Is your marketing organization struggling with the pace of digital? "Hacking Marketing" is the answer [Review]

Is your marketing organization struggling with the pace of digital? "Hacking Marketing" is the answer [Review]





“Hacking Marketing” was written by Scott Brinker, who is the program chair of MarTech: The Marketing Technology Conference.



The author of this article is the CEO of Third Door Media, which owns the MarTech event and Marketing Land.





Most marketing organizations are in transition. While they’ve adopted strategies and tactics to cope with the speed and complexity of the digital world, the foundation of their processes and organization is rooted in the analog past. That disconnect hinders performance, innovation and data-driven decision-making.



Sound like your marketing organization? Then Scott Brinker’s new book, “Hacking Marketing,” is for you. In it, Brinker articulates the reasons why marketing needs to be modernized, offers a framework for doing so and suggests strategies and tactics for accomplishing the job.



Here’s the thesis underlying “Hacking Marketing”:



1. Digital has changed marketing profoundly, and marketers who rely on organizations, strategies and tactics developed for the analog world will be (or have been) left behind.



2. Software developers have time-tested methods, tactics and best practices for succeeding in the fast-paced digital environment.



3. Those methods, tactics and best practices are relevant for and can be applied to marketing.





Digital has changed everything: Software is eating the world



GE’s latest TV commercials feature a young developer who tells his friends he’s gotten a job developing software to run trains and hospitals. A far cry from GE’s traditional messaging, which emphasized that they made locomotives and medical devices. Marc Andreesen was indeed right, “Software is eating the world.”



Marketing is no exception. It’s become a software-powered discipline, and that’s changed virtually every aspect of the business function, as well as the tasks performed and talents required of marketers.



The transition to digital means marketers must cope with five “digital dynamics” — speed, adaptability, adjacency, scale and precision.





“Digital environments enable far greater agility, innovation and scalability than were ever possible in the physical world.” — Scott Brinker in “Hacking Marketing”



Marketers who ignore this reality and continue working on annual or semi-annual schedules — where they roll out campaigns without testing their effectiveness — are being left behind. Those that lack the organizational flexibility to adapt to changing conditions are suffering the same fate.



In addition, communications from marketers are increasingly mediated by software – CRM, marketing automation, platforms (e.g., Google, Twitter) and browsers — all of which impact the user’s experience. What’s more, marketers are increasingly creating software to accomplish their objectives.





Revenge of the nerds: Hacking is good! Make it part of your marketing DNA



It’s the original, positive definition of “hacker” that Brinker conjures in “Hacking Marketing.” To explain it, he cites a letter from Mark Zuckerberg that accompanied Facebook’s SEC filing for its initial public offering. In that missive, Zuckerberg described the company’s hacker-inspired values as being fast, bold and open.



Zuckerberg’s vision and Facebook’s execution of it hold important lessons for marketers. Facebook’s experience demonstrates that the hacker spirit can be applied broadly to companies and departments, that the management philosophy is scalable and proven effective after decades of experience as practiced by software developers. In the digital world, marketing and software development are very similar exercises.



Agile and lean: Applying software development practices to marketing

Brinker’s suggests that software development methods are relevant to marketing based on his own experience, i.e., software developers have been working in digital environments for 40 years. He comes to the conclusion naturally, given his background as CTO at a marketing technology company and as a former developer himself. (Brinker insists the team he manages won’t let him near the code base now.)



Adopting the agile management practices of a software development team is a key framework. Agile divides tasks into short phases of work that are frequently reassessed. Short phases (called “sprints”) and frequent reassessment enables coders to overcome the complexities of continuously changing requirements. Since marketers operate in dynamic environments now, too, adopting agile practices is a way to overcome the complexities.



The second philosophy Brinker advocates is “lean,” which was popularized in Eric Ries’s bestseller “The Lean Startup.” It describes methods for teams — business, development, marketing — to build products in a way that increases their probability of success using an iterative process. That process brings products to market fast, solicits customer feedback early and often and conducts experiments and adapts quickly based on results.



Two agile management tactics from the software development world that Brinker recommends be applied to marketing are the Scrum and Kanban.



Scrum is an agile methodology that prescribes a specific process for project management that relies on short, iterative cycles of work called “sprints.” Scrum also is characterized by:



- prioritizing tasks by creating a transparent “backlog”;

- assigning tasks to small, cross-functional teams;

- daily 15-minute meetings among team members to review progress and where team members say what they plan to accomplish that day; and

- “review” and “retrospective” meetings to discuss improving the process for the next sprint.



