New Chart: Most Effective Email Marketing Objectives for 2011

In my last post on email, I talked about email marketing challenges. Today, I’d like to focus on email marketing objectives.

There are many good reasons for email marketing. Send out a well thought out and timed email and you can see sales jump. Unfortunately, many companies get addicted to email sends that produce instant sales, and when the numbers decrease, they wonder why.

That’s why it’s so important to set your objective for your email marketing. What do you want and expect from your email sends? Once you figure that out you can measure the effectiveness of these objectives.

So which objectives are most effective?

This should not be a surprise since with emails you want people to click to your landing pages or website.

But the number 2, according to MarketingSherpa, may come as a bit of a surprise – building brand awareness.

People often overlook the value of email as a brand awareness tool – but think about it for a moment, and you can see why.

To begin with, most business emails are not opened. According to eMarketer, the average open rate for a marketing email is 19.1%. That leaves 80% of your sends not being opened. However, there is a better chance that your prospect saw either your company’s name in the “from” line and read your subject line, but chose not to open your email.  Each time your email arrives in an inbox means you’re making your prospect aware of you. That’s why it’s so important to create a consistency with your subject line, because each subject line builds a little more brand awareness and identity.

And, when your email is opened (and read), it’s important that you provide them with information they expect from your brand.

The number 3 most effective objective is increasing sales revenue. That’s easier said than done, and requires coordination between the email, the offer and the landing page. One of the best ways to learn how to do this effectively is to read up on case studies. At MarketingSherpa’s upcoming Email Summit 2011, there are a number of sessions that deal directly with increasing sales through email. One is a panel how to develop content for specific buying stages and another is a case study on turning innovation into new revenues. 

Do you agree with these email marketing objectives?  What will you concentrate on during 2011?

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How to Be an Awesome Blog Commenter

Online tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook have made it easier for people to share with one another, but they don’t necessarily make the Web social. In fact, one could argue that these tools make it easier for people to be less social. In a space where spam and irrelevant messages spread faster than ever, being social requires one to be remarkable. On platforms battling spam and narcissistic one-sided dialogues, the true social value lies with businesses and individuals that communicate in meaningful ways.

This post will discuss how to be a thoughtful and engaged commenter, whether you are active in the blogosphere or on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and message boards.

Would you take a sign for your business and put it in the front yard of someone you don’t know? No, a credible business wouldn’t do that. But leaving blog comments that are nothing more than a link or multiple links back to your website is the online equivalent of that behavior. It is also the fastest way to get your comment deleted and to have future comments marketed as spam.

If you have a post addressing a specific question at hand, then it is ok to include that link into a comment, along with a summary of the information provided on your site. That way if people are looking for only a brief answer, they don’t have to click through to your site.

Another way to include a link back to your website in blog comments is to use a well-optimized signature.

For example:
Name
Company
Website
Twitter Username

This signature helps provide some context to the person reading the comment. If your comment is thoughtful and adds value to the discussion, it is likely that readers will visit your website and follow you on Twitter.

So, why do you constantly see people including links in their comments? It isn’t really to get traffic back to their sites. Instead, it is mainly for search engine optimization purposes. Those who constantly include links in their comments hope to generate more inbound links in an effort to rank higher in search engines for specific keywords. However, most of these commenters are wasting their time.

Most blogs, including this one, use something called a “nofollow” tag for all links in the comments of a blog post. The “nofollow” tag tells a search engine’s web crawler to not follow the link, thus not passing any search engine optimization credit. In other words, links with “nofollow” tags do not count as inbound links for a website.

Go to a blog post that has at least one comment and copy the name of the person who left the comment. Then, in your web browser click the view menu and select the option that says “Page Source” or “View Source.”  Use the find function on your computer (Ctrl+F) to search the source code for the name that you copied from the blog post. Does the link left by the commenter have the “nofollow” tag next to it? If it does, you know that the blog you are looking at does not pass SEO credit through comment links. Most blog owners use the “nofollow” tag as a way to reduce the number of spam comments on their blog.

How many of the blog comments you have read do you actually remember? If you are like me, your answer would be very few. That is because the vast majority of them are not thoughtful or interesting enough. In some cases I read comments and think to myself, “Did this person even read the article?” So, how do you make sure that the author of the blog remembers you? (More on why this is important later.) It is best to have a framework, a way of organizing your response so that it makes an impact.

For blog commenting it works best if you start out with a piece of positive feedback about the article. Follow up with more in-depth explanation or disagreement on one specific part of the article. Using this framework, a comment for this article could look something like this:

“Interesting article, I have never thought about commenting on blogs in this much detail before. I will use this information to improve the comments I leave for my business in the future. However, I do have to disagree with you about the reasoning for including links in comments. Being that many people sign up to receive email updates for new comments to a post they have previously commented on, I have found that including links in you comments can send a decent amount of quality traffic to your website and impact lead generation if you are commenting on relevant sites.”

