We see this happen time and time again: In the midst of managing a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, marketers get bogged down in the details of the campaign without paying attention to what actually matters.  What actually matters? PPC return on investment (ROI), of course.  If you’re managing a PPC campaign, you need to understand how all the little bits of data can play together and help you achieve a better ROI.  To do this, you should consider a few things: What are your priorities? Your priorities tend to reflect on what you’re being measured, and we hope you’re being measured primarily on generat

With the rise in popularity of social media and its use for marketing, there has been some debate about whether email is dying in the face of social media.  In fact, Ben & Jerry’s recently decided to drop email marketing in favor of social media in the UK.   Just because social media may be a new addition to your marketing mix doesn’t mean email marketing should be eliminated.  In fact, social media can help to enhance your email marketing efforts. Luckily, it looks as though marketers are starting to figure this out. As reported by eMarketer today, in an April 2010 survey by email marketing agency, eROI

The following is a guest post by Peter Rastello, the founder of Inbound Market Link, an Inbound Marketing agency specializing in helping small and medium, B2B and B2C businesses to succeed on the internet. If you are a marketing professional in charge of your small/medium sized business’ (SMB) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Inbound marketing, you are not alone. According to Marketing Sherpa, SMBs spend roughly 20% more on staff salaries to handle SEO & internet marketing  than do large sized businesses who tend to out-source this activity. For this reason, it is critical that SMB marketers focus carefully. Here are the

Facebook recently passed 500 million users and now is adding an important new feature to its platform. Today, the social networking platform released Facebook Questions. This new feature allows users to ask questions to the “entire” Facebook community. As companies like Yahoo and LinkedIn have used a Questions feature for years, this is not an unprecedented addition, but it highlights the possibility for individuals to communicate in a new way with people outside of their direct Facebook network. According to Mashable, Facebook Questions will allow users to do a few things: Photo questions: Users can post pictures of objects

When businesses give away something for free, they often get a lot in return from their fans or customers. One of the benefits of business blogging is that it establishes trust and thought-leadership. For example, even though HubSpot is an Internet Marketing software company, we share lots of free advice on our Internet Marketing Blog. Contributing a post to a blog other than yours is another way of giving away something small for free, but getting more in return. In this post, I’ll share some practical tips on how to approach guest blogging, and how to get the most out of it. Benefits of Guest Blogging Reach New Audiences A post on

Are you taking advantage of best practices when it comes to promoting news about your business on Facebook?  Now you can check with Facebook’s new Facebook + Media page, which launched Monday.  The new page — geared toward journalists but with implications for all businesses on Facebook — includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook. To determine the best practices compiled on the page, Facebook analyzed 100 top media sites that use Facebook’s social plugins. Okay — so you may not be a media company.  But if you publish news about your compan

The next time you are bombarded with popup ads and spam, Team Inbound will come to your rescue! With the help of Greta Get Found, Chris Convert, Annie Analyze and of course, Captain Inbound, the marketing world will be a better place! Watch marketing hero Captain Inbound defeat the Sultan of Spam to save the day in HubSpot’s new animated cartoon web series. The Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One Character Voices: Captain Inbound:@jlopinGreta Get Found: @repcorChris Convert: @OneAndOnlyCJ Annie Analyze: @CortenbergSultan of Spam: @vleckasNarrator: @andrewtquinnDavid Meerman Scott: @dmscott (as himself) Animated by Eric Gu

Posted by Danny Dover  This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters. See my stats for this video   Embed Video: <object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_159073" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allo

Posted by randfish As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love. In this post, I’ll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opp

Posted by JoannaLord We have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes. You know what we realized? There sure is a lot of data. While I have always appreciated the reporting features in GA, I find that too often people take the reports at face value and fail to go deeper. It’s unfortunate since it is in those deep dives th