Archive for 2012
The Startup’s Guide to Facebook Fan Pages
In spite of their IPO flop, Facebook is still a powerhouse. It can help you attract and drive a ton of traffic to your website, create a loyal community and build a profitable brand. In other words, Facebook should be part…
These 5 Squeeze Page Tricks Have Helped Me Get Up To 58.6% Opt-In Rates
Okay, right up front I need to call your attention to the fact that you’ll never convince anyone to opt in to anything if they aren’t right for your offer—or if your offer just sucks. In other words, these tricks aren’t magic…
Beyond the Basics: 30 Fresh Social Media Tips for 2012
In the ever changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media campaign. A few weeks ago, Sujan Patel published a great list of 75 Tips to…
Unforgettable: 10 “Purple Cow” Websites to Spark Your Imagination and Your Creativity
On this blog we talk a lot about websites that have effective calls to action, non-cluttered home pages, and trustworthy designs with the intention of showing what techniques help improve conversions. After years of showing our readers examples of what works and…
Webinar #11 – The Two Essential Google Analytics Features That Tell You Where Your Revenue Comes From
As marketers, it’s our job to grow revenue. Plain and simple. And before we grow our revenue, we need to understand where it’s currently coming from. Google Analytics CAN tell us which traffic sources, campaigns, and search terms generate sales. Here’s the catch:…
The Top 10 Reasons your Home Page Video fails at Converting Customers
How much money did you drop on your latest home page video? How long did it take to produce? If you consider the total time and energy you put into creating your video (from the original scripting sessions to the final…
A Beginner’s Guide To Public Relations For Tech Startups
Public Relations: The art and science of establishing and promoting a favorable relationship with the public. Human Relations: The social and interpersonal relationships between human beings. Startup PR 101 For many startups, public relations begins and ends with receiving a nod from TechCrunch. While…
The Only Innovation Guide You’ll Ever Need
Do you ever wish you could build something so great that people and the media would get just as excited as they do when Apple launches a new product? Or, do you ever wish that (because of your innovation), your company would…
How to Increase Your Mobile App Sales With A/B Testing
Marketing your mobile app can often feel like a dark art. With over 600,000 apps competing for sales in each app store, an app’s icon acts like a mini banner ad, so choosing the right one can mean the difference between…
5 Things to Do If Your Competition Is Making Your Life a Living Hell
Wouldn’t it be great if you could live in a world where you didn’t have any competition? Where you ran your business and made money hand over fist, slept great at night, and enjoyed long holidays and weekends? But life’s just not…
Why You Should Replace Your Sales Reps with Ambassadors
Are you building a new product and growing a sales team at your startup business? If you’re using the traditional sales model, you may be losing a ton of customers. Yup, you’re not growing nearly as fast as possible. It’s because your…
The On-Page SEO Recipe for Peak Inbound Marketing Efficiency
Why are so many businesses obsessed with search engine optimization? Well simply put, if you create a well-thought-out SEO strategy from day one, you can effectively get free internet traffic from that point forward. Today, I’m going to show you how to…
Webinar #10 – How To Make The Most Profitable Pricing Plan For Your Subscription Business
So how did you pick your pricing? Did you pull it out of a hat? Or turn around three times, click your heels, and throw a dart at a wall of post-its? Maybe you didn’t throw a dart at a wall to…
The Interconnected World of Growth Hackers
When startups are ready to scale, one challenge that often crops up is finding the right person to lead the growth charge. Stage right: the growth hacker. A good growth hacker has a burning desire to connect a target market with…
How To Turn Your Customers Into Marketers
Businesses spend millions of dollars to bring people into their stores. Wouldn’t it be nice if those businesses could incentivize their customers to bring people in for them? That’s what we’ll be exploring here today. Let’s start with an example: On a…
6 Copywriting Mistakes That Shatter Conversion Rates
It’s always a challenge to write effective landing pages, but it’s easier when you know the mistakes to avoid. Read on to learn the worst way to talk about pricing, the structure that strangles your copy, and four other copywriting mistakes…
10 Ways To Increase The ROI Of Your Thank You Page
Do you like leaving money on the table? Most of you probably answered “No,” but based on what I’ve seen from most websites, the answer actually is a big “YES.” The problem (and the solution) lies in your Thank You page… You know,…
Why “The Fold” Is A Myth – And Where To Actually Put Your Calls To Action
