B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Unleash Your Inner Influencer with Content Marketing #NMX

Chris Ducker, Content Marketing, InfluencerEveryone wants to be valued for their insights, and today’s content marketing-fueled age presents multiple opportunities for people to become influencers. I covered how to crowdsource these influencers in an earlier post, but what if you wanted to become one yourself? What does it mean to be an influencer? How do you reach a point where people in your industry are clamoring for your perspective? Finally, how do you build your business from such influence?

It’s not as difficult as you think, and it all revolves around efficient content marketing and re-purposing. Serial entrepreneur Chris Ducker outlined the process in an NMX super session, charting the path for people to build their influence.

Ducker, author of The New Business Manifesto, presented a plan for entrepreneurs to build personal/brand influence with content marketing, eventually seeking to launch a business from that attention.


Unleash Your Inner Influencer with Content Marketing #NMX

Becoming A Pinterest Power User and Taking Your Pinning To The Next Level #NMX

TopRank Marketing Editor
TopRank Marketing Editor
BlogWorld NMX, Online Marketing, Social Media

Cynthia Sanchez NMX 2014Social media has the power to drive an insane amount of traffic.  While many may not think of it has a source of huge potential, Pinterest drives more traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit combined.  But how do you harness the power of this social network powerhouse to drive that traffic to your blog?  Cynthia Sanchez, one of TopRank’s 25 Women who Rock Social Media, gave a session on Taking Your Pinterest Account to the Next Level. Her  strategies for attracting followers and driving traffic to your blog showed great ways to blow your blog up on Pinterest.


Becoming A Pinterest Power User and Taking Your Pinning To The Next Level #NMX

The What, How and Why of Schema for Bloggers #NMX

Mitch Canter #NMXI use Google more times a day than I should ever admit. I look for restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses around me. I use it for directions, looking up people or places, and occasionally for spelling if I just can’t seem to get that word right. My point is: I expect Google to have the information I want and present it in a way that I can consume at a glance or on-the-go.

Google must think there are others like me because the way they display their results is constantly and dynamically changing to provide more relevant, meaningful information in SERPs. Things like carousels for local results, image and video results, and authorship markup are helping searches find what they wanted, even if they didn’t know it.


The What, How and Why of Schema for Bloggers #NMX

How to Create a Mobile Content Marketing Strategy

mobile content strategy, Greg Hickman, #NMXWhen was the last time your checked your mobile device? Ten seconds ago? A minute? An hour? (Wow, you have strong willpower.) Whatever the case, you know that mobile is already a significant influence in our lives. For businesses, it’s fast becoming a necessity for content marketing: 57 percent of mobile users wouldn’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile website.

However, creating an effective mobile content strategy involves more than repurposing desktop content to fit on a smaller screen. The magic formula, according to MobileMixed podcast host Greg Hickman, involves a restructuring of control between businesses and customers.


How to Create a Mobile Content Marketing Strategy

Want To Be A More Productive and Effective Blogger? Here Are 15 Social Media Tools To Help #NMX

Ian Cleary Presenting at New Media Expo 2014If you’re a blogger or a social media marketer, you”ll undoubtedly end up multitasking. Multitasking doesn’t usually work very well.  We overwork.  There has to be a better way.  This is where the tools come into play.  In his New Media Expo 2014 session, Ian Cleary reviewed 15 Social Media Tools to Become a More Productive and Effective Blogger.

Some are designed to help you find content to write, others to automate and monitor, or optimize. Regardless, they can all help make your social media life a little easier.

Finding The Best Content To Write


Want To Be A More Productive and Effective Blogger? Here Are 15 Social Media Tools To Help #NMX

5 Tips on Crowdsourcing Your Brand’s Influence #NMX

Content Marketing, Crowdsourcing, Dino DoganLeveraging your audience for blog post ideas is common practice in content marketing and it can generate unique ideas from a customer-side perspective. But what does it take to use crowdsourcing as a tool for generating influence? Brands frequently target thought leaders to help amplify their content, but what is the best way to collect these resources?

Dino Dogan, founder of influencer marketing service Triberr, proclaimed a new age of crowdsourcing influence at his NMX content marketing super session. Dogan summarized his perspective with a simple question for brands: If your customers doesn’t know the brand, why would they trust its assessment of itself?


5 Tips on Crowdsourcing Your Brand’s Influence #NMX

10 Marketing Lessons from 10 Years of Blogging @LeeOdden Keynote at #NMX 2014

Lee Odden Keynote NMX

Over the past 10 years of blogging, TopRank Online Marketing’s Lee Odden (@leeodden) has learned a lot. In his New Media Expo 2014 keynote address to full room with standing room only, Lee talked about the 10 lessons he learned in 10 years and over 3,500 blog posts.

