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Benefits of Blogging as Part of Your Inbound Mix

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 22:22:57 +0000

Everything You Need to Sell Your Boss on Business Blogging

Posted by Paul Rios

Article Courtesy of: HubSpot

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

You’re an inbound marketing convert. You believe in the importance of creating relevant and interesting content for your prospects to consume. You’ve been reading up on search engine optimization, and have started applying the best practices to your website. You even opened up a company Facebook page and Twitter account, though your venture into Google+ is still tenuous.

All of that has been pretty easy to integrate into your day to day marketing responsibilities, but there’s one thing you really want to make more time for: blogging.

There’s just one problem. Writing blog content on a regular basis requires time that you just don’t have. To get the time, you’ll have to lobby your boss for more resources, and that means convincing your boss that blogging is actually worth your time, your effort, and his money. So how do you go about doing that? This blog post (how meta is that?) will give you the facts, research, and know-how to explain the benefits of business blogging to a tentative boss and debunk many of the common myths inbound marketing professionals are frequently faced with during these difficult conversations.

Is blogging really effective? What results will we see?

Nothing like some cold, hard data to prove a point. How does this sound?

The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.
HubSpot’s 2011 ROI Study shows that 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging.
57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
The Nielsen Company shows that US internet users spend 3X more time on blogs and social networks than in email.
Inbound marketing, of which blogging is a crucial part, costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing.

Bet you got your boss’ attention now, eh? You can find more statistics to impress your boss and make your point in this compilation of 100 interesting inbound marketing data points.

But won’t blogging open us up for negative comments?

Whenever you put anything out on the internet, you open yourself up to negative comments. You can’t let that stop you from creating a meaningful internet presence. That being said, blog comments are not only far less frequent than they were even just a few years ago, but the importance with which they are regarded has also decreased. If you’re operating your business on the up and up and your content is honest and genuine, you have little to fear in terms of commenter backlash.

And just as with any reputation management issue you’re confronted with in business, if you face it head on and operate as a compassionate human being instead of a faceless corporation, you have the opportunity to turn those naysayers into your biggest fans.

This sounds like a huge time investment. Who is going to write it all?

To determine how much time you’ll need to dedicate to your blog, you have to take a look at the competition. Are your organic competitors blogging twice a week? Multiple times a day? Not at all? To outperform them with your inbound marketing, you need to also outperform them with blogging.

Once you’ve determined the frequency, you’ll know how much support you need. Can you handle this yourself? Or do you need a new hire dedicated exclusively to blogging? Many organizations, including HubSpot, require specific employees to contribute a minimum number of blog posts a month. This solution helps feed your blog with quality content, provides more than one voice for a valuable mix of perspectives, and doesn’t put undue burden on any one member of your organization.

Does anyone here even know how to blog?

Blogging doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but the barrier to entry is very low. Think of it this way. If you’re in sales, you can answer questions about your products and services, right? If you’re in marketing, you can write copy that positions your company correctly, right?

If you’re a C-level exec, you sure didn’t get to that position without knowing a thing or two about your industry, right? You have the knowledge you need to blog, you just need to learn the best practices that make up a great blog post. Luckily, those best practices are not only simple, but we’ve already written them all down for you.

The best blogs aren’t long, complex, and full of stuffy language and industry jargon. They’re succinct, specific, and engaging. As long as your topic is helpful, you can write just like you talk — and your prospects will love it. Oh, we also came up with 100 content ideas to make it even easier for you to get started.

Will this help with our SEO and social media presence?

Yes, yes, yes. Not only is blogging one of the most important means of achieving SEO greatness, it will be extremely difficult to see consistent and meaningful SEO improvements without blogging. One of the most important ways a search engine knows to return your website in search results is based on the quality of your content and the frequency at which you publish it.

Blogging is a simple, low-cost solution to this. Blogging also makes it far more likely that your content will be shared on social media networks and receive inbound links from other websites, two more crucial aspects that boost your SEO street cred.

