and comments that arise. Without a strategy for engagement, you may actually do something detrimental to your customers’ brand experience unintentionally. 
3. Get involved. Now that you’ve determined how you’re going to respond, it’s time to start talking. Responding to customers’ opinions, comments and questions or getting involved in discussions surrounding your brand can help you to improve (or at least mitigate) customers’ experiences with your brand and can help you become more aware of negative and positive perceptions. 
4. Measure and analyze. Those conversations that are occurring (whether you’re taking part or not) are made up of data that you can collect, measure and analyze. When it comes to the web one of the best ways to measure brand experience is through customer insights and interaction with your brand. 
5. Improve. What should you be doing with that data you’ve collected? You should be using it to correct the areas where your brand is weak and improving your overall brand experience.

Blogs are important for your website's SEO. By ensuring that your blog content has lots of naturally occuring keywords to help longtail search and by working hard to garner relevant, reputable links, you can improve your overall traffic and search engine rankings. Unfortunately, getting links for your blog isn't always an easy task. That's why we put together this list of 6 ways to build links for your blog.

1. Write compelling content.This is perhaps the most obvious point on our list, but also the most important: if you don't have compelling content then you won't get as many relevant links. You need to give your audience something that they want to link to.
2. Write guest blog posts. Writing on other high-traffic industry blogs and including a link to your website is a great way to promote your own blog and encourage linking. Users that find your content useful on other blogs, are more likely to visit your blog, spread your content and provide links to your blog within their circle of influence online.
3. Make it easy for visitors to share your content. Ensure that your blog makes it easy for you visitors to email, tweet or share your content in their favorite way. This improves the chances that they will spread your content to other users who may choose to link to it.
4. Comment on other blogs. Becoming a regular commenter on high-traffic industry blogs is a great way to not only build relationships with other bloggers (who may link back to you in the future) and a way to promote your content and relevant resources.
5. Submit your blog to relevant blog directories. Blog directories are a good way to indicate to search engines and longtail users the topic of your blog and can help to drive more traffic and links for your blog.
6. Syndicate your content through social media. Using social media websites to spread your content and including links to your blog on your profile is a good way to build links. Social media users are one of the biggest groups of linkers, especially if you manage to produce content that ends up going viral.

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Of course these are by no means all the methods for building blog links. What linking tactics for blogs have you found to be most effective? What challenges have you faced when trying to build blog links? 

Image by alamodestuff on Flickr.

The purpose of the content on your website is to sell your company’s products or services to your website visitors, sounds easy right? Well with the enormous amount of copy and content on the internet today, it’s actually very difficult to write content that catches readers’ attention and engages them, however, there are some things you can do to help your website’s copy stand out and one of them is to tell stories.

Storytelling is one of the most well-recognized and compelling methods for engaging audiences. Storytellers have been around since the beginning of humanity and remain important because humans love being told stories. Most stories are filled with traditional techniques for influencing readers to help to convince them that your product or services are the best.

Stories are a natural part of daily life for most people. Audiences today are inundated with thousands of different stories on a daily basis through print ads, television, human interaction, novels and more. The powerful stories are the ones that grab people’s attention, that they enjoy participating with and are rich enough that users’ have an emotional reaction.  If you can use these methods when developing copy for your website, you can help persuade your audience, build credibility and trust, and create brand fans.

How can you use storytelling techniques in your copy?

1. Write a story that is relevant to your products and services. It’s great to write an interesting story on your website, but if it doesn’t support your marketing strategy then it’s not doing what you need it to do. Your story can’t just be interesting; it also needs to be convincing enough to encourage your readers to move to the next step in the buying cycle.
2. Speak to your key audience. A story is useless if it doesn’t make an emotional connection with your audience. Make sure that the story you’re creating speaks to your audience’s pain points. 
3. Don’t lose sight of the purpose of the story. Remember, your story is still meant to sell. Just because you’re writing a story doesn’t mean you need to write a novel. Keeping your copy concise is still important.