Kanban is a method of visualizing workflow that involves a simple, shared method of tracking progress. Benefits include “pulling” tasks through a process that can be easily monitored by team members, limiting work in progress and promoting continuous incremental improvement.



Fans of HBO’s Silicon Valley were treated to a parody of Scrum and Kanban in the series’ famous “scrum” scene (Warning: contains adult language!).



Agility begets innovation, innovation begets scalability… issues

Once agility becomes embedded in the marketing culture, it facilitates two critical elements of modern marketing success: innovation and scale.



Prototyping, beta testing, continuous deployment and collaborative design are all enabled by agile teams working in software-powered environments. Innovation results when elements of messaging, media and mechanisms (software-mediated customer and user experiences) are systematically and continuously tested to improve results.



But innovation has a counterweight: scalability. The fundamental challenge of scale is taking what is learned through innovation and adopting or deploying it throughout the marketing organization. Scale and innovation emphasize different, but equally important, priorities. While innovation “encourages a ‘fail-fast’ approach, ‘scalability’ strives for ‘fail-never’ robustness,” writes Brinker.



Brinker offers a two-track solution to the conflict. Ideas that are being incubated should be managed to maximize innovation, while programs and capabilities being deployed throughout marketing should be managed for scalability. Management of the “edge” of innovation and the “core” of marketing activities takes place simultaneously; successful “edge” initiatives are ultimately propagated throughout the organization and become part of the “core.”



Lots of useful ideas for the taking and making your own

While advocating the use of agile and lean practices, Brinker acknowledges that each organization must adapt them to its own circumstances. Think of “Hacking Marketing” as a guidebook to inform thinking, rather than as a recipe to be followed strictly.



Perhaps best of all, this book is exceedingly readable and appropriate for everyone in the organization. The read is worth the time invested for all team members, even if the benefit is solely sharing the ideas and vocabulary. I plan to share it with my entire organization and recommend that you do, too.

3 ways to use the "familiarity bias" for maximum B2B engagement

3 ways to use the "familiarity bias" for maximum B2B engagement





3 ways to use the “familiarity bias” for maximum B2B engagement



How can you get in front of prospects so you'll be top of mind when they're making their purchase decisions?



Matthew Barby





B2B marketing is undergoing a great deal of change, one aspect of which is a dramatic growth in B2B e-commerce, which Frost & Sullivan projects will reach $6.7 trillion in annual revenues by 2020. If you want a piece of that pie, you’ll need a whole lot of engagement.



Typically, those in the B2B space prefer to do business with someone they already know, with a company they already have a connection to, or with someone they have an “in” with. Approximately 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of senior-level executives turn to social media to support their decision-making, according to IDC research (PDF) sponsored by LinkedIn.



This is why you need to make the most of what psychology-minded marketers call the “familiarity bias,” which says that people are more apt to buy or invest in what they already know.



Here are three ways you can make it work for you.



1. Maintain an active organic presence wherever your customers are

Make sure your ideal customers see you wherever they like to spend their time. The inverse is solid advice, too — make sure you don’t waste your time and money on platforms where your audience isn’t active. Put some significant time into researching the blogs and communities where you might find relevant customers, and look at the social channels where they’re most likely to be.



For instance, if you’re a construction material supplier, you’ll want to connect with builders and designers. You’ll likely find them on Facebook, of course, as 50 million small businesses (PDF) have pages on the network, but you’ll also want to include a strategy to address more niche networks and websites like Angie’s List, Houzz and Porch. I’ve used this tactic within a ton of SEO campaigns to get results in the past.



It’s also a good idea to use Mention to set up alerts for the top keywords related to your prospects’ industries and pain points. Over time, you’ll see patterns emerge that you can use to tailor your strategy to better address the needs of your prospects.



2. Identify and reach out to your customers on social media

Through your active presences on various online channels, you’ll be able to find your prospects and reach out to them directly — especially if they’re on Twitter, where it’s largely acceptable for anyone to initiate a discussion with anyone else. Offer free advice, based on what you know about them and their interests.



Don’t resort to spamming them, and avoid pitching them right off the bat. First, you need to establish trust and credibility to engage them with a bit of information about you. Ask questions. Keep the conversation going.



Leadfeeder is an extremely useful tool in this context. You can learn the companies associated with the IP addresses of your site visitors, so you know more about the companies taking a look at what you have to offer. Research who the visitors are to determine the best way you can help them. Engage with people from the company as appropriate, and tailor your pitch specifically to their needs when the time is right.



Reaching out on social media to a relevant prospect who doesn’t know you can be tricky, but when they’ve already been on your website, the familiarity bias kicks in.