1. Stand For Something Specific

If you’re trying to be all things to all people, you’re competing with all companies in all spaces and yourself. That’s a lot to try to outrank! Ask yourself: what is the one thing I want to be known for? Be specific and make it easy for others to understand what you’re all about.

Each of the things you want to be known for can have it’s own spoke, own content plans, and each their own channels for distribution. After all, specificity rules when it comes to search and social!


10 Marketing Lessons from 10 Years of Blogging @LeeOdden Keynote at #NMX 2014

TopRank Liveblogging Schedule for NMX BlogWorld 2014

Conference AudienceIt’s official—we’re breaking one of the cardinal rules of Las Vegas. You know the one, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. But at TopRank Online Marketing,  just can’t bring ourselves to do that.

This year’s NMX conference is taking the city (and the New Year) by storm. Full of bloggers, digital marketers, and industry experts this new media conference promises to deliver so much information we just won’t be able to keep it to ourselves! Which is why I’m joining Nick Ehrenberg and Ben Brausen to jet off to soak up as much as we can, and share it with our readers (even if it means breaking the rules).

Along with liveblogging, our own Lee Odden will also be at NMX giving one of the keynote presentations along with Scott Stratten, Amy Porterfield and several other top blogging pros.


TopRank Liveblogging Schedule for NMX BlogWorld 2014

7 Reasons We’re Excited for NMX BlogWorld Las Vegas and Why You Should Be Too!

NMX Las VegasMinnesotans are used to the freezing cold, the slippery snow, and the driving obstacles that come with Winter. Like many Northerners who get to experience Minnesnowta Ice, we often daydream about going somewhere warmer like California, Florida, or even Las Vegas.

Well, I don’t have to daydream about warmer anymore.

Along with my TopRank Online Marketing teammates Ben and Nick, I’m going to NMX in Las Vegas!  With attendees from over 50 countries, NMX aka Blogworld, offers everything from blogging, podcasting, business, and video sessions to lots of power networking and some much needed warmth.

But that’s not the only reason we’re excited to attend NMX with 4 tracks of content ranging from podcasting to web TV. Here are 7 more reasons we can’t wait to board our plane and head off to the city that literally never sleeps:


7 Reasons We’re Excited for NMX BlogWorld Las Vegas and Why You Should Be Too!

Mold Your Engaged Employees Into Brand Advocates

matt ridings and michael brito

Matt Ridings & Michael Brito Advocating For Employee Advocacy

Employee engagement is key in improving productivity in any industry.  A happy employee is much more likely to be more productive than their counterparts.

A recent study from the National Business Research Institute (NBRI) shares just how important it is to keep employees engaged.  Findings include:

  • Engaged employees product twice as much work product in the time as unengaged employees
  • The average adult spends a quarter to a third of their waking life at work
  • 40% – 80% of customer satisfaction is affected by employee attitudes

Additionally NBRI identified the following six traits of engaged employees:

  1. Believe in their organization
  2. Have the desire to work to make things better

Mold Your Engaged Employees Into Brand Advocates

Link Building for Beginners in 3 Simple Steps

Alison Groves from Raven Tools talks link building in an introductory SEO track at NMX Las Vegas.Historically, link building was critical for companies to appear in search results, as links have long been an important signal to search engines. However, the new link building is about mentions, social visibility, and building your company’s presence, says Alison Groves, Product Coordinator at Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Groves presented her three simple steps to link building for businesses in a presentation this morning at NMX Las Vegas. Her process, she says, revolves around relationship building and nurturing in order to earn mentions from relevant websites. We need to focus less on the technical and more on attracting targeted traffic by getting our sites in front of the people most likely to be interested in our product or service, she said.

With those goals in mind, here are Groves’ three simple steps for link building:


Link Building for Beginners in 3 Simple Steps

Pinterest 101: 33 Ways To Create Engaging Content & Be More Pinnable #NMX

Debba from girlfriendologyI am amazed at how much Debba Haupert (@girlfriendology) was able to cover in one short session at NMX Las Vegas.  Debba’s session on Pinterest proved to be very informational and provided practical advice and tools that marketers can use to better engage their followers.

Many brands are still struggling to determine if Pinterest is a platform that will work for their business.  Companies that have taken the leap may be unsure of how exactly to use Pinterest and what their strategy should be.

The numbers don’t lie.  Pinterest has proven that it has staying power.

  • 10.4 million users
  • 25 million uni visitors/month
  • 1/3 use for shipping inspiration
  • Average time spent: 1hr 17 min
  • Draws more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and youtube combined

Pinterest 101: 33 Ways To Create Engaging Content & Be More Pinnable #NMX