Writing stories in your copy isn’t as easy as it sounds. A story is only effective if it supports your overall web strategy. If your stories don’t sell, then they’re no more effective than story-less copy.

Image by jma.work on Flickr.

This week's web marketing digest has a report from Pew Internet on internet usage, a video on the mobile year in review and a video based on the YouTube year in review.

This study, shows the internet usage demographics for 2010. The study is worth taking a look at to see which generations and demographics are using which internet channels.

This video, from The Mobile Future Coalition on YouTube, shows some very interesting stats on the state of mobile internet usage today.




This video,produced by YouTubes new "trends" section, reviews the most popular YouTube videos of 2010, and, if you're a marketer trying to breakdown the characteristics of viral campaigns and videos, it may be worth taking a look at.




Have a great weekend!

We just finished out most recent webinar, "Definitive Guide to a Website Redesign" you can access it in the resource section of our website along with the rest of our web marketing webinars.

The purpose of today's webinar was to help our audience understand the most important steps in a redesign, and how they can make sure that their new website will be as effective as possible at helping them reach their online goals.

What are the key steps in a redesign?

1. Performing a website audit to understand what's work and what isn't. 
2. Determine your website's goals to help you establish your website's requirements.
3. Design your website based on usability, sustainability and manageability rather than eye-catching design.
4. Develop a strong information architecture to make your site easier for search engines and humans to navigate.
5. Create engaging content to help drive traffic to your new website.
6. Establish a demand generation strategy to help increase your new website's ROI.
7. Ensure none of the last minute details are forgotten during launch: 301 redirects, Custom 404 pages etc.
8. Plan for continual website optimization: implement website analytics, integrate social media etc.

Hopefully these points help you get a good idea of what you should be doing during the redesign process. If you'd like to know more, contact us, or view the recording of the webinar in our resource section.

Sometimes in marketing it gets hard to find inspiration for your next piece of collateral, blog post, campaign or any other marketing initiative. We’re always preaching here about how your content needs to fresh, but believe us, we know that creating new content is a difficult task, especially with the enormous amount of information already available on the web. When we find that we’re having a difficult time getting inspired, we like to turn to beautiful examples of collateral created by others to help us get some good ideas. This presentation by Helge Tenno is a great example. It is called “One Hundred Inspirational Ideas” and it contains a “collection from the last 15 years of thinking and stealing.”

The presentation is a great example of inspirational content that is useful for a wide range of audiences, from consumers to marketers. If you’ve been finding it difficult lately to come up with some really innovative ideas, why not take a look at what’s already been done?

We've already talked about what we think the emerging trends for web design in 2011 are, so today's post isn't as much about emerging  trends, as the web marketing channels that marketers should have on their radar for 2011. Most of these channels have been around for a while, but they are still ones which are important for web marketers (regardless of whether they market to B2B or B2C) should be conscious of.

1. Social media continues to mature. Social media is already popular, but in the coming year we believe that it will continue to mature into a solid and mainstream marketing tactic. Social media is about listening and communicating with your community, whether that's customers, fans, partners etc. Social media has a huge user population that businesses can engage to help grow their online presence and brand identity and while some companies are still dabbling, we think that 2011 will be the year that social media turns into a realistic part of companies' marketing strategies from budget to measurement. 
2. Compatibility and usability for mobile devices becomes a standard, not a trend. The continuing popularity of mobile internet access, means that if your company doesn't have a web presence that translates to mobile, you're falling behind. Don't forget. mobile isn't just phones either anymore, tablets are quickly becoming one of the more popular ways to access the internet, and your web presence can still require some tweaking to work effectively on tablet devices. Don't alienate your audience by having a website that doesn't render well on mobile devices, and if you're going to create mobile apps, make sure you do it properly. Opinion polls show that most consumers now expect companies to have mobile apps but they also think that if the apps are created poorly or thrown together, it's better not to have one at all.
3. SEO becomes a more integrated process. Most companies are already taking advantage of SEO practices to help improve their website rankings. However, we often find that companies are still making the mistake of using SEO as an afterthought to website design and marketing strategy. In 2011 we think that more companies will start to integrate their SEO strategy into their web marketing, from their websites design straight through to maintenance, usability and information architecture.

