“A Bit Off the Edge” is an occasional review of some of the best online marketing information we’ve found of late.
Let’s get your Monday morning blahs out of the way right off the bat: Things could be worse. You could be Superman in 2010.
And now, the news…
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Business Blogging
Our friends at HubSpot published a study that shows that small and medium sized businesses that blog get 55% more site visitors and have 97% more inbound links, which is a huge factor when you want to be on the first page of Google for your important keywords. Of course, creating great content is a necessary, but not sufficient requirement when marketing a business blog.
While blogging may be a fairly new media platform, the principles of blog writing are timeless.
Improve Your Conversion Rates
Consistency, simplicity, and humanity will help you to improve your online outreach and conversion.
The “call-to-action” is the key to high conversion rates. Here are five examples that have worked really, really well.
Ryan Carson gives us a wonderfully detailed case study showing how he was able to increase conversions by 18.62% just by making some tiny design tweaks.
Social Media
It seems that the most admired CEOs of the world’s 50 largest companies are more actively engaged online (41%) than those companies that had mediocre reputations (28%). Anybody want to speculate on causation?
Valeria Maltoni suggests that the traditional marketing approach of buying media doesn’t work on social networks because people are there to be social. However, she reminds us that, “Developing content your contacts can use to persuade their teams to buy your services is one of the most powerful and profitable things you can do in marketing.” Lots of companies also use social media to help improve customer service.
And finally, here are a couple of social media case studies. The first is an example of what not to do, courtesy of a bad customer experience with Equinox (though perhaps they have redeemed themselves because of social media.) The second is from Joseph Jaffe who makes some suggestions for improvements to Mastercard’s social media efforts on Facebook.
The Brains Behind the Curtain
A special thanks to all of this edition’s bloggers, including:
- Rick Burnes
- Kipp Bodnar
- Tom Diederich
- TJ O’Connor
- Sherice Jacob
- Ryan Carson
- Andy Beal
- Valeria Maltoni
- Jenna at Likeable Media
- Zachary Adam Cohen
- Joseph Jaffe
Speaking of calls to action and conversion rates, did you know that you can subscribe to receive our blog posts through email? You never even have to check the blog to see if we have a new post up. Just enter your email address and a window will pop up with one of those silly captcha things. Sorry about that – Feedburner makes us do it. Any suggestions for a better system? Then you’ll get an email with a link. Click on it and that will confirm you really wanted to get our posts. At that point, you’re all set.