Over the years I’ve been privileged to work with companies of all sizes… from startups to fortune 500 companies. The reason they typically hire me or other consultants is because their internal marketing campaigns are failing.

No matter what size the company is, within three months they cut their new internal marketing initiatives because they feel they aren’t working.

And sadly it doesn’t stop with other companies either… your marketing campaigns are likely to fail to.

Here’s why:

You plan your budgets quarterly

Marketing isn’t always a quarterly expense. Some things like SEO can’t be turned on and off like a light switch. You have to continually do them, even when you are losing money in the short run, in hopes that you will make money in the long run.

Depending on the type of marketing campaign you are planning, budget it correctly. Don’t look to do something for a few months and then renew it if it is working and cut it if it isn’t. I doubt you’ll get a ROI from your inbound marketing efforts within three months.

Now granted, if you are doing a pay-per-click campaign, you can stop it within a few months if you aren’t getting an ROI, but most marketing campaigns don’t work this way. Generally you should plan your marketing spend on a yearly basis and not quarterly.

You’re copying your competitors

I used to make this mistake a lot when I first started my entrepreneurial career. Instead of being creative, I just looked at what my competitors were doing and I copied it.

What works for your competitors won’t always work for you. They may have been doing pay-per-click advertising for years and because their quality score is so high, their cost per click is low. But if you decide to copy their campaigns your quality score won’t be as high when you are just starting out, which means you will have to pay more money per click than your competitors.

Don’t look to copy other people because most marketing channels are saturated and expensive. Start thinking outside of the box and consider testing new means that aren’t as easy to copy.

A good example of this is content marketing… we have a ton of competitors at KISSmetrics, but we will always generate more traffic than our competitors because we are better at content marketing. And even though many of our competitors have more cash than us, it’s a difficult thing to copy, even if they threw a million bucks at it.

We used a creative marketing tactic to succeed versus spending thousands of dollars on the typical channels that our competitors are using.

Don’t let money be your excuse because there are always ways to acquire users even when you don’t have a lot of cash.

Your marketing efforts aren’t funding themselves

It’s not easy to create a positive ROI in the short run, but it is possible. The way you should be thinking about marketing is to split up your campaigns in two buckets. The first being campaigns that will provide a ROI within a few months and the second group is campaigns that will provide a ROI in the long run.

Campaigns like pay-per-per click advertising or remarketing can provide a return within 30 to 60 days. SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing are campaigns that are more likely to provide a ROI in the long run.

Before you start any of your marketing campaigns you should ideally tackle a few methods that will provide a quick return. And the reason you have to go after a few tactics versus one is because some won’t work out the way you wanted.

Once you start making some money from your current campaigns you can then start investing in long-term campaigns. This way you won’t be losing too much cash because your marketing campaigns are starting to fund themselves.

You’re not maximizing your profit

The chances are, you are tracking in session ROI and not your lifetime value of your customers.

An example of tracking in session ROI is spending $500 on your pay-per-click campaigns and generating $1000 in revenue. Usually you would consider that a successful campaign.

But what you should also be tracking is your lifetime value per customer. If you learn that a customer is worth $1000 in the first year, but $5000 over the course of 3 years you can hypothetically spend up to $4999 on marketing in the short run assuming you have no other expenses. Now granted you wouldn’t want to spend that much to acquire a customer but if you increase your pay-per-click spend to $1000 you may realize that you’ll be able to get 5 times more customers compared to only spending $500.

In the short run you may not make any money, but in the long run you will make a lot more.

You shouldn’t optimize your marketing campaigns for in session revenue, you should ideally be optimizing them using lifetime value metrics, as that will allow you to acquire more customers and make more profit.

You’re only focusing on traffic, not conversions

If you ask any marketer what they will be doing, they’ll usually talk about how they can increase your traffic. But traffic doesn’t always equate to more revenue.

A marketer shouldn’t only be driving you traffic, but they should be driving you customers. Part of their job is to make sure people are converting. That means they need to monitor spend on irrelevant traffic, and they will have to figure out how to modify web page elements and copy to boost conversion rates.

A/B testing isn’t something that is optional! You have to include it in your marketing arsenal. If you can double of triple your conversion rate, that means the cost to acquire a customer will go down by half or even three times.

If you don’t think A/B testing is valuable, just read this case study on how we were able to boost our conversion rate by 363%. That had a huge impact on our bottom line.

Conclusion

Strategy is just as important as the marketing tactics themselves. Before you start any marketing campaign, you should figure out what your goals are and what are the most efficient ways to achieve them.

Without strategy even the greatest marketers can fail. If you don’t think things through you will just waste time and money.

What are some other reasons that cause marketing campaigns to fail?

When we started Crazy Egg, my co-founder and I barely had enough cash to support the business. We didn’t have a ton of paying customers, and the business was losing roughly $30,000 a month.

And although that doesn’t seem like a lot of cash, when you are self-funded and living in your parent’s house, it all adds up.

So how did we grow the business to over 100,000 customers? Well for starters we used to have a free plan, which helped a lot. And you probably see advertisements for Crazy Egg all over the web, but we’ve been over 100,000 customers for years. Before that point we didn’t have a big marketing budget… all we had was $10,000.

So how did we do it?

CSS galleries

Before we launched Crazy Egg we made our homepage a landing page that collected your name and email address so you could be notified when we launched. On that landing page we also included a screenshot of our beta product so that you could see what the application looked like.

The only issue was that no one was coming to the site, which meant we weren’t collecting any emails.

What we decided to do was go to all of the CSS galleries and spend $10,000 on one time ad buys. These sites were getting hundreds of thousands if not millions of visitors a month from web designers who are our ideal customers.

Through the CSS galleries we were able to collect almost 20,000 emails so that when we launched the product we could do a blast out to everyone.

In addition to that, when we launched the site we coded it using CSS standards. This allowed us to submit our design to each gallery. Many of them showcased our design, which drove 23,294 visitors and helped drive new users.

If you are looking to drive traffic to your site, be creative. There are always sites out there in your vertical that have traffic and aren’t making too much money. Try to strike a deal with them so that they can promote your product or service at a low cost.

Press

When you are on a shoestring budget you can’t afford to hire a PR firm. So what we did was create a list of all of the popular news blogs in the tech space and offer the writers a free $99 Crazy Egg account.

We then helped them setup Crazy Egg on their blog so they could see how it worked. Because the product was so visual they naturally wanted to share the heatmaps and other reports Crazy Egg provided.

Using this strategy we were able to get TechCrunch, Mashable and other popular tech news blogs to cover Crazy Egg.

The key to our success was that we didn’t just give them a premium account to play with, we also helped them analyze the reports and we gave them feedback on what they should change with their overall design.

If you follow this strategy you’re going to get a lot of journalists who will ignore you, but if you continually follow up with them, some of them will eventually try out your product. Expect 5 to 10% of the journalists to cover you using this approach if you have a decent product.

Business partnerships

Our biggest acquisition channel came from partnerships. That alone drove more than 40% of our signups when we started out. So what exactly do I mean by partnerships?

There are a lot of businesses out there that have a large user base, but don’t make much money from each user. In essence, their margins are low.

Those businesses are always looking for new ways to make more money from each of their users. If you can offer their users a special version of your product for free, or a discounted price, they can typically drive you thousands of signups. All you have to do is give them a 10 to 30% cut of the revenue they drive you.

A good example of this is hosting companies. They typically have thin margins and are looking for ways to make more money off of their user base. This is the main reason why GoDaddy constantly upsells you when you are checking out.

By attending hosting conferences like HostingCon, I was able to meet companies like Lunar Pages. Although they may seem small, they have thousands of customers and, more importantly, they are getting hundreds if not thousands of new customers each day.

So what we did was make deals with companies like Lunar Pages in which every one of their new customers gets a free Crazy Egg account. This caused us to get thousands of new users for each partner we signed up and eventually a percentage of those users converted into a paid customer. We ended up keeping 70% of the revenue and paid out 30% to our partners.

In addition to partnerships with hosting companies, we started to create partnerships with SEO agencies. By networking at events like Pubcon, Search Engine Strategies, and SMX, I met hundreds of agencies and I offered them a free “premium” account that normally costs $99 a month. I did this because each agency had a nice book of business and if they started to use my product I knew that they would eventually recommend it to some of their customers.

By partnering up with SEO agencies, we were also able to drive over 4000 signups to Crazy Egg.

Business development is the fastest way to grow any business. Going to networking events, conferences and just meeting random people is a great way to expand your network. You should always focus on growing your network as it will open up doors for potential partnerships.

Speak at conferences

If someone can pay to attend a conference, it means they have money. If you can afford to buy a conference ticket for $500, you can afford to buy software that costs less than $100 a month.

To gain exposure for Crazy Egg I would apply to speak at conferences and I would discuss whatever topic the conference organizer wanted me to talk about… even if it wasn’t related to analytics.

Instead of asking the organizer to pay for my travel expenses or provide me with a speaking fee I would kindly ask them to make Crazy Egg a sponsor of their event.

Sponsorships didn’t cost the conference a dime, and for us it provided additional exposure that we would never have.

When using this strategy you’ll have to first start speaking at events and build up your conference resume. Once you’ve spoken at over 15 events you can start asking them if they will give you a free sponsorship, but it’s unlikely until you have spoken at least at a handful of conferences. Conferences don’t want to give away free sponsorships to unproven speakers.

Bloggers

There are millions of blogs out there and many of them have a strong following. To boost our brand recognition we compiled a list of all the popular bloggers using Technorati and offered them a free $99 Crazy Egg account.

We didn’t create any restrictions with the account and we didn’t require that they blog on Crazy Egg. Instead we just hoped that they would use our product.

What we learned was that many of the bloggers would show off their heatmaps on their blog, which resulted in more signups.

Once we realized that bloggers loved our products we hit up the blog networks, such as 9rules, and offered all of their members a free premium Crazy Egg account. This again caused more people to blog about Crazy Egg, which helped drive signups.

Although a lot of people are on Twitter and Facebook these days, blogs are still a big part of the social web. Don’t take them for granted, consider offering bloggers a free version of your product or service. Most bloggers don’t make money and they love freebies.

Leverage your product

Once we learned that people love showing off their heatmaps, we decided to make it easier for you to showoff your heatmap.

As silly as this may sound, we created an export feature which allowed you to pull your pretty heatmaps and show them off to your visitors. We provided multiple export options to make this easy for any user, no matter what type of computer device they were using.

This helped us boost our traffic from image sites like Google image search as everyone was posting their heatmaps on image galleries like Flickr.

Marketing doesn’t just exist outside of your product. Leverage your product to help boost your signup rate… a good example of this is Dropbox. If you want more storage space you have to invite friends and tell your Twitter follower about Dropbox. Your web app is a powerful marketing tool, so leverage it.

SEO

Although my background is in SEO, we didn’t leverage it the conventional way with Crazy Egg. Instead we did keyword research to figure out what people searched for that was related to our product or service.

We then created a list of all of the potential keywords we wanted to target and we created pages around them. For example we have a whole support section that addressed many of the things you may do a Google search on when looking for answers about our product.

If you don’t have a budget to build links or higher some top rate SEO consultant, there are ways you can do things yourself. There is always the Beginner’s Guide to SEO and the Advanced Guide to SEO that can teach you the ropes.

When you start your SEO efforts don’t go for the conventional strategies that most people use, such as link building. Try the unconventional methods like content marketing.

Conclusion

My co-founder and I were able to grow Crazy Egg to over 100,000 users with very little cash to spend on marketing. And to make things tougher, we hand to spend the majority of our time consulting so we could make enough cash to support Crazy Egg.

You have no excuse… go out there and get more users. You don’t need a big budget or a marketing background… you just need to be willing to work hard and think outside of the box.

Creativity is what makes great marketing campaigns, not dollars.

Have you ever read a story on TechCrunch that talked about how some angel investor made a few million bucks investing in a hot startup like Dropbox or Airbnb? And when you read all of these stories, what does it make you want to do?

Invest, right?

I got into investing years ago because I thought it was sexy and all of the cool kids were doing it. When I first started I lost a lot of money, but eventually I figured out how to make money.

Before you start throwing your cash around, here are a few things you should keep in mind:

Invest in what you know

Warren Buffett has a great investing rule, in which he only invests in things he knows. If he doesn’t understand the business, he doesn’t touch it.

I took a much different route when I first started, in which I invested in whatever I thought was sexy. A lot of those sexy businesses seemed cool, but they lost me money.

You should only invest in things that you know. If you want to start investing outside of your knowledge base, that’s fine as long as you are willing to lose some money to learn a new space.

Don’t get too greedy

When it comes to making money, I used to be one of the greediest people out there. I always wanted to sell during the peak and if I didn’t time things right, I would get upset.

Because of my greed I lost money in a few cases when I could have made money. Guaranteed money is always better than potential earnings.

It’s very difficult to maximize your potential earnings. If you have an opportunity to cash out on one of your investments, and you would be happy with the return, take it. You can’t predict the future, so unless you have data to show that you should keep the investment, sell it if the price is right.

Profit is more important than revenue

The biggest investment mistake I used to make was that I invested based off of revenue growth. If they had great growth, I would instantly write a check.

The issue with this is that not all business models are profitable. Even if a business has great growth, it doesn’t mean they will be able to turn a profit in the future. You need to analyze the business to make sure their margins are good and that they have a potential to turn a profit in the future.

There is nothing wrong with investing in high revenue companies with fast growth, but you have to make sure their business model has the potential to turn a profit in the future.

Ideas are a dime a dozen

It doesn’t matter how good an idea maybe, if the team behind it sucks, the business won’t go anywhere. Do yourself a favor and don’t invest in ideas… invest in people.

In an ideal scenario a business should be a good idea, it should be run by awesome entrepreneurs, and by a team who is fast at executing. If you can’t find an investment that fits that criteria you should reconsider the investment.

Companies typically pivot from their original business model they original thought would do well. They will have to adjust their strategy and come up with new ideas. But if the team isn’t good, you’ll lose your money because they won’t be able to pivot.

You make money on the buy, not the sell

It’s rare that someone is going to pay more than market price for something. For this reason you should try to get the best possible deal when you first make the investment.

And if you think there are no good deals, think again. There are always good deals, you just have to search for them.

For example, I was able to pick up a penthouse condo in Las Vegas in the highest rated building on the strip for only $250 a square foot. All of the other comps where showing that people were paying a bit more than $600 a square foot.

I know the deal may seem too good to be true, but the developer wanted to move the inventory so they sold all of the penthouses to a group who could buy them all… I happened to know one of the individuals so I was able to pick one up.

I now have the option to sell that unit for $350 a square foot and it hasn’t even been 30 days since I bought it.

If you hunt for good deals, you will find them. As an investor you have to keep in mind that you are only as good as your last deal. So make sure you choose them carefully.

Don’t spread yourself too thin

Both from a financial standpoint and a time standpoint you shouldn’t spread yourself to thin. I currently have over 30 investments because I used to take a spray and pray approach with my investing.

The issue with this is that investments aren’t as passive as you think. The more time you spend on each of them, the more likely they’ll succeed. So if you have 100 investments, it’s very likely that you won’t have time to help most of them.

And from a financial perspective, many of your investments will require more capital in the future… even if don’t seem like they will it right now. You should always keep a good portion of your cash in the bank incase you have to dump in more money into some of your investments.

A good example of this is a realtor named Neil Schwartz, who owns dozens of rental properties in California. During the recession most real estate owners got in trouble because tenants couldn’t afford to pay their rent and property values plummeted. Neil did well during this time because he was sitting on enough cash to continually pay the mortgages on his properties when they were sitting vacant.

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket

If you are just starting out and you don’t have a lot of cash, sure put all of your money into 1 business… because that’s what can help you become rich. But if you already have built up a nice nest egg spread your money out into multiple investments, this way if one goes wrong, you won’t lose all of your cash.

But you already know that.

What I really meant by “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket” is that you need to diversify your risk profile. Don’t only invest in risky investments or safe investments. Make sure you spread your money out in different risk profiles.

I used to only invest in revolutionary ideas that are likely to produce big returns, but those ideas are really risky and most of those investments will fail. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t invest in big, bold ideas, but you should also invest in safe bets.

These days I have my money in real estate, Internet companies, the stock market, and a handful of other sectors.

Conclusion

Hopefully you wont make the same mistakes I’ve made because it lost me a bit too much cash. I eventually learned how to pick better investments over time, but hopefully you don’t have to waste a lot of time and money like I did.

In addition to that if you want to get into the investing game, make sure you do it only if you are willing to continually make bets over the next 5 or 10 years. Investing isn’t a short-term game and over time you’ll be able to increase your odds of succeeding.

What other mistakes should you avoid when investing?

Do you know what you need if you want to make over $100,000 a year? It doesn’t matter if you are an entrepreneur or a 9 to 5 worker… if you want to climb up the corporate ladder there are 2 things you need to embrace.

Do you know what they are?

No they aren’t ambition or how smart you are. And luck has nothing to do with it.

It’s actually communication skills and how hard you work.

Lets break each of them down…

Communication skills

According to the dictionary communication is “the imparting or exchanging of information or news.”

In the corporate world things don’t get accomplished or done right mainly because of communication. It’s either due to the lack of communication, the speed in which you communicate at, or the fact that you may not be communicating clearly.

Let’s break down each of them:

1. Lack of communication – if you decide to not communicate as often or just not communicate, this would be considered lack of communication. A good example of this is not responding to an email or ignoring a phone call or skipping meetings.
2. Communication speed – how fast you respond is the speed you communicate at. For example if someone sends you an email and you respond 3 days later, that’s considered slow communication. If someone sends you an email and you respond within the hour, that is fast communication. The same goes with voicemail messages or follow up tasks you may receive from a meeting.
3. Clear communication – if you answer all of the questions someone asks you in way that they as well as others can understand, that’s clear communication. If you aren’t answering all of their questions, that’s poor communication. And if you can’t give people clear instructions or details on what you want done, that’s also poor communication.

So why is communication important? Because it shows that you care and you are on top of things. I actually recommended one of my friends to a local design shop in Seattle. The design shop got a $4000 contract from my buddy, but they ignored some of his emails and they decided to not respond to them in a timely manor.

My buddy was going to give them a $25,000 contract after they finished the $4000 contract, but the design firm is most likely going to lose it. It’s not because their work isn’t good, it’s because they don’t communicate effectively.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or a 9 to 5 worker you should have great communication skills:

• Always communicate with people – you should never ignore anyone, no matter how irritating they maybe.
• Respond on time – it doesn’t matter if it is after working hours or on the weekend, responding within 24 hours at the latest is a requirement.
• Over communicate – the easiest way to make sure you are communicating clearly is to over communicate. Be thorough on responding to people or even when you are giving tasks to other.
• Always take notes – whether it is a phone call, or a meeting, you should always take notes and follow up with people. Give them a summary of what happened and follow up steps to ensure everyone is on the same page.

If you follow the above communication steps, you’ll be better off then most people out in the corporate world.

Work ethic

As a kid I remember how my parents went from struggling immigrants with very little money to middle class citizens who succeeded through hard work. They did all of this so that they could provide my sister and I a life that they didn’t have.

So how did they provide us with a better life? They worked their butts off and did whatever it took no matter how unreasonable it sounded.

My mom who was a teacher couldn’t find a paying job when we moved to the U.S. So she worked for free at a school until they hired her. And because we didn’t have 2 cars, my mom had to walk a few miles to work, while pushing my sister and I in a stroller… in hopes that one day she would get a paid job.

You don’t have to be the smartest person out there, but if you want to succeed you need to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

For example we have a lot of sales reps at KISSmetrics. One of our best sales reps is a gentleman by the name of Brandon. So why does Brandon do so well? It’s not because of his connections because he doesn’t know too many check writers at large corporations. And it’s not because his sales training… he got the same training as everyone else.

What separates Brandon from the crowd is that he works more hours than most people. He is the first person in the office every day and the last person to leave. And when he gets home he continues his workday because I continually see emails from him at 9pm or even 11pm at night asking me to review contracts. Heck he even emails me over the weekends when he needs help so he can get some deals closed.

If you want to do well take a page out of Brandon’s book and work hard for more than just 8 hours a day.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how well connected you maybe, working long hours efficiently really helps you get a leg up among your co-workers and the competition.

And if that doesn’t convince you to work hard, think about how my mom got a paid teaching job because she continually worked for free. She got a paid teaching job even though English was her second language… all because she worked harder than most people.

Conclusion

I know I typically don’t write blog posts that are rants, but I had to because I continually see people with a ton of potential failing each day.

Why?

Because they are too lazy to communicate and they aren’t willing to work hard. It’s not that they aren’t smart or talented… they are just lazy.

If you want to make a lot of money you need to work your butt off and over communicate. People will eventually see how dedicated you are and you’ll come ahead.

And if you don’t care about money, you should still work hard and be a great communicator. No matter what field you go into, such as the non-profit world, those two things will help you accomplish your goals.

If you’re an entrepreneur long enough, you’ll eventually get burned out. Over the last 10 plus years of being one, I’ve gotten burned out once. It was when I was 21 years old and I lost a million dollars of borrowed money.

I was working a lot of hours, I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing, and I was losing a bit too much cash. Many people felt sorry for me, as I was a burned out 21 year old who was a million bucks in debt, but I feel lucky that I got to experience that.

Why? Because it taught me what I needed in my personal life and in business to avoid burnout while working 24/7. For the last seven years I’ve been able to work 70 hours a week without a vacation… yet I don’t get burned out.

So what’s my secret? Here’s how to avoid burnout while working 70 hours a week:

Have a cheering section

As an entrepreneur people will be skeptical about your abilities and your business. People will discourage you and tell you how you are screwing up… especially when you are starting out.

By no means am I saying that you should ignore these people because every once in a while they will actually have good feedback for you. But at the same time you need to create your own cheering section. Whether it’s your siblings, parents, friends, or significant other, you need people who are going to encourage you.

What I’ve found over the years is that if you have a cheering section it will push you to work harder and it will encourage you to keep pushing forward… especially during the tough times.

Love what you’re doing

I learned this on the hard way… if you hate what you are doing eventually you are going to get burned out. I lost a million bucks in a bad venture because I was involved in a company that I didn’t love, which means I didn’t put 110% into it.

When you feel like you are working a lot, sooner or later you’ll become exhausted and then eventually burned out. When you are working on something that you love and are passionate about, it won’t feel like work. When you enjoy something you won’t mind putting in the time and effort that is required to make it succeed.

Make sure you aren’t just doing something for the money. Life is too short to be spending your time on things you hate, so focus your time and energy on things that you love.

Create a great culture

If you are constantly working along the side of individuals who aren’t passionate about the company and they don’t care about their job, it will create a work environment that isn’t fun.

I enjoy going into our office because of the people… I could care less about our fun perks or the cool design of the office. I love working along the side of my team members because they are fun, smart, and they teach me a lot of new things. Plus we have a lot in common and we don’t mind challenge each other, which makes us all improve ourselves.

Perks like a fancy looking office and free soda don’t compare to being around great people. Make sure your company has an awesome culture like Zappos because it will make working that much more fun.

And if you are wondering how Zappos has built an all-star roster of employees, they actually offer everyone money to quit before they even start the job. This helps them weed out all of the bad apples.

Break up your goals

As an entrepreneur you need to feel like you are accomplishing something. If your business isn’t growing or even hitting your goals, you’ll eventually get frustrated. When you feel like you are constantly failing and doing everything wrong, it can easily lead to burnout.

What I’ve found is that by breaking up your goals into much smaller ones, you are more likely to accomplish them. And as you accomplish more of them your business will grow and you’ll have a sense of accomplishment.

Focus on creating goals that can be accomplished within a week’s timeframe. Make sure they aren’t too easy and don’t worry if you don’t hit all of your goals. If your hitting every single one, it means that you aren’t setting big enough goals.

Workout every morning

Did you know that working out gives you energy? Going to the gym every morning before work will not only give you more energy, but it also helps fight fatigue.

My friends usually make fun of my workout plan, but it really works when it comes to preventing burnout. Every morning I go to the gym, do around 15 to 20 pull ups, and then peddle on a bike for 20 minutes while watching TV. I then lift weights for 5 or 10 minutes.

I then end my workout session by hitting the spa. Just like how I spent 30 minutes in the gym, I spend 30 minutes in the steam room each morning before I start my workday. I’ve found that the steam room is a place I can go to relax and not think about work.