We'll have to wait a little bit to see if our opinions on these points hold true, but hopefully they give you something to think about as the New Year approaches!

Contagious Magazine, a marketing publication based on helping marketers, "find their way through the new marketing landsscape," recently released their "Most Contagious in 2010" presentation. The presentation walks viewers through the magazine's picks for the "most contagious" or popular marketing methods, channels and tactics for 2010.

So what's on the list?

1. Creating projects, not just campaigns.
2. Creating social movements.
3. Facebook.
4. Social / real-time activism.
5. Telling stories.
6. Creating viral content.
7. Social gaming.
8. New media devices.

This isn't the complete lists of top trends and technologies, but it does give you a good idea of the type of content that the report contains. Each point is proven with multiple examples and descriptions of the success and reasoning behind each of the trends. The presentation is definitely worth taking a look at (and so is the magazine if you're not subscribing to its RSS feed already).

This week's web marketing digest post has a presentation on the value of brand authenticity, an article on segmenting your social traffic in Google Analytics and and infographic on the evolution of blogging.

This post from SEOmoz details how users of Google Analytics can segment their social traffic to get a better understanding of their social media marketing metrics. The post walks readers through, in detail, how they can set up and track their social media traffic.

This presentation from Izzie Zahorian discusses the changing culture of branding, and how companies can be successful by being authentic and trustworthy.

This infographic on the evolution of bloggers, from Flowtown, a social media marketing organization, shows the evolution of bloggers from those who used blogging as a personal diary to those who blog for corporate interests.

Flowtown - Social Media Marketing Application

Have a great weekend everyone!

* INTERESTED IN WEB DESIGN TRENDS? REGISTER NOW FOR OUR WEBINAR ON DEC.8 : TOP WEBSITE DESIGN TRENDS FOR 2012 *

Every year new trends emerge within the web design industry and  staying on top of these trends and utilizing them in your own web designs can help to keep your website eye-catching and current. While having a beautiful web design is important, often these design trends have other benefits in terms of marketing. In today's post we've chosen out top website design trends for 2011 based on their popularity, their visual appeal and their ability to help your marketing initiatives.

So, without further ado, here are the trends:

HTML5 and CSS3. We're sure that some of you out there will debate whether this can be called a "trend" or a new emerging standard in web design, but the bottom line is that HTML5 and CSS3 are something to watch out for, and will only grow in popularity in 2011. If you don't know what they can do for you, then you may fall behind the curve. HTML5 and CSS3 make it simpler to build modern web elements into your web designs including smarter forms, beautiful typography and social tools like wikis and drag and drop functionality.

Using typography as a design element. Why is typography so important? Well it's one of the main ways that you communicate with your audience on your website. In the past getting rich typographic elements meant resorting to creating beautiful images that were neither search engine or website optimization friendly. Now, using tools like Typekit, web designers can find web-friendly fonts that can help you communicate with your audience in a visually appealing way, while still optimizing for search engine rankings.

 

Editorial-style layouts. Do you have a website with lots of frequently updated content? Then this type of website layout may be for you. By using a grid for the website's design layout, organizations can optimize the space on their website by leaving lots of areas for content. The more content that you have visible on your main pages, the more of it your visitors are going to find quickly and easily, not to mention the added benefit that fresh content has for your SEO strategy.



Minimalist layouts and color schemes. These are great for smaller organizations with less content for their website. Minimalist layouts take fewer resources to maintain and manage, they load faster (which is great for SEO) and can often be developed and implemented more quickly than larger, more complex designs. Many organizations are beginning to favor the clean, neat and easy-to-use navigation of these style layouts.



Large and interactive website headers. Making a good first impression for your website is essential for convincing your website visitors to stick around long enough to convert. Having a large website header where you feature important information like calls-to-action, latest promotions and offers can go along way towards convincing your visitors to convert.



