Guest Blog Posts: 2014

If you ever ranked for a popular phrase, you know: search engines can bring a steady stream of visitors that lasts for months or even years. Search can be a powerful, durable source of traffic for all of your content initiatives.

The most expensive mistake in content marketing is missing your target. The road to success is lined with burning wrecks of campaigns that targeted the wrong audience, created the wrong content or build relevance in an irrelevant social network. A documented content strategy is the best way to avoid disaster.

It's a search engine. It's a social network. Google is a lot of things, and its parts are interconnected. First, some background The same month that the Google+ social network was launched, Google announced a new way to link writers to content they create: Google Authorship.

Traffic is only half of the equation. Success is a combination of two factors: the total number of visitors (traffic) and the percentage of those visitors that take action (conversion rate). Here’s the basic formula for website ROI…

Traffic x Conversion Rate = Success

As an owner of a small business, you're busy selling and servicing customers. You spend a lot of time on the phone and on email, taking care of business. Things at the bottom of your to-do list don't get done. That includes writing blog posts...

Some bloggers seem to have all the luck. They get way more shares than you. They get tons more email subscribers than you. They get much higher search rankings than you. And it sucks, right? Because their content is good, but it's not great. Certainly it's not that much better than yours.

A degree in advertising, a beautifully polished LinkedIn profile, glowing recommendation, even years of experience in a traditional marketing role. Is it enough?

Probably not...

"We are, at present, in the midst of a historic transformation for brands and companies everywhere - and it centers on content," Alexander Jutkowit said recently in the Harvard Business Review. If you're involved in marketing, you've likely experienced this transformation first-hand. As Alexander points out, nine in 10 organisations are now marketing with content.

On January 20th, Matt Cutts posted his famous rant against guest blogging. He'd just received a spammy email from someone asking to write a post for his blog ...in exchange for a link. I guess Matt Cutt's blog is a bad target for link building. Who knew?

The words "duplicate content penalty" strike fear in the hearts of marketers. Most have never read Google's guidelines on duplicate content. They just somehow assume that if something appears twice online, asteroids and locusts must be close behind.

It's in the back of your mind. It's your next post. Actually, you've been thinking about several topics. You have a dozen half-finished posts and a notebook full of ideas. You're a blogger...

Content marketing doesn't work unless the content is genuinely worth reading. Routine, phone-it-in content won't get you the audience you need. Andy Crestodina over at Orbit Media Studios is one of the content marketers who really gets it.

Billions of times each day, people type things into little boxes in search engines. That's not going to change. But what happens when they hit enter is changing fast. Changes to search engines are arguably the most important changes to the internet. If you look for things online, you're affected.

Broadcast advertising works well for some brands. The idea is to cast a net far and wide, across a broad audience, hoping to cover enough of your target audience to make the ad spend worthwhile. But it misses certain opportunities brands have to reach their most relevant customers.

I trust my friends. If they tell me something is good (or bad), I tend to believe them. The power of influence is very, very powerful...

Andy Crestodina, Strategic Director of OrbitMedia joined us a few weeks back on #BizHeroes to discuss Content Marketing.The chat was a huge success and our community was asking for more, so we asked Andy to follow up with some of the most Frequently Asked Questions he sees in OrbitMedia.

It's been a long winter, many things have changed, so it's time for a breath of fresh air. It seems to do households good, and it's a great marketing habit as well. So let's do some digital marketing spring cleaning. 1. Purge: Unfollow inactives and dead weight If you haven't worn it in a year...

The return on investment for web marketing efforts are based on just two numbers: website traffic and the website conversion rate. Of course, traffic is the number of visitors. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who "convert" into leads or customers.

If you've thought of joining the digital marketing field, you're one of many. There are a ton of people looking to break into this field everyday and competition is high. To succeed, your resume needs to say more than you love Facebook and you're on LinkedIn...

Googled yourself lately? Be prepared to fix what you find, if it's bad, or increase your rankings, if good. Try these 14 tips to boost your personal SEO.

You work hard to drive traffic to your site. Steering people toward your site is hard work. You combine search marketing, social media, and email marketing. You might even be paying good money for those visitors. But once you have them, are you making the most of those visits?

If you're not a content marketer, you wouldn't know, but content creation is hard work. It's not just the long hours of research, writing, and editing. It's the always-on mode your brain is in, looking for insight and inspiration everywhere.

"I know enough to be dangerous." Ever heard that one? Ever said that one? It's a common thing to say, but sometimes we should take it literally. There are thousands of possible mistakes, but most of them are small and they do no long-term damage. But then there are the big screw-ups, the real disasters.

I love guest blogging. After 12+ years doing website and web marketing, I can honestly say it's easily the most fun I've had. It's creative, it's collaborative and it's effective. There are three main reasons I guest blog: search benefits, social media benefits and branding.

Do you need more leads? Are you looking for creative ways to use your blog content to improve your conversion process? In this article, you'll discover how to identify and patch the weaker part of your funnel by writing the right type of content. How Content Drives Leads Written content works in many ways.