The more you feed your blog, the hungrier it gets. The paradox makes sense; as you post more and more remarkable content, you rise in search rankings, your traffic increases, and your audience of followers grows. So how do you keep that voracious marketing machine fed? Thrifty bloggers have made use of guest blogging as a way to not only keep the stream of content flowing, but to also increase inbound links, reach a new audience, and strengthen important industry relationships.

That all makes it sound like guest blogging is the bees knees…and it is, when done right. But without a guest blogging procedure in place, it’s possible that soliciting and accepting guest blog contributions could take more time than just blogging yourself. Just as bad, you could find yourself with content that isn’t on par with what you normally publish, forcing you to reject content you asked for in the first place. Now you have an awkward conversation on your to-do list, and you could possibly even jeopardize an important relationship. But if you follow these steps the next time you solicit or receive offers for guest blog posts, you’ll save plenty of time and hurt feelings, and still end up with the high quality content your blog deserves.

Set Expectations

Before you and an external contributor put in any time developing blog content, make sure they are up for the task. Tell them about what you expect (in a nice way, of course!) from contributors, such as number of revision cycles, the level of quality you expect, and deadlines for submission. Setting these expectations up front will ensure they’re ready, willing, and able to be a great contributor to your blog and prevent any shock and confusion as you work together.

Give Some Context

To set your contributors up for success, give plenty of background information about your blog. This will require some time investment up front, but if you plan on having your contributors write on a regular basis, it will be well worth it for both of you. Explain the personas for whom you are writing, the tone and style you write in, the types of posts that typically perform well and why they are so successful, and just as importantly, the types of posts you purposefully don’t write. If your contributor is not a frequent reader of your blog, ask them to read a few of your more recent posts so they have a big picture understanding of the type of writing you publish.

Approve Topics in Advance

The success of any blog post lies in the topic. When you take the time to think of a great topic, you can ensure that your post is focused enough to stay relevant for your audience. The problem is, guest contributors won’t necessarily understand the nuances of what topics make successful blog posts. They might write a post about a relevant subject matter, but the angle could be all wrong.

Save your contributor the time of writing a post that you can’t use by asking them to run topics by you in advance. They’ll appreciate that you respect their time enough to work with them on solidifying the perfect topic before they begin writing. Plus, knowing the topic about which they plan to write lets you keep your editorial calendar organized and prevent writing about similar subject matters back to back.

Ask for Rough Outlines

After settling on a topic with your contributors, ask them for a rough outline of what they plan to cover in the post. This does not have to be an in-depth outline; just a few bullet points that detail some of the points the post will make. Doing this helps ensure the content of the post aligns well with your audience’s needs, and helps identify questions about what should and should not be covered in the blog post before your contributor begins writing. You’ll find doing this helps cut down on the number of revisions necessary after the first draft.

Set Linking Guidelines

Many business bloggers choose to be a guest contributor for the inbound link opportunities. A writer can subtly insert a link to his or her own website or blog in the post, and have complete control over the anchor text and page to which it links. Make sure you discuss your protocol for this up front, though. Some contributors may get link-happy and sprinkle exorbitant amounts of links to their site, and your readers will see right through it, dramatically diminishing your credibility. Remember that while your blog is indeed a sales tool, it’s first goal should always be helping its readers. Never sacrifice a great user experience to scratch your contributor’s inboud link itch.

Set a Sales Pitch Limit

Just as excessive linking can make a contributor’s post look more like a sales pitch than a helpful piece of content, including too much of a hard sell in the copy will certainly raise a few eyebrows. Clarify with your contributor whether you’re open to them including a soft sell, and if so, how often it can be done. It helps to include a sample of a soft sell that’s not too disruptive from previous blog posts to give them a frame of reference for what is acceptable.

If you get some push back from the contributor, tell them that people are coming to your blog for education and thought leadership, so any product or service mentions must not detract from the value of the post. Similarly, their contribution should also not detract from your own blog‘s lead generation goals, which you achieve through your own targeted calls-to-action.

Don’t Settle for Low Quality Contributions

After all of this, you still may find you receive content that simply isn’t up to par with what you usually publish. Start by asking for revisions, and give extremely specific feedback about what needs to be fixed, and how it can be remedied. If after one round of revisions the content isn’t at a place where you can quickly edit and publish it, it’s likely no amount of work will save the piece. Have the confidence to politely decline the piece, thank your contributor for their time, and encourage them to use it as a contribution to another blog. As a blog manager, your responsibility is to uphold the quality of the content you publish. It’s the only way you can keep your blog readership growing and maintain your status as an industry thought leader.