Link-rich footers. This type of footer is an excellent example of website design supporting website usability. Having a website footer that is full of links makes it easier for your users to navigate while at the same time improving your SEO.


Mobile compatible websites. This is becoming less of a trend and more of a necessity for many organizations. So many internet users are choosing to access websites and online information through mobile devices that it's a very good idea for companies to make sure that they have a website that renders nicely for mobile.

Wider layouts. Make the most out of the space you have available to you! That's one of the biggest motivators behind having large website designs that are designed for larger screen resolutions, but still scale nicely for those (few) people who are still using smaller ones.



Full-image backgrounds. Do you want a website that immediately grabs your visitors' attention? Well having a beautiful image as your entire background is a good way to do that. These types of sites are growing in popularity, especially for organizations with portfolio-friendly work.We think sites like these can be especially effective for higher education institutions that often like to have image galleries showing their campus. Why not just make those images the background instead?


It's always important to remember when your designing or redesigning a website that your website is mean to support your overall business goals. That means that it needs to help you get found more easily, it needs to convince your visitors to convert and it needs to communicate your message effectively. No matter how beautiful your website is, if your design doesn't support those initiatives, then it's not worth the time or money it takes to create the design. Make sure that when you are thinking about a new website, you are using a firm that will design your website as part of your marketing strategy.

If you like this post, make sure that you take a look at our webinar on the same topic, "Top Website Design Trends for 2011."

One of the biggest aspects of a website, your content, can also be one of the hardest parts to maintain. Consistently creating compelling content is a difficult task, especially if your bloggers run out of inspiration for content that is relevant to your audience. Luckily, content creators have a tool at their finger tips to help them figure out what type of content they should be writing more frequently to make their jobs a little easier, and that tool is analytics.

Which metrics can help you determine what content you should write?

1. Page Views.  Which of your content has the most page views? The content on your website that has the highest number of page views is definitely the type of content you should be creating more of. One of the key aspects of compelling content creation is developing content that your users want to read.
2. Organic Search Referrers. Which keywords are your visitors using to find your content? Writing more content around the popular keywords that your audience is using is a good way to make sure that you have content ready when your target audience enters a search query. 
3. Number of backlinks. Which content that you’ve develop gets the most backlinks? Backlinks are an important part of your SEO strategy, and developing more content that your readers like to link to will make your audience happy and increase your search engine rankings. 
4. Number of comments per post. This is a metric that is used when creating blog content. By looking at the number of subscribers who have commented on a certain post you can get a better idea of which posts your readers find most useful. 
5. Conversion rate. How many visitors convert (complete an action on your website, for example, subscribe to your blog) after reading a certain piece of content? The content that converts is the content you want to make more of.

A recent study released by ReturnPath on email deliverability benchmarks for 2009 highlights the key issues that still plague organizations using email as a main marketing channel. ReturnPath, an email deliverability solutions provider, developed the study by reviewing data from 131 internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States, Canada Europe and Asia Pacific Territories in 2009.

Key highlights from the study show that:

• Deliverability remains an issue with non-delivery rates as high as 20% across the globe
• The second half of 2009 shows an inbox placement rate of just 80.1% for permission-based commercial email in the US and Canada
• Only 75.2% of email is delivered when being sent to business email addresses

The report goes on to give some reasons why deliverability is still a major issues for organizations that use email:

1. The bounce rate myth. According to ReturnPath, senders are generally given reports month after month that show a "delivered" metric that tends to be about 95%-98%, but in most cases, that metric is usually the bounce rate because the system they use is reporting the number of messages sent through the pipe and subtracting the number that return a hard bounce.
2. Revenue masks a lot of sins. ReturnPath says that email generates a lot of revenue and this tends to hide the amount of money lost due to deliverability failures.
3. Change is hard. Many senders are still choosing to stick to their old methods of email sending, rather than taking on new and emerging best practices to help their deliverability.