This sample comment follows the methodology mentioned above. Notice that it isn’t too long. It is long enough to show thoughtfulness and to make a point, but not so long that others won’t take the time to read it.

The most valuable aspect of blog commenting often goes ignored. Most spam commenters are looking for a quick way to drive relevant traffic to their sites. Yet blog commenting isn’t good for quick traffic. Its true value lies in the opportunity to build long-term relationships. Leaving thoughtful blog comments can be one of the best ways to start a relationship with an influential blogger in your industry. After leaving several insightful comments and following him or her on Twitter, it is likely they will recognize your name and follow you back. Once they follow you on Twitter, you can continue to build your relationship with them through their blog and Twitter. After a while, you can approach them about the possibility of doing a guest post for their blog, or maybe ask them to tweet a major blog post that you have recently completed.

This type of relationship building through blog commenting can help drive long-tail traffic over time from links to your blog or website being included in the influencers blog posts and tweets.

How often do you comment on blog posts?

Photo Credit: moonlightbulb

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The Top 10 SEOrankings.com Blog Posts of 2010

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Thanks to all of you and Google for making 2010 such a great year. I hope it was a great year for you too. And your 2011 will be even better! In celebration of 2010 I thought it would be helpful to take a look back at this blog’s top 10 most popular posts for the year. So here they are. Enjoy!

I also want to send out a special shout out to M.J. Taylor of cyber-key.com for all of her support by being the blogs top advocate. THANK YOU!

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Twitter Usage Per Capita: How States Compare [Infographic]

HubSpot makes closed-loop internet marketing software that integrates your sales and marketing activities. It's simple really.

Get found.Convert visitors into leads.Close those leads efficiently.

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Do blekko and Google Completely Disregard Navigational Links?

I don’t actually think Google completely disregards navigation links. However, after taking a closer look at blekko’s SEO tools, it appears in most cases blekko does and other search engines might too. If it’s that important and easy for a hip new search engine to do, then it makes me wonder EXACTLY how Google and the other major search engines treat navigational and other page links.

Take a look at this detailed analysis to see what I’ve found out about blekko, which probably gives us some insight into how other search engines analyze the links on webpage.

Most navigational links get immediately disregarded or “exlcuded” (header, footer, sidebar, etc.)Links grouped together are usually excludedBlog comments are excluded regardless if they are dofollow links

Looking at the screenshots below you can easily see which links blekko marked as “excluded” and understand what I am talking about.

(Numbers in green are links that blekko didn’t tag as excluded, and red numbers identify links that are marked as excluded. Also, links highlighted in pink have the nofollow attributed assigned to them.)

InternalInternal (excluded)Internal, ImageExternalInternal (excluded)Internal (excluded)Internal (excluded)ExternalInternal/External (excluded)External, 302 Redirect, NoFollowExternalExternal, 302 Redirect, NoFollowExternalInternal (excluded)Internal (excluded)External, NoFollow (excluded)Internal (excluded)

Anything stand out to you here?

One thing that immediately stood out to me was that blekko seems to exclude most navigational links regardless if they are internal or external links. I don’t believe Google completely excludes navigational links. However, they are likely discounted in some way.

What’s also interesting is that blekko seems to completely ignore the nofollow attribute and 302 redirects. Take a look at links 10 and 12 above. Both of those links are nofollowed, 302 redirected affiliate links and neither of them were excluded.

Now let’s examine how Blekko treats outbound listing links coming from the top 5 directories recommended in the screenshot above.

It appears a listing and backlink from 4 of the top 5 directories I’ve recommended count towards ranking in blekko. JoeAnt is the only one whose listings are excluded – which is interesting, because JoeAnt might be the strictest directory of the bunch. Probably an oversight on their part.

Additionally, I found that “most” listings in the blogs.botw.org directory were excluded, except for listings that didn’t include any additional site links such as: [RSS], [AUDIO], [ATOM], [XML], [VIDEO]. Note: blogs.botw.org is a sub-domain and separate directory from the main directory at botw.org. Listings in the main directory are counted. Probably another oversight because links from both BOTW directories should count – in my opinion, anyway.

I believe the engineers at blekko have manually gone in and allowed links from these directories because other directories I checked had their links excluded. But the great thing is you can always check each directory before you submit to them.

Just keep in mind, blekko, Bing and Google don’t use the exact same algorithms and technology. Google may count links blekko doesn’t and vice versa.