Reward yourself

When you are first starting out you don’t need to do this as much, but when you are in business for 5 or 10 years you need to start treating yourself. It doesn’t have to be from a financial standpoint either…

It could be as simple as going to the movie theater to escape reality for a few hours. Or getting yourself a weekly massage, which should help you relax.

I reward myself each week with an hour hand massage which focuses on my fingers, wrists, and arms… this weekly treatment eliminates my carpal tunnel pain.

Whatever you escape maybe, treat yourself every once in a while because it will make your life that much better. Again the treat doesn’t have to be financially related, it could just be something simple that makes you happy.

Rage out

The biggest way I prevent burnout is by raging out once a month. My friends and I typically fly into Vegas on a Friday night, party really hard, and then get back to work on Saturday.

The key with raging out is that you have to go all out and not do it too often. I’ve found that once a month is the sweet spot as it makes you look forward to the event. If you rage on a weekly basis you’ll quickly get tired of partying and it could also have a negative effect on your work.

Your version of raging doesn’t have to be partying in Vegas… it can be anything you want. Just go crazy once a month and you’ll find yourself to be a much more productive worker.

Conclusion

I’ve found that even if I don’t do the above things on a monthly basis I don’t really get burned out. The number one reason is because I love what I am doing and I don’t see it as work.

Even when I hang out with my friends, I still talk about my work because I am addicted to it. And they talk to me about their business as well. We all work 24/7 and we enjoy it.

The tactics above may not work for you, you just have to figure out your formula to prevent burnout. Just think of it as a big A/B test on your life.

What other ways can you prevent burnout while working 24/7?

You already know about A/B testing, but have you ever run an A/B test? Sadly, the chances are, you haven’t. Although conversion optimization has been around for years, it didn’t start getting popular until the last few years.

Why?

It’s because people are talking about the results they’re experiencing from conversion optimization. But before you go out there and start running A/B tests, in hopes to get the same results for your business, there are a few things you need to know.

Here are 7 A/B testing blunders you need to avoid:

Blunder #1: Believing what you read

Everyone talks about A/B testing results and how one simple changed really boosted their conversions. And when you see these results you are likely to want to copy the same test on your own website. But a lot of people run A/B tests incorrectly, which is why you need to learn to read between the lines.

For example if you read about this A/B test from Hubspot it seems that having a red call to action button out performs a green call to action button. But if you read carefully, you’ll notice that they mention that the red button had a 21% increase in click throughs than the green button. That doesn’t mean that they saw a 21% increase in conversion rates.

Just because someone clicks a button, it doesn’t mean they are more likely to convert than a different variation. Now the article by Hubspot does mention how they also saw a “21% increase at the bottom” but it still doesn’t clearly state if they got an increase in conversions by 21%.

By no means am I saying the article by Hubspot isn’t useful, but more so I am trying to point out that you need to be careful on how you interpret data. Don’t just assume that if someone ran a test and called it a “winning variation” that it is a winning variation. And most importantly, don’t expect to take that same test and implement it on your website, and achieve similar results.

Blunder #2: Ending tests when they are statistically significant

If an A/B testing software shows the results are statistically significant, you should end the test, right? In most cases that would be true, but if you don’t have enough conversions on each variable you shouldn’t stop the test.

My rule thumb is each variation should have at least 100 conversions and the test should run for at least 2 weeks.

When I started running A/B tests on Crazy Egg 3 years ago we ran around 7 tests in 5 months and the A/B testing software showed that we boosted our conversions by 41%. But we didn’t see any increase in our revenue.

Why? Because we didn’t run each test long enough. Stopping a test when the winning variation had 41 conversions and the losing version had 15 conversions is a bad idea because things can quickly change… especially if the test has been only running for a few days.

Those results didn’t hold true in the long run, which is why we didn’t see revenue increases. Make sure you run your tests long enough.

Blunder #3: Expecting big wins from small changes

If small changes are providing huge gains something else is wrong with your design or copy. The conversion wins small changes provide typically don’t hold for the long haul.

The biggest conversion boosts are going to come from drastic changes. So if you really want to move your conversion rates don’t focus on small changes, focus on drastic changes, as they are the ones that boost your revenue.

When you are starting out you could try small tweaks to your design and copy to see if your conversion rates increase, but eventually you’ll need to focus on the big wins.

What I like doing is focus on the drastic changes and once I’ve felt like I’ve maximized their potential, I then focus on the small changes.

A good example of this is that we first got huge wins with Crazy Egg by changing the homepage to a long sales letter. After we made that drastic change, we then tested the call to actions, button colors and small things like that.

Blunder #4: The first step in A/B testing is to come up with a test

If you want to dive right in and start testing variations of your web page, that’s fine. I hope things work out for you, but the chances are you will lose some money.

You aren’t the one buying your own product or service, it’s other people. So why should you based your A/B tests based off of what you think people will want to see.

Instead you should start off by surveying your visitors. Ask them questions like:

• What else would you like to see on this page?
• What can we help you with?
• Why didn’t you complete the purchase? (great question to use on your checkout page if someone has been idle for more than 30 seconds)
• What could have we done to convince you to complete the purchase?

By getting qualitative data from your users it will help you pin point what’s wrong with your messaging. You can then take that data to make changes and test them out to see if you can find a winning variation.

But before you start the test you need to create an A/A test in which you test your current version of your website against the current version. You’re doing this to test out the accuracy of the A/B testing software you are using and the accuracy of the data.

Once the A/A test looks good, you can then start your first A/B test.

Blunder #5: Running a lot of tests on a regular basis

Just the other day I sat down with an entrepreneur who told me how they were experts in A/B testing. And how they run over 20 A/B tests each month.

When I then started to dig a bit deeper I found out that their website has a lot of traffic, which is why they are able to go through so many tests so fast. And they didn’t have a ton of pages, so it was easy for their design team to make changes.

But even after hearing all of that, I explained to them how it’s bad to run so many tests in a short period of time.

For starters they weren’t basing their tests off of existing data and they weren’t running them long enough. For this reason they weren’t seeing big revenue increases.

To make matters worse, they had a lot of losing tests, which was causing them to lose a lot of money. A temporary decrease in conversion rates means you temporary lost money.

If you can collect enough data, create tests based on the data, and then learn from the tests, that’s fine. But it’s unrealistic to do all of that in a very short period of time.

Don’t focus on quantity, focus on quality. Always run tests based off of data and learn throughout the process… even if that slows down you’re A/B testing schedule.

The biggest thing you need to take away from this blunder is learn from your tests, which takes time, so don’t try to force yourself to run a lot of tests each month.

Blunder #6: The more variables the better

I hate testing too many variables at once, which is why I am not the biggest fan of multivariate tests. I’ve found when you combine all of the winning elements in a multivarte tests, your conversion rates don’t go up as much as the software tells you they’re going to go up by.

If you modify too many variables at once, without testing them all, you also won’t know what variables are helping and which ones are hurting. For that reason you should only try to make one change at a time.

A good example of this is the Tim Sykes sales letter. Two weeks ago, he changed the video, the headline, the copy, and even how the form fields were designed. In the end he had a huge drop in conversions.

That doesn’t mean the test was a failure, but instead he didn’t know which elements of the new design boosted conversions and which ones decreased conversions. To get a better understanding of this he should have tested each variable instead of testing them all at once.

Blunder #7: Testing micro conversions

Do you remember the blunder at the beginning of this article, in which Hubspot tested click throughs? A click through is an example of a micro conversion… in which they were trying to increase how many people went from one part of the funnel to the next.

A macro conversion in that same scenario would be testing if a change impacted conversion rates. So instead of just testing the button color to see if it impacted click through rates, the macro version of that test would have been testing button color to see if it impacted conversion rates.

Now this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at micro conversions, but you should focus on macro conversions while keeping micro conversions in mind.

Blunder #8: Launching a new design

I know I said this post only contained seven blunders, but I had to throw in an eight one…

The biggest blunder you can make is redesign your website because your design is outdated and old. I’m a big believer that you should never just redesign things, but instead you should continually tweak and test your design until it gets to your customer’s liking.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you think of your design, all that matters is that it converts well. If you jump the gun and just change things up because you want to, you can drastically hurt your revenue.

Similar to the example in blunder number six, Tim Sykes also launched a new design because he wanted something fresh. Within hours of launching the design he noticed that his revenue tanked. There was nothing wrong with the code and everything seemed to work, instead the design wasn’t performing well. So he had no choice but to revert back to the old design.

You have a website to gain business from it. Creating a new design won’t always help boost your revenue, so continually tweak and test elements instead of just redoing your whole design at once.

Conclusion

It’s ok if you make mistakes while you optimize your site for conversions. As long as you learn from your mistakes and avoid making the same ones over again, you’ll be fine.

Hopefully this blog post didn’t discourage you from running A/B tests on your website. But instead I’m hoping that it encourages you to run tests the right way.

Are there any other big mistakes you should avoid when optimizing your site for conversions?

You already know that content marketing is the new SEO, but how do you do it? There are a lot of guides on the Internet that talk about it, but no one breaks it down from A to Z.

Due to this, I decide to write The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing along with the help of our Crazy Egg blog editor, Kathryn Aragon.

Here’s what is covered in this 40,000 word guide:

• Introduction – a break down of what you are going to learn.
• Chapter 1: Build a Strong Foundation – why not make those important content marketing decisions now so you can lay a strong foundation? In this chapter, you’ll get to know your objectives, your target audience, and your content strategy. You’ll also learn the technology and work flow that will help you meet your objectives.
• Chapter 2: Generate Clickable Ideas – having a content marketing plan isn’t enough. You need to be able to generate enough content ideas to keep you going for months if not years. This chapter will teach you how to generate ideas for any industry.
• Chapter 3: How to Plan Your Content For Maximum Productivity – there are a lot of time consuming aspects of content marketing, if you can’t figure out how to make the most of your time you’ll find yourself drowning in content creation. This chapter will teach you how to be productive.
• Chapter 4: Learn to Write Content Like a Pro – I’ve blogged in the past about how I write my content, but now I’ve created a whole chapter on how you can become an excellent writer like Seth Godin.
• Chapter 5: 12 Content Writing Secrets of The Professionals – in this chapter you’ll learn what separates the pros from the beginners. If you want to be a great content marketer, you have to follow the secrets of the pros.
• Chapter 6: Templates for Quick and Easy Content Creation – people have written content on all sorts of topics in different styles. There’s no point in recreating the wheel… which is why I help you templatize everything.
• Chapter 7: Overcoming Common Content Marketing Roadblocks – sooner or later you’re going to get stuck. Whether it’s on the creation side or the promotion side or within any other phase of content marketing, this chapter will teach you how to overcome the roadblocks you’ll run into sooner or later.
• Chapter 8: The Other Side of Content Creation: Optimize for Search – Google and Bing can drive a lot of traffic. If you want your content to do well you need to write it for humans and rank it on search engines.
• Chapter 9: Promoting Your Content to Increase Traffic, Engagement, and Sales – if you can’t generate revenue from your content marketing efforts you won’t be doing it too long. This chapter will teach you how to get a ROI from your marketing.
• Chapter 10: Driving Business Objectives With Content: 5 Simple Strategies for Monetizing Your Content – in this chapter, you learn five methods for monetizing your content without advertising. Not all of them will work for every business, but all of them are valuable strategies that are being used successfully by other content marketers.

Click here to read The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing.

Conclusion

Hopefully you like The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing. As time goes on I’ll try to keep the guide updated with the latest and greatest tactics. If you see anything that needs to be fixed, feel free and leave a comment below.

PS: Don’t forget to tweet about The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing.

PPS: You would be doing me a HUGE FAVOR by reading The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing, sharing it via Twitter and Facebook, and by leaving me a comment to let me know what you think.

One of the simplest ways to boost your conversion rate is by tweaking your headline copy. If you don’t believe me… just look at KISSmetrics.com, I was able to boost my conversion rate by 40% just by adjusting the headline copy.

That’s right… 40%.

So what was the original headline? It was… KISSmetrics helps you get actionable metrics for your business.

And the new one is… Google Analytics tells you what happened, KISSmetrics tells you who did it.

So how can you boost your conversion rate through headlines? Well, there are a few simple strategies you can test:

Test #1: Solution selling

People are looking for your product or service because you are offering a solution to their problem. If you can clearly identify what their problem is, and represent the solution as well as benefit in the headline, you’re likely to increase your conversion rate.

MarketingProfs did a headline test in which they tried using solution selling and they were able to boost their conversion rate by 28%.

Solution selling only works if you know the phrases and verbiage that resonates most closely with your customers. The easiest way to figure out what verbiage your customers like is to survey them. Here are a few questions you can ask them:

• What’s the biggest problem we can help you solve?
• What are you looking for in your ideal solution?

Test #2: Use the word “free”

Who doesn’t like free stuff? For that reason you should consider using the word “free” in your headlines… assuming you are offering something for free such as a “free trial”.

Highrise did a test in which the added the phrase “free trial” in their headline and they boosted their conversion rate by 30%.

If your product or service doesn’t offer a free trial, you can also use pricing verbiage within your headline. For example, on Crazy Egg we found that having the phrase “without the high costs” in our headline converts better than using the phrase “free trial”.

People don’t want to commit to anything they aren’t too familiar with. By reducing their commitment through free trials or reduced prices or even a money back guarantee, you can increase your conversion rate. Consider using any one of those 3 tactics within your headline copy.

Test #3: Create a comparison

We used this tactic with KISSmetrics to boost our conversion rate by 40%. We related our product to Google Analytics, which is a product that all of our potential customers are very familiar with.

By comparing our self to a product our potential customers use, they were able to figure out what we do within seconds. This is the main reason our conversion rate increased.

We also tested a few other headline variations, but the “Google Analytics tells you what happened, KISSmetrics tells you who did it” variation won by 40%.

When you are creating your headline copy consider testing a version that compares your company against others in your market place.

Test #4: Does your headline match your advertising?

If you create a deceiving headline in hopes to boost your conversion rate, it can potentially actually hurt.

Your headline shouldn’t just match your body copy, but it should also match your advertising. If a majority of your traffic comes from paid advertising, tests unique headlines that are related to specific adverts.

California Closets did a test with their headline, in which they decided to create a variation that was more related to their advertisements.

Can you guess what the end result was? A 115% increase in conversions! That’s huge.

In an ideal world each of your advertisements should be pointing to a landing page that has a specific headline tailored to your ad.

Test #5: Make your headline a testimonial

This may sound a bit unconventional, but turning your headline into a testimonial could boost your conversion rate.

LKR Social Media did an a/b test in which they turned their headline into a testimonial. This resulted in a 24.31% increase in their conversion rate.

Here is what the original headline looked liked:

And here is the testimonial version:

By changing the headline to “Yours is the only newsletter I actually read” people felt like they were missing out if they didn’t subscribe to the LKR newsletter.

If you are going to test this approach make sure you don’t use a really long testimonial as your headline. A headline is supposed to gain someone’s attention and make him or her want to learn more… you can’t do this by having a headline that is a paragraph long.

Test #6: Tell them what they get

Sometimes the straightforward approach is the best one. CityCliq decided to take this approach versus the solution selling approach.

They tested multiple headlines such as:

• Businesses grow faster online!
• Create a webpage for your business.
• Get found faster!
• Online advertising that works!

They found that the straightforward headline of “create a webpage for your business” works better than the solution of “get found faster”. The end result was a 89% increase in signups.

You don’t always have to come up with a creative headline to boost your conversion rate. All you have to do is tell people what you do in a straightforward and simple fashion.

Test #7: Sequence your headlines

It’s very rare that your conversion funnel only consists of one page. Typically you’ll have a few pages… such as Crazy Egg has a homepage, pricing page, signup page, and a thank you page.

In other words, the Crazy Egg funnel consists of 4 steps, which means there are at least 4 headlines on that site… one headline per page. By making sure your headlines flow with each other, you are more likely to increase your conversion rates.

The Obama Administration tested sequential headlines during their campaign. In which the headline in the second step of their funnel was highly relevant to the headline in step one.

The end result was a 21% increase in conversions. What you should learn from this is that your headlines on each step of your funnel should flow together.

Test #8: Don’t forget sub-headings

Jumpbox did a test with their ads to see if having an ad with a headline converted better or worse than an ad with a headline and sub-heading.

Here was the original version of the ad:

And here was the variation:

Can you guess which version converted better? The version with the sub-heading boosted click through rates by 88%.

When you are a/b testing don’t forget to test out having a sub-heading verses not having one. In addition to that, test multiple variations of a sub-heading because some may work better than others.

Test #9: Curiosity sells

On my Quick Sprout Traffic System, I used to use a free trial based headline that converted well. The headline was… “Learn how to double your traffic in 30 days for free” and I couldn’t come up with a variation that would beat it.

My buddy suggested I try this headline instead… “When Amazon, Viacom and NBC need more traffic to their website this is who they call”. Can you guess what the result was?

31.7% increase in conversions. I was shocked considering my original headline made a promise and it stated how it was “free”. But it didn’t convert as well as the headline that evoked curiosity.

Just because something is working well for you, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement.

Test #10: Time based headlines

People don’t want to go through a lengthy signup process. And they don’t want to use a product or service that that’s complicated and time consuming.

Within your headlines you can convey that your signup process is short and that your product it easy to use.

With Crazy Egg, we tested a time based sub-heading that told you our product is easy to use and that the signup process is short.

The sub-heading “View your heatmap & get started in less than 60 seconds” boosted our signup conversion rate by 16.2% compared to the sub-heading “You’re just 1 step away from viewing your heatmap”.

Conclusion

Some of the headline ideas I showed you above may boost your conversion rate while others may not. Don’t just assume that what works for one site will work for you, even if that site is in your same space.

You need to continually a/b test your headlines and you need to do it in a logical way. The last thing you want to do is randomly pull headline ideas out of your butt and test them because you’ll just end up with a lot of losing tests. Instead you need to survey your visitors and get an understanding of what they want to see and then you need to show it to them.

Before I even run a headline a/b test I create a fake landing page with the new headline variation and a call to action. The call to action doesn’t go anywhere, but more so I am tracking how many people click on it. I then buy Google AdWords traffic to that junk landing page to see if people resonate with the new headline by clicking on the call to action. If they do, I then start an a/b test.

What other ways can you create high converting headlines?

I was speaking at a conference the other day and someone asked me an interesting question…

If you were to start optimizing a site for search engines from the ground up, what would you do?

Answering that question would have been a bit easier years ago because all you had to do is build rich anchor text links and you could dominate the rankings. Sadly, SEO isn’t that easy anymore… what used to work in the past doesn’t anymore.

And although SEO is still going to change drastically in the future, I think if you leverage the long term tactics you’ll continue to dominate the search results in the future.

Here’s how I would optimize a brand new site for search engines:

Step #1: Start a pay per click campaign

Most SEOs start off with keyword research, and although you should as well, don’t do it the way most SEOs do. Sure you can use tools like WordTracker to help you determine what keywords you ought to go after, but you’ll soon realize that their data isn’t 100% accurate.

What you need to do is follow the keyword research steps outlined in this guide and then start a pay per click campaign using those keywords and phrases. This will show you the exact keywords that convert visitors into customers.

If you don’t know how to setup a pay per click campaign, just watch the YouTube video below:

This is important because it doesn’t matter how much traffic you’re generating, all that matters is how much money you are making. If you can’t convert your traffic into customers, you won’t be doing SEO for long, as it will be too expensive of an endeavor.

When going through this process, you don’t have to spend much money to figure out what keywords can drive enough paying customers… $500 can take you a long way.

Step #2: Build links

Once you’ve figured out what keywords to go after, you need to start building links. You don’t need these links to be rich in anchor text, but you do need them to be highly relevant.

So how do you find highly relevant links? You search for them. If you are trying to rank for a keyword, such a “dog food”, the most relevant link would be from a web page that already ranks in the top 100 search results for the term “dog food”. The second most relevant link would be from webpages that rank within the top 1000 results for the term “dog food”.

Sure, many of those sites are going to be competitors, but a large portion won’t. By leveraging these email templates you’ll be ready to manually email the top 1000 sites that rank for the term you are trying to rank for.

When building links you should ideally point them to internal pages that are highly related to that keyword. So for your dog food site, you would want those links to point to a web page on your site that only shows all of the different types of dog food, versus having the links go to your homepage which showcases hundreds of random dog products.

By following this strategy for all of the terms you want to rank for, you’ll naturally boost your organic traffic over time.

Step #3: Build a Facebook fan page

Within my Google Analytics account, I have access to over 100 different websites. Can you guess what each of those sites have in common? Facebook is always one of the top 10 most popular traffic sources.

If you aren’t on Facebook, you’re missing out… no matter what industry you are in. For a few thousand dollars you can build a huge Facebook audience that you can leverage to drive traffic back to your website. Plus they’ll like your webpages, which should help boost your rankings, as social signals are used within search engine algorithms.

To build a popular Facebook fan page, you just have to follow the steps below. And once you do, you’ll notice that you can easily generate 15,000 if not 30,000 visitors a month from Facebook.

Step #4: Build up my Twitter profile

Just like Facebook, Twitter also happens to be one of the top 10 most popular traffic sources for all of the sites I have Google Analytics access to. So naturally you should build up your Twitter profile so that way you can boost your social signals and drive traffic back to your website.

A simple way to get more followers is through Twitter’s ad network, which isn’t too expensive.

Once you are up and running, make sure you also follow these steps to get the most amount of retweets. And if you don’t have money to spend on Twitter advertising, you can also build up a powerful account for free if you leverage these tactics.

Step #5: Hire a PR agency

Links from authority sites like TechCrunch or New York Times will always hold more weight than links from your mom’s blog. So how do you get links from these authority sites?

You hire a PR agency. And don’t worry, if you don’t have much cash, you can always leverage a performance based PR agency like PR Serve, in which you only pay them if they provide results.

Here’s what I would have your PR agency focus on:

1. Launches – anytime you launch a new feature or service, have your PR agency focus on getting you coverage. This is the easiest way to get press… assuming your features or services are awesome.
2. News – if you have big news like a fundraising event, it’s easy to get coverage. It may not always be from TechCrunch, but there are enough authority sites that love covering news worthy related events.
3. Guest posts – if you are a good writer, you can always have them pitch you for a guest post. Most blogs will turn you down, but it is worth a shot.
4. Interviews – if you’re a rockstar, it will be easy to get you interviews. If you don’t have a stellar resume, then come up with some interesting data points that you want to share… a journalist will want to interview you on the data, assuming it’s interesting.

All 4 of the above tactics will just help you build links, but more importantly they will get your brand out there. People will read about your business and it will cause you to make more sales.

Step #6: Write awesome content

Blogging is very powerful. It’s actually the number 1 revenue generating marketing channel for all my businesses and it has been for the last 5 years. It’s the main reason why I blog so often.

You should start a blog because it can do wonders for your business. Don’t expect miracles in a short period of time, but within a year your blog should be kicking butt if you are writing great content.

If you aren’t sure on how to get your blog started, just replicate my process for writing blog posts and promoting them. It’s really important that you follow through on the promoting part because without it, your content won’t do much for you. But with it, you’ll start noticing that your blog will get more search engine traffic than your main site.

And if I were in your shoes and I had to start a blog from scratch I would only focus a portion of my time on writing blog posts, because everyone can create great content these days. But where there is a huge gap in the market is the lack of detailed guides. Spend the majority of your blog writing time to create content like The Advanced Guide to SEO and spend then money to make it look really good with a professional design because most companies won’t go that far. That’s what’s going to separate you from the competition.

Step #7: Focus on conversion optimization

Conversion optimization only started to become popular since the last few years. No one used to really care about it 5 years ago, but now everyone is doing it.

Why you may ask? Traffic is becoming more expensive than it ever was before and the price to get a visitor to your website will continue to rise in the future. By optimizing your site for conversions you’ll be able to continually spend the money you need to in the future.

Before you start your conversion efforts, always start off by surveying your visitors. This will tell you why they aren’t buying or what parts of your website they find confusing. Through solutions like Qualaroo you won’t have to worry about coming up with survey questions as they have a lot of templates that tailored around conversion optimization.

You can then use that data to determine what changes to your website. When running a/b tests make sure you run them till they are statistically significant.

If you find that you are running tests that are causing your conversions to move drastically up or down, it usually means that your visitors are sensitive those specific web elements… which is a good thing.