Of course, you’ll want to spend some time actively using the social networks themselves so that you can address questions, add followers and so on, but the right social dashboard and integrated CRM can help you maximize both the strategy and the time investment to connect with a higher number of prospects.



3. Retarget with banner ads to remain fresh in prospects’ minds

Retargeting your website’s visitors on other websites they visit is key to keeping your brand fresh in their minds.



Use a tool like AdRoll to set up sequences of ads that can follow individuals across multiple websites, social networks and devices. While it’s more expensive to book ads on this platform instead of directly through the networks themselves, AdRoll’s cross-channel, cross-device capabilities are worth the spend.



This way, your message “follows” your customers wherever they are online, and they’ll be more apt to return to ask for more information.



Though there’s not a concrete number of impressions that works in every industry, research shows buyers need multiple exposures to a brand before they’ll consider buying. Retargeting makes those exposures easier for you to accomplish.





Staying at the top of their minds



Getting your prospects’ attention won’t be all that hard if you develop and execute a strategy based on providing information that your ideal customers are looking for or would otherwise appreciate.



You’ll struggle to get on solid ground if all you’re doing is tweeting your own horn and hard selling.



It’s time to think about social selling as a psychologically oriented discipline. Focus on spending time where you know your customers are, connecting with them without the pitch and retargeting them to keep your brand fresh in their minds.

How 'Anxious Reappraisal' Can Help Turn Anxiety Into Productivity - The Atlantic

How 'Anxious Reappraisal' Can Help Turn Anxiety Into Productivity - The Atlantic

It’s called “anxiety reappraisal,” and it boils down to telling yourself that you feel excited whenever you feel nervous. It sounds stupidly simple, but it's proven effective in a variety of studies and settings.

It’s also counterintuitive: When most people feel anxious, they likely tell themselves to just relax. “When asked, ‘how do you feel about your upcoming speech?’, most people will say, ‘I’m so nervous, I’m trying to calm down,’” said Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the phenomenon. She cites the ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters as partial evidence.

But that might be precisely the wrong advice, she said. Instead, the slogan should be more like, “Get Amped and Don’t Screw Up.”

That’s because anxiety and excitement are both aroused emotions. In both, the heart beats faster, cortisol surges, and the body prepares for action. In other words, they’re “arousal congruent.” The only difference is that excitement is a positive emotion‚ focused on all the ways something could go well.

Calmness is also positive, meanwhile, but it’s also low on arousal. For most people, it takes less effort for the brain to jump from charged-up, negative feelings to charged-up, positive ones, Brooks said, than it would to get from charged-up and negative to positive and chill. In other words, its easier to convince yourself to be excited than calm when you’re anxious.

Brooks discovered this for herself by performing a series of three experimentsfor a study published in 2014. After rounding up her participants, she surprised them with a series of tasks that most people find at least a little bit anxiety-inducing.

First, they were asked to sing the song “Don’t Stop Believin” by the band Journey in front of the group. (“I chose ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ as the target song because it can be performed easily in three different octaves,” Brooks wrote. It “was also the 21st most downloaded song in iTunes history and tends to be extremely familiar to English speakers.”)

The participants were then told to either say “I am anxious,” “I am excited,” or nothing before they broke into song. The “excited” participants not only felt more excited, and they also sang better, according to a computerized measurement of volume and pitch. Their on-and-on-and-ons were just more, well, on—perhaps because the participants themselves were.

The same was true of a speech test. When asked to give a two-minute speech on camera, the excited participants spoke longer and were seen as more persuasive, confident, and persistent. Then came a math test, in which the excited participants similarly outperformed a group that was told to remain calm.

Surprisingly, though, the excitement reappraisal didn't actually make the subjects less anxious, nor did it lower their heart rate. That’s because the underlying anxiety was the same—it was just reframed as excitement.

Facebook Tests New Safety Features | SocialTimes

Facebook Tests New Safety Features | SocialTimes



Facebook is testing three new safety features: a tool to alert users if other users are impersonating their accounts; new ways of reporting nonconsensual intimate images; and a photo checkup feature.

5 Questions the Most Productive People Ask Every Day | Inc.com

5 Questions the Most Productive People Ask Every Day | Inc.com

1. What's my top priority?

I always look through my list (after having my morning routine, of course) and decide what has to get done that day. Is an article due? Do I have an important phone call with an important figure scheduled? I always start out the day and pick one thing that is not negotiable that day.

2. What are the roadblocks?

Next, I always look for the roadblocks. Do I have to drive downtown? OK, I better conserve some energy. Is the meeting coming up this afternoon going to be tense? I've written before how you should manage your stress, not your time. You have to coordinate around roadblocks.

