Sure, you might “get” that social media isn’t just a passing fad and that it can actually help improve your business. But you still might be underestimating its power and potential.

Our top inbound marketing article of the past week points out that social media engagement isn’t exactly as easy as it seems.

1. 5 Not-So-Easy Steps to Managing Your Brand Online

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Following on from my debut SEOmoz blog post on How to Get Links in Tough Industries, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the processes you can use to find people who are likely to link to you.  Using the right processes to identify the leaders in your industry can give you a much better return on your time spent link building.  This is for two reasons -

1. You are finding people with a genuine interest in your industry who are more likely to reply to you
2. You are finding people who are influential which can lead to more links from their audience

We all know that link building is hard, it takes time, patience and an uncanny ability to handle rejection.  I often like to talk about improving your link building conversion rate, if you can do this then you are making your life a lot easier.  This post is designed to help improve your link building conversion rate by reaching out to the right people.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Glasgow Collective breadcrumb trail

Breadcrumb trails can be a useful secondary navigation tool for large sites such as online stores. They facilitate easy navigation back up the hierarchy of a website as well as providing a location indicator for visitors who may have arrived directly at the page (via search or a referring link) without navigating to it.

I thought it would be useful to look at some of the better and more visually interesting implementations of breadcrumb trail design. View the breadcrumb trail showcase.

Further Reading

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Danny Dover

Update: Thank you everyone for your patience with the video issues. It looks like our video host’s CDN accidentally cached a bad request. Everything should be working now! Party on!

 In this week’s Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage. Also, I shaved my beard and now look like a 12-year-old boy. (I don’t recommend that as a pitch tactic.)

Posted by randfish

If you’ve been using SEOmoz’s tools for a while, you’ve likely run across the same challenge we have — the data rocks, but you have to run a separate tool and report for each aspect of your SEO. That’s why, for the past year, we’ve been building a new platform to house all of the features and functionality of the SEOmoz toolset, and includes the ability to track metrics over time. We call it the SEOmoz "Web App."

It’s hard for me to resist making this post nothing but a huge collection of screenshots…

Starting TODAY (right now, in fact!), every PRO member has BETA access to the new web app.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to learn more about the science of delivering contagious presentations, be sure to download the eBook now and register for the August 19th Science of Presentations webinar.

In addition to the survey data and the webinar Twitter data, I also gathered information about presentations uploaded to SlideShare.

Read the rest of this entry »

At HubSpot, we’re always debating which marketing tactics get us the best leads – the leads that eventually convert to sales. Looking at this data from the 2010 Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study by the Lenskold Group, I notice many familiar tactics – webinars, free trials, whitepaper and e-books, e-newsletters, discounts etc. All of them take different levels of time and effort. You don’t create a webinar in just one hour (if you want it to have good content). A decent presentation takes weeks to promote and develop. White papers take research and thought to produce something of lasting value.

Source: The Lenskold Group

What this chart tells me is that if you choose the right topic and market to the right audience, your webinars will be effective. If you can get your prospects to try your product and spend the time educating them about its benefits, you have a good chance of converting that sale. But all of this takes time and effort, which brings me to what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – what is the return on effort (ROE) of these marketing tactics?

Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook recently announced that it would be making updates to profiles and pages and that these changes would take effect on Monday, August 23. According to Facebook, these updates are designed to “simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers and enable [Facebook] to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.”

While I personally think they could’ve been a little clearer about what these changes would do to pages, yesterday they enabled admins to see, in advance, how their pages will be altered.

Facebook’s Changes Will Affect Your Pages in 3 Ways:

Read the rest of this entry »

The rumors are now official. Today, Twitter released its own Tweet Button to allow website owners to encourage visitors to Retweet articles and pages. The new Tweet Button replaces the current industry leader, TweetMeme, though Twitter has worked out a licensing deal with TweetMeme for some of the technology they have already developed.

Twitter’s Tweet Button comes with some additional options: as well as multiple formatting choices, it also allows website owners who install the button to suggest Twitter accounts to follow for people who use the button on their site. Although the design of the button is different, it works in the same way as TweetMeme in that it allows users to easily share stories on Twitter and provides a counter for the number of times each article or page has been shared. The release of this new button is the next step in Twitter’s expansion and filling the gaps in its core service offerings.

Marketing Takeaway

Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to learn more about the science of delivering contagious presentations, be sure to download the eBook now and register for the August 19th Science of Presentations webinar.

In my survey, I found a few interesting differences between men and women and how they share presentation content in social media.

The first thing I found is that while only 22% of women reported that they’d Tweet or blog about a presentation if they disagreed with it, a full 40% of men said they would. Men are more likely to talk about how they disagree with your presentation.

Read the rest of this entry »