So for example, if you ran an a/b test on the text of your call to actions and the variations didn’t drastically go up or down, it means that people aren’t too sensitive about your call to action text. This means that you should consider moving on and testing other elements of your web page, such as your headline copy.

You should be focusing on getting big conversion wins and the best way to do this is to make drastic changes to your web pages.

And if you want a few a/b testing ideas, check out the following blog posts:

• How to optimize contact forms for conversions
• Click here: 11 ways to improve your call to actions
• 11 obvious A/B tests you should try
• Holy grail of eCommerce conversion optimization – 91 point checklist and infographic
• 13 unconventional landing page strategies to increase conversions
• 31 conversion optimization tips – how to increase conversion rates

Conclusion

If you notice I left out things like Google Plus and on page optimization because those are the basics that you have to do no matter what. Instead I wanted to focus on tactics that will drastically help you achieve much better results compared to if you focused on what everyone else is doing.

What other things would you do if you had to start your SEO campaign from scratch?

Guest blogging is the most popular way of building links. It’s been working so well for most SEOs, that bloggers are getting bombarded with dozens of emails a day asking if they accept guest posts.

And although guest blogging will still work after the Penguin 2.0 update, I think the way you build links through guest blogging will change.

Here’s how I think guest blogging will be affected:

Change #1: Social signals

The more tweets, shares and even Facebook likes a post gets the better, right? Although that’s true in most cases, some authors have been cheating the system with the help of Fiverr.

For $5 you can buy over 100 tweets, likes, or any other type of social share out there.

You already know search engines look at social signals to help determine the ranking of a website, but after Penguin 2.0 I think they will focus less on the social count, but more on who is sharing it. If someone with a powerful network of 200 influential (and real) people shares your post, that will carry more weight in Google’s algorithm than a share by someone with a network of 2,000 bots and spam purveyors. If it doesn’t now it soon will.

In addition to that, Google will most likely look at if you yourself are sharing your own guest posts on your own social profiles. Because if you aren’t willing to tweet or like your own guest post, the chances are you didn’t write a great post.

Solution: Write great content that you can be proud of… so proud that you’ll share it on your own social profiles. In addition to that you need to start networking with influencers who have a large social following because if your content is really good, they may even decide to share it.

You should also message all of the authors who are in your space with popular social followings. When you write a great guest post, ping them to see if they will tweet about it. It’s much easier to get them to tweet or like your post than it is to get them to link to it.

Change #2: Author rank

Author rank is becoming is more commonly used by writers these days. This allows Google to see where you are publishing your content and how well it does throughout the web.

If you continually write great content, Google will eventually place more weight on your content… no matter what site you write on.

At the same time, if you continue to put out crap, they’ll keep track of it and devalue the links in your post. It doesn’t matter if you are blogging on Huffington Post or an unknown blog, they will devalue anything you link to if they notice you are just guest blogging for links.

This means Google isn’t just going to be devaluing sites, but authors now too.

Solution: Be even pickier about the content you push out. If you are unsure of how to write exceptionally good content, check out blogs like Copyblogger and Problogger as they will teach you everything you need to know about writing.

If you want to learn how I create my content, you can follow my guidelines here or check out this guide to guest blogging for your business.

Change #3: Devaluing links

You already know that links from your author bio aren’t as effective as they used to be. I have a strong feeling that these links are going to carry even less weight than they do now.

In addition to that, Google will be pickier on what links they do give a lot of weight to and which ones they don’t.

If you have a rich anchor text link within the first paragraph or two within a guest post, that link will probably be devalued. If you are just posting the same old infographic on multiple blogs, those links will also be devalued.

The reason search engines have to do this is because it’s easy to get your content pushed out anywhere on the web. The sad part is, I can pay people to just shove my infographic on popular blogs like Mashable and Huffington Post and generate back links… so why should those links carry as much weight compared to when to a well known author links to me from an editorial piece.

Solution: Don’t go for easy link building methods, but instead focus on providing value. If you create something that is so great, people will naturally link to it. And if you take the creativity of design, such as infographics and tie it in with content, you will build much better links than if people just shared a basic infographic on their site.

A good example of this is The Advanced Guide to SEO. It’s an infographic that contains over 45,000 words.

Change #4: Devaluing sites

Sites that are consistently linking out to one site will get penalized. Google wants you to link out to many sites and ideally ones that are authoritative. If you are writing good content, you’ll naturally do this.

For example, I link out to Wikipedia, Forbes, and a few other authoritative sites a lot… it’s not because I am trying to game Google, but more so those sites provide great information. So why not link out to them… it just benefits your readers.

Sites that also post irrelevant content are going to start being penalized or their links won’t contain much weight. For example, why would a site about dog food be linking out to a payday loan site. It just doesn’t make sense.

Blogs that push spammy links within their content will be devalued. If you do this once or twice, I don’t think there will be an issue, but if you do it on a regular basis it will really start hurting you.

Solution: When picking a site to guest blog on, make sure to pick one that doesn’t link out to spammy sites and one that is highly relevant. When you write your guest post show some love by linking out to other sites that will benefit your readers… even if that other site is your competitor.

Change #5: Co-citations

Have you ever noticed that a large portion of the time, when people talk about you or your website, they don’t link to you? This happens a lot with me, especially when it comes to authoritative blogs.

Forbes, and many of the news sites out there that mention Quick Sprout don’t always link back to the site.

When I did a search and looked through the last 100 sites that mentioned me, 29% of the time they didn’t actually link back to my site.

If you continually do guest posts and link back to your site, it will hurt you in the long run. Google knows what link percentages are natural and if you don’t fit within that range, I think it will hurt it you.

Solution: Don’t always link back to your site. Write great content because you want to educate people and share what you have learned. This should also help improve your ratio of sites that mention you and link to you and sites that mention you and don’t link back.

Conclusion

Some of the changes I mentioned above may not happen in Penguin 2.0, but they are the ones I think will be in the algorithm update. If they aren’t, I personally feel Google will eventually implement them.

What other changes do you see Google making with Penguin 2.0?

Do you know what you should be looking for in an ideal employee? I didn’t really know what to look for when I started my entrepreneurial journey, but after making dozens of hiring mistakes I’ve learned what to look for and what to avoid.

If you are trying to grow your business, especially during the early days, it’s really important to hire the right people. Hiring one bad person, can derail your whole business and potentially cause you to fail.

Don’t make the mistakes I made by just hiring the cheapest employees out there, make sure you hire the right person for the job. Here are what qualities you should be looking for:

Hire people smarter than you

You should never hire anyone who isn’t smarter than you. Now they don’t have to be a jack-of-all-trades, but they do need to be smarter than you when it comes to their job.

For example, if I were to hire an online marketer, I would hire someone who is much more knowledgeable in this area than I am. Plus that person needs to not only be able to talk the talk, but they have to be able to walk it as well. If they can’t execute on their knowledge, they typically aren’t the right fit for any job.

If you don’t hire smart people, you’ll end up wasting your time micromanaging. Employees hate that and it will consume too much of your time. Smart people on the other hand are independent and they’ll figure out how to get stuff done on their own, and they’ll be able to do a better job than you.

Don’t take culture for granted

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that culture is really important. I used to think that you could just hire smart people and expect them to do wonders for you.

But if people don’t fit within your company culture, they will be more likely to butt heads when it doesn’t make sense, quit when things aren’t going well, and they won’t care for your company.

Zappos does a great job of hiring people who fit within their company culture. During their interview process they’ll even offer you money to quit, which helps them weed out all of the bad apples.

Over the years, I’ve learned that if someone doesn’t fit your company culture, you shouldn’t hire them… even if they fit all of your other requirements. We followed this strategy at KISSmetrics and we were able to keep every one of our employees during the tough times… such as when we went through a class action lawsuit last year.

Hire hungry people

The main reason companies don’t hire people who are over qualified is because they aren’t always willing to do what the job requires. People who are very successful, such as corporate executives, usually aren’t as willing to get their hands dirty compared to someone who is trying to get his or her big break in the corporate world.

If things don’t work out for that big corporate executive, they can always get another high paying job. But if things don’t work out for that young kid, they’ll be left with nothing. For this reason, you want to hire hungry people because they have no choice but to work hard and strive to succeed.

When we started our sales team at KISSmetrics we had a choice of hiring a sales executive from Web Trends who managed a large team and was producing over $30 million in sales a year or a Director of Sales from Truste who managed a small team and was producing over $16 million a year.

Do you know which one we hired?

We didn’t hire the sales executive from Web Trends even though he was in the same industry as us. It wasn’t because of his qualifications or salary requirements, it was because he was a high paid executive who already was successful and was used to managing big teams that did all the heavy lifting for him.

The guy from TRUSTe on the other hand badly wanted to be a VP of Sales for a company and was willing to do whatever it took. He wasn’t just a manager, like the Web Trends candidate, he was actually selling for TRUSTe while managing. For that reason, we went with him because he was willing to do whatever it took to earn the job.

In the end it worked out well because he put in more hours than required to ensure the company’s success. He didn’t have the luxury of failing due to the fact that he needed things to work out to improve his future.

Focus on hiring people who are hungry because their output will usually be much greater than a high paid executive. Worse case you can always pay the high paid executive to mentor your scrappy hire.

Money isn’t everything

If someone cares for money over everything else, they probably aren’t a good fit for your company. You want to hire people who love your company and want to work there because they believe in your vision.

The right candidate will take equity in your company and less pay because they really want to work with you. They’ll get the opportunity to learn from you, work with like-minded people who can challenge them, and they will be in fun work environment that isn’t filled with useless meetings and boring calls.

When negotiating compensation keep in mind that people have bills to pay and they need money to survive. So you can’t expect people to work for free, but you can expect them to work for you below the market rate.

It’s hard to scale without process

As you become larger, you will have growing pains. You’ll have to figure out how to make things more scalable and you’ll have to train more employees. You’ll also have to figure out how to make things more efficient. There’s no quick solution in solving all of these things, but employees who are good at creating processes will make your life a lot easier.

If you hire people who aren’t good at creating processes, it will be hard for them to determine the bottlenecks in the business and what can be improved. For example, my VP of Sales created our sales process and continually adapts it to help his team maximize their efforts. Because the last thing they want to do is make hundreds of sales calls and close no deals.

If you want to grow fast, you’ll have to fine-tune your business, and it’s hard to do that without processes.

Don’t accept candidates from recruiting firms

I know this really isn’t a quality in a candidate, but I had to include it. In most cases recruiting firms don’t have the best candidates. Why you may ask? It’s because talented people don’t need recruiters to help them find a job.

If someone is really good at what they do, they’ll constantly be bombarded with job offers. And if someone isn’t too good at what they do, they won’t receive too many job offers.

For this reason you should try to avoid recruiting firms. And by no means am I saying that recruiters are bad. Having recruiters work for you internally is a much different experience than using a recruiting firm to help you hire.

The candidates who aren’t receiving too many job offers, usually use recruiting firms to help them find a new job.

Conclusion

I know when you are starting out it’s going to be hard for you to find the perfect employee. But don’t settle on hiring someone who is mediocre because it can hurt the trajectory of your business.

If you want to find the best candidates for your job openings, my recommendation is that you should manually hit up potential candidates from your LinkedIn profile. Using your LinkedIn account will achieve a higher response rate than using a random person’s LinkedIn account.

What other traits should you look for in an employee?

Penalized by Google? There’s no need to jump to conclusions and dump your website, there’s actually a way to fix it and get back in. Sure it will take some hard work, but in the long run it’s better to fix your website than it is to start all over again with a brand new domain.

But before I get into how you can get your website out of the penalization box, I’m going to go over the most common situations that first got you into the penalization box.

And don’t worry, I won’t use animals like Panda to describe your penalization, but instead I’ll go over what you did to get penalized and how to fix it.

Here are the most common tactics that caused your site to get penalized and here is how you fix it:

Tactic #1: Over optimized anchor text

If you want to get ranked for a keyword like dog food, you should get sites to link to you with the anchor text “dog food”, right? And although that’s correct to some extent, if too many people link to you with that anchor text, it will actually decrease your rankings.

So what should you do? Remove the links?

Assuming you’ve built relevant links from authoritative sites and they weren’t paid for, you shouldn’t remove them. But if you built over optimized anchor text links from irrelevant or spammy sites, try to get the webmasters to remove the links.

If you built good links, keep them, even if your anchor text is over optimized. Over time you need to continually build more and more non-rich anchor text links from authoritative sites. Here are some of the anchor text variations you should use:

• yourdomain.com
• yourdomain
• The text of your title tag
• Click here
• Learn more
• www.yourdomain.com

And don’t just stop with the anchor text examples from above… keep rotating them up with other variations. Ideally, the keyword you are trying to rank for shouldn’t be more than 10% of your anchor text links.

Tactic #2: Spammy links

Building spammy links from irrelevant sites used to help boost your rankings, but they don’t anymore. If you have hundreds of these links pointing to your website, you need to remove them.

If you aren’t sure what a spammy link is, they are usually links from:

1. Sites that are link farms
2. Sites that don’t have high quality content or have duplicate content
3. Sites that link out to gambling, Viagra or even adult sites.
4. Sites that are penalized in Google (if you type a sites name into Google and if they don’t show up in number one spot, they are typically penalized)

If you have spammy links coming to your site, go out there and contact every one of those sites and ask them to remove the link. If they don’t remove them, try to send them a generic legal notice that a lawyer drafts up for you. That should help motivate them to remove the link.

After you reach out to all of the sites multiple times, Disavow the remaining links through Google’s Webmaster Tools. Disavowing the links isn’t as good as removing them, which is why you want to do that first. But you should use it for the links you can’t get removed.

Tactic #3: Build too many links too fast

Have you noticed that when you build too many links too fast, you tend to lose most of your rankings… even if those links are high in authority and natural?

This happens with many startups that get a lot of buzz and links form hundreds of sites too quickly. So what do you do in this case? You wait it out and just keep operating your business as if nothing is wrong, because over time your rankings will come back and be stronger than before.

On the other hand if you artificially inflated your link count too fast you’ll have to adjust your link building strategy. If those inflated links where spammy, remove them just like how I described in tactic number 2.

If you built high quality links too fast that weren’t paid for, don’t remove the links. Just keep building more links from authority sites, and overtime your rankings will continue to go back to where they where, if not even higher.

If you built high quality links too fast and the links are too rich anchor text, don’t remove the links. Just continue building more high quality links from relevant sites… and just rotate up your anchor text as I described in tactic number 1.

Tactic #4: Junk or duplicate content

In the early days of SEO you could throw up thousands of pages filled with junk content or duplicate content and you could rank well. Especially if you had authoritative links pointing into your domain.

Now a days throwing up thousands of pages filled with junk content will hurt you. It’s not about creating a large volume of content, it’s about creating high quality content.

It’s much better to have a hundred pages of high quality content with thousands of unique links and hundreds of social shares, versus having a million pieces of content that no one wants to read.

If you have junk content on your site, try transforming them into corner stone content pieces that everyone wants to read, link to and share via the social web. If you can’t do that, then you have two options:

1. Remove the content from your website.
2. Block those pieces of content from being indexed through your robots.txt file.

Tactic #5: User generated content

Not always, but in many cases, sites with user generated content have been hit hard over the years. It’s not because Google hates user generated content, it’s due to the fact that most user generated content is low in quality.

The biggest reason I’ve seen user generated sites being penalized is because people are slipping in links to Viagra sites or they have a ton of junk content related to adult or gambling. And when your user generated site has millions of pages, these little things tend to slip through the cracks.

Do searches on your site and see if you have any spammy content. If so, remove it.

And if you have low quality content pages, the easiest route for you to take is to block those pages from being indexed through your robots.txt file. Once users build up those low quality pages and turn them in high quality ones, you can then remove them from your robots.txt file, which will allow search engines to crawl those pages.

Tactic #6: Building all page links

Have you ever had one website put a link to your website on every one of their web pages? That’s an all page link. People try to build all page links to boost their Google PageRank and hopefully rankings. In most cases, Google hates all page links.

I’ve actually experienced this penalty on NeilPatel.com because I built all page links to it from Quick Sprout. I noticed that a week after I built the links the rankings tanked.

I could have removed the links, but I kept them because I never created them with the intention of gaming Google… more so the links where used to drive traffic over to my site.

After 6 months the site return back to normal because other sites naturally linked to NeilPatel.com over time. But the quicker route of getting unpenalized would have been to remove the all page links.

In most cases if you built all page links to your site, it’s because you are trying to game Google. If that’s the case, remove them. On the other hand if you have all page links due to adverting, you should consider no-following the links… which is what I should have done with my site.

Conclusion

Don’t take the easy route of just trashing your domain and starting a new one if you get penalized. Work through the motions to build your site back up and get on Google’s good graces.

If you happen to be penalized and you fix it, typically you’ll get back within 3 or 4 months. If it takes you longer to fix the issues, it will take you longer to get back in. If you are extra fast to fix the issues, still assume that it will take 3 months before things go back to normal.

And if you haven’t been penalized, do yourself a favor by avoiding tactics that provide short-term gains. For example, buying links may sound smart, but it will bite you in the butt in the long run.

What other ways can you get out of the Google penalty box?

Have you ever wondered how the rich are getting richer? Or how they’re able to pay very little in taxes compared to how much they make?

Sure they use some tricks that you already know about such as writing off all of their expenses like their cell phone bills or claiming part of their home as office use… but none of those small tricks really save them that much money.

The way the rich are actually growing their wealth is through a handful of tax saving shelters… which I’ll describe below in a bit. Now many of these methods may seem illegal, but if you happen to ask a lawyer I bet they’ll say that they are 100% legal.

Here’s how the rich are getting richer:

Captive Insurance company

Insurance, it’s something that you already have, but did you know that you could own your own insurance company? Any business that has a risk of losing money can be classified as an insurance company.

What the rich are doing is setting up their own insurance company, which is called a captive insurance company or 831b.

They are having their shares and ownership of their corporation transferred to the insurance company. Then when they get their monthly or quarterly check, they push that money into the insurance company instead of pushing it into their personal bank account.

What you can do with the insurance company is take that pre tax money and invest it into things like real estate, stocks, bonds, and even privately held corporations. To ensure that they aren’t throwing off red flags to the government, you would investing in safer things like real estate and then you can get riskier over time.

If this doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, just imagine pushing $1,000,000 into your life insurance company. And then they take that million and invest it in a hedge fund that is producing 20% returns per year.

Here’s what that $1,000,000 would turn into after 10 years…

• Year 1: $1,200,000
• Year 2: $1,440,000
• Year 3: $1,728,000
• Year 4: $2,073,600
• Year 5: $2,488,320
• Year 6: $2,985,984
• Year 7: $3,583,181
• Year 8: $4,299,817
• Year 9: $5,159,780
• Year 10: $6,191,736

At then end of 10 years, if you decide to pull the money out of the captive insurance company, you would be charged capital gains tax rate of 20%. And if you lived in a state like California, you would be charged 13% for state income tax. That means you would be left with $4,148,463.

On the other hand if you didn’t have a captive insurance company and you invested $1,000,000 in a hedge fund that produced a return of 20% a year, you would have to pay normal short-term tax gains of 39.6% each year. And assuming you lived in a state like California, you would also have to pay 13% in state income tax.

Here’s what you would be left with at the end of 10 years…

• Year 1: $1,094,800
• Year 2: $1,198,587
• Year 3: $1,312,213
• Year 4: $1,426,610
• Year 5: $1,572,801
• Year 6: $1,721,903
• Year 7: $1,885,139
• Year 8: $2,063,850
• Year 9: $2,259,502
• Year 10: $2,473,704

As you can see, $4,148,463 is great than $2,473,704. Now just imagine if you did that with $10,000,000 or even $100,000,000. The difference really starts adding up when you deal with larger amounts.

Roth IRA

The beautiful part about IRAs is that you can put money in them and save money on taxes, right? Although that’s true, the rich usually avoid traditional IRAs.

Most people put money in IRAs because they assume that when they are older they won’t make as much money, so they can take it out when they retire and pay less tax due to their income bracket decreasing once they retire.

The rich avoid that because history has shown that the government continually raises taxes over time and if you have a lot of money now, the chances are you’ll continue to have it in the future.

So what the rich do is use a Roth IRA, in which you pay taxes on your money before you put in it. If the IRA happens to grow over 10, 20 or 30 years, you can then pull the money out and not have to pay any taxes on the gains. This strategy is extremely popular with early employees of PayPal in which many of them are using their IRA cash to invest into startups and when they happen to sell for a billion bucks, they don’t have to pay taxes on the gains.

Tax free corporation

Did you know that the government has a tax incentive in which if you setup a C-corporation this year and hold it for at least 5 years, you don’t have to pay any federal taxes up to $10 million when your company sells?

And if you happen to raise $5 million, you don’t have to pay taxes up to $50 million… assuming you hold it for over 5 years.

Now many people already know about this, but what rich people are doing is setting up multiple C-corporations even if they don’t have a “company” yet. They are just setting up shell companies and when they have something that produces money, they move it over to these C-corporations so that when they sell it they don’t have to pay taxes on the first 10 million dollars.

Now granted if the company makes money each year, you’ll have to pay taxes on that income, but you don’t have to pay taxes when you sell the business for a large lump sum.

No state income tax

This is one of the most common ways the rich save on taxes… they move to state with no state income tax. I did myself around 4 years ago, in which I moved to Washington State and I saved a decent chunk of change. But funny enough, I didn’t move to save on state income tax, I more so moved so I could be closer to a few of my mentors.

When I used to live in California I used to pay 10% state income tax… since then it’s risen to 13%. In the state of Washington I pay 0%. Nevada, Florida, Texas, Alaska, and South Dakota are other states that have no state income tax.

There’s nothing wrong with living in a tax free state, but what I’ve been noticing lately is that rich people are starting to abuse it. Some people “claim” to live in a state with no income tax, but they aren’t really living there. This is mainly happening with people from Southern California, as Nevada is a quick 4-hour drive.

What they’ll do is buy a home in Las Vegas, switch out their driver licenses to a Nevada one and claim that they are living there. They’ll then turn their California home as their secondary residence or vacation home… and avoid using credit cards while in California incase they get audited.

To make it seem legitimate, they give one of their credit cards to a friend who lives in Nevada and have them spend a few hundred bucks every month in Las Vegas to make it seem like they are actually living there when they really aren’t.

Invest in gold

The economy may seem like it’s going up, but you already know that it’s artificially inflated. Things seem to be getting better, but the US government is in more debt than it ever has before and one day they’ll have to pay it off.

The rich are worried about inflation or if the value of the dollar tanks. The best way you can protect your assets against the above scenarios is to switch a portion of your cash into gold. Why, because there is only 3.2 Olympic size swimming pools worth of gold on Earth. Assuming people still find it valuable 100 years from now, it will always go up.

What the rich are doing, which is interesting, is that they are keeping their gold off shores. There are places like Das Safe in Austria which you can actually store gold bars and not have to report it. On the other hand, if you keep your gold in a safety deposit box in a US, you actually have to report it.

And if the US wants to reposess it like they did in 1933, you’ll end up losing it.

Commercial real estate

One of the best way to decrease your tax rate is to own depreciating assets. One of the easiest assets to depreciate is a commercial building as you can write them off over time. Typically a 39-year period.

So if you bought an apartment complex for 1 million bucks, you can write off $25,641 every year from your taxes.

Now what the rich are doing, is buying commercial real estate that throws off positive cash flow, plus is section 8 zoned. Maybe what this means is that if you buy apartment complexes in low-income areas that are zoned, the government is subsidizing the rent. So if a low income tenant lives in your section 8 apartment complex, the government will pay you the rent for them to live in your build.

For you, that’s pretty much guaranteed income. You can’t really get anything better than that.

Moving assets overseas

During the Presidential election, one of the hot topics was how Mitt Romney has millions of dollars tucked away in the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands is a tax haven in which they don’t charge any taxes.

People like Mitt are moving their money over to tax free countries while they are living in the US and then investing it. As they invest it and make money, they don’t have to pay gains on their taxes each year. At the end when they are ready to bring it back, they pay taxes.

This strategy is similar to a captive insurance company as you get to play with the government’s money. President Obama is trying to put a stop to this loophole, but the rich are still finding ways around it.