Speaking of social media, you can (and should) add social media share and follow buttons to every blog post you write. If you don’t know how to create these buttons, here’s a cheat sheet that will tell you everything you need to know. Your blog content will not only help you get more followers on your social media networks, but your social media networks will help you get more blog readers. Blogging and social media are two peas in a pod; as your reach expands on one, so it does on the other.

Blogs: Good for Automotive & Good for Business

admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:31:51 +0000

Dealers, Why Aren’t You Blogging?

4 Reasons to Create and Leverage a Dealer Blog

Posted by Justin Braun
Article Courtesy of: Automotive Digital Marketing

“Blogging is the most underutilized yet powerful marketing force that dealers have at their disposal.”

That’s what automotive thought-leader Ralph Paglia said in a recent interview.

No matter if you love Ralph and his advice or think he’s ‘full of it,’ studies indicate that he is absolutely right on this matter.

According to data analyses by HubSpot, a leading Inbound Marketing company, small businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors, 102% more Twitter followers, and 126% higher lead growth than non-blogging businesses.

A successful blog is one that is updated on a regular basis and discusses topics of interest to your current and potential customers (but we’ll get more into best practices at a later time). Naturally, a blog’s ROI will vary from dealership to dealership but there are several clear benefits to blogging that should not be ignored.

4 Reasons to Create and Leverage a Dealer Blog

1) Tell your story and demonstrate industry knowledge

Information has empowered consumers to educate themselves about what product to buy, how much to pay, and where to shop. Consumers do the majority of their purchasing research online and, moreover, consumers read blogs to find the answers to their questions.

Why not provide them with that information yourself?

Help the consumer make an educated buying decision through your writing and you will find them more inclined to do business with you because you have established yourself and your company as reputable, transparent and knowledgeable.

Additionally, consumers will be more inclined to do business with you if they can form an emotional connection with your dealership. To do this, you need to tell your story.

“Dealers have to find the compelling stories that will make people want to do business with their dealership,” says Ralph. “Every dealership has something very interesting or compelling about them that would make great fodder for a blog.”

2) Higher Google Ranking (SEO Opportunity)

I think HubSpot said it best in its Inbound Marketing University white paper How to Blog Effectively for Business:

“Search engines favor fresh over old content. Old content might no longer be accurate or relevant to the searches. Fresh content, in contrast, signals to search engines that the information is up-to-date and more relevant to searchers’ needs. As a result, blogs, a generator of fresh content, help with search engine optimization, which in turn drives site traffic and promotes a business.”

A regularly updated blog ranks highly on Google. Additionally, dealers that blog can optimize their posts for commonly-searched keywords specific to their brand, vehicles, or frequently asked questions so that their dealership is easy found during the consumer research process.

Blogging is a practice that doesn’t cost a lot of money and has the potential to result in a continuous payout in the form of increased traffic, engagement and lead-generation.

3) Crisis management and humanizing your brand

Blogging can put a face and a voice to your dealership, communicating the subtle aspects of your brand’s personality. Blogs can help consumers get a sense of how you do business and how your employees treat customers. By being less “corporate” than your website, blogs can add the personal touch of 1-1 customer service and relationship-building to your digital showroom, similar to the benefits of live chat.

Furthermore, blogs can help manage a crisis and prevent damage by online negative word-of-mouth. To survive any online reputation crisis, it is essential to embrace Coca Cola’s motto of“our consumers control our brand.” Dealers can use their blog as a forum for customers to share their issues and for you to address them in a personal and transparent manner.

4) Involve potential and current customers in your brand’s discussion

Social Media has empowered consumers to share product and brand insights with their peers, transforming them into brand advocates and authorities. If you give readers of your blog the information they seek end encourage interaction, you will be able to develop and nurture a relationship with them early on in the sales process. The opening up additional channels of communication between your dealership and its customers is always a good idea.

According to HubSpot, “Folks who comment on your blog may be sales leads, or they may just challenge or support your views.