If you’ve spent any time at all learning about web design, online marketing, or conversion-rate optimization, you’ll have heard to never put calls to action below the fold. Indeed, in industries where web designers know enough about marketing to use calls to…
How to Set Up Twitter Advertising to Build Awareness for Your Business
About a week after Twitter Advertising became public, I signed up for access. I then received the following email invitation to expand my presence on Twitter by advertising on Twitter. Today, I want to tell you about the Twitter Advertising…
Find More Customers for Your B2B SaaS Product with These 5 Distribution Hacks
Everywhere you turn, there’s an endless list of marketing tactics for expanding your business: 7 best practices for this, 14 ways to get more of that, how to accomplish something while sleeping. We have 50-bajillion ways to get our stuff shared…
How To Build A Trustworthy Website
Every online business wants to increase sales, revenue and customer loyalty. In an effort to do so, companies will offer promotions, create social media contests, and advertise their brand. All of these campaigns are good, but there’s one less common way…
Webinar #9 – How Analytics Can Give You The REAL ROI Of Your Online Marketing
Important: Be sure to update Java on your computer. This webinar will start at 10am Pacific. As marketers, it’s our job to grow the business. When we spend X dollars, it’s our job to give our business X dollars + some…
8 Elements That Make A Great SaaS Website
Building a useful and beautiful website is difficult. It takes a lot of time, thought, and energy. And in the end, visitors might not even like it. Here, I will break down what some of the best SaaS (Software as a Service)…
3 Obvious but Overlooked Elements to Test on Your Landing Pages – Right Now!
Deciding what to test on your landing page can be difficult – especially if you’re new to landing page optimization. With literally thousands of variables to choose from, you can easily find yourself in a “can’t see the forest for the…
How Selling Patiently Can Increase Your Online Sales
You’ve worked hard, and you’ve worked smart… You’ve bought the highest-converting keywords in your industry. You’ve reworked your landing page headlines to focus on benefits and not features. You’ve even added some powerful testimonials… So why do your visitors bounce off your landing page when…
Checkout Champions: 10 Tips To Win More Ecommerce Sales
We often try to find new ways to increase the conversion rate of our product or landing pages; however, one thing that we might forget is the checkout process. Many think that once the visitor clicks “add to cart,” they will…
79 Link Building Resources for 2012
It’s amazing to realize that another year has passed since the 2011 edition of 79 Link Building Resources where we listed various blogs, their top link building posts, and some great link building tools to add to your toolkit. Those…
29 Companies Tell You How To Rock Social Media
Social media can send businesses in a lot of different directions. Some use it as a marketing channel, others use it to spread content, while others start without a plan and end up abandoning social media altogether. Before businesses dive into social…
Getting Things Done: How Moving Fast Doubled Our Feature Engagement
As a SaaS business, we regularly make improvements in our software product because we care about our customers. We also want to give our customers a competitive advantage with our customer data so they can make better business decisions. When we started…
What Customers Want in an eCommerce Site
Running an eCommerce website is not always easy. There are sales to make, orders to fill, and payments to receive. This is why it is essential to make sure you have your bases covered when it comes to running a well-rounded…
10 Studies That Reveal What Customers WANT You To Know About Them
How well do you know your customers? It’s certainly a tough thing to evaluate. Luckily, one fantastic tool we have in our arsenal for creating happy customers is research in social psychology. We also have data on company-customer interaction. With these insights into the…
How to Use a Single Metric to Run Your Startup
Collecting data is easy. There are lots of tools out there and ways to gather data about everything that’s happening with your business, from lead generation through to customer satisfaction. But what are we supposed to do with all that data? How…
Personal SEO: 14-Point Checklist to Dominate Your Personal Brand on Google
Google yourself. See that? It’s your personal brand. Unless you love everything about each listing on the first page, it’s time for some personal branding SEO. There are two goals in personal SEO: Dominate the entire first page of Google (branding) Push negative or…
The Blog Editor’s Cheat Sheet: What to Do Before, During and After Your Post Goes Live
Writing a great blog post is only half the battle. There’s also the need to make sure your post looks and reads well, as well as figuring out how the post fits into your overall “blogging game plan”. Print out…
