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Inbound marketing is an effective way to drive visitors to your website by:

• Providing content that is of interest to your ideal client
• Optimized around the way they search for a solution
• Delivered via social media channels.

Inbound marketing attracts your ideal client to you

Implementing an inbound marketing plan can have a major effect on the growth of your small business but it can also be a drain on an already overwhelmed small business owner.

To take advantage of inbound marketing without wasting time and effort, you need to have a solid understanding of:

• Your ideal client
• What makes your business different from the competition
• How you uniquely solve a problem or fulfill a need
• How to price and package your offerings to provide the best value

Then you can choose the right inbound marketing activities that will achieve your marketing goals.

Your 5 Steps to Inbound Marketing Success

1. Ensure your website is ready for inbound traffic

• Determine if you need a website update
• Transition to a responsive WordPress theme
• Reorganize and refresh your content
• Optimize for your top keyword phrases
• Incorporate Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to gain intelligence

Consult with an inbound marketing resource to understand what features, landing pages and calls to action your website needs to support your marketing efforts.

2. Create great content

Providing the content your audience wants and needs increases your visibility and makes you a credible expert. First you need to understand what your ideal client is looking for.

• If they are they trying to solve a problem, can you create content that offers tips, tricks and advice in your blog or as an eBook?
• If they are interested in learning new things, can you offer self study courses, webinars or podcasts that help educate them on this topic?

Then create a plan for content creation:

• Determine what type of content you need to provide
• Decide how often you will create original content and in what media (text, video, audio, infographic, presentation, eBook)
• Schedule time to write
• Optimize content using SEO best practices
• Post to your blog and selected social sites
• Make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your blog via email or RSS

If you focus your content on the topics that will interest your target audience, your content will be naturally optimized. Do take advantage of the WordPress SEO plugin for your blog to ensure stronger optimization.

Not a great writer? Search Elance for bloggers who are familiar with your topic and can do the writing. Or have someone interview and record your conversation and then transcribe it into a blog post. All you have to do is edit, optimize, add an image and publish.

3. Curate content

Implementing a strategy for curating content allows you to provide a service by organizing content into a format that enables them to quickly scan. This shows that you understand what is interesting and valuable to your audience, increasing your credibility and positioning you as a hub of information.

• Subscribe to blogs that provide content that would benefit your target
• Schedule time each day that works to scan, skim and share content
• Search for specific topics that are of interest to find new resources for quality content
• Use curated content to write a meaningful blog post around a specific topic
• Automate sharing content via Buffer or Hootsuite to distribute them to your selected social sites at opportune times

Part of this activity can be outsourced to a virtual assistant or handled by your office manager. Let them scour the Internet for useful content and organize it for easy consumption. Now you can take a few minutes to select and share the right content with your audience.

4. Be Social

This is where you engage with your audience and develop relationships. Before people will do business with you, they need to get to know, like and trust you.

• Spend time on your most important social sites
• Provide interesting content (manually or automated)
• Ask questions of your audience
• Respond to comment or questions from followers
• Review, find and follow interesting people

You are the only one who can project your personality into your social media activity. You can have someone that monitors the social sites for you but you should not let them impersonate you on your profiles. Be authentic. Be yourself.

5. Build your in-house email list

The point of inbound marketing is to drive visitors to your website where you can educate, capture leads and convert them into customers. Once you have their permission, continue to provide valuable content that is helpful to them. Building relationships with those who give you their valuable contact information is the first priority.

• Create a valuable offer
• Make your signup form easy to find and complete
• Develop a plan for staying in touch with those on your list

Create your inbound marketing system

Developing your system can include activities that are outsourced so you can reduce your time and focus on running your business. Writing, curating and optimizing content can be done by someone else as long as you stay involved. Just remember that you do need to be present to build relationships and interact with people who are interested in your services.

How do you simplify your inbound marketing activities?

Related posts:

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Content Strategy: Helping Your Small Business Blog Stay Visible

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/inbound-marketing-5-steps-to-a-winning-strategy/

A lot of great advice has been written about the new search engine optimization (SEO) rules due to the Panda and Penguin releases of Google’s algorithm. In many cases, what previously worked may no longer and some of the practices can damage the ranking of your website. If you are implementing an inbound marketing strategy, make sure you are familiar with the new, up-to-date SEO best practices and stay away from the older techniques, which will be coming in my next post, that could get your website penalized.