Conclusion

You may read about things like the rich paying lower tax rates due to things like capital gains, which is taxed at 20% instead of 39.6%, but that’s not the real reason they are saving boat loads of money. It’s actually from the tactics above, which most people don’t hear or even know about.

Now I am not saying you should or shouldn’t do the things above if you want to save money, but more so I’m just trying to shed some light on how the rich are getting richer.

What are some other ways the rich are getting richer?

I don’t like bragging, but I have to say I’m a pretty good blogger. It’s not because I am smart or anything like that, it’s actually because I screwed up one too many times. After starting 4 blogs and making hundreds of mistakes over 7 years, you eventually figure out what to do, and what not to do.

I just wish someone told me all of this before I started my first blog. Here are 11 things you should know before starting your first blog:

You need to be social

When I started blogging I hoped that I would get a ton of traffic through search engines because all of the other popular blogs got a lot of Google love. The reality is, you won’t get too much traffic from Google because your blog is new… it takes years before your search engine traffic will kick in.

So how do you get traffic in the short run? Through social media. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon are just a few examples of social sites that can drive you a ton of traffic.

If you are willing to spend money, you can buy traffic from StumbleUpon ads or Facebook ads, but if you aren’t you’ll have to focus on building up your social media profiles. This means you’ll have to spend time participating in the community, befriending other people, sharing stories, and even messaging other users.

When you’re going through this process, don’t put all of your time and energy into one social media site because sometimes even the popular sites die down. With my first blog, Pronet Advertising, I made it popular by consistently getting on the front page of Digg, but now days Digg isn’t popular. You have to diversify your social media traffic.

Once you build up your social media profiles you can make almost any blog popular. For example, my business partner and I were able to get the Crazy Egg blog to over 100,000 visitors a month in less than one year. We did this by promoting the blog content on our social profiles.

Consistency is the key to growth

I never realized consistency was important until it affected my traffic… in a negative way. Sometimes I used to write a blog each week, while other times I would write five blog posts a week. It wasn’t until June 2009 that I realized that not being consistent can hurt your traffic.

Back in May 2009, I used to blog five times a month and my traffic stats were 45,237 visitors a month.

And when I slowed down to on my blogging, my traffic tanked to 35,786 visitors a month.

I had to consistently blog for 3 months to get back to my May traffic numbers. This just goes to show that you need to blog on a consistent basis or else your traffic won’t grow on a regular basis.

For that reason, you better love what you are blogging about or else you won’t have the will power to blog on a consistent basis.

What goes online, stays online

When I first started blogging I used to create mediocre content. But my content did all right from a traffic standpoint because I was good at leveraging social media.

Over time I got lazy and the quality of my content continually decreased. This caused a handful of people to email me and tell me how I sucked. And to make matters worse a few bloggers even blog about how my content sucked.

Your brand is everything and I hope you don’t have to go through what I went through. Treat it like gold and do whatever you can to protect it. Make sure every piece of content you put out on the web is a masterpiece because if you screw up once, it will be on the web forever.

I was able to recover my brand over time, but I did lose a few consulting clients during that time period, which hurt my income.

It’s all in the list

I’ve said it time and time again, the best traffic source for your blog is through emails. I used to be a big believer that RSS traffic was the best form of traffic, but over time people stopped using their feed reader, which is why Google shut theirs down.

So why should you collect emails? Well for Quick Sprout, emails make up 13.91% of my overall traffic, they drive 41% of my comments, and email subscribers are 3.9 times more likely to share the content via the social web.

And it’s not just with Quick Sprout… we see similar stats from our email list on our KISSmetrics blog.

If you want to start collecting emails from your blog, follow the steps in this blog post.

Blogging isn’t free

I started blogging years ago because I thought it was an affordable way to drive more business to my startup. And although it’s effective, it isn’t too affordable. Sure it’s cheaper than most marketing strategies, but it still costs a lot of money to do it right.

Let me explain…

If you just want to create a personal blog you can do so for free through WordPress.com. And if you want to host a blog on your own server with your own domain name, you can do so for under $50 a year.

But if you are trying to make money from your blog, you are going to have to spend money to make it. Here are a few things that you will end up spending money on:

• Unique design – you don’t want to use a generic theme if you plan on monetizing your blog.
• Custom development – there aren’t plugins for everything you need. It costs money to have a developer create unique email collection modules, or make an ad that scrolls with the user.
• A/B testing – if you want to maximize your revenue you are going to have to a/b test your call to actions and monetization methods. If you don’t have the skill set to do this, you’ll have to spend money hiring consultants.
• Social media marketing – some times to get more social love you have to spend money. Every once in a while I spend money paying consultants to help me boost my StumbleUpon or even Facebook traffic.

The above bullet points are just some examples of expenses you will incur. You can spread out your expenses over time and figure out how to do things on a budget, but don’t expect to create a great blog for free. If you don’t invest in your blog, it won’t grow as fast.

It took me years before I spent money on blogging and I wish I did it sooner as Quick Sprout would have been much larger. Here are my expenses for Quick Sprout last month:

• Hosting – $750 (I use Akamai as my CDN, which adds up fast)
• Design – $7700 (I am releasing an Advanced Guide to Content Marketing at the end of this month, similar to the Advanced Guide to SEO)
• Writers – $3000 (I had a writer help me edit, and correct the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing… it’s over 40,000 words)
• Coding – $3500 (I needed to hire someone to code the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing)
• Time management – $4000 (I have an assistant because it saves me 2 to 3 hours a day. I can then use those 2 to 3 hours and put that towards blogging and respond to comments.)
• Emails- $731 (my SendGrid and Aweber bills add up)
• Plugin development – $4500 (I’m creating a WordPress plugin that will help me collect more emails on Quick Sprout and get more social media traffic)

I have a ton of small expenses as well, but the ones above are the major ones. The ones above add up to $24,181, which just covers one month worth of expenses. It may seem like a lot of my expenses are one time, but it’s very rare that I spend less than $20,000 a month on Quick Sprout.

I don’t mind the expenses, but I just wanted to let you know that you have to spend money to do things right. Without spending money it’s rare that you can create a blog with a big audience.

It’s easy to get new traffic, but hard to retain it

If you look at the image below you’ll notice that Quick Sprout received 441,676 visits and 340,176 unique visitors over the last 30 days.

Out of all of those visitors can you guess how many are returning visitors? 31%

It used to be where only 18% of my visitors used to be repeat visitors, but over time I’ve been able to increase it. I wish I focused on that earlier because my traffic would be much higher if I focused on it years ago.

Here’s how you can retain your visitors:

• Survey them – learn what they want and provide it to them. I use Qualaroo and Survey Monkey to figure out what you wanted to read and then I write it.
• Build a community – if you can make your readers feel part of something they’ll be more likely to come back. This is the main reason I focus so hard on improving the number of comments on Quick Sprout. And why I try to respond to every email I get from you.
• Collect emails – as I mentioned above you should collect emails. It’s one of the best ways to increase your repeat visitor count.

Strike while the iron is hot

There’s always going to be a new method of content marketing that is hot… you just have to leverage it before everyone else. It doesn’t matter what your blog is on, you can always make boring topics fun to read… you just have to get creative.

When you find one of these hot ideas, keep leveraging them until they die down.

With KISSmetrics, we realized that infographics were going to be hot, so we decide to create one every single week. We ended up cranking out 47 infographics, which generated 2,512,596 visits from 41,142 backlinks ,41,359 tweets and 20,859 likes.

I tried creating infographics on Quick Sprout, but I was too late. By time I got into it, they were already played out and they didn’t get as many social shares nor did they drive as much traffic as they did for KISSmetrics.

Another example is The Oatmeal. The founder of that site, Matt, realized that quizzes and comics where popular, so he created a site that only contained quizzes and comics. Again, that strategy is played out so if you want to boost your traffic you’ll have to come up with a different strategy.

If you find a hot content idea, keep milking it until it lasts… because sooner or later it will get played out just like everything else.

Content length affects traffic

I didn’t realize content length affects traffic until I started to write really detailed posts. It wasn’t because I was trying to game Google or any social site, but it was because I wanted to write content that helps you. And I couldn’t figure out how to do that without writing really detailed content.

The beautiful part about writing detailed content is that it ranks higher on Google. If you look at the results page on page one of Google, each site on average will have at least 2000 words of content. That just shows that Google really sees content as king.

Just make sure you don’t fill your posts with fluff to reach the 2000 word content. Always write for users and never for search engines. It just happens that people prefer detailed content with actionable steps and it’s hard to do that in a few hundred words.

Write your posts in a conversational manner

People prefer conversations over lectures. That’s why you never fall asleep when you have a conversation with your friends, but you would fall asleep in your high school lecture.

I never used to write in a conversational manner, but when I did my time on site increased by 22.7%. And when I ran a Crazy Egg heatmap, I noticed that people used to scroll more than before.

You can make your content more conversational by:

• Using the words “you” and “I” – those are two words that are common in conversations. By using them you will be talking to your readers instead of at them.
• Use line breaks – don’t make your paragraphs go on forever. Not only will that make your blog harder to read, but it will make your content feel more like a lecture than a conversation.
• Italicize words – have you noticed that I italicize words and phrases throughout each of my blog posts? I especially do it when I am asking you a question or answer one. It helps keep you engaged because it makes certain parts seem more like a conversation.
• Don’t be too formal – conversations are friendly and not formal. Don’t write your posts as if you are writing an essay.

Design is marketing

I always felt that design was important, but I never nit picked every little thing. Why? Because I felt that my design was better than the average blog out there. But this caused you to get frustrated with certain things such as not being able to find the popular posts on Quick Sprout.

Eventually I was able to please you once I fine-tuned my design.

As you already know, being average isn’t good enough. You need to be best! And to be the best you need an awesome design… not a mediocre one. You need one that drives traffic to your money pages, one that boosts your conversion rate and most importantly makes the content easy to read.

The size of your font, typography, and even spacing are all little things that are part of your design. Those things can have a big impact on if someone is going to read your content or not.

Plus it doesn’t hurt to have a pretty design because you can then submit it to the CSS galleries, which usually can drive 500 to 3000 visitors to your website, assuming you submit your site to at least 10 galleries.

People matter

When I started my first blog all I cared about is how many visitors I had and how I could convert those visitors into customers. I never really cared about my readers.

These days I don’t focus on visitor count or even revenue, instead I judge how well I am doing by a few things:

1. The number of comments – usually when you leave a comment you are asking a question. I then respond back as I love helping you and other people.
2. The numbers of emails – just like comments, most of the emails I receive are from you asking for help. I enjoy responding to you and others as it brings a smile to my face.

These days I do make money and lot more than I used to when I first started blogging, but money is a side effect of solving problems and helping people. If I had to put a dollar value on respond to comments and emails, I probably would be in red, but how could you put a price on helping people.

Sure by helping people I’m gaining a ton of good karma points, which probably helps me but I wouldn’t trade not helping you for any sum of money.

With your blog, don’t just focus on traffic and revenue. Focus on helping people too as the rest will come once you help out enough people.

Conclusion

Hopefully you can avoid the mistakes I made when I first started blogging. I would hate for you to repeat my mistakes as they hindered my growth.

If you want to make your blog popular, focus on solving one problem at a time. It’s going to be too hard to implement all of the tactics above… but if you focus on them individually, eventually you’ll conquer them all.

So what other blogging mistakes should you avoid?

Guest posting is one of the most effective ways to build links, grow your brand, and drive sales. I myself used to try and do 5 guest post a week and it did wonders for my business. It was actually our 3rd biggest lead generation channel, right after SEO and pay per click.

It’s become such a mainstream method of marketing that bloggers are becoming inundated with guest posting requests, which is causing them to ignore them.

Since January 1^st I’ve received 931 requests for guest post submissions on quicksprout.com. And out of the 931 requests, do you know how many I’ve accepted? 0!

It’s because all of the pitches I get are either spammy or just suck. Here’s an example of the type of emails I’m getting on a daily basis:

Dear Site Owner

I want to know do you offer guest posts on your website? Can you please tell me discounted price? http://www.quicksprout.com

I will provide you very high quality and 100% unique article. Looking for your reply.

Regards Ambrose

When I see emails like the one above there is no way I’m going to accept the post because of a few reasons:

1. They didn’t even bother to fix grammatical errors.
2. They didn’t personalize the email.
3. They didn’t tell me what they were going to write on.
4. They offered me money, which would mean that I would be selling a link.

If you want to start leveraging guest posts as a marketing channel you need to first avoid the 4 mistakes above and then follow the steps below:

Step #1: Do your homework

You should never approach a blogger with a guest post submission unless you’ve done your research. Sure you could try the rapid-fire approach by just blasting out hundreds of guest posting requests, but no popular blog is going to accept you.

Here’s the type of homework you need to do before approaching any blogger:

• See if they accept guest post – the obvious way to see if a blog accepts guest posts is to see if they’ve published any in the past. And if they have, look for a web page that may outline their guest posting requirements.
• Read their blog – don’t just read their last few blog posts, but read at least 10 of them. Look for patterns on what their readers like and don’t like as well as the type of content that performs well. You can easily do this by looking at social share counts… the higher the number, typically the more successful the post was.
• Read comments – the best way you can figure out what people like is by reading the comments on the blog. This will give you a quick understand of what the readers are like and what they are looking for.
• Analyze their writing style – from how they format their blog posts to the style they write each post in, analyze everything. This will help you determine how you need to write your guest post. For example, on Quick Sprout I only accept guest posts that are written in a conversational style and contain an introduction, body, and conclusion.

Now that you’ve done your homework, you are ready to write.

Step #2: Come up with a topic and write

You know what the blog owner likes and you know what their readers want, so write something that pleases both of them. If you can write an awesome piece of content, you’ll increase your odds of it getting accepted.

When I write guest posts, I first and foremost make sure that it contains an awesome headline. If your headline sucks, no one is going to want to read your content… no matter how good it is.

Jonathan Morrow from Copyblogger actually has a great tactic in figuring out if a headline is great. He goes to his local bar and pitches headline ideas to random groups of drunk people. If he can get them all excited and laughing about a headline, he then knows he is onto something.

Once you have a headline, go out there and start writing. Make sure you write a really detailed post… something so great that they’ll not only accept it, but they’ll want you to come back and write again. That’s actually why Kristi Hines is so successful at getting guest posts. You see her name all over the blogosphere because she goes above and beyond with her first submission, which causes the blog owner to ask her to write again.

Lastly when you write your post, make sure you include images. They need to be royalty free or bought, so that the blog won’t get in trouble for using them. And the images need to be formatted to fit within the blogs design.

Step #3: Send off your email

Now that you are done writing the post, you need to shoot of an email to the blog owner. Here’s an example of a template that I’ve found to be effective:

Subject: you should blog about [insert your guest blog post topic]

[insert their first name], as an avid reader of [insert their site name] I would love to read about [insert guest blog post topic]… and I think your other readers would as well.

Your content on [insert existing post from their website #1, insert existing post from their website #2, and insert existing post from their website #3] are great, but I think you can tie it all together by blogging on [insert guest blog post topic].

I know you are probably busy and won’t blog on it so I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.   How about I write it for you? Don’t worry, I’m a great blogger and have had my posts featured on [insert previous guest post URL #1] and [insert previous guest post URL #2].

Let me know if you are interested, I already know your blogging style, plus I understand what your readers love… as I am one.

Look forward to hearing from you,
[insert your name]

If you look at the template above you’ll notice 2 things. The first is that it is very personalized to the site owner. Even though it is a template, it won’t work without being customized. And second, you’ll notice that the email isn’t formal. Typically if someone writes you a formal email, such as the one Ambrose sent me, it’s likely it will be rejected.

Bloggers see formal emails as sales pitches, which is why they ignore them. Casual emails are typically from readers, which is why most bloggers at least read them.

Lastly, before you send out the email, use a free software like Yesware. Yesware plugs into Gmail and tells you if someone opened up your email. This way, when you send off emails to bloggers, seeing if they will accept your guest post, you’ll at least find out if they opened up and read your email. If they aren’t opening up your email, it could be going in their spam box and you may want to try sending it again from another email address or trying a different subject line.

Step #4: Follow up

Hopefully your guest post has been accepted by now, but the chances are you’ll just be ignored. Most bloggers will open up your email, but they won’t take the time to respond to it.

What you’ll want to do is just send them a follow up email every week to see if they are interested in publishing your guest post. Keep the email short, casual, and to the point… like this template:

[insert their name], I just wanted to follow up to see if you were interested in publishing the guest post I emailed you last week.

Cheers,
[insert your name]

Until you get a yes or a no, don’t stop emailing. Sooner or later they’ll have to respond.

Step #5: Promote

If your post gets accepted, you want to ensure that it does well. If your post gets a lot of traffic, social shares, and comments, the blog owner will most likely accept guest posts from you again. Plus, you can use that post as a reference when pitching other blogs.

Here’s how I ensure my guest posts will do well:

• Leverage the social web – I promote the post through all of my social media accounts. From Twitter, to Facebook to even Google Plus, I share it on every social site that I have an account on.
• StumbleUpon – for 10 cents a visitor StumbleUpon can drive thousands of visitors to any blog post within 24 hours. Check out their Paid Discovery plans if you need a bit of help.
• Don’t forget your friends – hit up all of your friends and ask them to share your post via Twitter and Facebook. The more social shares you get the better.
• Respond to comments – to get the maximum engagement out of the post, you need to encourage comments. The easiest way to boost the comment count is to reply to every single comment on the post. And don’t leave short comments like “thanks”, write thoughtful comments that helps people out.

Conclusion

Guest posting is a new form of marketing that has been taking off over the last year or two. It works extremely well if you are willing to put in the time and energy.

The one thing I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t just get one or two guest posts published and expect it to do miracles for your business. You either have to do them on a consistent basis or you have to crank 20 to 30 of them in a short period of time to make a big splash.

Do you have any other tips that will help your guest posts get published?

As of right now Quick Sprout has 62,232 comments, which took place over 353 blog posts. That means the average blog post gets around 176 comments… which is more than most blogs.

Sure, if you go through the comments you’ll notice that half of them are from me replying back to each comment, but that still leaves 88 comments per post.

Do you want to know how I was able to achieve such a high comment count? Here’s how I did it:

Step #1: Create an emotional connection

People like talking and communicating with people they feel comfortable around. If you can get people to love you, they’ll want to communicate with you.

Just think of Gary Vaynerchuk… people come up to him and talk to him all of the time because he has a warm and fuzzy personality.

So how do you create a bond with your readers? Well, you need to open up and help them get to know you. Within your blog sidebar, you should have an image of yourself and a quick bio. Have that bio then link to your about page.

On your about page you need to really open up and share your life story. From the good times to the bad ones and everything in between, you should be an open book. For example, on my bio I talk about how my parents struggled and how it motivated me to do better in life. Or even what my future goals are in life.

You’ll also want to show multiple sides of yourself when doing this. The bio in my sidebar is very corporate, as well as the picture that goes along with it. But the image on my about page is a cartoon drawing that is goofy and shows a different side about me.

Step #2: Don’t ignore people

Have you ever been in a social situation where you say something and people just ignore you? You know they heard you speak, but no one cares and they don’t even bother to respond.

That’s happened to me a lot, and I hate it. So when people comment on your blog, don’t ignore them because they’ll get the same feeling as the one above.

That’s the number one reason I respond to comments. I think it sucks to get no reply, which is why I spend hours each day responding to comments. I do whatever it takes to help people out and when I can I try to give thorough responses.

Help your readers out and respond to them. Even if it is with a simple “thanks”, something is better than nothing. It lets your readers know that you are listening to them.

Step #3: Care for people

You should always go above and beyond to help people out, even when there is nothing in it for you. I’m a big believer that if you help other people, some how the universe will take care of you.

The biggest way I help people out isn’t through comments, it’s by responding to emails. I get hundreds of emails each day and good portion of them are from people asking for help. Although I am unable to help everyone, I really do try to help as many people as I can.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that the majority of my commenters are from people who I’ve interacted with through email. When I look at all the people who emailed me from my blog in the last 30 days, 19% of them left a comment on Quick Sprout in the last 30 days. It may not seem like a big percentage, but it adds up over time.

If you try your best to help people by responding to their emails, people will appreciate it and participate by commenting on your blog.

Step #4: Collect emails

A few months ago I broke down how 13.91% of my overall traffic comes from my email list, and although that number may not seem huge, that list accounts for 41% of my blog comments.

If you want to maximize how many comments you are getting, the number one thing you need to do is collect emails. Just follow step #2 on this blog post if you want to build an email list.

Step #5: Create a conversation

Your writing style has a huge impact on the number of comments you get. Most people write blog posts the same way that they would write an essay. You don’t want to do that!

Just imagine yourself having a conversation with one of your friends. It’s really relaxed… you may not always use complete sentences or follow every grammar rule out there. The conversation also feels intimate because you use the words “you” and “I” throughout your conversation. And it’s very rare that you’ll be in a conversation without even asking one question.

I write my blog posts as if I am having a conversation with you. I use the words “you” and “I” a lot, and I always ask questions throughout my blog posts. Heck, I even end each blog post with a question too.

If you can follow that strategy you should get more comments because people like being part of a conversation. But if you take the route of making your writing style like an essay, you’ll just put people to sleep and you shouldn’t expect anyone to comment.

Step #6: Pace yourself

Have you noticed that I only post two pieces of content a week on Quick Sprout? It’s not because I can’t publish more or less, it’s because I’ve optimized for comment count.

When I used to publish only one new post a week, on average I would only get 133 comments per blog post. When I started publishing 2 pieces of content a week my average went up to 164 and over time I’ve gotten it up to 176 comments per post.

But when I started publishing 3 pieces of content a week, my average went down to  119 comments per post. I never tried going up to 4 or 5 posts a week, but when I look at all of my blogs that do 5 posts a week, such as Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, the comment count isn’t too high.

If you want to get more comments per post, test the ideal number of posts you should publish each week.

Step #7: Control the voice

Both my corporate blogs, Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics grew in traffic much faster than Quick Sprout. It took Quick Sprout 6 years to hit 400,000 monthly visitors, while KISSmetrics got there in two years.

The reason my corporate blogs grew so fast is because we used guest authors to crank out 5 pieces of content each and every week. But that also caused inconsistencies in the overall voice of the blog, due to the fact that there were multiple authors.

This caused the readers to not have an emotional connection with any of the writers and they just viewed the blog as a place to go to get information… versus seeing it as a community.

It’s rare to have a corporate blog like SEOmoz that gets a high number of comments per post. Personal blogs are much more likely to get a lot of comments.

Step #8: Get creative

I used to use more aggressive tactics in the past to boost my comment numbers. Here are some aggressive plugins I used:

• Top commenters – people who left the highest number of comments on the blog got a site wide link from Quick Sprout. This used to help boost people’s PageRank, which caused more people to leave comments. I removed this plugin as it used to cause more junk comments that didn’t add value to the community.
• Subscribe to comments – if you left a comment on Quick Sprout, my server would email you every time there was a new comment on that same post. This caused a lot more comments, but it caused me to also get spam complaints, which is why I removed this feature.

If you want to boost your numbers, consider using the plugins above or whatever else your imagination can dream up. Just be careful, as using tactics that are too aggressive can cause complaints.

Conclusion

As a blog owner you have to figure out what the most important metrics are to you. For me it is comments, because higher engagement means more loyal readers. Ones that will tweet, like and share via the social web or even check out my companies when I politely ask them to.

If you want to boost your comment numbers, follow the steps above and you’ll see a huge improvement. If you don’t have the time to implement all of them, try step 3 number as it’s my favorite. If you are looking for maximum engagement step 2 and 4 will have the highest ROI.

What other ways can you boost your comment count?

Do you use title tags and meta description tags? Well of course you do because you already know about the meta tags that can help boost your search engine rankings.

But did you know that meta tags actually affect your social media traffic? Sure, there is Google’s authorship tags, but what about Facebook and Twitter. They actually both have their own social media meta tags that can help you boost the amount of social traffic you’re getting.

They’re called Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards. Here’s how you can leverage both of them:

Facebook Open Graph

When you share an image on Facebook, what does it look like?

Well, it doesn’t always look like that. Facebook tries to read the code on your page, but they aren’t always able to pull your images. If you don’t use the Open Graph tags and you share a URL from your site on Facebook, this is what it may look like:

That’s what it used to look like with Quick Sprout before I implemented Open Graph tags on my site. After implementing Open Graph tags I was able to increase my Facebook traffic by 174% when an image was next to my Quick Sprout status updates.