Are you leveraging guest posts for your blog, or are you an active contributor on other blogs? What other guidelines help make the process of writing and accepting guest posts easier?

Related posts:

1. Blogging For SEO: How To Get Maximum Search Benefit From Your Small Business Blog
2. Seo – Exclusive Blog Content Enhances Seo
3. How to Submit Your Blog to the Top Search Engines

So you’ve done a great job of driving traffic to your social pages. You’ve got the eye balls all over the place, they are commenting, liking and sharing content. You are paying attention to them and everyone’s happy. But now it’s time to ask yourself? How can I drive direct conversions from my social pages?

Evaluate your audience:

How are contacts using your social pages? Depending on your industry and product this can vary widely.

• Are they clicking on posts to your site and converting?
  • If so, what’s their AOV?
  • Higher or lower than an average customer?
• Are they posting to your page?
  • Frequency of posts?
  • Positive or negative?
• Are they sharing your content?
  • Do they share more information or promotional content?
• How were your likers/followers acquired?
  • Was it a major incentive or was it for general interest in your social page?

So you’ve done this evaluation process and now you’ve got some idea of how your social following will react to what you push out.

Start testing promotions:

You could run several types of promotions/incentives through your social channels. Remember we’re trying to get a conversion from an audience who can easily go to your site and find products/deals and may already receive your emails, what is something they can’t find on your site? What would make them take notice? That’s up to your audience. Based on what you know about them you could test:

• Free products
• Free shipping
• Discounts
• New products not yet advertised anywhere else
• Limited quantity warnings

By making it a social exclusive promotion you can see the reach of the campaign. If you’re including social as a part of a bigger promotion then tracking results back to social can be more complicated.

If you sell a very high price pointed item that has a large and loyal social following you should try  doing a ‘sneak peak’ of new products. This would be a promotion your audience would find valuable because they already have a perceived value of your item and what it will cost so price point isn’t as big of a motivator as having the newest and the coolest thing.

Hypothetically what do you think would be more successful?:

• Apple giving a small discount on the iPad 2 to their social followers?

or

• Apple giving exclusive access to purchase the iPad 3 to their social followers before anyone else?

Tracking results:

There are several ways to track someone’s path along different marketing channels to conversions. Make sure that your social pages are being tracked just as clearly as your most viewed landing pages. Just like any other channel you need to have some way of gauging the results of a campaign. I know some panic at this step, just remember there’s always a starting point. You can start small, maybe try unique coupon codes and see what kind of response you get. Over time you can become more advanced in your data analysis and start to really understand what is working and what’s not working.

If you know you have people who sign up for your emails via Facebook, or share content from your emails to their social channels then segment them out and track their activity. This is a very basic step that must be done in order to do targeted campaigns in the future.

Moving forward with successes:

Speaking of what’s working… I wish I could say do ABC and your guaranteed an improvement X, but let’s face it you need to find your own success. Your brand is unique and so are your consumers, only by trying new things and evaluating their success will you really be able to see how improve your conversion rates through social media. Drop what isn’t working, and keep experimenting on what is working.

Kestrel Lemen
Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. How to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website ?
2. 7 Ways to Drive Laser-Targeted Traffic
3. Using Google Adwords to Drive Traffic to your Website

Have you noticed the use of QR Codes have increased throughout the year?  Quick Response codes are used everywhere and used for nearly everything.

At Bronto we have printed QR codes on business cards that were handed out at conferences, Heinz has them printed on ketchup bottles, Best Buy has them on almost every product in their store, and QR codes can be found at mall kiosks for advertisements. A QR code was even on the Dole banana I ate this morning.  The banana was a bit of a shocker because it was promoting the new Alvin and the Chipmunks Movie. A QR code on a banana? Really?  I guess that is thinking outside the box…

If you don’t know what I am talking about or you need a refresher, Anna Pfeiffer, wrote a great post on QR Code Marketing 101.

If you are using QR codes, what are you using them for?

Did you know that you can use a QR code to grow your email list? Follow these simple steps to ensure you are on the right path.

1. Placement

Place the QR code on things like banners, billboards, menus, window signs, flyers, and stickers.  Get creative and place the QR code on a sign next to the cash register, in the dressing room, in the waiting room, on a napkin, takeout box or even your packing slip.  You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  Think of what you are already doing for direct mail, printed receipts, basically anything you can see or touch.

Remember to ask yourself, does this make sense for my business?  You don’t need to go QR code crazy.  It does not make sense to push QR codes on anything digital.