SEO Best Practices

• Go responsive – Google recommends that you use a responsive design for your website and blog because it serves the same URL for a piece of content to all users regardless of the device they are on. This saves resources for your website and for Google’s crawlers.  A responsive design makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content while also helping Google’s algorithms assign the most relevant indexing properties for the content.
• Create quality content – SEO always includes the statement “create quality content”. Great, but what is quality content? It’s content that educates and entertains your audience, adds value to your website and encourages visitors to share it with others. Quality content is determined by intimately knowing your target audience and providing content that is useful to them in some way. And yes, quality content also means grammatically correct with no typos. But one thing is for certain – creating quality content is not an option. It is the marketing fuel that accelerates your visibility, determines your reputation, trust and authority and drives more search engine traffic.
• Build online authority – Google Authorship will become a powerful ranking metric and may be more important in how well your content ranks than other on-page SEO techniques (although they are still important as well). Google Authorship displays your Google+ profile picture and links to your profile on posts you have written, enabling Google to better verify the ownership and authenticity of the content. Associating your profile with content you’ve written increases trust in the link, while building credibility in you as an author and increasing click through rates. If you search for “Facebook Page Tagging”, you will get similar results to those shown below. The result with the picture will generate more clicks than the post without because the of the human association with the content.



Google Authorship Search Results

• Stick with sensible on-page optimization – Although the goal is to write content targeted at the human, there are some specific things you can do to help the search engines understand how to better index each page of your site by implementing on-page optimization. Spend time on the SEO title and description of each page and post of your website. This is what shows up in the search engine results as you see above. The title will catch the searcher’s attention first and should contain the main keyword phrase. The description should be a concise, keyword rich statement and call to action to encourage the reader to click through to your website. Adding your keywords naturally to your writing, linking to other quality content, adding alt and title tags to your images and formatting your content for easy reading will add to the quality of your content.
• Increase your social activity – Google is now using social signals to help determine search engine rankings for content. Writing and optimizing content for your blog is no longer enough to gain visibility in the top of the search results. Now it is important to make it easy for people to share your content via social networks. Add social sharing buttons on content you want shared, including your images. Check out Foobox – a responsive image lightbox that adds social sharing buttons to your images.

In many ways, these changes to how search engines index and rank web pages is a benefit to most small business owners. Optimizing your content is now a more common sense exercise than one of how to game the system. The next time you get a sales call from an SEO company that guarantees top ranking in Google, make sure to ask if they implement these five SEO best practices.

What SEO best practices are you now implementing and have I left any off the list?

Related posts:

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/seo-best-practices/

SEO Worst Practices

In my last post on SEO best practices, we covered the SEO techniques that can increase visibility in the search engine results. Now we will take a look at SEO worst practices that must be avoided if you don’t want to end up in the Google penalty box.

What exactly are the Google Panda and Penguin algorithm releases?

Google continues to make changes to its algorithm to fight search spam and eliminate websites that taint the search engine results. The Panda and Penguin releases targeted specific areas:

• Panda – low quality, thin content sites such as content farms
• Penguin – search spam, penalizing sites with unnatural links created specifically to influence the search engines

Google is on a mission to offer the best search experience as possible and will continue to enhance their algorithm to make it nearly impossible to game the system.

SEO worst practices that will hurt your website

The following are areas of SEO that are out-dated and in fact, are more likely to hurt the visibility of your website.