Now that you are convinced that you should use Open Graph, here is how you set it up on your website.

If you use WordPress, just install this plugin and you won’t have to do much more than that.

If you aren’t using WordPress you’ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site. To make the instructions below easier to understand, I’m going to use the blog post, 11 Creative Ways to Build Links, so you can see a live example.

og:title

This is where you put the title of your content. Think of this as being similar to your normal html title tag that a search engine would use. When creating your og:title keep the character count fewer than 95 characters.

Example: <meta property=”og:title” content=”11 Creative Ways to Build Links”/>

og:type

This is where you describe what kind of content you are sharing. Is it a video, picture, blog post… etc. Here is the full list that you can pick from when defining your content type:

Activities

• activity
• sport

Businesses

• bar
• company
• cafe
• hotel
• restaurant

Groups

• cause
• sports_league
• sports_team

Organizations

• band
• government
• non_profit
• school
• university

People

• actor
• athlete
• author
• director
• musician
• politician
• public_figure

Places

• city
• country
• landmark
• state_province

Products and Entertainment

• album
• book
• drink
• food
• game
• product
• song
• movie
• tv_show

Websites

• blog
• website
• article

Example: <meta property=”og:type” content=”article”/>

og:description

This is also similar to your html meta description tag, in which it should describe your content. You shouldn’t care if it is keyword rich, but instead you should come up with a compelling description that will result in more clicks. You have up to 297 characters for this tag.

Example: <meta property=”og:description” content=”Are you tired of building links the old school way? You know, the methods that require you to send out emails to thousands of webmasters begging for links. “/>

og:image

Remember how I mentioned above that I was able to increase my Facebook traffic by 174%? It was because I used Open Graph ensure that Facebook showed an image every time someone shared a URL from Quick Sprout.

By using an og:image tag, you’ll ensure that an image will be along the side of the content you are sharing. This way it stands out compared to all of the other text based status updates people see in their timelines.

But before I get into how you can use this tag, Facebook has a few requirements. An image has to be at least 50px by 50px, but they prefer images that are bigger than 200px by 200px. And the image can’t be more than 5mb in size.

Example: <meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.quicksprout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/linkbuilding.jpg”/>

og:url

In this tag you should just place the URL of the page you are sharing. This tag may seem irrelevant, but it’s important because sometimes you’ll have more than 1 URL for the same content. By using this tag you’ll ensure all the shares go to 1 URL versus multiple URLs, which should help your Facebook Edgerank.

Example: <meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/03/21/11-creative-ways-to-build-links/”/>

og:site_name

This tag just tells Facebook the name of your website. You don’t really need this tag, but there is no harm in including it.

Example: <meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Quick Sprout”/>

fb:admins

If you have a fan page on Facebook and you want to get more data in Facebook Insights, then you have to use this tag. It pretty much tells Facebook you are the site owner and it connects your Facebook fan page to your website.

Example: <meta property=”fb:admins” content=”500013011″/>

Now that you have your Facebook Open Graph meta tags in place, lets move onto Twitter Cards.

Twitter Cards

Have you ever seen a tweet like this?

Well these detailed tweets only take place when you leverage Twitter Cards. Wouldn’t you like to have that for your site? It will help it stand out from the crowd.

Here’s how you leverage Twitter Cards:

If you use the SEO for WordPress plugin by Yoast, just follow these steps. For everyone else, follow the steps below.

twitter:card

This meta tag describes the type of content you are sharing. You have 3 options with Twitter: photo (for images), player (for videos), and summary (for everything else). If you don’t define your card, Twitter will default to summary.

Example: <meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary”>

twitter:url

This is the page you are sharing on Twitter. Similar to how Facebook asks for a URL, Twitter does this as well because you may have the same piece of content on your site multiple times. This will ensure one URL gets all of the tweets instead of having your tweets split across multiple urls.

Example: <meta name=”twitter:url” content=”http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/03/21/11-creative-ways-to-build-links/ “>

twitter:title

Similar to your Facebook Open Graph title, this shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords, but instead it should be compelling so people will want to click on it. Again, like Facebook you’ll want to limit the character count to 70.

Example: <meta name=”twitter:title” content=”11 Creative Ways to Build Links”>

twitter:description

This is similar to a meta description tag you would use for Google. But don’t stuff it with keywords… your goal should be to create a compelling sentence that causes people to click through onto your website. Your description is limited to 200 characters.

Example: <meta name=”twitter:description” content=” Are you tired of building links the old school way? You know, the methods that require you to send out emails to thousands of webmasters begging for links.  ”>

twitter:image

To make your tweet stand out, you need an image. Your images have to be less than 1mb in file size and they can’t be smaller than 60px by 60px. Images larger than 120px by 120px will be resized.

Example: <meta name=”twitter:image” content=” http://www.quicksprout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/linkbuilding.jpg”>

After you apply the Twitter Card meta tags to your site, you then need to apply to Twitter’s Card program. Once you get accepted, URLs from your website will be shown in the card format.

Conclusion

Meta tags aren’t just for search engines, social media sites are also leveraging them. Just like how you would optimize your meta tags for Google rankings and click through rates, you also need to do the same for Facebook and Twitter.

So what do you think about Open Graph and Cards? I know I got a nice increase in traffic from Open Graph, but I would love to hear what you think.

Are you tired of building links the old school way? You know, the methods that require you to send out emails to thousands of webmasters begging for links. Don’t get me wrong, they still work well, but they get boring after a while.

So what other ways can you build links?

Well, there are a handful of creative strategies out there. Here are 11 fun ways you can build links without burning yourself out :

Strategy #1: April fools

April fools is coming up soon, so why don’t you leverage it to build links. You shouldn’t do an April fools joke that’s obvious, instead you should take a page out of TechCrunch’s book and follow their strategy.

They wrote a blog post on March 31^st a few years ago on Richard Rosenblatt’s yacht, which was called “The AdSense”. A lot of people believed the post was real and over 600 people tweeted about it and some even linked to it.

The key to creating a good April fools joke is to make it realistic. Do something the day before April 1st and go above and beyond to make it seem realistic. TechCrunch got Rosenblatt to record his voice talking about the post, which made it seem more realistic.

If you want your April fools idea to build links, it has to be good. You can’t do something mediocre.

Strategy #2: Interview experts

One of the easiest ways to build links is to interview experts. If you email someone on how great they are and how you want to interview them, it’s rare that they will say no.

I myself get asked to do around 4 interviews each week and I never say no. I’ve also emailed dozens of other people to interview them and it’s also rare that they say no… this even worked when my blog wasn’t popular.

So how do you build links when you interview an expert? Well most experts have a website, so once you interview them you can ask them to share it with their readers or even tweet and post it on Facebook.

I’ve found that over 90% of the time people will at least share the interview on Twitter and Facebook and over 40% of the time people will link to it from their website. One trick to boosting your link percentage chance is to look and see if people have a press page before you ask them for an interview. If they have one, the chance of them linking to your interview is over 95%.

Strategy #3: Infographics

This is my favorite method of building links, as I love making complex data easy to understand. Mint used this strategy heavily in their early days, in which they made complex financial data easy to understand through beautiful graphics.

We also do this at KISSmetrics as our infographics have received over 3741 links.

So what’s the key to generating links from your infographics? Well you first need to have an embed code at the bottom of each infographic so people can link back and secondly you should follow the promotion strategies in this blog post.

Strategy #4: Quizzes

You may know Matt Inman as the guy behind the Oatmeal, but most of us SEOs know him as the master of quizzes. He got his start at SEOmoz in the early days and then the started getting into link creation through linkbait.

He ranked Mingle2 for all of the online dating terms by creating viral quizzes such as: how many 5 year olds can you take in a fight. He then took that same strategy and got a payday loan site ranked for all of the payday loan related keywords.

Matt currently has quizzes on The Oatmeal and you should consider replicating the strategy if you want to build thousand of links. Just be careful as both his dating site and payday loan site got dinged by Google, but you shouldn’t have that problem if you follow these rules though:

1. The quiz needs to be related to your website – don’t try to create a quiz about fighting 5 year olds if you run a dating website.
2. Don’t use rich anchor text – at the end of each quiz is an embeddable badge that shows off your score, that badge shouldn’t contain rich anchor text. The anchor text should be the name of the quiz.
3. Link to your quiz page – don’t have the badges link to your homepage, they should link back to the quiz.

Strategy #5: Personalized videos

Do you remember Elf Yourself? JibJab created that campaign for OfficeMax and hundreds of thousands of people Elf’d themselves. In which they uploaded a picture of their face and JibJab created an Elf video out of it.

At the end of the video, you were given a link that you can share with others or post on your blog.

According to Open Site Explorer, Elf Yourself has over 10,000 links. Not too shabby for a Christmas promotional video.

If you can come up with a creative video concept that allows people to personalize the video, you can leverage it to build links. People love sharing funny personalized videos.

Strategy #6: Sponsor an event

One of the simplest ways to build links is to sponsor an event. Conference sites list out each and every single sponsor and in most cases they link back to their sponsors.

This may not seem like a fun idea or creative link building strategy, but just think about this… you’ll be able to go to the conference.

If you work in the corporate world you may get a bit tired of working in the office, so it will be a nice for you to get a break by attending a conference. Plus, you’ll get a link out of it.

When getting links from conference sites, keep in mind that they maybe taken down in the future, which means you will have to continue to sponsor the event each year. The cost can quickly add up if you are a small company, but it’s fun to go to conferences.

Strategy #7: Sponsor a non-profit

I love the non-profit world because it’s a great way for you to give back to the rest of the world. If you sponsor a non-profit in many cases you can get a link back.

When I used to own KISSinsights we used to give away our product for free to non-profits and they would link back to us. We came up with this concept when a non-profit asked us for a free account in exchange for press on their blog.

The beautiful part about this strategy is that it doesn’t require an exchange of cash. You can volunteer your time, your products, or even services for a link. Whatever it maybe, I’ve found that non-profits are open to almost anything as they don’t have a big spending budget.

Strategy #8: Take some pictures

There are always people looking for images, especially high quality stock photography images. I myself don’t mind paying for images, but it can get expensive really fast.

If you have a really good digital camera, such as an SLR, you can go out there and take high quality photos of anything related to your industry. Then pop them up on a page on your website and let people know that they are royalty free images. Just make it a requirement that people need to link back to you if they decide to use any of your images.

The cool part about this strategy is that you are going to get highly relevant links, as people in your industry are most likely to use them.

Strategy #9: Scholarships

Ross Hudgens is an SEO that’s known for building tons of high quality EDU links. And he is doing so without spending much money… so how does he do it?

Well he creates scholarships related to your company. It’s a great way for you to give back and get links at the same time. For example, if you are a marketing agency, you could create a digital marketing scholarship in which you give 1 student $1000 a year.

Once Ross creates the scholarship, such as a marketing one, he would notify all colleges that have a marketing department about the scholarship. The end result is hundreds of EDU links as colleges will put it on their website to notify students.

The one thing you have to do if you want to create a scholarship is make it a “real one”. SEOs are trying to create them just to build links. Make sure it is legitimate; you have to give money away each year, and if possible try to help the winner of the scholarship out. For example, if I created a marketing scholarship, I would give away money and even provide the winner with a paid internship.

Strategy #10: Get press

The side effect of getting press is that you’ll build more links to your website. It’s rare that a site like Forbes would write about your company and then not link to it.

That’s just not user friendly, which is why reporters always link to you when they cover you or your company. If you want to build links, why not get press for your business or your entrepreneurial success?

Hit up your local PR agency and see what they can do for you. Or if you don’t have a ton of cash, learn how to get your own press or just use sites like Help a Reporter Out.

I myself just hire PR agencies like PRserve in which they run a pay per performance model. If they get you press, you pay. If not, you don’t pay a dime.

Strategy #11: Give away swag

Some people love free stuff. It doesn’t matter if it is expensive or cheap stuff, people love getting gifts. One person who talks about all of the free stuff he gets is Shoemoney.

Every Friday he takes a picture of him wearing a new t-shirt that someone gave him. He then blogs about the shirt and links back to the company who gave him the shirt.

Get creative and start giving bloggers swag. From shirts to hats, to items, to anything else that is related to your brand, just start giving things away. Not only will bloggers love you, but they will start blogging about your company and linking back to your website.

Conclusion

The possibilities of link building are endless. You can build links in many different ways, you just have to be creative. What I’ve learned over the years is the best link builders are the creative ones.

Just look at Matt Inman, no one would have thought that he would rank a site for online dating, but he was able to do it in a matter of months because of how he built links.

All you have to do is think outside the box as the list above is just scrapping the surface. What other creative ways are you building links?

My favorite form of real estate is online websites. There is a large opportunity to make millions of dollars on the web with a lot less capital requirements compared to other forms of investment.

One of the ways I’ve grown my wealth over the years is to invest in online real estate. Sure, I have my main companies like KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, but I also own a ton of small sites such as Gym Junkies that most people don’t know about.

Here’s the process I use to make money from acquiring and selling sites:

Rule #1: Always buy distressed assets

The most important thing to remember when buying sites is that you always make money on the buy, never the sell. It’s rare that someone will pay a large multiple on revenue or profit, so don’t expect to get rich when selling a site.

But where you do make money is buying sites for less than they are worth. In many cases people are willing to sell sites for 1x yearly revenue or even 1x yearly profit. Sometimes people want out of a business for reasons such as death, divorce, or any other financial obligations that they have to meet.

Usually people who are willing to sell their sites for a low amount have these common qualities:

1. They don’t update their site too often
2. They don’t make too much money from it
3. They don’t care about the business

If you can spot those 3 qualities, you can typically come up ahead on the buy side. If you are wondering how to find these sites, just reach out to website brokers and tell them your requirements. I myself use Flipping Enterprises.

And if you happen to buy a website, don’t buy the company, just buy the assets. If you buy the corporation, you will then take on any liabilities that may have had, such as a lawsuit.

Rule #2: It’s harder to build something than to grow it

The hardest part about running an online business is starting up a website and getting traction. Sure, getting to 10,000 visitors a month may not be hard, but getting to over 100,000 visitors a month is hard.

But the interesting thing is, once you hit 100,000 monthly visitors it is much easier to grow to 200,000 or even 300,000 visitors a month.

For this reason I won’t buy a site that doesn’t have at least 100,000 monthly visitors and ideally is in a lucrative market. It’s hard to grow traffic in a really small niche, so I focus my time and energy on lucrative niches such as finance, health, IT, and anything that may have a high Google cost per click.

Rule #3: Don’t rely on Google

I love Google and it actually drives a lot of traffic, but you never want all of your eggs in one basket.

Before I buy any site, I make sure I can grow the audience through Facebook. It’s one of the most popular channels in the world and you can drive a ton of traffic to your site by building up a fan page. Here’s my process on Facebook:

1. Create a test advertising campaign – before you even buy a site, you can create a test advertising campaign on Facebook, in which you don’t fully finish the ad. But by entering in target keywords and demographic data, you can find out how many people you can potentially target. I never go after an audience that doesn’t have at least 5 million targeted members.
2. Build out your campaign – assuming you buy the site, you want to build out your ad campaign. I usually set $10,000 aside. I don’t target general categories that Facebook provides, but instead I focus my money on specific keywords that are highly related to my site. I also focus on my ideal customer, such as with Gym Junkies I know that males are more likely to be into weight lifting than females. I also make sure that I am only buying traffic from people who live in the US or any other market that I know that would potentially buy products I would sell.
3. Let Facebook optimize – when sending traffic to a fan page, there is a setting in which you can let Facebook optimize your bidding for you. It optimizes for engagement and page likes versus a CPC or CPM model.
4. Create good content – I add a ton of images, quotes, and video content to my Facebook fan page to boost engagement. If you want to copy my content strategy just follow the steps in this article. If you don’t think they work, just check out the Gym Junkies fan page.
5. Use Facebook insights – after 2 weeks of buying fans you should be able to see the age, region and gender of the fans that are liking most of your pictures. I used to bid on Canada traffic for Gym Junkies and although they were the majority of my fan base at one point, I learned that they weren’t liking and commenting on photos as much as males who were over 18 that lived in the US. So I adjusted my overall ad spend to maximize my likes, shares, and comments.

If you can successfully build up a Facebook fan page you will be able to drive more traffic to your website. Every time when we post a link to Gym Junkies from Facebook we can easily drive 2000 plus visitors back to our site.

Rule #4: Collect emails

The way I grow any site’s traffic… no matter what industry it is in, is through emails. From offering free ebooks to discount coupons, you can collect emails from your site. This way, anytime you have an offer you can do a blast to your email list.

Here are the 3 most common methods I use to collect emails:

1. Facebook – you can create a page on your Facebook fan page that allows you to collect emails. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to do this here. To boost the opt-in conversion rate, offer a free ebook, course or even a coupon.
2. Blog – hopefully the site you are acquiring has a blog. If it doesn’t, you should create one. When creating a blog you can use pop-ups, sidebar opt-ins and opt-ins below each blog post to collect emails. Again, offering something for free such as a 30-day course or an ebook works great to collect emails.
3. Contests – although you can’t run contests all of the time, you can leverage them to collect a few thousand emails in a short period of time. I usually use Contest Domination to run my contests as they have features that will help make your contest go viral incase you don’t have a big user base.

After you start building up your email list promote whatever products or services you maybe selling. Or if you don’t have any, you can create an email drip sequence and promote affiliate offers.

Rule #5: Write great content

My favorite way to grow a website is through content marketing. By creating great content and pushing it out via the social web, you can gain new readers, build links and increase your overall Google traffic. And the best part about it is you are doing this by adding a ton of value to potential customers by educating them with free advice.

If you want to create a content marketing strategy, it’s important to note that you need to write really good content. Don’t regurgitate the same old information and don’t waste your time covering the news. Also don’t write short blog posts as ones over 2000 words tend to get a lot more traffic and rank higher.

When writing content, follow my strategy that I use for Quick Sprout. You can find the steps here.

Rule #6: Optimize for conversions

There are 2 ways you can make more money from any website. The first is to drive more targeted traffic to the website, and the second is to optimize the site for conversions. The first option is the more expensive one and it should be leveraged once you have a high conversion rate.

I’ve written a decent number of posts on conversion optimization in the past, but incase you missed them here are a few posts that should help you boost your conversion rates:

• 11 ways to improve your call to actions
• What spending $252,000 on conversion rate optimization taught me
• How to optimize responsive designs for conversions
• How to optimize contact forms for conversions
• 11 a/b tests you ought to try

Once you optimize for conversions you should follow this guide to boost your overall search engine traffic.

Rule #7: Focus, focus, focus

One of the biggest reasons most people lose money when they buy a site is that they don’t focus on them. You can’t expect to spend a bit of money and make a huge ROI without putting in much effort.

You have to put in the time and effort if you want something to pay off. If you don’t have the time like me, you can hire someone to deal with it on a day-to-day basis, so you don’t have to think about it. Or what I do is offer people 50% of all profits to run the business and I just have to provide the capital.

Whether it’s you or someone who is qualified, if someone isn’t working on the new website you just bought, it won’t get the attention it needs to grow. This is important because no acquisition is as easy at seems… you are going to run into roadblocks.

Rule #8: Don’t get too greedy

There is always a right time to sell your business. So when is the right time? Well it depends on what’s enough for you.

I myself don’t like selling properties, but once my growth rate slows down to 30% a year, I look to sell off the site and move onto something new. Just make sure your growth rate doesn’t die down to 10% per year because the multiple you will receive on your yearly profit or revenue will drastically decrease.

If you are wondering how to sell your business, you can use the same broker you used to buy the business. They typically have a ton of contacts in the website buying world.

Conclusion

My guide to buying and selling sites isn’t fool proof, but it’s worked well over the years. Just don’t expect to get rich off of the process above because it takes years before you’ll see a great return on your investment.

It’s very rare to acquire a site and sell it in a few months for a huge ROI.

So what other things should you should consider when buying or selling sites.

There are two key elements to marketing. The first is to drive traffic to your website and the second is to get the traffic to convert into customers. You can have a million visitors going to your website, but if you can’t convert them, what’s the point?

Over the years I’ve learned a lot about improving conversion rates. Some of my knowledge has came from hiring conversion rate consultants, or even running my own a/b tests, but most of it has come from co-founding 2 analytics companies: KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg.

One of the easiest ways you can boost your conversion rates is by optimizing your call to actions (CTAs). Here are 11 ways you can improve your CTAs:

Tactic #1: Test button copy

So what button copy should you use? Click here, buy now, add to cart, purchase now, and order now are a few call to action texts that you see around. But I’ve found that generic verbiage like the words above don’t really impact conversion rates by much. If they do, then there are other elements on your webpage that need to be tested.

And just copying other people’s tests, like how 37 Signals started using the call to action “see pricing and plans” because it boosted their conversion rate by 200%, won’t always work for you.

We tested that same call to action on Crazy Egg over a year ago and learned that it decreased over conversion rate by over 10%. But what did increase our conversion rate by over 20% was the CTA “show me my heatmap”.

Lesson learned: call to actions that are related to your product or service tend to convert better than generic call to actions. Try testing button text that is highly related to what you are offering or selling.

Tactic #2: Color matters

Gmail once tested 50 shades of blue for their call to action color and found the highest converting shade. The end result was a boost in signups. You probably won’t be able to test 50 shades of a color, but you will be able to test a few different colors.

SAP found that the color orange boosted their conversion rate by over 32.5%. Performable found that the color red boosted their conversion rate by 21%.

Lesson learned: different colors have different meanings, such as red can sometimes create a sense of urgency. The main goal with your CTAs is to make sure they stand out and there is a good contrast between your button color and the color of your website design.

Tactic #3: Location, location, location

Just like with any business, location is one of the most important factors. You should test adding CTAs above the fold, below the fold and anywhere you think it makes sense.

I tried testing the call to action placement on NeilPatel.com and found that placement had a big impact on the conversion rate. I tried adding one above the fold, but it didn’t perform as well as placing it right below the fold.

Through surveying I quickly learned that people wanted to read a bit more and learn what I had to offer before seeing a call to action. For this reason having a call to action above the fold caused a decrease in conversions by 17%.

Lesson learned: don’t assume that placing your call to action higher on the page will boost your conversion rate. Make sure your visitors know what they are going to get before you present them with a call to action.

Tactic #4: Design matters

I ran an a/b test on the Quick Sprout Traffic System in which I tested the overall design of the call to action. The original call to action was just a button that said “add to cart”.

But through surveying I found that people were a bit confused on what they would get with the system. So I decided to make a quick tweak with the CTAs.

The new button also contained the text “add to cart” but it also contained an image of the product. The end result? A whopping 28% increase in conversions by modifying the button design to include an image of the product that was being bought.

Lesson learned: just because everyone else uses simple buttons that may contain a few words and round corners, it doesn’t mean you should do the same. From testing different sizes, to round corners, to even including an image of your product within your CTAs, you can boost your conversions by being creative.

Tactic #5: Timing is everything

You would think that showing a call to action button on your site would boost conversions versus not showing it right away, right? Kimberlysnyder.net recently did an a/b test in which they required you to watch a sales video before showing you a call to action button.

The video was 30 minutes long, so you would assume that it dropped their conversion rate. Especially because you couldn’t fast forward through the video or skip to the end. But because they delayed the button from appearing, it forced people to watch their video, which caused their conversions to increase by 144%.

Lesson learned: by forcing people to understand what you are selling and the benefits of it, you can increase your conversion rate. A great way to do this is to not show a user your call to action button until you get them to read what you are offering. This helps prequalify potential customers and helps get them excited on what you have to offer.

Tactic #6: Be creative

CTAs don’t have to be buttons. We recently tested something unique, in which we added a call to action button within a video on our KISSmetrics blog. Once you are done watching the video within it we show you a call to action to signup for our analytics service.

That call to action gets 380% more clicks than our normal sidebar call to action. And it drives 65% more clicks than our call to action within our Qualaroo survey.

Lesson learned: don’t assume that the standard call to action converts the best. I would have never thought that by placing a call to action within a video it would cause more clicks than a simple button.

Tactic #7: Tell people not to click

Can you change your call to action text to “don’t click here” and expect to boost your conversions? It doesn’t work for everyone, but it may work for you.

For example, on TimothySykes.com we recently tested a call to action that stated, “don’t click here if you’re lazy” and it performed 39% better than “click here”.

Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You to Be Rich uses a similar concept where he tells people to NOT click here.

Using reverse phycology can be an effective way to get people to do what you want. Test different variations of this tactic and try to tell people why they should click by using negative language. For example, if you run an ecommerce site, your call to action button could be “don’t click here unless you want to save 10%”.

Lesson learned: by using call to action phrases that are the opposite of what people are used to seeing, you can potentially boost your conversion rates.

Tactic #8: Special effects

Another great tactic that sites like TimothySykes.com use is that they add special effect to their CTAs. From making the call to action scroll with the user to having it wiggle to draw attention, you can do many things to boost your click throughs.

The call to action “next big pick” on TimothySykes.com has a 21% more clicks because it scrolls. The call to in the sidebar of Quick Sprout of the Michael Arrington ad gets 218% more clicks and 159% more conversions than the Ben Huh ad.

And when I tested the call to action in the Hellobar it converted 3x more when I selected the setting that made it scroll with the user versus not scrolling with users.

Lesson learned: little effects can bring more attention to your call to actions, which can cause them to get clicked more often. This doesn’t mean your conversion rates will go up, it just means they will gain more clicks.

Tactic #9: Exit call to actions

One type of call to action that isn’t used a lot is an exit call to action. I recently did this through BounceExchange on NeilPatel.com in which you only see the call to action when your mouse moves towards the back button on your web browser.

BounceExchange detects when someone is about to leave your website and it shows them an offer to try and grab their attention. The end result was a 46% increase in conversions.

At first I was a bit hesitant to try it out, but no one has complained yet and the conversions definitely make up any small complaints that I could potential receive from an exit call to action.

Lesson learned: you may feel that tactics like exit call to actions are a bit spammy, but others may not feel it is spammy. You won’t know if something works or if it bothers your visitors unless you try it out.

Tactic #10: Whitespace

A great way to make your call to action standout is to place nothing around them. Whitespace can be your friend as it can help make your button standout. You can do this through the following steps:

• Reduce elements within your web design.
• Reduce the number of bright colors in your design.
• Don’t place too many things around your CTAs.

I tried using more whitespace on my Traffic System landing page and saw a small increase in my conversion rate. The increase was 8%, but I didn’t have statistical significance. It would take 30 to 60 more days for the test to end, so I stopped it. Hopefully you will have better luck with testing this method than I did.

Lesson learned: Putting too many elements around your call to actions can be deadly to your conversion rate. Use whitespace to draw more attention to your CTAs.

Tactic #11: No call to actions

Would you dare to remove your call to actions? Tim Sykes did this with his site on his store page and found something interesting. He didn’t do this because he wanted to run an a/b test, but instead his developer didn’t finish his ecommerce store.

His products weren’t connected to a shopping cart, so he removed the call to action buttons on the page and learned that more people were interested in his products because they felt that they couldn’t buy them anymore.

By removing his CTAs and by adding an email address on his store page, he got more inquires from potential customers than what he used to get when he had CTA buttons in his ecommerce store.

Lesson learned: flooding your website with call to actions isn’t always good because it may cause people to feel that you are there only to sell them on something. When you remove your call to actions it can potentially cause a reverse effect in which people may want something they feel they can’t buy anymore.

Conclusion

What worked for me and the other websites above may not work for you. And what didn’t work for them may work for you. In the end you are going to have to test your call to actions if you want to find out what’s best for your user base.

The big takeaway that you should get from this blog post is that you need to constantly run a/b tests. If you don’t try to improve your conversion rates they won’t go up. Don’t be afraid to test!

What other ways can you improve your call to actions?

Do you feel overwhelmed with content marketing?  As simple as it sounds, it’s easy to forget that there’s just as much marketing involved as there is content creation. Typically, this task falls squarely on the shoulders of the marketing department.  If this sounds like the track your content marketing strategy is on, it could be costing you more customers than it gains.

So how can you make sure you’re developing a solid, actionable content marketing plan? Well, you’ll first have to avoid the following mistakes as they will derail your content strategy… here’s what to avoid:

Mistake #1: Relying completely on the marketing department

The first and most common mistake is dumping everything on the marketing department.  Compared to other departments in the company, this would make the most sense on the outside. If your company does this, you’re not alone:

But content marketing shouldn’t be thought of as purely an extension of marketing, editorial or public relations.  It should pull from various departments, including design, engineering and even sales, to name a few.

Why? Because the marketing department won’t always know what the best type of content you should be creating. For example, with KISSmetrics here are some of the types of content our engineering and design departments recommended:

• How to track people – one of the most common questions we get at KISSmetrics is “how do we track people”. The marketing department can’t write a piece like this, as it would require a deep understanding of our technology.
• How design affects conversion – a lot of our ideal customers are trying to boost their conversion rates, the design team is not only better suited to write a piece like this, but they can also create design examples.
• How to delay the loading of external javascripts – a lot of people are concerned about their website load time, so one way to improve things is to delay external javascripts. An engineer can not only explain how to do this, but they can also break down the code you need to use to accomplish this task.

As you can see from the examples above the marketing department wouldn’t be able to write all of those content pieces. For that reason it’s important to have many departments in your company involved in your content marketing strategy. Here’s how you can get the other departments involved:

• Encourage other departments – tell them the benefits of content marketing for the company as well as how it can benefit them personally. Such as increasing their personal brand. An easy way to do this is to also look for people in the company who are already communicating to customers, as they are going to be more open to blogging.
• Create an editorial board for all content pieces – this will act as both a springboard for ideas, and keeping the brand and voice consistent through all content marketing channels.
• Create an email alias or Skype group – add all these members so that you can easily communicate with each other the moment an idea hits or a concept piece is finished.

Mistake #2: Running out of steam

Now that you have a team together, you need to focus on the content itself.  When a strategy has just launched, it’s all too easy to churn out tons of great ideas and get right to work making them a reality.  But at some point, you’ll run out of ideas and the quality suffers.

When that happens, here’s what I do:

• Storytelling – people are attracted to certain kinds of stories:  stories of triumph, stories that challenge and stories that inspire.  How will your content play a role in helping to tell the kinds of stories that get shared? Just make sure you aren’t mistaking storytelling with storyselling.
• Answer the questions your customers don’t know how to ask – what are some of the greatest challenges people face with your product?  How can they be more successful with it?
• Add personal touches – one of the biggest problems with most content marketing formulas is that they subtract the person completely and focus entirely on the company and what it’s doing.
• Pay attention to the competition – one of the easiest ways to get new content ideas that are hot is to keep an eye out on the competition. You can check out my process of, researching the competition in order to come up with creative ideas, here.

Now to double check that you were paying attention to the 4 bullet points above, do you know what’s wrong with this example of content marketing from GE?

It’s all about GE and their technology, not about the people they’ve helped or the impact they’ve made. Or better yet, they should have created content that benefits their ideal customer.

Mistake #3: Marketing content only via the company blog

By now, you should know that marketing content on your blog alone isn’t going to cut it.  You need to reach out and broaden your focus to include the channels your customers are using.

You need to look at all the possible ways in which content can be shared:  social, video, document, slide, infographic and more. Content marketers are oftentimes so laser-focused on social media that they completely forget that their audience may also be reading other sites, which you can leverage by creating other forms of content.

You should try the following:

• Turn your video into a guest post
• Turn a blog post into an infographic and post it on someone else’s site.
• Interview industry experts via a podcast and try to get them to publish it on their blog.

Once you create the above content pieces you can then use the following email outreach templates to publish your content on industry related blogs:

Subject: you should blog about [insert your guest blog post topic]

[insert their first name], as an avid reader of [insert their site name] I would love to read about [insert guest blog post topic]… and I think your other readers would as well.

Your content on [insert existing post from their website #1, insert existing post from their website #2, and insert existing post from their website #3] are great, but I think you can tie it all together by blogging on [insert guest blog post topic].

I know you are probably busy and won’t blog on it so I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.   How about I write it for you? Don’t worry, I’m a great blogger and have had my posts featured on [insert previous guest post URL #1] and [insert previous guest post URL #2].

Let me know if you are interested, I already know your blogging style, plus I understand what your readers love… as I am one.

Look forward to hearing from you,
[insert your name]

The reason you should guest post on a regular basis is that it can do wonders for your search traffic. For example, I wrote 59 guest posts, which help build an extra 117 links into 30 posts on Quick Sprout.

As you can see from the image above, the posts I linked to from my guest posts received more search engine traffic than the posts that didn’t gain as many links. And then if you add in the number or leads and sales those guest posts generated, the ROI was huge.

Mistake #4:  Not winning customers over

You have the content, but is it really winning customers over?   One very common content marketing mistake that’s made with even the best of intentions is to put a positive spin on every piece.  For one thing, your customers aren’t buying it.  You and they both know the product or service has flaws, or isn’t right for everyone.  Every content marketing effort feels more like a sales pitch.

To help avoid this, you may want to invite users to participate in your content marketing efforts.  Vermont ski resort, Jay Peak, did this by encouraging their users to tag Jay Peak in their instagram photos describing what they love about the mountain. The mention of Jay Peak is secondary to users emphasizing what they love about skiing there, but the campaign does a great job of sharing the enthusiasm without hyping up the location.

So how do you do it?  You could:

• Encourage users to pose with your product or showcase your brand name in an unusual way.  Nylabone users post pictures of their dogs using the product and invite them to add their own captions, providing real social proof in a way that marketing videos or photos can’t.
• Give a shout out to the submitter when you do post their content, since they’re very likely to show both the content and your response to their friends.
• Focus on feelings rather than the brand itself.  Coke’s Happiness is… Tumblr page and Chobani Greek Yogurt’s Pinterest Page don’t always mention the products themselves, but by interacting with the pages, customers grow to associate the brand with those feelings.

But don’t make the mistake of relying completely on user-generated content.  Make sure that you check the sources of uploaded pictures or videos before posting, and let customers know up-front that any content they submit becomes the property of your company to do with as you wish.  This will help prevent any controversial or legal issues that could crop up if the campaign truly takes on a life of its own.

If you really want to harness the benefits of user-generated content, you should ask for (and respond) to reviews, both good and bad.  For many users, knowing that the company cares and is willing to work with them to resolve the issue will diffuse any anger or frustration, which can be the spark that leads to other disgruntled customers jumping on the bandwagon.

Mistake #5: Not measuring the results

The easiest way to gather usable content marketing metrics is to figure out which pages or promotions have the biggest impact on customers, and why.   Measuring things like the click-through rate, time spent on site, bounce rate and unique visitors are all sales-focused metrics.  You should also look at:

• The type of media customers engaged with most – this is the most basic and boils down to number of pages, downloads or other raw data.  You can use basic tools like Google Analytics to determine this.
• Where and how the content was shared socially – you can use services like Hootsuite to track the number of social shares and the channels content was shared from.
• Whether or not content converted into customers – all your content marketing efforts are wasted if they’re not turning into paying customers.  Start off by learning who’s doing what on your site, how often they participate, and how soon they made a purchase.

Here is an example of what we track on our KISSmetrics blog:

As you can see from the image above content URLs are placed on the left and number of times people visit the blog after reading one of those URLs is at the top. So the higher the percentage, the better the content. If you are writing content that causes a low return visit percentage, it means that you are publishing content that people don’t care to read.

At KISSmetrics we try to optimize our blog for return visits because we know it helps create brand loyalty an in the long run those visitors are more likely to turn into customers.

Conclusion

It’s never really easy to create a content marketing strategy that works well, but if you avoid the mistakes above you will be better off.

Out of all the mistakes I’ve listed above, the most common one is not measuring results. You can’t just dump tons of hours or dollars into a content marketing strategy if you can’t produce a positive ROI. It’s not just about the number of downloads or shares, but about the number of customers who gained from consuming the content.

What are some content marketing mistakes you see being made today?  How would you handle them?

With billions of searches happening every day, and over 65% of the search market, it’s a obvious that you should be paying attention to Google.  Knowing how the search engine works, what it looks for, and how it plans to evolve are all important to understand if you want to stay ahead of your competition.

By thinking like Google, you will not only learn what makes the world’s largest search engine tick, but how to improve your site for higher rankings as well.

But before we get into that, you need to first understand how search engines work:

How searches work

When you do a search, you may not realize that in the background, thousands of channels, programs and scripts are working to get you the answer within milliseconds.

Google has prepared a great interactive infographic that simplifies and explains how search works. Of course, many changes have been made to this formula over the years, especially as some sites try to game the system and artificially inflate key factors that Google looks at, such as: back links, domain age, and social marketing efforts.

Although no one but Google knows exactly what’s in each algorithm or even how many there are that make a site rank where it does, you can find some good information by looking at what Google has done previously.

It’s important to remember that Google is only as good as the service it provides.  If people make billions of searches, but don’t find what they’re looking for, they’re far less likely to trust them or even worse, use them again.  So it’s in Google’s best interest to give people what they want.

Clues from the past

One way to tell where Google’s going is to look at where it has been. SEOmoz has a list of Google’s algorithm changes since 2000, in which they note all of the minor and major changes in the search engine’s indexing and ranking changes. There are a few common threads that you’ll notice:

• Google is always trying to think one step ahead of spammers and scammers by identifying sites known to harbor malware and devaluing sites that use outdated techniques such as keyword stuffing, doorway pages and invisible text. This shows that you shouldn’t jut avoid these tactics, but also other spammy tactics as they won’t last long. Any quick solution that you can use to boost your rankings probably isn’t wise because Google’s history has shown, that it won’t work forever.
• Google has always felt that content is king, but over the years people have tried to game the system by producing mediocre content. From fighting duplicate content to useless content, Google continues to promote content rich sites that provide readers value and they eventually push down sites that don’t have great content. Your goal shouldn’t be to write tons of content, but instead you need to focus on higher quality content, as those pieces tend to gain more backlinks and rank higher throughout their algorithm updates.
• Links have always been a huge part of rankings and it seems that it will continue to be that way. Over time webmasters have figured out how to build links, but the ones that are still hard to game, are links from relevant authority sites. If you are planning on building links, go for quality and not quantity. As long as your links are relevant, they aren’t keyword rich you should do well in the longrun. The concept of links is also changing… links from social media sites, such as tweets can help. Co-citations may also help your rankings in the longrun.
• When you’re serving billions of pages a day, there’s a clear focus on speed.  Not only has Google’s index updated quicker with the introduction of updates such as Suggest and Caffeine, but sites speed is a major factor that affects the relevancy and conversion rate of your site.  Site speed is just one of 200+ known algorithmic factors that Google takes into account when ranking your site. If you want to boost your rankings, consider optimizing your load time. Just look at how I doubled my traffic by improving my load time.

Another way to keep your finger on the pulse of the search giant is to take a closer look at what it’s currently involved in.  SEO by the Sea highlights interesting features and information from Google’s patent filings.  From Google glasses to leveraging rich snippets, you can learn a lot about the future of Google from these posts.

Likes and Dislikes

I’ve already shared a few notable things that Google dislikes: spam (comment and otherwise), malware, duplicate content, low quality inbound links, a high number of outbound links and so forth.  But what about what Google likes?

• Authoritative content – not just good content, but content with backlinks from relevant authority sites and reviews from peers. An easy way to build links to your content is to follow the steps in this blog post. Also content that contains at least 2000 words tends to rank higher than content that is shorter.
• Cornerstone content – this is information that serves as an often-linked-to resource from other sites. It’s content that doesn’t need to change often because it’s so complete and so relevant that it only need minimal maintenance to stay that way. The Advanced Guide to SEO is a good example of this and it will continually get more and more traffic each day, as it is the most thorough guide to SEO online.
• Social signals – Google measures social networks differently and pays attention to diverse signals.  Votes (likes), shares, posts and bookmarks are just a few of the criteria Google looks for. The more social shares your content gets, the higher you will rank. This is especially going to be more important as Google spends more time and money on Google Plus.
• Personalized experiences – a big trend Google is going after is personalizing their search and product experience to each user. From mobile devices, in which their investing billions of dollars in, to personalized search, Google wants users to receive experiences tailored to their needs. If you can adapt your website to the needs of users, you are likely to rank higher in the longrun. From using responsive design, to tailoring the experience based on history, like Yelp does, it’s all about offering a unique experience to each user.

If Google is so smart, why does _______ still work?

Your search engine ranking may be below a site that you’re 100% certain uses black hat and other underhanded techniques to rank where it does.  This begs the question, if Google is so smart and so advanced, why do some of these techniques still work?

The answer is because Google’s index is delicate.  They don’t want to mistakenly sandbox quality sites or generate false-positives as they did when they declared the whole internet to be full of malware in 2009.

Google’s engineers are hard at work trying to figure out how to maintain a balance of quality results without the changes wrongly affecting sites who have done nothing wrong. So instead of stooping to your competitions’ level, if you use ethical white hat tactics, you’re likely to rank higher in the long run.

From what I’ve seen over the years, sites using unethical tactics may rank high for a few months or even a year or two, but eventually they get caught. If you focus on producing high quality content, and building legitimate links, you’ll eventually rank higher than the people who are taking the quick and easy route. I myself used to take the quick and easy route and ranked for terms like “web hosting” or even “online poker” really high, but eventually Google caught up to me and others and penalized us over time.

Slow and steady really does win the race in the game of “Google”.

Tools of the trade

Another way to get more insights about Google is to use the tools they provide. One of the most important ones to checkout is Webmaster Tools. Here are some of the things Webmaster Tools can tell you, which should give you insights on how Google thinks:

• Page speed – Google used to have page speed data in Webmaster Tools. They now send you to their PageSpeed program, which shows you that they feel load time is important. The reason Google feels page speed being important because they noticed a correlation in which when they rank sites that load slowly, people use Google less frequently.
• Errors – no search engine likes sending people to a site with errors. Google lists out all of the errors they find on your site that you should fix in Webmaster Tools.
• Search queries – if you are trying to figure out a trend on if your traffic is going to go up or down, just look at how many search query impressions you receive. The more you get, the more traffic you should receive. So if you make changes to your marketing strategy and the number of impressions go up, you should do more of it. If the number of impressions goes down, you should do less of it.
• Valuable content – through the use of sitemaps Google will tell you how many pages they are indexing on your site. This should show you what the search giant thinks of your content. If they are indexing a lot of your content they probably feel it is more valuable compared to if you only have very few pages indexed.
• Messages – this is my favorite feature in Webmaster Tools is the messages area. Google will tell you what they see wrong with your website and this is where they will be sending you warnings as well.

If you want to get an understanding of where Google is going and how to adapt with their changes, it is essential that you use Webmaster Tools.

What’s next for the search giant?

Using the programs and services above, as well as other features like Google+, you can get a good understanding of where Google is moving towards. Facebook has been slowly trying to take a bit of Google’s market share by going after search and rolling out their own ad network, but Google continues to adapt and fight back.

You may look at Google Plus and consider it a nice try, but a failure on their part.  But that’s only because you maybe comparing it to Facebook in terms of popularity.  Google Plus is becoming more and more integrated with the things we use every day, similar to Facebook’s universal login.  Recently, they started promoting brands’ Plus pages and showcasing their +1 buttons as a way to encourage more companies to embrace Google Plus.

Beyond Google+, there’s also the Knowledge Graph, Google’s answer to Facebook’s long reach in the social sphere.  The Knowledge Graph collects and connects the who, what, where, when and how of social with search.

Combine this information with the social community and Google Maps, and you get Google Now, a personal assistant for Android smart phones that hopes to “make you a local, anywhere” by giving you the right information at the right time.  This includes sports scores from your favorite teams as they’re playing, the latest train schedule while you’re standing on the platform, and flight details from the moment you reach the gate.  The more Google Now knows about you, the better its recommendations.

The big thing all of these changes should show you is that Google is getting more personalized, not just from a localization standpoint, but they are trying to show you different results then your next door neighbor. With all the information they are collecting about you, your friends, what you guys like, your location… they are trying to make your search experience more customized to you.

This means as business you need to adjust your strategy. You can’t just go after head terms, anymore. You need to start going after local search results and ideally adjust your content to be more relevant for each type of search a person may make.

Conclusion

The good news is that to think like Google, you don’t have to be an algorithm hawk, by watching out for every little change. Instead, concentrate on giving your customers what they want:  great, relevant content, shared through various social networks.  Ask them to spread the word via their own friends and colleagues, and make that information available through more than just a blog post. Obviously it’s worth paying attention to algorithm updates as they may affect your site on some small level, but as long as you keep giving people what they want, you’ll inadvertently also be giving Google what it wants.

What are your thoughts on optimizing for Google?  Have your site rankings been helped or hurt by recent updates?

As it turns out, 9 out of 10 smartphone users conduct some form of financial activity on their devices, according to a Prosper Mobile Insights Survey.  That includes over half who use their phones to shop online.  Although conversion rates on desktop computers are still higher, tablets aren’t too far behind.

What’s interesting is that even though conversion rates for smartphones are still below 2%, the smaller the screen, the more money users spent on average.

One point to keep in mind is that most sites are still not optimized to handle mobile traffic.  As responsive design becomes more and more intertwined with best web design practices, shoppers will become more comfortable shopping on a variety of devices, and companies will get used to catering to customers through a variety of channels dedicated to those devices.

A good example of this is WebUndies.com, a family-owned retailer of underwear, sleepwear and loungewear, reported that its mobile commerce sales alone topped $168,000, or 5.4% of its 3.1 million in sales.  If that barely seems like a slice of traffic worth optimizing for, consider that this is an increase of over 169% for the retailer.  WebUndies uses both a responsive design and a tablet-optimized catalog.  With this much attention to its mobile shoppers, it’s no surprise that their mobile traffic has doubled year after year for them.

What is responsive design?

Responsive design is a flexible, liquid layout that adapts to fit a variety of screen sizes, resolutions and devices.  Rather than having separate individual design elements that are built for a mobile site, responsive design focuses on a core set of code that aligns and situates itself to flow within the parameters of the device itself.

Consider this example showcasing cabins for rent:

As you can see, the layout adjusts itself to present information in a way that makes sense for the device it’s being viewed on.

But the real question from a conversion standpoint is: what do I keep, and what do I trim away?

Conversion elements worth keeping

Keep anything that makes it easier for mobile customers to find what they’re looking for quickly.  That means maps and directions, business hours, and tap-to-call functionality that puts them in touch with a representative.

The Red Cross’ mobile site is a perfect example of integrating mobile features in a way that makes perfect sense.  In one example, you could tap to make donations via SMS, over the phone or by credit card.  Having this kind of flexibility lets users take control of how they take action.

A conversion-focused responsive design also makes use of features beyond the touch-screen.  Since you’re dealing with a much smaller screen space, you want to take full advantage of sight, sound and media options available to you.  Reading plain text on a mobile phone is tiresome and difficult, but watching a video or playing a podcast is intuitive and easy.

Elements worth trimming away

Optimizing a mobile-responsive design for conversion optimization is a lot like building a landing page.  You have to trim away the fat, which means anything that could lead the visitor to click away or be distracted from taking the action you want them to take.

As you saw from the cabin example above, the ad to rent the cabin on Flathead Lake was completely removed in favor of room for more photos and text.   Since white text on a black background is more difficult to read, better usability standards were implemented for the smartphone version, which presents a more readable black text on a white background.

But optimizing for mobile responsive design isn’t just about removing ads and adjusting layouts.  You also have to take a serious look at what to remove for a better user experience.  Here’s how beauty company Tria was able to optimize their mobile site to sell laser hair removal products:

There are several things we can learn from a design like this:

• Less is more – notice how the mobile optimized page presents images in a scrollable slideshow format rather than one large view, and several thumbnails, for easier touch-based navigation.
• Expandable content – rather than force mobile users to scroll through waves of content, one tap opens a page full of benefits which are ordinarily exposed to desktop viewers at left. Tabs that appear in blue on the Desktop version are opened via plus signs on the mobile site.
• Reviews are more prominent – notice how ratings and reviews are front-and-center on the mobile site, where more high-end purchase items are further reinforced with social proof.
• Price and payment options are larger – the price and the option to pay in installments are considerably larger so there’s no need to search for “how much it costs” or “how can I pay for it?”
• Free shipping is more noticeable –mobile shoppers see the free shipping notification immediately, along with a large, prominent icon to view their shopping cart.
• Large call-to-action button – Tria makes full use of a large call-to-action button that takes up the entire width of the screen, so there’s no pinching, squeezing and zooming to focus in on the add to cart button.