2. CTA

Be sure you have a strong call to action to the QR code and list the instructions on how to use. Example: Signup to receive the latest products from BrontoGear.com. It is as easy as 1. Snap the QR code, 2. Fill in your email address 3. Click Submit.

3. Destination

Be sure the QR code leads to the signup webform and not your homepage. You do not want the user navigating your site looking for your email signup on their mobile phone. Remember website sites are slower on mobile devices, and phones in general are slow. You want to have the best possible user experience.

4. Ease of Use

On the email signup webform be sure this is optimized for a mobile devise. Keep it simple.

• On this webform provide a brief line of instruction.  Example: To subscribe enter your email address and click submit.
• Ask the user for ONLY necessary information. This should not be as complex as your website signup. You should only be asking for the email address and a few additional items that are truly necessary.

For more tips on optimized design for mobile, check out this post by Emily Keye, ‘Tis the Season for Email Design Optimization for Mobile Devices

5. Confirm

After the user clicks submit you should direct the user to a fast loading thank you page and send a welcome email.

• If you are going to offer an incentive for subscribing then be sure to tell the user how and when can they expect the incentive. This is very important if you are a restaurant or retail store and you are promoting the incentive. The user is expecting an instant reward. Example of the thank you message: Thank you for subscribing to BrontoGear.com. Check your email now as we just sent you a welcome email with your coupon code.
• You can also display the coupon code on the thank you page. If you display the code on the thank you page I do not recommend having the thank you page reloaded to your website, simply add a call to action button to navigate a user there.
• If you are not offering an incentive you should still load the thank you page and inform the user that they will receive a welcome email from you.  Then reload the page and redirect the user to your homepage.

Test

Make sure your QR code works.  Test to make sure that the user  flow makes sense and is not confusing. Test to make sure your process works as you mapped it out.

Track

Tracking is just as important as testing.

1. Track the source of the signup. On the webform of the QR code be sure you can assign a source to the user that signs up on your email list using the QR code. This will provide you insight on the quality and value of the user.
2. Make sure you can track how many users are actually using the QR code. You want to see engagement metrics, how many users are using your QR code.

Did this tactic grow your list? Where did you place your QR code?

If you need more tips and uses for QR codes check out another great post by, Anna Pfeiffer, 7 Best Practices for QR Code Success.

Steve DuBois
Marketing Strategist

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1. Is there such a thing as too many analytics tracking codes?
2. How List Building Compliments SEO
3. How to Create A Target Keyword List ?

I’m asked on a daily basis by clients, “When is the best time to send email?” My answer, “When your subscribers want it.” This is not the answer that my clients are anticipating.  Most marketers have accepted the fact that the “batch and blast” email method is a strategy of the past and that they must put their subscribers’ needs, wants and interests first.

Email subscribers have varying habits around checking email, engaging with email and buying via email. Different time zones also throw another variable into the mix. The time in which your email message reaches a subscriber’s inbox can impact the results of the campaign.

So, how can you best determine when you should be scheduling your promotional email deliveries?

1. Test & Analyze:

Before you map out a testing strategy, you’ll first want to take a look at past send data. There is probably a lot of insight already sitting in your campaign reports. How about taking 6 months’ worth of emails and graphing time of send against response and seeing if any patterns emerge? Specifically, are certain send times always associated with a higher response rate? Use this data to develop a control “time”. Keep in mind, if you always send emails out at the same time, you may have nothing to compare. If this is the case and assuming your list is large enough to be sent out over a 7 day period, pick a week to send out a mailing and analyze the results. Make sure there are no holidays or other anomalies that would significantly skew your results if possible and allow enough time for the results to mature before you analyze (maybe a week or so).

2. Use Send Time Optimization (STO) Tools:

Send Time Optimization tools allow you to schedule emails to send at the time of day, and optionally the day of the week, that the contact is most likely to open the message (based on open time data). Each contact’s optimized time is refreshed daily. One of the biggest benefits for marketers is that STO only takes a single click, and then the technology does the rest. There’s no slicing and dicing of your list, no sending the same message multiple times, and no analyzing of multiple mailing reports. STO is a perfect solution for companies who are sending campaigns across multiple time zones. By eliminating the need to separate queries in order to target each recipient at 9 a.m. in his or her local time zone, it cuts back on wasted manual effort. You simply use STO and allow it to deliver at the optimal time for each recipient worldwide – regardless of whether you’re sending your email to three time zones or 10. As with any element of email marketing, testing is a smart bet when it comes to STO too.