• Lack of unique, quality content – Pages with little to no real content or made up primarily of links can be the kiss of death for your website. Content needs to be both unique – i.e. authentically yours – and it must provide quality information to the visitor. Copying someone’s quality content is not unique. Writing your own content is unique but not necessarily of high quality. You need to combine both. Spend time creating content that gets read. Don’t just create content for the sake of posting regularly. You benefit more from providing a few, high quality authentic pieces of content each month.
• Duplicate content – There are many ways duplicate content can be created, not all of it due to SEO worst practices. Duplicate content is created when you have WordPress date, category, author or tag archives and you allow the search engine to index them. Search engines are trying to serve original, authoritative content and having many pages on your site with the same content, although unintentional, can cause your site to lose rank. Install and use the WordPress SEO plugin and set the archives to “no-index, follow”, telling the search engines to not index the archives but follow any links.
• Over optimization – One of the areas that is a warning signal to the search engines is using your keywords too frequently and unnaturally. Write for your human audience and use your keywords in your content where it makes sense. If you create links back to your site, make sure your anchor text is created naturally as well. For example, don’t have all your inbound links look like you forced your keywords into the anchor text.
• Keyword stuffing – At one time, keyword stuffing was reserved for the meta keyword tag. Most search engines no longer use the meta keyword tags, but that didn’t stop the abuse. Keyword stuffing moved into the title tags, image alt text, heading tags, anchor text and in the content as well. When you are optimizing your page, use your one focus keyword in the header, title, image alt tag, links and content naturally so that it reads clearly for the human.
• Low quality links pointing to your site – Link popularity is still used by the search engines as a measure of the trustworthiness of a site based on whether these inbound links are coming from other authoritative and trustworthy websites. Buying links is not an option as they are usually made up of low quality directories and article sites, comment spam or link farms.
• Hidden text – This technique was used to add content to a web page specifically for the search engines and invisible to the human reader. Tricks used include putting text in the same color as the background, using CSS to hide the content or setting the pixel size of the font so small that it is unreadable. But just because the human can’t see the text, doesn’t mean the search engines don’t realize that you are trying to fool them. Don’t do it!
• Doorway pages – Ever land on a website that has many links at the bottom of the page with anchor text such as “Electrician Boston MA”, the only difference being the town/city name? SEO companies would create hundreds of pages of duplicate content but change the URL, title and heading to include that one keyword phrase, hoping that these pages will rank and be found by those searching for service in that city or town. And guess what, this poor SEO tactic actually worked for a period of time and in some cases, still does. But it won’t for long and just having them on your site will subject you to issues in the future, including duplicate content. Another example of a doorway page is when exact match domains are purchased (i.e. ElectricianYourTownMA.com) and used for these one-page microsites that effectively steer your visitor back to your main site.
• Exact match domains – Purchasing an exact match domain for the purpose of ranking for that keyword (like the ElectricianYourTownMA.com above) will not help your cause if it is only hosting a website with bad content. I know many companies that bought exact match domains to create one-page websites that basically pointed to their main site, only to be disappointed that this technique was no longer effective. This doesn’t mean having your main keyword in your real domain will hurt you, and in fact will help somewhat, but creating sites using these domains just to redirect people to your main site will not gain you any visibility.

If you suspect that your site has some of these techniques implemented either through an SEO firm or your own work, review your site and remove them now.

Getting and Staying Found

With the constant change in the search engine algorithms, trying to chase the latest trend in SEO is a losing battle. The best thing you can do for your business is to build your expert reputation and authority through the content you write.

• Understand what your target audience needs by looking at what keywords were used to search and find your site
• Write content to address the challenges faced by your target market focusing on these keywords
• Promote your content through social sites to gain visibility and acquire legitimate back links

Build a web presence that are valuable to your human visitors, have compelling content, and are easy to navigate both for the human and the search engine crawlers. If you keep this in mind, you will remain in the game and out of the penalty box.

Related posts:

SEO Best Practices – 5 Tips to Get You Noticed

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“Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/seo-worst-practices/

You know how important your website is to your inbound marketing strategy. As the central focal point of your online marketing, your website needs to be up 24×7. You also know that building your website in WordPress gives you the ability to manage and maintain the website yourself. But do you have a WordPress backup strategy in place? And how will you recover all the work you’ve put into building your online web presence so you don’t lose visibility for your business in the event of a website meltdown?

WordPress Backup Options

Depending on your skill level, there are several options from which to choose.

• Simple backup of content and images
• Automated backup using a WordPress plugin
• Manual database backup – most of us probably won’t select this method but if you have an IT person who is database savvy, this may be the option they choose.