3. Who is my customer for this?

One of my editors likes to remind me about this one. It's incredibly important if you communicate about anything -- through written text, video, email, Slack, or whatever you are using that day. The true sign of an unproductive person is someone who doesn't think about the customer.

4. How will this create value?

Related to this is the idea of creating value. Lost productivity and minimal value go hand in hand. They are kissing cousins. Unproductive people are not creating value, they are wasting time. For any new project or task, ask how this activity is creating direct, measurable value.

5. What should I skip?

It's such a freeing concept to remind yourself, on a daily basis, that some things are not worth doing. You establish what needs to get done, identify your audience, and create value as I described above. Then, you skip anything else that is superfluous, a time-waster, or is not a top priority. Productivity stars weed out the fluff.

Is modern SEO more than the sum of independent parts?

Is modern SEO more than the sum of independent parts?



For the purpose of altering how search results appear...



Modern SEO is more about the complex interrelationships between different strategies aimed at increasing online visibility and improving user experience and less about any particular set of  technical elements and tactics that are meant to increase your rankings.

#MarTech Conference: Google dominates the marketing stacks of 150 "unicorn" startups

#MarTech Conference: Google dominates the marketing stacks of 150 "unicorn" startups

When it comes to marketing stacks and startup companies, it’s Google’s world, and other technology providers are just living in it.

Google technologies took the top five spots in an analysis presented Monday at our MarTech Conferenceof about 150 “unicorns” — startups that are valued at more than $1 billion.

Isaac Wyatt, Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations at New Relic, used the Datanyze platform to analyze the technologies in use by the startups on Crunchbase’s recent “unicorn” leaderboard.

He found that this group of companies uses an average of about 10 different marketing technologies, and almost all of them are using at least one Google platform — quite often, a version of Google Analytics. 

10 Interesting Facts About Twitter on its 10th Birthday

10 Interesting Facts About Twitter on its 10th Birthday





To mark the popular microblogging platform’s 10th birthday, here are 10 interesting facts about Twitter that you might not know:



1. Twitter was almost called “Friendstalker.”

No joke, had Evan Williams had his way, we might all be “Friendstalker”-ing instead of tweeting. Thankfully the Twitter co-founder’s tongue-in-cheek name suggestion was cast off as “too creepy,” reports the New York Times.



The platform could have also been dubbed “Twitch,” “Twitcher” and “Jitter.” Twitter was eventually settled on after one of the co-founders read the word's definition aloud from a dictionary: “The light chirping sound made by certain birds; agitation or excitement; flutter.” And -- chirp, chirp -- history was made.





2. Twitter’s iconic bird logo is named after a sports legend.

Nope, that cute little birdie blue is not named after Larry Page or Larry King. Turns out it’s named after basketball legend Larry Bird, a famous former Boston Celtics forward. Biz Stone confirmed this fact after Celtics vice president of digital media Peter Stringer asked him about the rumored tidbit, fittingly on Twitter. His guess was a slam dunk.





3. Twitter did not invent the hashtag.

#NoSeriously, it didn’t. Hashtags date back to 1988, when people communicated via chat rooms called Internet Relay Chats (IRCs). The first hashtags made their way to Twitter in 2007, when Chris Messina, formerly of Google and now a lead developer at Uber, proposed using them as a way to lump together related tweets. The simple searchable tags instantly caught on.





4. Katy Perry boasts the most Twitter followers.

The chart-topping pop songstress has almost 85 million followers. That’s more followers than people who live in Egypt. Fellow pop sensation Justin Bieber comes in second (77 million followers) and Taylor Swift third (73 million). The most followed brand on Twitter is not Twitter. It’s YouTube (61 million followers).





5. The idea for Twitter was hatched on a slide at a playground.

Not all Silicon Valley tech startups are born in hipster bars and coffee shops. Case in point: Twitter. Dorsey says he first shared his idea for the social network on a playground slide “like a geeked-out Moses on Mount Sinai.”





6. Ellen Degeneres sent the most retweeted tweet.

If you guessed it was the comedian’s star-studded Oscar-selfie tweet, you’d be right. Actor Bradley Cooper actually snapped the viral pic at the 2014 awards show. It’s been retweeted nearly 3.4 million times since The Ellen Show first fired it off. Call us weird, but we like the Simpsons’ cool cartoon version of the pic better.





7. The 140-character limit is because of mobile phones.

True story: those little glowing bricks we can’t put down are to blame. Indeed they’re the reason tweets are short, 140-character blips. At first, Dorsey limited them to 160 characters because that used to be the max length for text messages on mobile phones. The restriction was later trimmed back to 140 characters, which he calls a “beautiful constraint,” one that’s apparently here to stay. Maybe.