3. Look Beyond Opens & Clicks:

In general when testing the time in which your email is sent, you’ll analyze open and click rates and typically will see some level of increase there. But, consider that the biggest impact may be on conversion rate, revenue generated per email and overall order size. This makes sense because you’re catching recipients at a time they have allocated for Internet activity. Because they aren’t as rushed, they engage more deeply.

You may also want to consider adding a “what time do you like receiving emails” box in your preference center.  That would be an interesting data collection point. You could then analyze when people “say” they want to receive email and compare that to when they actually open.

Today’s consumers expect to be treated as individuals. Marketers who stop looking at their lists as an “audience” and start taking the steps to communicate with each subscriber as an individual will increase their chances of success. Follow the recommendations above and begin to solve the “right message, right time” equation.

Clearly timing is an important issue in email marketing. But many of the concepts involved apply equally to other channels. Do you, for example, apply as much care to the timing of your blog posts, Tweets or Facebook updates as you do to your emails?

Emily Keye
Marketing Strategist at Bronto

Related posts:

1. 6 Lead Nurturing Emails Every Business Should Send
2. Don’t Sabotage Your Email Deliverability!
3. Resolve to really get to know your contacts!

The definition of sabotage is “an action aimed at weakening another entity” and comes from the French root word of ‘Saboter’ meaning to spoil through clumsiness. Sometimes marketers may be unaware that even though they’re not deliberately trying to hurt their program, their actions may directly harm their deliverability efforts.

Inactive Addresses

Often marketers do something that seems simple and innocent, yet poses a massive risk to their email reputation, deliverability and results. Sometimes marketers look for quick revenue dollars by maximizing all the contacts they have.  For example if you have a list of inactive contacts that you’ve tried to reengage with no luck, I recommend to keep those contacts separate from your core, performing list.  By keeping inactives as part of your core list, or adding them back into the list, there is an enormous risk of the inactive contacts spoiling the great deliverability rates accomplished with your very active list.  Don’t risk a couple extra dollars at the sake of delivering your message to an inactive list.

Another example of inactive lists are those where you have permissions but have not mailed to in months or years.  Sure, they gave you permission to include them in your mailings, but given the time gap they could have forgotten that exchange or even your business.  These are not healthy addresses, and should be treated as such.  Separate them out from your core list and send a campaign asking them to update their email preferences.  If they don’t respond to the email, remove them from your database.  Why take such a drastic action?  It doesn’t take many people to complain to the ISPs that your email is spam, which in turn hurts your overall deliverability to active contacts.  You need to consider is it worth the risk to take your core list of engaged subscribers who are opening, clicking and buying and sabotage it with a list of email addresses that will cause more harm than help?

Point of Sale Acquisition

A customer is checking out at a point of sale at a physical location of your store, they’re clearly engaged and interested in your company/products. Some marketers will use a ‘point of sale’ sign up form at the check-out counter, where a person can provide their email address in return for a discount.  For some customers, there is no real incentive to give a legit email address.  Since they have already received an immediate discount, there is a chance that they will provide a false email address or incorrectly submit their address.  There is also a chance that an error will be made when transferring handwritten addresses into your database

When marketers send to this list, they may see disastrous results due to high bounce rates, spam trap hits, or a mass exodus via unsubscribe or spam complaints to the ISPs. These sends cause alarms to sound at ISPs and subsequent sends from this sender will most likely be bulked mailed and the fallout can be permanent or take days to recover.

A better approach to POS sign-ups is to send the discount coupon via email (for use on the customer’s next purchase) or drive them to your website for sign-up. Another effective method is to entice customers to use SMS “text to sign-up” to build your mobile customer database.  Both of these approaches will validate email addresses and provide a healthier list.  If these two methods are not an option and you decide to use POS sign-up practices, encourage and educate customers to provide a correct email address so you are increase the chances of getting a valid email address for your discount dollars.

Small in Size, Large in Risk

It’s a small list, how can it hurt my deliverability?  Even the smallest list of new unhealthy email addresses into your core group of proven value purchasers can hurt your deliverability.  You can have a list of 10,000 core buyers and if you add in just a few hundred or fewer of these poor emails and just a handful of those complain, the other 10,000 emails will never make it to the inbox. So, is it really worth trying to squeeze a few low-value subscribers out of a few hundred and cause your send to 10,000 high-value subscribers to the bulk mail folder?  It works the same for non-engaged subscribers. Why continue to send to people who have clearly indicated they are not interested? You risk deliverability of emails to engaged users because you are desperately trying to “woo” back subscribers who just are not interested.