The main points of the report are here, but it has some great graphs which are worth taking a look at. The only critique we have of the report is the section regarding the "bounce rate myth". We agree with the rest of the challenges, we certainly see customer who use our email software having difficulty implementing and using best practices and having a strong idea of their real revenue from an email campaign. However, the "bounce rate myth" sounds like it's the issue with some systems, not all, and it seems unlikely that it is an global issue across the majority of email marketing platforms.

You can download your own copy of the report on ReturnPath's Website.

There have been several studies over the last few years showing the companies with corporate blogs, espeically small businesses, receive significantly more traffic online than those without one. Unfortunately, just having a corporate blog isn't enough to get you the traffic results you need or want. Too often organizations will build a blog after having heard that it will bring them more traffic but when it comes to turning it into something that improves website traffic and ROI they fall short. Why? Because they don't understand the fundamentals of a successful blog or the amount of content and resources needed to build and maintain a successful blog.

What can you do to help your corporate blog start generating more traffic?

1. Develop a publishing schedule. Before you get started blogging, you need to determine how often you're going to publish posts. Having a firm schedule and ensuring that you have the resources necessary to keep it up is an important part of ensuring that your blog has fresh,quality content on a frequent basis.
2. Put ownership in the right place. Blogging can't be an afterthought or a side-job for one of your already overworked employees. For you blog to be successful, it needs to have a dedicated person(s) who are able and willing to put the time and effort in to creating the content, finding graphics and researching posts to keep up with the publishing schedule you've already established.
3. Avoid blatant self-promotion. Your company should already have enough marketing strategies in place without co-opting your blog into your newest advertising platform. When done correctly your blog should be a repository of knowledge developed by your blogging team to help your target audience find the answers they need, when they need it.
4. Syndicate your content. Once you're posting regularly it's important that you are spreading your content to the largest audience pool that you can. The easiest and quickest way to do this is to synidcate your blog content through social media and the use of RSS Feeds.
5. Monitor comments, posts and feedback. Just like any other social media initiative, it's important that you're monitoring your blog for comments and feedback from your audience. One of the best ways to increase your blog subscribers and traffic is to start a loyal following based on genuine conversations you've had with your readers.
6. Measure. Setting and tracking web analytics for your blog is just as important as having them set up for any other page on your website. Tracking metrics like blog traffic and measuring which blog posts are the most popular can help you to optimize your blog in the future. I also suggest measuring the navigation paths of visitors who arrive at your blog to help you visualize where your readers go on your site after they've arrived at a post.

Don't forget when you're planning your corporate blog, that blogging for business is very different than personal blogging. When you're writing a blog for professional purposes you need to keep your audience's needs and desires front-of-mind. You need to make sure that your blog is written in both the language and tone that your audience finds most accessible and that the content your writing appeals to their wants. Remember, your blog isn't meant to be simply an advertising platform, but it is meant to help support your online goals and targets.

image by Kristina B on Flickr.

Usually on Fridays we write a post as part of our Web Marketing Digest series, filled with links to content that we think our readers will find both useful and informative. Well today we thought we’d do something a little different.

Recently I came across a post on Peter Shankman’s blog that he wrote after completing the Ironman in Cozumel (an astounding achievement). The post itself is very interesting, and at the bottom of the post Peter included an inspirational speech he’d listened to prior to running the race that had really helped him keep his energy and passion at a high level.

The video (included below) is of a sports coach speaking to his team before a game and you can see (and hear) that it definitely has the desired effect, of encouraging his team to feel invincible in the face of opposition. After watching the video, and reading the post, I thought about how I wished I saw more of this passion in marketing and sales. 


Everyone needs a little boost once and a while, a team-building, passion-filled reason to fight and work harder and be the best they can be. Are you motivating your sales and marketing teams? Motivation is a key aspect of success, and without it, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. So, having said that, why don't you think about trying something a little more inspiring to hopefully help renew your energy and get you ready for your next big promotion, strategy, sales call or client meeting. 


Have a great weekend everyone!