8. Twitter co-founder Noah Glass got booted from the company.

Twitter co-founder Noah Glass, who originally came up with the company's name, was famously fired from the startup. The San Francisco-based developer’s heart-breaking story of being "forgotten" and betrayed by his fellow founding team made headlines in 2011. Today, his Twitter bio simply reads: “I started this.”





9. Twitter has yet to turn a profit.

Despite the social network’s massive global user base -- notably down for the first time last quarter amidst an internal shakeup -- the company is not profitable. With its accumulated revenue losses approaching $2.1 billion, Twitter stocks are now trading at about a third less than the $26-per-share price put forth with the company’s November 2013 IPO. So much for being the next Facebook.





10. Being “Twitterpated” is a thing.

The word "twitterpated" doesn’t just mean to be infatuated. The Twitter-related version sounds like constipation for a reason. As Dorsey explains, it's “when you’re overwhelmed with information or you’re just so excited that you forget to tweet or forget to share.” We know the feeling.

Digital Marketing Predictions

7 Digital-Marketing Predictions You Need to Keep Your Eye On

By Samuel Edwards

Digital marketing is very fluid. Strategies are changing on a continual basis and it’s impossible to sit back and relax. If you want to gain an advantage over your competition, you need to always be on the cutting edge. And while digital marketing changes on a weekly basis, there’s something about the launch of a new calendar year that puts things in perspective. As we are getting comfortable with 2016, you should be aware of a few things.

1. Video advertising to kick into high gear
Everywhere you look, video is on the rise. Every single day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos. Facebook is already heavily invested in video advertising. Bing offers advertisers video options. And finally, Google may be preparing to get involved with in-SERP video advertising features.

All of these things mean that video advertising is on the rise. In 2016, expect to see even more dollars spent on video advertising. As a marketer, you can no longer ignore this medium. It’s now an integral component of successful digital-marketing strategies in all industries.

2. Live-streaming social platforms rise to the top
Last year, live-streaming social media platforms were birthed. It started with Meerkat being unveiled during March’s SXSW in Austin, Texas. Soon thereafter, Twitter revealed that it had been working on a similar platform known as Periscope. Ever since, the two have been battling it out for supremacy -- with Periscope being the clear winner at this point.

While social live streaming gained some serious steam during the latter half 2015, this year things will really take off. Look for additional players to enter this space and expect more users to migrate towards Periscope as they become comfortable with the concept. From a marketing point of view, it’ll be important for brands to begin leveraging this new medium in unique ways. Here’s how some brands are already using Periscope.

3. Mobile will trounce desktop
For the first time in history, the number of mobile-only Internet users surpassed the number of desktop-only Internet users this year. This marked a transformational period in the history of the Web and indicates that the future lies in mobile devices.

As a digital marketer, this doesn’t come as a shock to you. This is just a reminder that mobile will continue to trounce desktop in 2016. All of your efforts -- social media in particular -- need to be optimized around mobile users. There’s still a place for desktop, but it’s no longer the primary platform.

4. Virtual reality will experience growth
While there were a lot of signs that last year would be the time in which virtual-reality technology finally became mainstream, it didn’t quite happen. We’re still a while away from mass adoption. However, all signs indicate that significant growth will continue in 2016.

“Virtual reality represents the most complete immersion into an experience that consumers have ever had,” writes Onit Digital. “When it comes to marketing digitally, this means that you can completely surround your potential client with the experience of your product, providing them with a much more realistic view of what you can actually do for them.”

5. Relationship marketing is emphasized
In 2016, experts are calling for the rise of relationship marketing. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you’re not alone. According to one definition, it refers to “a strategy designed to foster customer loyalty, interaction and long-term engagement.” This happens by promoting ongoing and open communication via personalized marketing campaigns that are aimed at individuals, as opposed to mass targets.

Along with the rise of relationship marketing, there will be a rise in the cost of digital marketing. While this may be alarming, it’s only natural. Businesses will begin focusing on high-touch marketing, as opposed to casting cheap, wide nets. The result will be more profitability per touch. Ultimately, marketers will see a higher return on their efforts.

6. Marketing automation becomes a widespread priority
While personalization will become more important, this doesn’t mean marketing automation loses value in 2016. In fact, most agree that it will gain prominence. Marketing automation is currently a $5.5 billion industry and marketers will continue to rely on these features to manage time-consuming tasks.

7. Location-based marketing takes off
It’s challenging to ignore the potential of location-based marketing this year. As beacon technology grows and marketers are educated in regards to how these technologies function, the creative wheels will start spinning. The possibilities are virtually endless. Perhaps the best part about location-based marketing is that it allows brands to bridge the gap between online digital marketing and in-person digital marketing.