In this example, Tria has simplified, streamlined and focused on what was important for the best possible user experience, accessibility and ease of use.

What would you trim?

Here’s another example of a mobile responsive design, this time promoting the World Wildlife Foundation’s Earth Hour:

The tablet version simply shifts around elements of the site, but the smartphone version stacks them and eliminates bandwidth-sucking extras like the dim light bulb and the countdown clock.  The latest news is also removed from the main focus area, which helps keep the call-to-action brief and straightforward.

But not every site cuts out the eye candy.  Take a look at Food Sense.  On a device where the very look of a meal could be the make or break moment to clicking through to learn more, Food Sense opted to keep their stunning images, and trim down the text:

On the tablet, the sidebar navigation is moved to the top, so that browsers can enjoy the full view of the fruit salad.  Smartphone users have the icons removed completely with simple text-based navigation, and greater emphasis on individual photos.

By looking at these examples, it should be clear that creating a mobile responsive design is more than just a juggling act of design elements.

The 400% increase in conversion rates

Design firm Electric Pulp recently redesigned clothing retailer O’neill’s website to be more mobile responsive.  They made all the right decisions in incorporating best practices for mobile design: a fluid layout, collapsible menu that could be opened with a single tap, increased font size, larger tap areas and improved photos.

They then conducted several tests. Not your typical A/B split tests, but they instead looked at pure order volume and revenue in addition to conversions of non-mobile traffic.  Here were their results:

Sometimes, mobile responsive design happens as a matter of practicality.  As Shiseido Americas discovered when they launched a mobile site for their high-end beauty brand Nars in January, they simply couldn’t maintain three separate versions of their existing site (for desktop, tablet and smartphone).  Switching to a more fluid design allowed them to keep pace with new device releases they weren’t prepared for, such as the iPad Mini.

In this case, Shiseido created graphics and other assets that would fit Nars’ mobile design exclusively, rather than simply rearranging elements on the existing site.  The results so far have paid off in more ways than one.

They were able to increase smartphone checkout conversions by 54% and tablet conversions by 24%.   In addition to that, the new approach also boosted the team’s workflow and productivity while ensuring that all device approaches use the right assets to compel the customer to take action.

Best practices for mobile forms in responsive design

Back in the ancient days of WAP, form fields were unthinkable because they were a headache to try and fill out.  Fortunately, standards have changed and user interface designers have provided a well-rounded set of instructions for maximum button touch effectiveness.

UX Booth has a fantastic article on the best practices for designing and optimizing mobile forms, which includes the following:

• Using vertical-align labels (top) versus traditional left-aligned labels.
• Removing any information that isn’t absolutely necessary.  Many users can have their connections dropped and data lost, making long forms difficult to complete.
• Combining form fields (such as country/state/province selection) where appropriate or making the most popular choices appear first on the list.  Incorporate default selections when it makes sense to do so.  This in turn makes it easy for users to quickly scan and take action without wasting a lot of time or bandwidth.

A good example of an easy to use mobile form is Hertz.

How to create your own responsive design

By this point you may be wondering, showcasing examples and results is all well and good, but how do you create your own mobile responsive design?  Fortunately, there are several tools you can use to help streamline and simplify the process:

• Simple Grid – this system uses a series of “slots” that can be rearranged and combined according to a grid-based design.
• Skeleton – skeleton is a boilerplate development kit that is based on the popular 960 grid style.  It also has a number of extensions for popular content management and sharing platforms including WordPress, Drupal and Github.
• Gridpak – this is a “responsive design generator” that creates a grid with a slider that you can adjust to fit your needs.  You can also adjust features such as the column padding for greater control and flexibility.
• The 1140 CSS Grid – this grid is available as both CSS and a Photoshop template.

Conclusion

By starting with a fluid layout, you’ll minimize the time, cost and work of trying to fit your site to different devices, and instead concentrate on solid code that can easily be applied across devices from today, and well into the future.

The most important thing you can do to increase conversions through a mobile responsive design is to discover which features are most important to your visitors.  You can do this by way of an overlaid heat map to determine where their areas of focus tend to fall.   A good mobile responsive design that’s conversion focused will eliminate useless navigation and design elements, while focusing on crisp, simple design that loads fast and demands action.

Do you have a mobile responsive design?  How has it affected your conversion rate?

Just because a potential client loves what you have to say, it doesn’t mean they are going to hire you. These days, people are talking to multiple firms and figuring out which one is the best fit for them.

Companies are evaluating every aspect of your pitch… especially your proposal. So if you want to increase your odds of locking in a potential client you’re going to have to create a great proposal.

So what should you include in your proposal?

Well you probably already know the basics, such as: what you are offering, scope of work, price, and terms and conditions. But that’s not enough. Here’s what else you need to include:

Customize your template

You can templatize your proposals, but they need to be custom. If you just use a ton of filler text and add in the client URL here and there, they will quickly notice it and feel that you won’t put much effort into their campaign.

Just think about it, if you were too lazy to create a custom proposal, what’s going to happen to when it comes to doing the harder work?

One of the simplest ways to make a proposal seem customized is to modify your template’s design. You can do this by adding in the customer’s logo or even creating a unique title slide.

Social proof

You have to assume that your proposal is going to be passed around, maybe to a manager or even another co-worker. They may not be up to date with what’s happening or why your SEO firm is so great. So make sure you include:

• A corporate bio – a paragraph or two about your firm and why it’s great. From your company philosophy, to your culture, show your true colors in your bio. Make it stand out and don’t just write something generic like telling them how you guys are the best SEO firm, as every firm will make that claim.
• Logos – show off some of the clients you work with or have worked with in the past. And the bigger the logos you can put in there the better. If small companies see that big companies trust you, it’s very likely that they will trust you to.

What’s wrong?

Just because a potential client came to you for SEO, it doesn’t mean that their only problem is that they don’t rank well on Google. In this section of the proposal you need to tear down the client’s site and list out everything that is wrong.

Your list shouldn’t be strictly related to SEO, you should list everything you can find that is wrong. Show examples, URLs, and even screenshots in this section.

Lets assume for a minute that NeilPatel.com was a potential client for you and you were creating a proposal for what you could do for the site. Here are some things you could break down in the problem section:

1. Site depth – currently the site only contains 1 page that has content. If you are looking for more search engine traffic, you should consider adding multiple pages. If you can’t add multiple pages with detailed content, consider adding a blog where you can share valuable marketing information. If you decide to go with a blog, consider the URL neilpatel.com/blog.
2. Case studies – you currently have empty case study pages on neilpatel.com. You either need to finish the case studies or consider removing them. I recommend that you keep them as it provides social proof. When writing them make sure you include the problem, solution, results and specially list out everything you did. If you are unsure of what this looks like, checkout the Harvard Business Review as they write detailed case studies.
3. Load time – search engines look at the load time of your website. The better your load time the higher you are more likely to rank. If you look at Google’s PageSpeed it shows that you have a score of 70 out of 100. Consider leveraging browser caching, optimizing your images, combining images into CSS sprites and optimize the order of your styles and scripts.
4. A/B testing – you should consider running split tests on neilpatel.com if you already haven’t. If your primary goal is to get consulting leads, you should try a variation in which the form fields are above the fold. Currently the copy is really long and a user would have to scroll to the bottom of your website to see the form fields.

If you look at the above 4 points you’ll see that I get into a lot of details. If I were creating a real proposal I would have created at least 15 to 20 points and included screenshots.

Solutions

Your solutions to the problems you stated above can’t be generic. You need to be so detailed with your solutions that the client can just take that information and implement it without even hiring you.

I know that sounds counterintuitive, but 99% of clients will be too lazy to implement your changes without you. Instead they will feel that the easier route would be to just pay you to do it for them. For that reason you need to be as detailed as possible as it builds trust.

Again, if I were creating a real proposal, here would be 4 potential solutions to the problems above:

1. Create a blog – start a blog on neilpatel.com/blog and give away free information on how companies can market themselves through content marketing. A few sample post ideas are: how to create a powerful blog post in less than 2 hours, how to market your content through social media, and how to convert blog readers into customers. When writing blog posts, follow these guidelines.
2. Finish your case studies – consider writing detailed case studies such as this one. If you can include a video testimonial from your client or text based testimonials, it will help your case studies seem more legitimate. I would also recommend that you include call to actions throughout your case studies.
3. W3 Total Cache – I see that neilpatel.com is running on WordPress, which has plugins that can help improve your load time. With the W3 Total Cache plugin you can improve your Google PageSpeed score. The best part about the plugin is that it doesn’t require a developer.
4. Run split tests – through Qualaroo you can survey your visitors and find out why they aren’t converting into leads. Once you get that data you can then modify your design and run a/b tests. A simple test could be moving your form fields above the fold. You can also try adding Bounce Exchange to your site, which should help boost your lead count by 10 to 20%.

Scope and deliverables

In this section you should tell the client what you are going to do from them. But more so break it down into multiple plans.

The first plan should be for only what the client requested and the price should be somewhere in their budget range. Make sure you break down all of the things you will do within this plan. The more detailed you can be, the better.

You should also include one of two more plans that contain more than what the client requested… these plans should be more expensive. In these plans you should offer to solve all of the problems you pointed out in the proposal. Again be very detailed on what you are offering here.

Lastly, in all plans you should add a timeline of when you are going to complete each action item in each of your plans as well as if the client will receive monthly reports or calls.

Personalize

The large consulting companies typically throw associates onto new accounts. If you are a boutique SEO agency, make it clear that experienced people are going to be working on the account.

You can show this by adding an area showing who is going to be working on the account and include their bio, which should back up their experience. Make sure you keep your bio short and to the point… for example, I would use this as mine:

Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. Through his entrepreneurial career he has helped large corporations such as Amazon, AOL, GM, HP and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was he named one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal, but he was also named one of the top entrepreneurs in the nation by Entrepreneur Magazine. He has also been recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama.

Case studies

As I mentioned earlier, you have to assume that your proposal is going to be passed around. You can’t assume that the person reading it knows about your firm or you. For this reason, you always want to include case studies at the very end of your proposal.

I typically like including case studies that are relevant to the proposal I am creating. So if I were creating a SEO proposal for an ecommerce company, I would include an ecommerce case study.

Each case study shouldn’t be longer than 1 page. It should include what you did, the results, a testimonial, and it should be easy to skim. You ideally want include 2 to 3 case studies with every proposal that you send out.

Conclusion

If you follow everything that I mentioned above, you’ll increase your odds of closing a deal. I myself used to create generic proposals and I had a low closing rate. Once I followed the above steps, I boosted my closing rate by almost 3x.

The one thing you can also add that I didn’t mention above, as it’s tough to add, is rough estimates on the results that you are projecting to provide.

Is there anything else you could add to a SEO proposal to make it standout from the crowd?

When I first started to blog, I used to write 300 to 400 word blog posts and I was ecstatic when the post received a hundred plus visitors. Little did I know, my content sucked and people didn’t want to read it.

Over the course of the last 8 years I’ve been able to slowly fine tune the way I write content and I’ve learned the hard way on how to create blog posts that people love. They love them so much that they’ll comment, email you about how great your content is, and even share it on social sites.

I’ve blogged in the past about how I write blog posts, but I’ve never gone down into the specific details on how you can replicate my strategy for any industry… even the boring ones like credit cards or car insurance.

What I am going to do is share this information with you through a webinar. Don’t worry, the webinar is FREE, and I’m not looking for anything in return. Instead, I just love communicating and helping out my Quick Sprout readers.

So what are you going to learn during this free webinar?

• How to effectively write content for any niche.
• The 10 big lessons I learned from content marketing over the last 8 years.
• How to make your content go viral, even if it is on a boring topic like car insurance.
• The different forms of content that you can leverage and the results you can expect from them.
• How to create a content marketing strategy for your business.
• How to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing.
• Where to content marketing landscape is moving to in the next year.

If you want to learn how to create a content marketing strategy that won’t put you to sleep, signup for the webinar here.

Webinar information

If you are interested in attending the webinar, here are the details:

• Presenter – Neil Patel
• Format – PowerPoint presentation with question and answers at the end
• Date – Monday March 4^th, 2013
• Time – 9am to 10am PST

Click here to attend the webinar.

If you can’t attend the webinar their will be an update that I will make to this blog post by March 11^th, in which I will add the webinar here. The link to it will be at the bottom of the post.

PS: Come prepared to the webinar with questions and your website URL. I would love to give live tips and examples of what you should be doing with your business.

PPS: If you want me to cover anything else, leave a comment and I will do my best to cover it.

Update: If you want to watch a recorded version of the webinar, click here.

What’s the easiest way to grow your company? Acquire customers, right?

I used to live by that philosophy when I first became an entrepreneur, but acquiring them can be very expensive when you are first starting out. Plus, how do you know what customers you should be acquiring?

Starting up a Google AdWords campaign or some Facebook ads may sound simple, but if you don’t know exactly what kind of customers you should be acquiring, you’ll end up losing a lot of money. And even if you do know what customers to go after, you can still lose money.

So if you are just starting out, focus your energy on manufacturing customers… not acquiring them. So how do you manufacture them?

Well, manufacturing involves 3 steps:

1. You choose your market carefully
2. Fulfill your promises
3. Add your secret sauce

Here’s how you can manufacture customers:

Chose your market carefully

Who’s your target market?

Is it 18-35 year olds males, who make between $100,000 and $150,000 a year who live in Los Angeles, California? That’s a classic example of targeting… but even if you get your targeting that niche, it won’t work.

Why?

Not every 18 to 35 year old male who makes $100,000 to $150,000 a year in Los Angeles faces the same problems.

The reason this is important because if you target the wrong demographic and get feedback for product or service you are trying to create, you’ll get information that could derail your business. The last thing you want to do is create something that your ideal customer won’t want to buy.

A good example of choosing your marketing carefully is the story of how APPfog came about. The founder Lucas, who hangs out on Hack News noticed there were people like him who had similar issues when it came to developing and deploying applications. But instead of assuming those people where in his target market, he decided to test things out.

He popped up a landing page where people could signup to his APPfog service, the thing was, the product wasn’t actually created, he just made it seem like it was so he could get an understanding of how many people wanted a service that helped them with application development and deployment.

Within 24 hours 800 people signed up for his service. And four weeks later 4000 people signed up for it.

Now that Lucas knew there was a potential demand for his solution, he decided to require them fill out a survey if they wanted to be let into a beta offering. They survey went against conventional marketing wisdom as it mainly contained open ended questions, and required 30 minutes of your time to be completed.

Naturally you would think that most people wouldn’t fill it out, but the demand for his solution was so high that he was able to get 2000 people to complete it. This also allowed him weed out all of the people who weren’t in his target market because only those with that deep pain, would have filled out such a survey.

Amazingly, out of four thousand, two thousand people filled out the survey! He had found a group of people who shared the same problem and who felt deeply about it.

And it doesn’t have to just stop with web-based products or service. Betabrand is a company who is very careful about finding the right market as they know it is the first step in manufacturing customers.

Every time they consider releasing new clothing products, they first find the customer group, and then tests clothing ideas for them.

They tested out the concept of “bike to work pants”. In which you flip out a flag in the back pocket and fold up the cuffs and you have reflective material to improve visibility on the road. Tuck them away and you have slacks suitable for work.

Each new article of clothing is a minimal viable product. They only make a hundred or so, reach out reach out to their target market, and test the waters. And although bike to work pants blew up, the important thing to realize is that not all of their ideas succeed. To minimize losses, they create low volume runs of clothing items for new ideas, and if they do well, they continually improve the product. If it doesn’t, they dump the idea.

If you want to create a similar type of success, you need to describe who you think your passionate early adopters might be. In other words those who don’t care if your product is perfect, they just want it now.

Then go find them, hang out with them and understand them deeply. Invite 10 to be on your “customer advisory board”. When doing so realize that it’s not good enough that you are one of them. Go confirm there are more of you out there and that you actually understand their problems.

Fulfill your promises

The next step in manufacturing customers is to help solve their pain. In other words, you are going to have to deliver on what you promised. By this point you’ve already identified a group of people who have a pain or passion they feel deeply about and you are going to address that somehow.

The key with solving that pain and delivering what you promised is that your whole brand and company has to be a part of it. Every interaction you have with the customer affects the promise and therefore your ability to keep it. This includes the product… but also, marketing, sales, distribution, return process, support, and so on.

A good example of this is Zappos, they don’t just sell shoes, but they provide you with the best shoe shopping experience out there. They will randomly upgrade your shipping to next day air for free. Or if you aren’t happy with your shoes, even if you have worn them for 6 months, they’ll let you return them without any questions asked.

So how do you keep your promise like Zappos? You need to address the pain or passion, but don’t focus on the features. Concentrate on how you need to make them feel and plan to build only what provides that.

Appfog, did this by only building what was absolutely required to keep those 2000 survey applicants happy. He built 3 or 4 features on the frontend and a backend to support it. This didn’t manufacture passionate customers, but it did manufacture customers to continue to learn from.

When building your product, keep in mind that simple is better. Being all things to all people is a recipe for failure. Big companies become big companies by growing into multiple product lines and multiple models that deliver simple value propositions. Not by crating complex products that solves problems for the entire world.

What promise will you make that will positively impact the lives of your customers? What is the minimum functionality you need to provide to fulfill your promise? Figure those questions out and then run in by your customer advisory board to make sure you are on track.

What’s your secret sauce?

If you want to manufacture satisfied customers, they must realize that the promise has been made to them, but if you want passionate customers they must feel something extraordinary has been made. It might be joy, relief, or even flattery. You have to change their life in some meaningful way. Customers are passionate when they feel special, and that’s when they share their experiences.

To achieve high growth you have to evoke this passion. You can fake passion for a while by inducing a desired behavior, but it’s not sustainable. A social media program offering a steep discount or an award for sharing might get people to “like” your Facebook page, or tell all of their friends, but the moment the program goes away so does the buzz.

Think about the products you use and the ones you love. What’s different about your behavior with products you love? What is it about the product or company that puts you over the top?

Here are some ways businesses go about creating passionate behavior:

• Donating money to charity or adopting a social cause – Toms does this by donating a pair of shoes for every one that is bought.
• Providing extraordinary customer service – Zappos and Nordstrom are two companies known for providing excellent customer service. For example, Nordstrom has a lifetime return policy.
• Create usable products – people love Basecamp not because it has the most features, but because it’s really easy to use.
• Appeal to beliefs – American Apparel only sells made in American clothing as some people feel that wearing clothing made in other countries is hurting the American economy.
• Going above and beyond the call of duty; in other words, something works or the experience was better than all expectations

Creating passion doesn’t have to be a direct relation of your product or service. At KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, we create evoke passion through our blog. That’s our secret sauce. People love our content so much because we educate our ideal customer, even if that means telling them about our competitor’s product.

Brian Clark of Copyblogger calls this creating your minimum viable audience.

You have a minimal viable audience when:

• You’re receiving enough feedback from comments, emails, social networks, and social media news sites in order to adapt and evolve your content to better serve the audience.
• You’re growing your audience organically thanks to social media sharing by existing audience members and earned media.
• You’re gaining enough insight into what the audience needs to solve their problems or satisfy their desires beyond the free education you’re providing.

Building an audience first is like creating your very own market segment.

You’re creating a group of similar people drawn together by your compelling and value-driven content. Over time, you develop a deep understanding of these people, and from that knowledge, will very likely gain insights into products they desire.

You should also use your secret sauce with your customer advisory board. If they are passionate about it, it’s likely that others will as well.

Conclusion

There is nothing wrong with trying to acquire customers, but when you are starting out you should focus on manufacturing them. It’s too expensive and risky for a new company to focus on buying customers when you could be manufacturing them for pennies on the dollar.

Plus, I’ve found it to be the best way to compete with the big guys. You’ll never have more money than Google or Microsoft, but if you take lean entrepreneur principles and apply them to your business, it will give you a leg up on the competition.

So what do you think about manufacturing customers versus acquiring them?

If you aren’t sharing your content on Facebook, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. Why? Because they have over 1 billion active users!

Now by no means are you going to be able to reach 1 billion users… over even 1 percent of them. But the beautiful part is, if you even reach .01% of their total user base, that’s still a huge number.

So how do you increase your odds of grabbing the attention of those 1 billion users? Well, you need to write great status updates. Here’s how you can do so:

Be short and to the point

Unless you are writing a personal rant, people don’t prefer to read long status updates.

The graph shows that people prefer status updates that are around 225 characters versus ones that are longer or shorter. One of the main reasons that people don’t prefer status updates that are too long is that over 33% of Facebook users are viewing it through a mobile device. Due to mobile screens being small, it would be difficult to read long status updates.

You also don’t want to create status updates that are too short, as you can’t provide any real insights in a short status update. When writing them, keep the fluff to a minimum because it’s already hard enough to fit in a ton of useful tips and data in 225 characters. For this reason I recommend that you only try to prove one point or provide 1 tip within each status update.

Don’t forget the face in Facebook

The one thing that you may have forgotten about Facebook is that it was created so that you can keep tabs on your friends and family… especially the ones that don’t live right next door to you.

So what kind of status updates do your friends and family want to see? I surveyed 1291 Facebook users and here’s what they came up with:

• Your life – your friends and fans are the ones following you. So they want to know more things about your life. And not just updates containing text, they ideally want to be able to visualize what you are personally experiencing.
• Advice – people want to continually learn more, so the more advice you can give them, the better.
• Experiences – what are you doing, where do you hang out, and where have you been? People want to see check-ins and pictures of places you go to on a regular basis or are visiting.
• Entertainment – who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh. If you have a funny story, joke, or anything that can help people pass time, add it to Facebook.
• News – if there is anything news worthy out there, feel free and share it. It doesn’t just have to be related to things like the world or politics… it could also be about things like a sports event such as the Superbowl.

And to further back up this data, we analyzed 682 status updates and noticed that the ones that were about your life contained 247% more comments than ones that weren’t about your personal life.

This is important because Facebook has an algorithm similar to Google’s. Facebook’s algorithm is called Edgerank and it looks at how fast a status update obtains new likes, shares and comments. The more likes, shares, and comments it gets in short period of time, the more people Facebook will show the status update to.

Although Edgerank sounds simple, the algorithm is much more complex. For example, comments have more weight than likes, as it is easier to click the like button than it is to write a comment. And it doesn’t stop there… if a family member likes or comments on your status, it holds more value than if an acquaintance comments.

So your goal should be create updates that get shares, likes and comments.

Where’s your value?

As I mentioned above people are your fans and friends because they want to know more about you. But it doesn’t mean it should stop there. The more value you can provide to your users, the better off you are.

When we analyzed the 682 status updates, we also noticed that status updates that contain advice and teach you something new are shared 522% more than status updates that aren’t advice related. Again this is important because Facebook values shares more than likes within their Edgerank algorithm.

Here are examples of status updates that provide value:

• Share content – link to interesting articles that you find on the web. For example, the Facebook post of “what does 200 calories look like” received 4215 likes, 6032 shares, and 4003 comments.
• Quotes – people love quotes. I try to share a new quotes on Facebook each day and they get anywhere from 50 to 150 likes. I’ve posted quotes that have generate over 50 shares as well. For example, my quote “done is better than perfect” received 107 likes.
• Stats and data – if you can turn stats and data into a visual format, you’ll get a ton of likes, shares and comments. Kimberly Snyder does a good job of this on her fan page, she recently showed how a cup of lettuce gives you your daily value of vitamin A. That status update received 522 likes, 143 shares, and 36 comments.

People forgot to like status updates that contain links

One way to drive traffic to your website from Facebook is to share content from your blog on Facebook. By sharing your content via status updates you’ll be able to drive a decent amount of visitors…

All you have to do is take your latest blog post URL and past it into the status update box.

What you’ll notice is that status updates that contain links always contain less likes, shares, and comments compared to other forms of status updates. It’s not because people don’t enjoy reading your content, it’s because they are clicking a link and heading off to your website. Once they do that, people forget to go back to Facebook and hit the like or share button. That causes the Edgerank algorithm to show that status update less often.

One way to combat this is to add Facebook like buttons to your blog posts. So when a Facebook user finishes reading your content, they can just click the like button to share it.

The second way to boost your Edgerank is to replace your blog commenting system with Facebook’s. So when someone leaves a comment on your blog, it syncs up with your status update, which helps boost the number of comments you are getting per update. Comments hold more value than likes, so this should help your content spread more on Facebook. The sad part about this is Facebook comments are in iframes, so search engines won’t be able to index the comments on your blog. But you will end up getting more social traffic.