One of the most common goal marketers have when optimizing their websites is to increase their website's conversion rate. Every page on your website has a goal which supports your overall business objectives and encouraging your users to take actions which help you reach those goals helps your website's ROI. There are many ways that you can help to increase your conversion rate and one of the most overlooked ways is simply to optimize your web copy.

How can you write web copy that optimizes your conversion rates?  

1. Define your webpage’s objectives. If you don’t know what the goals of your page are, how can you successfully convince your readers to take the actions you want them to take to help you reach your objectives? Every page has a purpose. Defining that purpose for every page on your website before you start writing your copy is essential for getting your readers to do what you want them to do.
2. Highlight key points to get their attention. Writing catchy headlines that are easily distinguishable on your page is a good way to grab and hold your visitors' attention. Matching powerful words in a headline with your optimized web copy will help to draw your readers in.
3. Make your message clear and brief. Don’t confuse your readers! The simpler the better when it comes to web copy. Once you've defined your objectives you need to communicate your message with your readers as clearly and concisely as possible.
4. Focus on the benefits.  Your readers aren't going to take action based on what your products are capable of doing. They're going to take action because you've told them what buying your products will do for them. Providing the benefit of taking an action, gives your visitors a reason to act.
5. Make your copy actionable and urgent. Your job when writing web copy is to make sure that your reader knows what is expected of them on a given page. You want your visitors to understand almost immediately after landing on a page what you want them to do on that page.
6. Keep copy consistent across your entire website. You can’t just optimize your copy on one or two key pages on your website. This process needs to be a consistent theme across the entire website. If you don't and a visitor happens to land on a page that isn’t optimized you may miss out on converting them. 
7. Tell the truth. Don't lie to your audience. Stretching the truth to try and make your product sound better in your copy will not breed trust in your audience, and sours your prospects' experiences with your company from the get-go.
8. Write to and for your target audience. Using appropriate language, tone and writing style can help you communicate more effectively with your audience. If your readers don't relate to your copy, then they most likely won't convert on your offer.

Yesterday, Mashable drew their readers’ attention to DKNY’s (fashion designer Donna Karan’s brand) Facebook page where People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) were staging a protest against DKNY’s use of fur in their clothing products.

The protest, which involved several Facebook users changing their profile pictures to letters, spelled out DK BUNNY BUTCHER on DKNY’s Facebook wall.
The protest spurred an enormous outburst from the public. Within a few moments of the posts being published on the wall, hundreds of DKNY’s fans began posting their outrage and disgust that the brand was using animal fur in their clothing products. The protest, and subsequent posts/comments, took up the pages entire wall, and was made visible to the brand’s 205,000 followers.



In response, DKNY disabled their wall, disallowing users from posting (although they could still comment on the posts made prior to the wall being disabled). This tactic, rather than diffusing the situation as the brand hoped, did nothing but antagonize the protesters into insulting the brand and Donna Karan herself calling them animal abusers and cowards.

As of this morning, DKNY’s only response has been to completely delete the protest-related posts and to keep their wall disabled, opting to completely ignore the situation. This was quite a drastic social media protest, which we’re sure DKNY was in no way anticipating, but they still reacted exactly against everything we preach when it comes to protecting your brand identity online and in social media.



So—what could DKNY do wrong, and what could they have done to improve the situation?

1. They shouldn’t have disabled their wall. All that disabling their wall did was irritate the protesters and other commenters. Making it so that they were unable to post actually encouraged them to take their arguments to other forms of social media like Twitter (see the screenshot of their Twitter page below).
2. They should have addressed the issue. Leaving the situation for almost 24 hours without doing ANYTHING let the comments and posts get completely out of control. Trying to moderate the discussion, or at least showing that DKNY cared that their fans and followers were upset with the brand could certainly have helped mitigate the situation. 
3. They shouldn’t have pretended like it never happened. Pretending like the situation never happened hasn’t stopped people from talking about it (as proven by the multiple blog posts that were created within hours of the protest) and it hasn’t appeased their disgruntled fans either. All that ignoring the issue has done in fact is prove that DKNY are acting like the cowards the comments on their wall claimed that they were.