One group estimates that $9 billion will be spent on location-targeted mobile ads by the end of 2015. That number is expected to balloon to $15 billion in 2018. This upcoming year will be a pivotal period of growth and market education.

As we make our way through 2016, you want to make sure your marketing efforts are moving along with you. While all of the predictions laid out in this article won’t be 100 percent accurate, you should keep an eye on them. It’s clear that these are the directions we’re headed in as an industry.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270259

3 Qualities that make successful entrepreneurs

3 Qualities That Make Successful Entrepreneurs

By Melinda Emerson

If you think you have what it takes to be a top entrepreneur, there are a few ways to know for sure.

There is a long list of attributes of successful entrepreneurs, but my list is fairly short, simple, and focused on the most important qualities. What’s more, everyone has these qualities, just some in higher amounts than others. It is important to evaluate personally if you have what it takes to be a top entrepreneur. Have an honest conversation with yourself.

Take note of these three characteristics to discover what it takes to run a great business and why:

1.  Successful Entrepreneurs Have Passion

When you have passion, you’re willing to bust through walls to get your message, tools, products or services out to the world. That means: sticking to it when your family or life partner doesn’t believe in you, or when your friends wonder when you’ll get a “real job.” Passion is really about perseverance and working towards a future that can sometimes be uncertain. Fuel your passion by never give up, ever! And focus on your passion when you don’t know how things will fit together in your business.

2. Top Entrepreneurs Have Vision

You see the needs of your customers before they appear. You really can predict the future in terms of what will come, what can be and what must be. To have this kind of vision takes guts. You must be free to trust yourself to reach your vision. You have to know you are great and that you’re the one to do the job. No matter how many others have tried it, you believe in your talents. You know the world needs your unique skills, products, and point of view. It’s about owning your true brilliance. Vision + Swagger = Dreams turned into Reality.

3. Entrepreneurs Who Are Flexible, Thrive

When you see something isn’t working, you’re 100 percent comfortable with changing direction and challenging conventional wisdom. You find a way to make it work and ignore the way “we’ve always done it.” Think of this trait as the ability to walk, talk and chew gum at the same time. It’s the quality of quick thinking and problem solving. This can be troublesome for people who may consider themselves shy and introverted. But you must push forward even if you are apprehensive. Business owners with the most flexibility and the best ideas tend to win. Ignore speed and focus on allowing the great solution you have to bubble to the surface.
I am sure you do have the traits of a successful business owner. The key is to realize that you do and to let this set of characteristics run free, as this will translate into your business. Once that happens, stand back, look at your progress, and say “Wow. You created that. You solved your customer’s problem. You made something you always wanted to do — happen.”
Allow your passion to drive you past the toughest and most uncertain moments. Use your vision to inspire others to join you in your business and fall back on it to push past self-doubt and the naysayers in your life. Flexibility empowers you to find unique solutions to business problems. You do have what it takes. And I look forward to seeing your amazing results!
Refer to this list often. Consider writing down your passion, vision, and ability to be flexible. Put those qualities on cue cards. Tape them to your bathroom mirror, your front door, and your closet door. Just remind yourself of who you really are. Even if you don’t believe you have these traits now, you will have them in full force eventually. Start believing it now. I believe in you.
Republished by permission. Original here.

http://smallbiztrends.com/2016/03/3-qualities-that-make-successful-entrepreneurs.html?utm_campaign=Smallbiztrends&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

Modern SEO

Is modern SEO more than the sum of independent parts?

Columnist Jayson DeMers asserts that what we think of as SEO is actually just a combination of different customer experience strategies woven together to create the best online presence possible.

Jayson DeMers on March 14, 2016

When you think of SEO, what do you actually think about? If you were going to “practice” SEO, what would you be doing? Would you be writing content? Analyzing your performance? Engaging with your audience on social media?

Modern SEO is a complex, multifaceted collection of different sub-strategies, nearly all of which can function independently on their own as a way to boost brand visibility and build customer relationships. As a quick example, content marketing is a necessary strategy for SEO, but even without a deliberate SEO process, it can be valuable in terms of increasing customer engagement and building brand trust.

With that being said, is modern SEO anything more than just the sum of its interconnected parts? Is there any one strategic initiative that functions exclusively to increase a brand’s rankings for various search queries?