Either way, comments beget comments, and you will soon be at the center of an industry-relevant dialogue with customers and partners.”

This dialogue is the core benefit of the practice of blogging and is what drives traffic to your site and highly qualified leads to your showroom.

Media Crush Takeaway:

It’s very simple. This informative article applies to everyone.

Plug in the category of your business and start blogging!

Media Crush has set up and launched scores of blogs on behalf of customers, for both large and small businesses.

Contact us for more information.

Social Traffic without SEO?

admin — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:01:24 +0000

Getting Social Traffic on the SERPs Without SEO

Article Courtesy of: Simon Heseltine

It’s coming up on a year since Matt Cutts announced that social signals are absolutely used as ranking factors for your content, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about here.

I’m going to talk about other ways that social can drive organic traffic to your site outside of links being retweeted or publicly shared by influencers.

Personalization

If you perform a search on Google for SEO, you’ll see something similar to the image below (I stripped out the paid ads). Note the position of the various results, especially the third result with is for a completely different definition of SEO.

Now what if I’m logged into Google? What will I see? Well, for me, it looked like this (again with the paid ads removed).

It looks a bit different. Suddenly there are people that I’m connected to with my Google account showing up under results they’ve indicated that they like, through some form of sharing.

The first two results are the same, but Aaron Wall’s site SEOBook.com, which was sitting in fifth when I wasn’t logged in, is now third for me. In fourth I now see the SEOmoz.org home page. When I wasn’t logged in, there were articles from SEOmoz in 9th and 14th, but their home page wasn’t showing until 21st position, way down the SERPs. Thanks to Keri there’s a much higher chance that I would click on it with it being 17 places higher than it normally ranks.

Everything else not shared by my network remains in the same order, although pushed down one or two spots based on their original position. So here social sharing within my group of contacts has changed my view of the SERPs and potentially my click behavior.

The same is also true of Bing. I did the below search for “NFL Picks” which shows the results from the third text link down.

Then I logged into Facebook and did the same search, and you can see the results aren’t too different, apart from the “Liked by your Facebook Friends” section, which suddenly surfaces a new video, a video that, when logged out, I don’t see surfacing in the top 100 results. Once again, my social network has personalized my version of the SERPs to give some content a greater chance of being clicked on that it generally has.

Even where the search results haven’t changes, I’m seeing the smiling faces of my Facebook friends sitting next to results that they’ve ‘liked’. If these people in my social circle are people that I trust, then the likelihood that I’ll click on that content rather than on the ‘unliked’ content ranking above them increase.

Real Time Results

When Google had their Twitter deal (prior to discontinuing it in July of this year) they would show a scrolling list of results in the SERPs. If users saw something they liked, they could click on a link within a particular tweet and open up a new page.

While Google doesn’t have real time search in their results, they have said that it will be returning at some point soon, with Google Plus as an integral part.

Bing currently displays their social results on a their social page but it would be hard to say that they’re “real time.”

That said, around the time of the Emmys, I saw Bing conducting a test of a Twitter widget. This widget showed up on the right side of the SERPs, with a list of results scrolling upwards.

This widget was good because it was less obtrusive than breaking the SERPs up with a scrolling list in the middle, and that it also displayed the domain of the shortened links. So no worrying about where the t.co was going to take you. All in all, I found it to be a good solution for displaying real time Twitter results, and therefore a good potential source of clicks on a SERP where your content may not be ranking organically.

Now, I’ve not seen this widget again since that weekend, and I don’t know whether it’s something they’re still testing, but it shows that both major search engines are trying to come to terms with the best ways to show social results in search results.

2011 Ranking Factors Guide

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:07:09 +0000

SEOMoz has just published their 2011 Ranking Factors Guide, which is the essential reference for search marketers to learn about the new or changing factors shaping their world. While the entire report is very large, I’ve pulled out some of the most important details to our readers, based on the questions and discussions that I see on a daily basis from HubSpot customers and fans. If you’re interested in reading more of the report or looking at their raw data, you can find it on SEOMoz’s site here. The overview page alone contains some great insights from a survey of some of the top search engine optimization experts today.