I think most of us assume Google and the major search engines are smart enough to identify, discount or exclude all dofollow blog comment links. However, I thought it would be interesting to see exactly how blekko looks at them since that data is available to us. So I found a site that allows dofollow blog comments and uses the CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and Top Commentators plug-ins.

Internal, NoFollow (excluded)External (excluded)Internal, NoFollow (excluded)External, NoFollow (excluded)NOT FOUNDExternal (excluded)External (excluded)

In this case blekko excluded every link related to blog comments even if they were dofollow links. I also noticed that blekko didn’t find the URLs listed in the drop down option menus on this site.

blekko appears to be extremely strict in regards to which links they count. Navigational links and links that are grouped together are typically ignored while contextual links are NOT marked as “exluded” regardless of their attributes, i.e., NoFollow, 302 redirect, etc..

What have you observed about the way blekko or other search engines looks at navigational links?

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How to Market Smarter, Faster, and Cheaper with David Siteman Garland [Inbound Now #2]

In this episode of Inbound Now, we are joined by David Siteman Garland from The Rise to the Top.

David is a marketer and hustling entrepreneur that runs his own business and show over on RISE and has managed to grow his audience from 0 to over 100,000 raving fans in just under two years. In this episode we discuss:

The ins and outs of creating contentWhere to start when diving into inbound marketingThe importance of having a clean, user-friendly siteWhy emulating big brands might not always be your best betWhy passion is a key ingredient to content creationThen, we take a look ahead into whats coming up in 2011

Enter to win a signed copy of David's new book: Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business, by heading to the Inbound Now Fan Page and commenting on why you want the book! (* to comment you must "like" the page)

The barriers to successful marketing are crumbling. It is time to out-care, out-create, and out-hustle your competition by using inbound marketing to gain the upper hand.

David suggests finding one thing you are good at within the content creation realm and start producing one piece of content a week. (Make sure it's indexable by Google for SEO credit!)

Getting your feet wet and creating a content creation habit are critically important for your success online! 

One of the best ways to build trust and longevity in a brand is about creating interesting, entertaining, and relevant content.

Don’t get intimidated by the big guys who are cranking out the content. Start with one small thing that is repeatable.

Consistent content is key. People are programed on schedules and if you set an expectation for your content, you should stick by it. Choose one thing you might want to try and get rolling with it. Do it once a week.

20% on creating the content and 80% on promoting that content and building those relationships online.

You don't have to be Shakespeare to blog or Spielberg to create video.

Repurpose content! Video = audio and text. People like to consume content in different ways. Cater to all of them. Remember, Google eats text for breakfast when indexing pages.

People are not going to tune into your blog or other pieces of your content if they are product focused.

David’s focus has always on his community and not necessarily about building the “David Siteman Garland” brand. He focuses on creating entertaining useful content for his community and his community responds to that and builds and builds. This has resulted in David being hired time and time again by numerous companies including Google.

Both the Rise to the Top and 37 Signals started building their communities of passionate, raving fans before they had a tangible product. 

Start building your site and content now!

Moonlighting to grow a community, there is no shame in that!

You need a home base to house your own content. Twitter could die tomorrow and "Flitter" could pop up in it's place leaving you with nothing to show for it.

Housing your content on your own site will ensure that you will be in good shape if something like this were to happen. 

Not to mention the tremendous SEO implications of building out all of those pages of content on your own site.

Take ownership of your content and fans today. Build out these areas of your site and keep building that in-house email list. 

Emulating big brands may not be the best model. Look at people that are building big things that started with nothing.

Don’t look at an entrenched big brand that joined social media “just because”. (I'm talking about you, Oprah.)

Look for people who have done this without a huge budget! Companies that have just emerged and have leveraged “digital smoozing” can teach much better lessons.

Hands down passion is a KEY component to building any business through these new social channels. 

Knowledge and personality can increase over time but without passion for the content that you are producing, you will fail.

Passion may come from the product itself, it may be from a bigger idea, it may be from the thrill of starting something new, or changing an existing market, or the company itself, but in order to really "crush it" you have to have it!

Hubspotters are extremely passionate about everything inbound marketing and the web! This helps fuel all of the content we produce and grow our community.

Passion is something that you can see and feel in the content that is produced and that passion is contagious.

David sees many many more businesses becoming media sources. More web shows, more podcasts, more “web djs”  Content curation will be a rising trend where, within this sea of content, there will be an increasing need in someone out their making sense of it all.  Moving online relationships to offline in person relationships. Bringing people together!

Past Episodes:

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New Charts: Most Effective Email Marketing Tactics for 2011

HubSpot makes closed-loop internet marketing software that integrates your sales and marketing activities. It's simple really.

Get found.Convert visitors into leads.Close those leads efficiently.

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