The constituents of SEO

I’m not going to try and list every little factor or tactic that could conceivably impact a company’s organic search rankings, so don’t expect this to be comprehensive. Instead, this is going to serve as a general list of strategies that all feed into a brand’s search engine performance, one way or another:

On-site optimization. This is a general term that covers all kinds of technical improvements and creative choices. Mobile optimization, site speed, site security, meta titles and descriptions, rich snippets and structured data, site architecture, site mapping, navigation structuring and content availability are just some of the ways you can optimize your site directly to be found and favored by search engines. But almost all of these strategies are as much about improving customer experience as they are about making search engines happy: better structured, faster sites are easier to use.
On-site content. On-site content could be called “content marketing,” but I avoided using the term here because content marketing is sometimes associated with a blog. On-site content, on the other hand, includes all pages of a site. The quality, accuracy, conciseness, detail and uniqueness of your content can all help your search rankings (as can the frequency and consistency of your posts), but primarily, this content serves as a means of building customer loyalty.

Link building. Link building exists in a few forms. Traditional link building could be considered an SEO-exclusive strategy because that’s its primary function (and most people aren’t interested in referral traffic for these links). However, more advanced, modern link-building tactics involve guest posting and content syndication — and these have far more brand visibility benefits than just ranking higher in search engines.

Social media. Social media is often lumped into the “SEO strategy” category, but it actually doesn’t influence SEO directly at all. Instead, it’s a kind of SEO conduit. Engaging with a wider audience means more people to see and share your content, leading to more potential inbound links, which can then influence your website’s organic search rankings.

Local SEO. Local SEO strategies specifically involve getting your business listed accurately on third-party directories and review sites, then managing your online reviews. Doing so can increase your chances of earning a slot in Google’s local 3-pack — but more importantly, these efforts increase your reputation with customers.

Do you notice a pattern here? All of these approaches can be referred to as “SEO strategies,” and all of them can help increase your search visibility. Yet they can (and sometimes do) function independently of SEO to improve customer relationships and experiences.

You can group this suite of services together as “SEO,” but there’s no strategy listed here that’s exclusively focused on improving search rankings.

Keyword-based SEO is dead
It’s also worth mentioning that traditional concepts of SEO — that is, doing a certain amount of online work to rank for a selection of specific keywords — are obsolete. It’s become far more difficult to rank for specific keyword terms these days, thanks to Google’s semantic search functionality, increased sophistication, increased competition, more paid features and the Knowledge Graph.

That being said, traditional concepts of “SEO” are practically dead. Modern SEO is all about using different customer experience strategies together to give your brand the best online presence possible.

Arguing over semantics?
You could accuse me of arguing over semantics here, but understanding that modern SEO isn’t an independent strategy (instead being a collection of other independent strategies) is important both for SEO agencies and for independent practitioners.

It’s the responsibility of SEO agencies to make sure every client understands what really goes into SEO — and selling “SEO services” without selling at least some of those other services (e.g., content marketing) is like selling a car without wheels.

The bottom line
Some tactics — including rich snippets and meta descriptions — are executed for the purpose of altering how search results appear, but it’s still important to realize that modern SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s more about the complex interrelationships between different online visibility and user experience strategies and less about any one tactic that’s meant to increase your rankings.

SEO is still very much alive and still important, but only in its context as an aggregation of other important strategies. Keep this in mind as you optimize your online presence, both on-site and off-site.

http://searchengineland.com/modern-seo-just-sum-independent-parts-242638#.VudCPUMpKPs.facebook

Processed or Not?

Processed or not?
That is the question!

When you look just at that, processed foods make up a full 57.9 percent of all calories consumed in America.

Processed foods, they said, were any foods that “include substances not used in culinary preparations, in particular additives used to imitate sensorial qualities of minimally processed foods and their culinary preparations.”

Of course, besides being incredibly appetizing, that definition is also so expansive as to sound almost meaningless; especially when you consider how wide-ranging the examples were. (A list of the most common foods included “breads; soft drinks, fruit drinks and milk-based drinks; cakes, cookies and pies; salty snacks; frozen and shelf-stable plates; pizza and breakfast cereals.”)

The justification for pulling them altogether becomes a little clearer though when you look at where the calories were actually coming from in different groups. The heavy-hitters in providing calories in unprocessed or minimally processed foods were meat, fruit, and milk. In the processed category, most calories were due to added sugar and oil.

http://gizmodo.com/more-than-half-of-all-calories-eaten-in-america-now-com-1763884932?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

3 Methods of Outreach to Get Thought Leaders Sharing Your Content

3 Methods of Outreach to Get Thought Leaders Sharing Your Content





Content Marketing: Methods of Outreach to Get Thought Leaders Sharing Your Content





Straight to the point



Sometimes, instead of beating around the bush it’s best to be straightforward. The people you’re reaching out to will be busy but many are also aware that their sphere of influence can be used as a helping hand.



