Online Marketing Blog

[Note from Lee: This week's guest post is from someone I've known  from the Search Marketing world for a long time.  Bryan Eisenberg is a Wall Street Journal & New York Times Best Selling Author, popular keynote speaker and well respected guru in all things related to marketing and conversion optimization. We serve on the SES Conference Board of Advisors together and as he's elevated his status in the business world, has always been helpful and full of practical advice. You'll see that in this post about several tools for which he is an advisor.]

True or false? You never seem to have enough time in the day to get your job done.

If you answered “true”, then lets explore some tools/services that will maximize your time and effectiveness. Marshall McLuhan said “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” If the explosion of tools to improve your website and marketing efforts over the last 3 years is any indication of how we are being shaped then there may be hope for the time and resource starved.

If you agree that content is king then we should serve a feast that uses our customers’ own words.  All we have to do is leverage all the  social and search data that uses our customers’ words. I offer that as a common sense recommendation. However, all too often I see people (even experienced SEMs) failing to leverage this data in their everyday workflow. Don’t you think that access to search and social intelligence while writing content that it would make you a more effective writer?

A recent study I co-authored helped prove that it provided:  a significant and consistent impact on search engine results, an increase in reader engagement. and an increase in conversion. It did all that and  improved content relevance across a variety of writers and online content types who used a new content coaching tool called Inbound Writer. It’s free for up to 8 documents and month and costs only $19.95 for unlimited documents.

Never write an ad your landing page can’t cash! Do you know who the most successful PPC advertiser of all time is? Amazon! That is because they built their PPC program opposite of the way most people do it. They built and continuously optimize each of their product and category pages to convert at maximum efficiency. They have loads of content to help customers make a buying decision. Only then do they focus on what ads would drive you to that page and then what keywords should trigger that ad. Most advertisers start at the keyword first. One way to avoid that mistake is using a tool like TagCrowd.

TagCrowd will make a word cloud from any text you paste in (i.e. a press release), a plain text file you can upload or a web page url. The larger that words appear on the tag cloud the more times those words appear on the page (tweak the setting for a minimum frequency of 2 or 3 to filter out some noise). One quick look at the tag cloud should give you a good clue about what your landing page is about. Use those words in your ads and as starting points for the keywords you’ll target.

Example of TopRank Newsroom Tag Cloud

What if you could get an army of writers who would compete on a regular basis to improve the effectiveness of your PPC and FaceBook ads and the only time you ever paid them was when they beat your best effort? Well thanks to crowd-sourcing company BoostCTR you can take advantage of that opportunity today. While this company is relatively new,  they have been producing guaranteed lifts in click through rates (CTRs) and conversions (by around 30%) for their clients. In fact, they are so confident about their service you can get started with a free trial. You pick the ad group you want their network to optimize, then they will start a contest where their writers compete in an A/B test against your best “control” ad (you pick which of the variations you choose to be included in the contest) and you only pay when you have a winner.

I hope these tool recommendations were useful to you. As an online tool junkie I review tons of other great online marketing tools you can leverage to improve your website and marketing efforts but hopefully these 3 will give you a good head start over your competition.