Webinar #8 – Discover How Your Competitors are Using A/B Testing
Wouldn’t you love to know how everyone else is using A/B testing to build their business? Which tools do they use? How often do they test? What kind of return do other people get? You see, there’s a huge benefit to understanding…
The 5 Best Ways to Get Feedback from Your Customers
Analytics and data gives us all sorts of insights into what our customers want from our business. But sometimes… don’t you wish you could get an answer straight from your customers? That’s what customer feedback is all about. It helps us understand the…
The “Secret” Method Experts Like Perry Marshall Use To Double Or Triple Their Sales Page Conversion Rates
Once upon a time, making money on the web was as simple as putting up a red-headline-yellow-highlighter sales page, and buying clicks on Google. Those days, thankfully, are now gone. Between “today’s economy” and living in Scamworld, people online are rather…
The Ultimate Guide To Creating Viral Content
All of us have witnessed the phenomenon of the viral video first hand. From the days of the Numa Numa guy on YouTube to the latest Volkswagen ad, we now know that there is value to be had if our content…
A Deep Dive Into Facebook Advertising
As a savvy internet user you might think no one clicks on Facebook ads. Wrong. Facebook is on track to make over $4 billion in revenue this year from advertising. Someone’s clicking. How do you get them to click your ads? More importantly, how do you get them…
How Your Customers Hold The Key That Unlocks Your Amazing Product
Think of the last product you bought. Maybe it was some fancy Bluetooth headphones. Or a spatula. Was it as amazing as you hoped for? I don’t mean kinda-sorta amazing, I mean riding in on a unicorn with rainbows shooting out of…
An In-Depth Look at the Science of Twitter Timing
If you’ve been following KISSmetrics for the last week or two, you have probably enjoyed our in-depth look at the science of blog timing and Facebook timing. Today, we’re going to take a deeper look into the ins and…
How to Increase Your Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers
You’ve just launched your Twitter and Facebook page. You’re excited to engage with thousands of fans and followers and possibly get a customer or two. Fast forward two months. You have 20 Facebook fans and 30 Twitter followers. Half of them are…
The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing
Starting a business is exhilarating. Unfortunately, the “build it and they will come” theory doesn’t hold much weight and those overnight success stories you hear about are often the result of behind the scenes years of hard work. Simply put, startup…
Webinar #7 – How to Find the BIG Wins that Your A/B Tests Are Missing by KISSmetrics and Optimizely
Do you ever feel like your A/B tests only give small, insignificant improvements? Well, we will show you how to get qualitative feedback that helps you figure out which tests are the most important. This way you’ll find the optimizations that…
Turn Copy Into Customers – 7 Lessons From The Legendary Joseph Sugarman
Joseph Sugarman is a legendary copywriter who started a mail-order business, JS&A Group, through the power of his pen. He’s also the author of The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. Here’s a sampling of the marketing successes he’s known for: He once offered $10…
What Are The 3 Most Important Things Businesses Need To Know About Social Media?
If I asked you: “What are the three most important things businesses need to know about social media?” What would you say? If one of the answers you gave was something like: “constantly and solely promoting one’s product”, then you probably…
10 Helpful Twitter Lists for Social Media Marketers
Twitter lists allow users to categorize their followers into different segmented lists based on a particular subject or theme. For instance, Twitter users can create a list of their friends or favorite brands to follow. Lists can also be made private…
50 Ways To Seduce Your Web Visitors With Persuasive Landing Pages
You’ve worked so hard… You see your traffic go up, and up, and up. But sometimes you wonder… Why are so many web visitors bouncing? How could you increase your conversion rates? It may sound difficult, but it really isn’t. You’re about to learn how to make…
This Inexpensive Marketing Plan Can Lead to More Traffic, More Leads and Higher Customer Retention
Are you up against competition that has deep pockets and can outspend you using traditional advertising methods? Does it seem like a losing battle to go head-to-head with them to get new prospects? Particularly for startup companies, using traditional advertising and marketing methods…
How To Catapult Your Email Campaign Optimization To The Next Level
Sometimes when your business is doing well, it can be tough to push it to the next level. And you’ll hear comments from team members like: “Why stir up the status quo? We’re doing so great!” and “If it ain’t broke,…