In summary, as ISPs start to migrate toward engagement and reputation metrics to determine where to put your messages (inbox vs bulk folder), it’s time to evaluate the risk of to sending to people who are not engaged. There are many resources, including this one by Kristen Gregory, on how you can remove those who aren’t engaging without sacrificing ROI. Thinning your list can be challenging to explain to management but make it clear that sending to subscribers who are interested in buying will increase your ROI.  Remember, don’t sabotage your deliverability by continuing to send to inactives, it’s just not worth it.

Chris Kolbenschlag
Director of Deliverabilty at Bronto

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SMX Israel took place in Jerusalem on Sunday as a one-day event full of keynotes and sessions, led by Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land/Search Engine Roundtable.

That’s a long trip for those of us in the states (or for those in many other parts of the world for that matter), so if you were unable to attend, you could hardly be blamed. But that’s what makes the Internet great. Attendees and presenters have shared info and commentary about the event for everybody else to see. I’m sure it doesn’t quite match actually being there, but it’s better than nothing. And it’s free.

Some presenters have shared their presentations online. Here’s one from Aviv Manoach:

Here’s one from Mark Ginsberg:

Dixon Jones shares one here.

Ben Druce offers a live-blogged account of SMX Israel here.

“The SERP (search engine result page) scene from Google has always been changing – so their updates such as Search Plus Your World and Panda are not necessarily spoken of with resentment – Panda specifically is a good wakeup call to many for remembering that real people like fresh and real content,” he says, in a separate “highlights” piece. “However, the notion that Google is being unfair in their current practices is now coming to the forefront. The most common claim is that Google SERPS are showing Google Plus results on top of the far more relevant traditional organic sites, or even Facebook or Twitter results. The general feel was that Google is here to stay, and if we don’t like it, we still have to deal with it.”

Nichola Stott has her own summary of the event, concluding that the speakers “seemed to be very much in agreement on the following points:”

• There is a very clear chronology of events, which gives a clear directional guide as to your future search strategy. Know your search history and you know your search future
• It is getting harder and harder to fake it – plus why bother? If you can’t deliver then what’s the point of trying to rank a mediocre page anyway? (Mediocrity doesn’t convert so well)
• “Treat Google well” to continue to succeed and you can’t go far wrong. {Quote is from Eli Feldblum, though I have paraphrased.]

Gil Reich compiled a list of the “best lines” from the event, which includes:

Roman Zelvenschi: Nobody knows how to pronounce my last name, but that’s OK, I rank number 1 for it.

Eli Feldblum: Use schema. Do it now. Seriously. You have an internet-connected device with you.

Eli Feldblum: We’ve reached the point where “normal” blue text links get lost in the noise on a Google SERP.

Barry Schwartz: Google is recommending … Doesn’t mean you should do it … Just saying.

Shira Abel: Google owns you. Get used to it.

Marty Weintraub: Facebook owns you too.

Marty Weintraub: Use Facebook to target businesses. Raise your hand if you have a FB account. Raise your hand if you have a job. See …

Tomer Honen (from Google): We got better at Flash. Right about the time people stopped using it

Olivier Amar: When you’re in-house you pay a lot more attention to long term. Because you still want to be here.

Ofer Dascalu: Some people say “publishers and Google are partners.” My partners reply to my e-mails. They pick up the phone when I call.

Michael King: When you interact with people on Twitter don’t use the same account that you use to Tweet SEO articles. That’s like trying to pick up a girl while holding a book called How to Be a Pickup Artist.

Reich has a more complete round-up of the event here.

It’s also interesting to see conversations that transpire in the aftermath of these conferences. For example, this one on Google+ including one of the presenters, Miriam Schwab, about the necessity of using Google+ for search marketing. Schwab said in a post, “Welcome to all my new followers since SMX Israel yesterday. Oh the hilarious irony that after bashing Google+, my community here grows. Love it ”

Aaron Zakowski responded, “Hi Miriam, I enjoyed your presentation yesterday. But despite many people’s feeling about G+, all of us marketers need to be here b/c Google is making G+ a necessary component for online success. I predict that within a few months, G+ will be more important to most us than Twitter.”

Schwab replied, “Aaron, I don’t disagree. Google has made Google+ necessary. My problem is that they are forcing us to join, and promoting Google+ results over other networks, even when the relevance is questionable. They are acting like a big bully, and that is not the right way, and maybe even not the sustainable way, to build community. We will be here because we have to, but will there be activity here? Will non-marketers join too? Possibly not, since they’re all comfy on facebook.”

A pretty timely discussion, given the regulatory scrutiny Google is getting.

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