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Your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are strong. You get solid, relevant traffic to your website, your ads contain compelling calls-to-action (CTAs), and your click-through-rates (CTR) are respectable. Sounds like a recipe for success, right? But when your campaigns are as optimized as they can be, and your site's just not converting, it's time to take a look at your landing pages.
Sometimes, a well-tuned PPC campaign is just not enough. Visitors are great, obviously, but unless they're converting into paid customers, you're throwing money down the tubes. You have to ask yourself: is my online space good enough for them to want to stay on the site and buy from me? The best indicator is your bounce rate. It is high? If your bounce rate is over 35%, your landing pages can probably use some TLC. It’s a good idea to build specific landing pages to support specific ad groups within your PPC campaigns to extend their messages.
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There are many different types of emails that you can send to your clients; they don't always have to be sales-related. Why not set up an educational email nurture campaign?
One night last week I couldn't sleep, so I decided to catch up my my blog reading instead of tossing and turning.
Normally, when I come across an article that I really enjoy or think will be useful to me in the future, I save it to Evernote. However, this time I was using a different application on my iPhone than I normally do to read my blogs, so I had to email the article to Evernote, which I had never done before, instead of enjoy the auto-sync that usually occurs.
Do you struggle with putting together a blog? Unsure about what to do with the space besides announcing company news? You may need to put together a strategy to focus your content. Here are some easy ways to break down your blogging approach:
1. Who are you trying to talk to?
First, it’s ideal to identify your target segments. Is there a particular target segment you want to attract more of? Think about them, then ask yourself:
How social is your content? In other words, aside from visitors showing up to your blog, how often do they click “Like,” Tweet it, add to their bookmarks? Google wants to know. This past June they added Social Interaction metrics to Google Analytics. Why?
The one big question businesses have about the social side of web marketing pertains to reliable metrics, which Google is attempting to do by quantifying the activity of socially engaged users on your site. Before, you could evaluate this through the events tracking function. The problem, though, was that it lacked consistency, making it difficult rate performance with any real accuracy.
Social Interaction metrics changes that, though, with a consolidated linking of social media performance, which is tracked through the plugins on your site. To further standardize this process, Google partnered with Delicious, Digg, Gigya, Reddit, and several others, as well as with social sharing aggregators AddThis and ShareThis to align themselves for even greater tracking consistency.
When undertaking a new web project, it's abundantly obvious when a professional web designer has been hired (versus your second cousin who is relying on the HTML training he got in high school .. 10 years ago). And while you may be the first to admit you don't have the skills or knowledge to re-design your website all by yourself, you may be a bit too proud to admit you don't have the capabilities to handle your website's copywriting. You speak English after all, right? Why wouldn't you be qualified?
With Christmas just around the corner, you're probably thinking of all the wonderful presents that you'll be unwrapping shortly.
Well, don't forget about your website! What gifts can you give to your website to spruce it up for the holiday season and beyond?
Making sure your website content is updated and fresh is important to keep your rank up in the search engines. Also, by expanding your content and creating new pages (like when you blog), your site is expanding, which search engines LOVE.
According to reported sales figures so far for the 2011 holiday season, retailers have cashed in. Online sales are the highest they’ve ever been for the months October through December. Bloomberg reported that Black Friday sales increased 6.6 percent to the largest amount ever as U.S. consumers shrugged off 9 percent unemployment rates and went shopping anyway. Consumers spent $11.4 billion on Black Friday alone.
We’re in the middle of holiday shopping season. The best of the best e-commerce retailers have tailored their websites to visually appeal to holiday shoppers, but they're really designed for holiday conversions. Here are a few that are doing it really well this year:
Congratulations! For months or maybe even years, you and your team have wanted to tackle some type of online marketing or web design/development project that would enhance your company's lead generation and brand awareness - and now, you've finally decided to do it!
The first step that virtually every marketing team, sales team or one-person-show considers is "who can we talk to in order to get our goals completed?" While having help outside of your company for web development, design, SEO, PPC, etc. is important, it's just as important to look internally for how you want your project to be structured, who will be leading it and what roles everyone will play. An unorganized team can extend project timelines, which can mean lost opportunities.
You know you should put yourself out there, that you might find true happiness and develop positive relationships, but you just don't feel motivated or prepared. No, we're not talking about dating; we're talking about an equally scary monster: social media.
Sure, setting up a personal Facebook account and sharing funny pictures of your dog is easy. But what about your business? How do you deal with all the requests, the occasional negative comments, all the LOLs and OMGs and other bad social media grammar? And staying connected 24/7? It's not like you're checking into Twitter and Facebook between your last college course for the day and the keg party at your friend's house; you have a more-than-full-time job, a business that relies on you. Is social media really a priority?
Yes. Yes, it really, really is.