In addition, you should also have a file transfer program such as Ipswitch WS_FTP or Filezilla. Moving files between your desktop and the hosted server will make moving the backup files easy. WordPress provides instructions for using Filezilla but in general, FTP clients work pretty much the same way.

Simple WordPress Backup

Although this works, it will take you longer to recover depending on the size of your website. If your site is relatively young, this method will help you recover easily. If you have been blogging for a while, consider implementing the automated strategy below in addition to keeping regular backups of these files.

• Content (posts/pages/custom post types)
• Theme settings if using a premium theme that provides a .json file (WooThemes and Genesis provide them)
• Plugin settings if available
• Uploads into the media library
• Theme files
• Plugin directory so you can just transfer the directory up to your host and then activate them all at once.
• .htaccess and robot.txt
• wp-config.php file. The wp-config.php file, located in your top-level directory on the web server, contains the login information to the database. If something corrupts the wp-config.php file, your website is inaccessible.

Create a backup folder on your computer to put all of your backup files into one location for easy access. The first three above (content, theme and plugin settings) will be downloaded via the WordPress dashboard. The other files need to be moved using FTP.

To backup your WordPress content, go to Tools in the WordPress dashboard and click on export. Notice that your content backup will also include custom post types if you use any plugins that create them.

WordPress Content Export

Make your selection and click on the “download export file” button and save the XML file to your backup directory.

One thing to note is the size of your content export. Depending on your hosting provider, you will only be able to import your content via the WordPress import feature if your XML file is less than the upload size restriction placed on your media library. If you host at Bluehost.com, they give you a 10MB upload limit therefore, your XML file needs to be less than 10MB. If this is not the case, you can export your content in pieces. For example, export pages as a separate XML file. Export your posts by year. Then every time you publish a new blog post, you should take an export of all posts since the beginning of the year. This way if you do need to rebuild your site, you can get your pages up quickly and then work on recovering your posts.

Some plugins also provide a backup capability, such as Fast Secure Contact Forms. Take a backup and store them along with your content, images and plugins.

Fast Secure Contact Form Backup Restore Feature

Automated Backup using a WordPress Plugin

The more practical way to develop a WordPress backup and restore strategy is to use a plugin. There are several available that you can choose from but depending on your skill level, some plugins may be easier for you to set up and run. There are both premium and free plugins that do the job. And some of the plugins will take advantage of cloud storage such as Amazon S3, Dropbox or Google Drive.

The plugin I have chosen is UpdraftPlus Backup. There is a free and premium version but the free version is full featured and provides all the backup and restore features you need to ensure you can recover. Check out their add-ons for those things you may need, such as premium support, subfolders in Dropbox or fix the time that a backup starts.

UpdraftPlus simplifies backup and restore as you have one settings panel with a few options. Backup and restore is done with a single click. The information panel, once you have done an initial backup, will show what is happening and when you last had a backup done.

UpdraftPlus Information Panel

You can separate out backups for the database and the files (those under wp-content) and schedule them at different times. You can pick the interval that is right for your site depending on how frequently you blog or change your page content.

UpdraftPlus Configuration

You can choose to backup into the cloud using Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and email. Or you can do as I did and simply let the plugin create the backup files into its own directory called /wp-content/updraft/ and use FTP to keep a copy locally on your hard drive in case you need access to them and your host is unavailable.

UpdraftPlus Cloud Selection

Keeping a backup of your WordPress website is crucial to maintaining a powerful web presence. If you lose your website and do not get it up and running within a few hours, your visibility may take a hit. Since you never know when the Googlebot will come by to index your site, you don’t want to risk not being available when it does.

What is your WordPress backup strategy and what plugin do you use?

Related posts:

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/wordpress-backup-strategy/

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Ensure your content marketing activities support mobile

We love our smartphones and tablets. Usage of both devices is growing rapidly with people using their mobile devices more than a laptop. Given the fact that people are finding and consuming content on tablets and smartphones, our inbound marketing tactics, specifically content marketing and search engine optimization, must support those devices seamlessly.

