You don’t need to go through dozens of links just to get a glimpse of the latest marketing trends and happenings of the past week.
That’s what I do.
All you need to do right now is to grab your cup of coffee, relax, and get the skinny without having to lift a finger.
Your Weekly Marketing Skinny
Guest Blogging
Multi-authors blogs.
There’s a reason I never read them.
I just kept my mouth shut - didn’t want to stir the pond.
However, even some of those blogs are now acknowledging that pawning your readers’ attention off to whoever pitches the next guest post might not be such a brilliant idea after all.
In not so many or these exact words, of course, but closing their doors to guest authors speaks volumes.
If you are curious to know who I am talking about, read my post on how to guest blog in 2013.
And one more thing: if you are using Google and the rumored “guest blogging penalties” as an excuse not to guest blog, I’ll be happy to yank that one from under your feet.
If you are guest blogging for the right reasons, i.e. building your brand, sharing expertise, providing value, and not as a purely link building stunt, you’ll be fine.
Two reasons:
1. Matt Cutts said so himself
2. You should worry less about Google traffic and focus on something it can’t take away from you.
Like leveraging other blogger’s audience to build a stronger business.
This is the only post you need to read to become a great guest author:
Slideshare
Do you remember the recent guest post by Mauro D’Andrea I published at Traffic Generation Café?
Did you do anything about it?
Debbie Horovitch from TheSparkleAgency.com did.
She followed Mauro’s suggestions to create her first Slideshare presentation on how to stop cyberbullying.
The Results
- 1,500+ views in 24 hours
- 2,750+ views in 48 hours
- Also was competing with Top Slideshare of their own promoted slideshow of a new feature
Not too shabby for a Slideshare newbie, right?
Read more about how Debbie did it:
- My Experience With “Milking the Slideshare Homepage for All the Traffic You Can Handle” - thesparkleagency.com
WordPress
Found this great ongoing series Blog Exercises at lorelle.wordpress.com.
We all need to do a little cleaning at our blog, but the task always seems to be too daunting, doesn’t it?
Lorelle makes it simple: tackle one little thing per day.
She refers to her bite-sized tips as “an ongoing collection of exercises to flex your blogging muscles.”
My recent favorites:
Money
Last week, I published my completely transparent monologue on Why Traffic Generation Café Is Not Making as Much Money as It Should.
It sparked quite a discussion on the best ways to make money online in the comment section; you should definitely check it out.
Also, Ti Roberts published her response to my post on her blog; another curious read for today:
If you are new to affiliate marketing or are simply lost when reading a post on the topic, here’s a handy affiliate marketing glossary for you:
- Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terms: 40 Common Abbreviations - AMNavigator.com
Facebook Traffic
Read this post at Neil Patel’s QuickSprout.com and just had to make a Slideshare presentation based on the points he made, even though it was midnight already.
Embed this presentation on your blog (just copy and paste the code below):
Told you I was addicted…
Did you see that part about keeping your updates down to 225 characters or so?
I’ll be definitely making some changes to the way I write my updates in the future.
By the way, the same principle applies to email marketing - yet another thing that never occurred to me.
Maybe because I’m sticking with my dumb phone… most of the time, I don’t even know where it is…
Email Marketing
Did you know that 41% of all commercial email is opened on mobile devices? (source)
The number is expected to surpass PC/desktop opens by the end of the year.
And are you designing your emails to render well on mobile devices?
Until today, I haven’t even thought about doing it.
There’s one simple change you can make today that will make a huge difference in click rates: add more white space.
1. Keep text minimal. Communicate what’s important, and use your typical brand voice, but leave out the nitty gritty.
2. Leave blank areas between your blocks of text, images and other elements.
Email marketing knowledge motherload: MarketingExperiments.com
Not sure how I discovered this source, but glad I did.
MarketingExperiments has the largest library of online marketing research and case studies in the world. Their research has included topics like:
Every three weeks, they release some of that research along with actionable optimization advice to the marketing community through our Web clinics.
Here’s the one I just watched on email copywriting:
I am planning on using some of what I learned to email my subscribers about this post; look forward to seeing the difference in my open and click-through rates.
Cool Tools
A few great tools I’ve stumbled upon and have been testing in the past week.
FREE keyword rank checker software that batch checks keyword position automatically. Works on both Mac and PC.
Love it.
One drawback: you have to tell the software what YOU think your site should rank for.
In other words, you add the keywords you want to rank for and it spits out the rankings.
It won’t tell you if one of your posts ranks for a keyword you might’ve not thought about tracking.
As far as I know, SEMRush is still the only tool that does that.
For instance, I had no idea I was ranking for “alexa rankings” (the last entry in the screenshot below).
It seems like it gets a healthy amount of searches and with a little work, I should be able to push that post to the first page and get even more search engine traffic.
Of course, SEMRush does come at a price. I’ve been a paying member for almost 2 years now and since I use it almost every day, it’s worth it to me.
Your business, your decision.
The free option is limited (I think to top 10 results), but hey, it’s free.
If you know of any other tool that does what SEMRush does, let me know in comments; would love to check it out.
Has there been a time when you needed to find that one tweet you sent out about a week ago, so you were stuck combing through your Twitter timeline for what seemed like eternity?
AllMyTweets.Net is a free tool that will show you all your tweets in a very simple format:
Thank You
Thank you for all your tweets, Facebook shares, comments - everything that makes me want to give even more value every day.
In addition to the posts I mentioned above, here’s one more Thank You for mentioning Traffic Generation Café:
- Alexa Ranking Dropping Like A Meteorite To Earth - inspiretothrive.com
Need Your Help
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You can (and should) do this every day for me. Will you?
To an even better next week!
He did such a great job and on mine all seems to be half ready. So in future it should definitely be no problem to leave a comment without registration.
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