Trend Number One: Exact-Match Keyword Domains Going Away

SEOMoz calls out something specifically that has been a particular thorn in the side of many marketers: Exact-match keyword domain names. If you’ve never heard that term before, that means domain names that match the exact keyword phrase they want to rank for, such as “www.boston-barber-shop.com” for the phrase “Boston Barber Shop”. These used to be an incredibly powerful way to rank for specific keywords, but their value is dropping quickly. Last year, exact-match .com domains had a .38 correlation with higher rankings, which is very strong. This year, they are down to .22 correlation, and the feedback from individual optimizers is much more negative. Lindsay Wassell provided the comment, “Exact match domains, while still highly effective today are beginning to wane in power.” There is still some value to that exact-match domain that you might be using, but the value given by that is beginning to shrink and it will only go further downhill. As with all things, as people got better about buying domains up or trying to game the system with exact match domains, Google has turned down the value of them.

Takeaway: If you’re on an exact match domain today for a generic phrase, make sure that you’re doing other activities that will support the natural ranking of your site so that you don’t lose your rankings. If you’re not on one, don’t sweat it- This just means your competition is losing a trick.

The next two trends have a lot to do with both what Google and Bing have been saying for the last few months, and the opinions of what search engine optimization experts are seeing in the wild: How people use your site matters almost as much as what’s on your site. Usage data, social media sharing, and more is important to understanding how you will rank in search engines. Below is a chart from the SEOMoz survey, of the factors that SEOs believe will increase the most in the next year in importance for search rankings.

SEOMoz Chart 1Source: SEOmoz Ranking Factors Report

Trend Number Two: Social Media Directly Affects Search Results

This should come as no surprise to anyone, but social media signals on the pages of a website, such as the number of likes or tweet a page has, appear to be incredibly valuable. The correlation value of things like Facebook Shares and Tweets had been previously covered by SEOMoz in a couple of different blog articles, their survey of search marketers and their experience is still very interesting. The correlation data shows that Facebook is by far the most frequently correlated with high ranking pages. That is, pages with many Facebook comments, likes, and shares tend to rank better than ones that do not have this. Tweets are similar but not quite as strong a correlation. However, in the survey results, the answers were flipped – Most search marketers believed that tweeted links and the authority of the Twitter users tweeting the links (such as their number of followers) was more important to social search than Facebook activity.

Takeaway: Make sure that it’s easy for your visitors to share your content on social networks, so that you can get the full benefit of social sharing for your website. Shares, Likes, and Tweets are all very important to a modern linking profile.

Trend Number Three: More End-User Usage Data Playing Into Search

Google has been using usage data from customers for years to help understand how people use their search engine and what they are searching. Most search engine optimization professionals have indicated that they expect Google to start using this data much more than they do today – For example, tracking the bounce rates of clicks on organic search results back to the search engine. If people are clicking back to the search results page from the website they visited very quickly, it probably means that they didn’t find the content or website useful to their query. If Google starts seeing some websites that are frequently in that position, or seeing some websites doing very well on that front, they can reorder the search results to hide things that people do not like to see.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/16327/3-SEO-Ranking-Factors-To-Watch-in-2011.aspx#ixzz1PZMkdWF9

Media Crush – What’s Going On Here?

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:40:38 +0000

Media Crush LLC

Let’s face it the internet landscape changes as frequently as New England weather.

Media Crush can forecast and prepare your business for any online climate changes. We develop and deploy custom, scalable, and affordable long and short term strategies and solutions for you and your company.

Our multi-tiered products can bring you Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Unique Lead Generation, Local Search all under the Brand and Reputation Management umbrella!

We are unique in the fact that we developed our own ad and marketing network of URL’s used to leveraged your program!

We own and operate over 300 URL’s in a wide variety of interest groups.