According to 2012 research by Keynote Competitive Research on Mobile User Preferences, Habits, and Expectations, the top three activities for:

• Smartphones – accessing local information (88%), searching for information (82%) and participating in social media/networking sites (76%)
• Tablets – reading news and entertainment (79%), searching for information (77%) and watching videos (76%)

Our impatience shows:

• 60% of tablet users and 44% of smartphone users expect a webpage to load in less than 3 seconds
• 46% are unlikely to return to a website if it didn’t work properly the first time

Our frustration shows:

• Web pages are slow to load
• Websites not optimized for smartphones
• We experience loading errors or the page doesn’t open
• Navigation is difficult to use
• Content is difficult to read

When it comes to reading email, the statistics are obvious. One of the key mobile activities for most people I know is reading and responding to their email.

Content Marketing for Mobile Devices

While most of our small businesses may not engage in mobile advertising, we can implement content marketing activities that support mobile users along with those using a web browser. Consider the following activities to ensure mobile users can easily find, consume and read your content.

Convert your website to WordPress using a responsive theme

Hopefully your website is already using WordPress as a content management system, but if not, your first initiative needs to ready the hub of your online presence for mobile users. A responsive theme, recommended by Google, turns your entire website, including your landing pages, into a mobile oasis for your marketing campaigns. Now your blog is accessible across all devices, ensuring your primary content marketing activity is easily consumed. There are many free and premium WordPress themes from which to choose. My recommendations based on experience are:

• Catch Box – A free, responsive WordPress theme that can easily be customized using a child theme. As described on the WordPress.org website, “Catch Box is simple, lightweight, box shaped, and adaptable WordPress Theme for bloggers and professionals. It is based on HTML5, CSS3 and Responsive Web Design to view in various devices”. I originally used this theme to update my website and I really liked the way it responds to various devices.
• Canvas – WooThemes offers premium themes but their prices are incredibly reasonable. I selected one theme for a project I am working on and when I bought the developer license with a lifetime support contract, I received 3 bonus themes. I also bought their responsive WooThemes WooSlider plugin to use for recent posts. Canvas has a lot of customization available through the WordPress dashboard, but you can also create a child theme and do a lot more.

Responsive themes are a huge benefit to small businesses as they reduce the cost of your web presence by allowing you to have one website that supports both browser and mobile users.

Review your SEO to Incorporate Mobile SEO Best Practices

If you have already optimized your website for increased visibility, you should be in good shape for mobile search. Mobile SEO has best practices that ensure those using touch screens can search and find your business easily. Responsive design, short keyword phrases and getting listed on sites mobile users frequent are the top activities for mobile SEO. The key is to be where mobile users search and that your web presence is easily accessible.

Ensure your email marketing service supports mobile

Those who have already opted into your email list may already be reading your eNewsletter or blog posts on their mobile device. Make sure you review your email on your mobile devices when you are testing the campaign to ensure it works as expected. Also, investigate how your email service provide supports mobile devices.

MailChimp now offers a new template editor that allows you to preview your email campaign in both normal and mobile modes. The screenshot below shows what your email looks like across both devices. You can also rotate the mobile view to see it in landscape mode.

Mobile Email Support via MailChimp

Given the importance of your content marketing activities, be creative on where and how you get people to opt-in to your list so you can provide them with the content they seek. Add your signup form to your Facebook Page. Use creative offers offline to encourage signups online.

Consider using QR Codes

Most smartphone users have downloaded a QR/Barcode scanning application and although use is minimal, if you have a local business, you can get creative and take advantage of this technology.  The use of QR codes are an inexpensive way to create offers and encourage people to sign up for your email list. There are several free QR-code generators that you can use to try out this technology.

Mobile is another marketing channel, not just a new technology

Supporting mobile is not complex. Once you have updated your website to a responsive theme, your tactics align with what you already do for inbound marketing in general. The good news is mobile support is being added to all of your marketing tools, so you don’t need to worry about learning a new technology.

Keep mobile support in mind whenever you consider new marketing campaigns and you will be in a better position than your competitors.

How are you incorporating mobile marketing into your marketing plan?

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Related posts:

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/content-marketing-for-mobile-devices/