As you can see on Quick Sprout, I’ve added like buttons on all of my blog posts, but I haven’t replaced my commenting system with Facebook’s as comments make up over 2/3 the content on Quick Sprout… so I would probably see a decrease in search traffic.

To maximize how much traffic your status updates drive, you’ll want to make sure that at least 2/3 of your updates don’t contain links. Rotate them up with quotes, personal stories, pictures, and other things that can help boost your Edgerank. If you continually post links and nothing else, very few people on Facebook will see your status updates as posts with links tend to get less likes, comments, and shares.

Timing is everything

If you post a status update when none of your friends or fans are online, your post won’t get any love. No one will see it and it won’t get any likes. So would you like to know hat the ideal time to post on Facebook is?

Saturday is the most popular day to post on Facebook. And more specifically, noon EST is the most popular time to post updates. So you should ideally post every Saturday at noon EST.

If you also post too frequently on your profile or fan page, people won’t read them all. The ideal amount to post is every other day.

The simplest way to maximize your Facebook exposure is to post on it every other day at noon EST.

Conclusion

If you follow everything above you’ll start noticing that you will get more Facebook traffic and friends. Your updates will spread, more people will learn about you and your company, and your traffic will increase.

Do you know of any other ways to boost your Facebook traffic?

What you may not know is that search engines might start penalizing sites that accept guest posts, or discount posts made by specific authors because a lot of junk content is being guest posted on the web. Even high authoritative blogs such as the New York Times or Huffington Post, are allowing guest posts, and many of those posts are filled with mediocre content and spammy links.

Here’s what Google thinks about guest posting…

Now this doesn’t mean you should not allow guest posts on your blog. But instead, it means that you need to be pickier. Don’t just accept guest posts because you think it will increase your traffic, but more so accept them because the content will benefit your readers.

Here are 7 rules you should follow if you plan on accepting guest posts:

Rule #1: Authors must have a track record of writing great content

I get a few dozen inquires each week for guest post contributions. Do you know why I don’t accept most of the posts? Well, one reason is that I want Quick Sprout to still be my personal blog, which means I need to be the main writer. The second reason is that most of the authors don’t have a track record of writing awesome content.

Many of these guest authors have never written a guest post, which isn’t a big deal… but many of them don’t even have a great track record of writing awesome content on their own blog.

Here’s what I look for when an author offers me a guest post:

• Spam – I Google their name to make sure they aren’t pushing out spammy content throughout the web.
• Links – I make sure they aren’t linking out in their bio or within the content to spammy websites.
• Depth – look to see how detailed their past content is. I usually look for authors who write content that is at least 1000 words if not 2000. You can’t put much advice in a 400 word blog post, so avoid writers who are just trying to crank out content for links.

Rule #2: Watch outgoing links

This is probably that most tricky part about evaluating guest posts. Some blogs like Search Engine Watch are known for removing all links while other ones like Huffington Post keep almost every link you add.

So what should be your stance on links within guest posts? Let authors link out as many times as they want as long as those links are benefiting your readers. The moment those links don’t benefit your readers, remove them.

It doesn’t matter if those links go to the author’s site or even your competitors’ site. As long as the links help educate your readers, people will want to read your blog

Here’s a general guideline to follow:

• A bio should only contain 1 or 2 links – either to their website, Twitter handle, or their blog.
• A blog post shouldn’t contain less than 4 links – I don’t have a max number of links that should be in a post, but I do have a minimum. People have written blog posts on almost every topic out there, so instead of regurgitating the same old information, link out to the sites that have already covered it.

Rule #3: The content must be detailed and unique

I would never accept content that isn’t detailed or unique. What I mean by detailed is that the content needs to be at least 1000 words without containing fluff. You can always make a post meatier by adding details and steps, so why not take an extra hour and write a better blog post.

I also won’t accept a blog post on a topic that has been beaten to death. For example, most people know that Google PageRank doesn’t matter. So why accept another blog post that talks about why PageRank isn’t important.

Lastly, guest authors who contribute to dozens of blogs have a tendency to continually spin content. They’ll take the same post topic and continually spin it so that they can guest post on more blogs. To combat this, use free services like Copyscape, which will point out any duplicate or similar articles. All you have to do is upload the guest post to a private URL and run it through Copyscape.

Rule #4: Be picky

Even if a guest post is good, it doesn’t mean you should publish it. The content needs to be great! If you don’t set strict standards from day 1, your blog won’t consistently be read.

Here is how I am picky:

• I won’t accept posts with spelling or grammar errors. If a post has this, it means the author didn’t spend too much time on it. (I know, I have a ton of grammar errors on Quick Sprout. I need to improve my grammar skills.)
• Make sure you believe in the post, because if you don’t, your readers won’t. No matter how good the writer is, don’t accept content you don’t believe in. For example, at KISSmetrics, we had the option to publish a post on how A/B testing is useless. It was from a well-known analytics expert, but we as a company believe A/B testing is powerful and everyone should do it.
• The content has to fit in with your blog theme. For example, Quick Sprout is a blog about marketing and entrepreneurship. I won’t accept any guest posts outside of those 2 topics, no matter how well it is written or whom it is from.

Rule #5: Don’t give out author accounts

The biggest mistake you can make as a blog owner is to give out author accounts. You don’t want someone to have a login to your blog in which they can post content on whatever they want, whenever they want.

Why? Because you shouldn’t trust most blog authors. I’ve seen reputable ones plagiarize, add in spammy links into old blog posts and even delete pieces of content when they shouldn’t have. This happens because some authors are desperate and they will do almost anything for money. If someone bribes one of your authors with a lot of cash, most likely, they will take the bribe.

If someone is requesting an author account, something is off. It’s easier for a blogger to send you their content in a text document and have you deal with the headache of formatting the post and adding it into your blogging platform.

On the other hand if you want to give people author accounts to save you time, make sure they only have the ability to save content as a draft. Publishing privileges should be saved for you or someone on your team.

Rule #6: You need to fully own the content

It doesn’t matter who writes the content, but you need to own it. If you don’t own it, people will start publishing the same piece of content on their own site or even on other people’s site.

If a guest author wants to link to their guest post from their own site, that’s fine. Giving them credit for writing the post or letting them showcase their masterpiece isn’t an issue, the rights to the content is the issue. As long as you own it, you can do whatever you want.

I usually don’t do anything with content that is guest posted on my website, I just like to own the rights as it decreases the likelihood that they contributor will spin it. Or if a journalist wants to cover or republish the piece, which happens more often than you may think, you can give them authorization without having to reach out to the author.

Rule #7: Authors need to help build and support your community

My favorite part about blogging is creating a community. A community that reads the content published on your blog, learns from it, and contributes by commenting. In many cases, their contributions can teach you things that you never knew before.

If you want to continually build up your community, you need your guest authors to contribute to it. Not just through blog content, but they also need to contribute through comments. Anytime someone comments on a post they write, they need to respond to the comment. It doesn’t matter if it is with a simple reply, but they need to acknowledge that someone has commented and respond to it.

By doing this you will encourage more people to come back to your blog, which not only helps with social sharing and traffic, but it helps create brand evangelists.

Conclusion

If you follow the above rules you won’t have to worry about Google penalizing you for having guest posts on your website. Why? Because the guest posts will be providing value to your readers, which is all that matters.

Search engines like Google, want your readers and their searchers to benefit from the content on your website… no matter who is writing it. You just have to make sure the content you are publishing is great and not mediocre.

What other rules should you follow if you want to accept guest posts?

Although I’ve co-founded a handful of companies, I didn’t really create my first startup till 7 years ago. The first one was Crazy Egg, which helps make websites more useable. And it wasn’t till 4.5 years ago till I co-founded my first venture-backed startup, KISSmetrics.

As they say, the startup life is a roller coaster with ups and downs. So if you are looking to start one, hopefully this blog post will help you.

Here are 11 things I wish I knew before starting my first startup:

Lesson #1: Investors love to make excuses on why they don’t want to invest

When we first started pitching Crazy Egg, no investor would write us a check. It wasn’t their fault, as my co-founder and I sucked at pitching. They all had different reasons on why they didn’t want to invest and after getting over 20 “No’s” from investors, I realized something was off. Each one would sugar coat the “No” and tell it to you in a way that would make them come off nice.

I don’t blame them, as no investor wants a bad reputation. But one thing I learned as an entrepreneur is that when an investor tells you “No”, you should ask what you could have done differently to improve your pitch. By asking this you will get feedback you can use to improve your overall pitch and increase your odds of raising money.

Lesson #2: Raising a lot of money doesn’t mean you’ll get a high salary

Our seed round for KISSmetrics was a million bucks and our series A was 3 million. When we raised our seed round my co-founder and I were ecstatic as it was the first time we raised outside capital and we were so happy that we could take a salary. We were even hoping that we could take a nice 6-figure salary.

Our lead investor True Ventures, was very flexible and didn’t restrict us on how much of a salary we could take. They guided us and explained that we could take high salaries if we wanted, but that would increase the overall burn, which means the company would have to raise more money faster, which would  cause more dilution for my co-founder and I.

Due to this we decided to only take a $5000 a month salary… even after we raised our 3 million dollar round.

And the reason I say we took a $5000 monthly salary instead of $60,000 a year is that we couldn’t always pay ourselves each month as we had to conserve cash when things didn’t work out the way we wanted. In the long run everything worked out, but we wouldn’t have been around if we didn’t penny pinch… not just with our salaries, but with everything.

If you are going to raise capital, don’t be dumb by paying yourself a lot of money. That will just cause you to have to raise more money, which means you will own less of your own company.

Lesson #3: Options is the quickest way to dilute yourself

Especially in the bay area, employees and advisors are notoriously known for asking for a quarter of a percent to a half a percent in equity. By all means, good employees deserve a lot of shares as they are getting paid less to work for you than would if they worked for a Google or a Facebook.

But where we made the mistake is we signed on a ton of advisors and gave many of them what they wanted early on. This caused us to use up our option pool faster than we should have, so when we raised our next round we had to refresh our options pool to a full 10%. This caused my co-founder and I to get diluted more than we would have liked to. This wasn’t the fault of our advisors as they provided a ton of value, but we should have done a better job negotiating.

Treat your options as if they are gold. Hold onto them so you can give it to your key employees. If an advisor wants a lot of shares, make sure they give you a written contract on what they are going to provide you for those shares.

And keep in mind that if an advisor has a big personal brand, they probably won’t have much time to help you. So get a written contract on what they are going to provide you for the shares. (This is only necessary if they are requesting a lot of shares)

Lesson #4: 90% of startup networking events are a waste of time

What you learn at most startup networking events, is the same stuff you can learn online. The only difference is, startup events typically cost money. There are a few networking events that are worth attending, but most aren’t.

Look for attendee lists before you register for conferences or networking events. Make sure there are either potential clients or people who are a lot smarter than you at these events. If you are the one teaching the room on how to run a company, something is off. You can only learn if people smarter than you, are at the event.

If you want to attend good networking events, look for the ones that are intimate and invite only. It’s hard to get into those events, but when you do, it will be worth it. Those are the type of events that will allow you to create new friendships and business partnerships.

Lesson #5: Live in San Francisco, but don’t build for it

Although I don’t live in San Francisco, I’m there a lot. And my business partner lives just outside of the city. The one mistake both of us made is that we built a business based on the feedback we get from individuals within the tech sector.

This may seem wise at first because you are getting feedback from really smart people, but you need to take a step back and realize they are probably not your ideal customers. Startup people don’t like paying for stuff and they make up a very small portion of the world’s population.

When building a product or service, you need to consider all of the people who live outside the bay area… such as someone who may live in Lincoln Nebraska. Remember, the majority of the world doesn’t live in the tech epicenter.

But just because your customers may not live in San Francisco, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. You’ll find more tech investors in the bay area than anywhere else. And they tend to invest in people they know and believe in. You won’t be able to get to know them as well, unless you are living close to them.

Lesson #6: It’s never too early to start making money

When you raise money for the first time, you have less of an urgency to create a revenue stream for your startup. When you take on a seed or series A round, you end up spending more time building a product versus getting paying customers. On the other hand, if you were using your personal savings to build up your company, you would try to get to break even ASAP.

The biggest mistake we made at KISSmetrics to date, was that we didn’t start selling early enough. We focused on creating a great product, reaching product market fit… and all of those other things startups do. But even before you have product market fit, or even a working product, it doesn’t mean you can’t start selling.

It’s been more than a year since our VP of Sales joined the company, and within 6 months of him joining, our revenue started to shoot up and to the right. It takes a while for anyone, no matter how good they are at sales, to figure out how to sell your product or create a revenue stream from it.

We should have started the sales process before we even finished creating our product because not only would it have helped bring in money to reduce our burn, but it would allow us to learn from paying customers faster.

Lesson #7: Experienced employees aren’t better than hungry ones

When your startup has a few million bucks in the bank, you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to hiring. Because of this you will look for the smartest person out there to hire. You know, the person with a ton of experience and has done what you want to do… such as executives.

What I quickly learned is that although those high paid people did well in their last job, it doesn’t mean they will do well with your company. In many cases, they do much better in big corporate environments. What they lack is the ability to move fast and do so without relying on others.

Those corporate executives are used to farming out the work, versus figuring out how to do things on their own. When a startup is young, these are the people who I recommend you stay away from. Instead, you want to hire hungry individuals who haven’t got that big break in their career yet. The ones who will fight and do whatever it takes to succeed.

Later on you can hire those corporate executives, but you don’t need them early on.

Lesson #8: Your social circle defines you

When you were a kid, did you parents always tell you to hang out with the smart kids? I know mine did… they didn’t want me to hang out with kids who were dumb or misbehaved as they feared it would rub off on me.

The same goes with entrepreneurship, it wasn’t till later in my career that I realized that your peers have a big impact on how well you will do. If your friends are smart entrepreneurs who are successful, it will push you to do better and you will develop faster as an entrepreneur.

For example, my business partner hangs out with a ton of product people and engineers. He loves it as it helps him develop his skills when it comes to building products. And I hang out with a lot of business/finance guys, which has helped me understand things, such as how to raise money or structure a buyout.

Neither my business partner nor I started to hang out with people who could help us evolve until we were well into our first startup. If we both knew this ahead of time, we would have moved out of Orange County a long time ago.

You should move to a location where you can surround yourself with people who will help you get to where you want to be in life. And at the same time, make sure you reciprocate and help them out whenever you can.

Lesson #9: The grass is always greener on the other side

If you are coming from the corporate world, you probably read TechCrunch and see how young kids are raising millions of dollars and selling their company to Facebook for a billion bucks.

If you are in the startup world, you always hear how people are getting paid well into the 6 figures with perks such as free food, to work at large companies. And best of all, they don’t have a ton of stress because they only have to work from 9 to 5.

The reality is, neither of the above 2 scenarios are accurate. People in the startup world work their butt off, they don’t get paid much, and it’s rare that they ever succeed. And people in the corporate world, don’t always get paid a lot, and many of them work 70 hour weeks even though they are only getting paid to work 40 hours a week.

Don’t become an entrepreneur because you want the entrepreneurial lifestyle. And don’t work in the corporate world because you want an easy job. Do what you love and solve problems while you are doing it.

I first became an entrepreneur because I wanted to be rich. Sure, I do pretty well financially, but I failed a lot along the way. I now am an entrepreneur because I love the challenge of solving problems that I am passionate about. But if I took my work ethic and just went straight into the corporate world, I probably would have done well financially.

Don’t pick a career path like I did, just for the money. The startup world isn’t a place where most people get rich. Luckily it worked out for me, but if I were you, don’t count on luck. If you want to solve a problem because you are passionate about it, become an entrepreneur for that reason, and not for the money. Money is a side effect of solving a problem that enough people are facing.

Lesson #10: Stick to what you know

Warren Buffett is notoriously known for investing in companies that he understands. He is good friends with people like Bill Gates, but he wouldn’t dare to make an investment in Microsoft because he doesn’t understand the tech industry.

I used to start companies and invest in things I was really passionate about, and in most cases I didn’t understand what I was getting into. But the one thing I didn’t learn fast enough, is that passion isn’t enough to create a successful business. If I stuck with creating businesses that I understood, I would have been much further in my startup.

For example, with KISSmetrics my co-founder and I went through many iterations of the product until we had something people were interested in paying for. One of our previous versions of the product focused on solving problems for online gaming companies.

During that time Facebook games were becoming really popular, but there was one big issue. Nor my business partner or I understood much about games as we never created one. On the other hand our current product solves problems that marketers are facing, which my business partner and I understand really well as we used to own a marketing firm. If you look at the business, our growth is exploding because we know what we are doing.

If you want to increase your odds of succeeding, follow Buffett’s advice by sticking to what you know.

Lesson #11: Successful people don’t always know what’s best

When I started out I used to get mentorship from other successful entrepreneurs. Throughout the years, their advice was helpful and without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

But the one thing that I kept screwing up on is that I would never question the advice from these mentors. If they said something, I followed it because… who am I to question someone who has sold their business for 100 million dollars.

Mentors are great at giving general business advice and guiding you along, but getting specific industry advice isn’t always a smart idea, unless that person has a lot of knowledge about your industry.

Just because someone is successful it doesn’t mean they know what is best for your business. Heck, someone who was successful told us at KISSmetrics to go after the social gaming market… but that didn’t work out well for us. And it wasn’t their fault… it was our fault for not questioning the advice.

In the end, we pivoted and found our own direction based on the needs of our customers, which worked out well for us. Our mentors have been great and they helped us out a lot, we just had to learn how to ask them the right questions.

Conclusion

Hopefully this blog post didn’t stop you from taking the plunge into entrepreneurship. I myself love it and I don’t think I could do anything else. You just need to have realistic expectations when taking the plunge. It’s not realistic to think that you will raise a lot of money, create an awesome company, and sell it to Facebook for a billion bucks.

So what do you think about starting up a company? Is there anything you wish you knew before taking the plunge?

You know content marketing is essential for you business, so why don’t you do it? If you are like me, you probably don’t have enough time in day to focus all of your energy on content marketing.

So what should you do?

Sadly, you don’t really have a choice but to leverage it. It’s such a powerful marketing channel; it will actually change your business. For example, at KISSmetrics, our content marketing strategy has resulted in our blog achieving 82% of our overall traffic and 70% of our leads.

And to top if off, content marketing is our cheapest channel marketing. That’s not too bad considering that those leads generate well into the millions of dollars in revenue for us each year.

So what should you do if you don’t have that much time to spend on content marketing? You should focus on these 3 tactics that provide the biggest bang for our buck:

Step #1: Create great content on a consistent basis

You can’t leverage content marketing, without the content.

So if you are going to write content, make sure you write it on a consistent basis. Whether it is 1 post a day, 1 post a week, or even 1 post a month, the number isn’t really as important as the consistency. Whatever pace you decide to create content at, make sure you stick to it. You can also pump out more content later on if you have more time, but it can hurt your traffic if you decrease your consistency.

Just look what happen to Quick Sprout when I decided to not post on a consistent basis:

I had a decent traffic month in May of 2009 and my traffic was consistently growing as I always published 4 to 5 blog posts a month.

Now look at my June numbers…

Do you know why my traffic went down? I got lazy and I published 0 posts in that month. That laziness resulted in a 21% decrease in monthly traffic. And to make matters worse, it took me 3 months of consistent blogging to recover that traffic.

Now that you know you have to be consistent with your publishing schedule, you also have to focus on writing high quality content. Here’s a guide you can follow if you want to write great blog post.

Step #2: Collect emails

Do you know what the most engaging traffic source is for Quick Sprout? It’s not search, or even social media… it’s actually email traffic. Over the years I’ve been collecting email addresses through popups and sidebar opt-in boxes.

As you can see, emails account for 13.91% of my overall traffic (it’s listed under campaigns). But what’s really interesting if those people account for 41% of the overall blog comments and they are 3.9 times more likely to share the content via the social web versus people who came to the site from another traffic source.

And the beautiful thing is that it’s not just Quick Sprout who is experiencing this. We are also seeing similar numbers with my other two blogs: KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. And people outside of the tech industry like KimberlySnyder.net are also seeing similar numbers.

So how do you go about collecting more email addresses?

Through WordPress plugins like Popup Domination and Modal Dialog you can create a popup that plugs into your current email solution provider. In addition to that you can also collect emails by placing offers within your sidebar and below your blog posts, similar to how I do so on Quick Sprout.

If you don’t have much time focus your energy on the popup as it tends to drive 3 times the opt-ins compared to a sidebar or below the post offer.

If you aren’t sure how to set up a popup, read this article.

Here’s some interesting data that might help you create an effective popup:

1. Courses convert better than ebooks – most bloggers typically give away ebooks, but from extensive A/B testing we’ve found that 7-day courses or 30-day courses convert better by 6%. The main difference between a course and an ebook is that a course is structured more like classroom learning in which you give people bit sized information that they can easily understand over a period of time.
2. Don’t forget to add a dollar value – although the information you are giving away is free, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth anything. In my sidebar opt-in, when I added the text “$300 value” my opt-in rate increased by 22%.
3. Be aggressive – there are different settings with you popup. From delaying when it shows up to only showing it to people who’ve viewed multiple pages, to not showing it on mobile devices, you can get very specific on who sees it and who doesn’t. I’ve found that showing the popup to everyone upon their first visit causes 23.5% more opt-ins versus delaying the popup by 10 seconds.
4. Color matters – my developer tested out 33 colors (blue, green, red, black, white, pink, grey, purple, yellow, orange, brown, as well as 2 shades of each color) for the call to action button on my popup as well as the popup on 3 other blogs. We found that red, green, orange and yellow tend to be the highest converting call to action colors. And the colors black, brown and purple where the lowest converting call to action colors. Make sure you test these colors out on your blog to see which ones work for you.
5. Don’t ask for too much information – on web based popups I typically ask people to enter in their name and email. When I performed an A/B test, in which the B test only asked for their email only, my conversion rate increased by 17%. But what was interesting is that when I did the same A/B test just for mobile traffic, my mobile opt-in rate increased by 39.3%.
6. Placement is everything – with plugins like Popup Domination, they have multiple design options. Sometimes the email opt-in forms are on the right side of the message, while other times they maybe right underneath the offer message. When I tested out this out on Quick Sprout, I found the having the opt-in below the offer message caused an 11% increase in conversion.

Once you have the emails, make sure you notify them every time you publish a blog post. This how I drive 13.91% of your traffic, like it does with Quick Sprout each month.

Step #3: Convert readers into fans

Do you know who does a great job of converting readers into fans? WetPaint. Based on an algorithm they created, if they feel that you are an engaged reader, the will display a small box over the content asking you to like them on Facebook or Twitter to read the rest of the content.

If you don’t want to, you can just click “no thanks” and continue reading their blog. But that one approached has enable them to get thousands of Facebook fans. Just look at their WetPaint Facebook channel, they have over 380,000 fans.

Can you guess what kind of results this is producing for bloggers? I did a quick test on Quick Sprout over the weekend and I was able to convert 2.9% of my visitors into fans. Now that percentage may go down over time because I have a good amount of repeat visitors, but I could counter act that percentage decreasing by A/B testing the copy. Plus, my version wasn’t as good as WetPaint’s… and I had a few bugs on Internet Explorer and Firefox so I had to remove it.

I know those numbers don’t seem huge, but if you are getting 100,000 unique visitors a month, you will be growing your fan page at a pace of 2900 fans a month. After 12 months you should have roughly 34800 fans, and you can direct them to your blog or any other website whenever you want.

My test run was so successful that I will be rolling out a bug free version of that on Quick Sprout over the next month or so. 

Encourage your readers to not only share your content across the social web, but to also follow you. Whether you do what WetPaint does or by directly asking your readers to follow you on Facebook within your blog sidebar… there are many ways you can grow your social channel. Just pick one or two social channels and encourage your readers to engage with you on it.

In the long run this will help your content spread more through the social web, which not only will increase your traffic, but search engine rankings as well.

Conclusion

Content marketing is something that you have no choice but to leverage. There are a lot of different ways to tackle it, but if you don’t have much time, I recommend that you focus on the above 3 tactics.

I’ve found those tactics to be the most effective and to provide the biggest bang for your buck.

What other content marketing tactics do you feel are worth leveraging?