If you share the same industry and your content is good, there’s room for thought leaders to share it so be direct and nudge them in the right direction. Whether it’s via a Twitter direct message, a tweet, a message on LinkedIn or an email is up to you.



Twitter DMs become less effective the more followers an individual has because they no doubt receive dozens of (probably automated) messages daily. Tweets on other hand are a great method of communication because they can be repeatedly propped up by other people favouriting and retweeting them, making them more noticeable to the recipient.



The crucial strategy of an outreach tweet is to be aware of the character limit as well as the prospect that that tweet might actually become the shared content, via a retweet. Because of this, ensure what you write covers your request as well as being promotional in its own right – it might be viewed by an enlarged audience.



As for emails and messages on other platforms, flattery is fine, but don’t be a sycophant; somebody who is often approached for promotional reasons will want a time-conscious and concise rundown.





The social media warm up



There will be people who simply don’t respond to direct requests to share content out of the blue. This can be for a variety of reasons, from time constraints to a strict quality control ethos. In these cases, a little warming up is necessary. Social media is often lauded as ‘one big conversation’ and it’s easy to start up a discussion with total strangers. Take this into account and consider posing questions or conversation starters to influential figures. See these messages – whether they’re tweets or inclusions in comments on other social media – as springboards into a greater dialogue.



When you include your outreach targets in conversation make sure to increase the frequency of this inclusion the more receptive they become. As long as you’re providing genuine material for conversation, there’s no reason for a professional relationship not to arise.



Once you’ve established this base, the request for them to share content will be much more likely to succeed.





Give before you take



It’s important to realise that a successful business can only be achieved through mutually beneficial relationships. Because of this, before any request for promotion (or anything else, for that matter) you should contemplate whether you’ve provided equal benefit. Chances are that if you want something from a big player in the industry, you’ve got to create some leverage.



This doesn’t have to be difficult. If you occupy the same industry, offering content as a guest post is a good start that also showcases the quality of your material. Sharing, linking and quoting influential figures are other established methods to increase the likelihood of them being receptive to sharing requests.



The key here is to provide real value, to the point where gratitude and relations justify a returned favour such as a retweet, a link or a feature.



Building business relationships is easier than ever online. With the amount of content being shared on social media, reaching out to thought leaders with a large following is a great way to get your content visible above the rest, as well promoted to a larger audience.

How to Steal the Best SEO Tricks From TOP 5 Online Marketing Experts

How to Steal the Best SEO Tricks From TOP 5 Online Marketing Experts



The best SEO secrets and tricks from Robbie Richards, Ramsay Taplin, Bryan Harris, Brian Dean, and Neil Patel. 

Just these TOP 5 online marketing experts alone have 565 blog posts. On average, each post consists of more than 4,000 words!!! That means you can read one post in just 18 minutes. However, it takes more than 169 hours of reading ALONE to learn these 5 experts’ SEO recommendations in their entirety!

Experts use these strategies in their blogs every single day.  

Here are the top experts’ content marketing strategies, secrets and tricks: ...

How to Prove ROI Potential of Content Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday - Moz

How to Prove ROI Potential of Content Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday - Moz

How to Prove ROI Potential of Content Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday

By iPullRank

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

We all know that creating and promoting content can be a ton of work (not to mention expensive). So how do we know whether it'll be worth it? In today's Whiteboard Friday, MozCon 2014 speaker Mike King shows you several ways you can be sure your content has the potential you need before you even start making it.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Greetings and salutations, Moz fans. My name is Mike King. I'm from an agency called iPullRank, and today here on Whiteboard Friday we're going to talk about how to prove ROI potential of content. Basically, before you launch content, get a sense of will this perform before you go ahead and spend tens of thousands of dollars on promoting that content.

Content components

Surveying your target audience

So let's just hop right into it. One of the things you want to do for your content component aspect of it is survey your target audience. There are a lot of channels that you can do this effectively in. In fact, the ad platforms have gotten even better at letting you hyper target audiences and drive that traffic right away.

One of the things you can do is use StumbleUpon Paid Discovery. I love this platform for content promotion as well. But it's great in this use case because it's only $0.10 a click. Again, you can target based on different audiences, not as granularly as you can with something like Facebook or something to that effect, but you can get audiences around ideas, concepts, and things of that nature.

What you can also use is a tool called UserReport. What this tool does is allows you to do custom surveys on your own site. You put up your content experience. You throw UserReport on there. Once the user gets to a certain point in the page, you can make that survey pop up. You can ask them questions like: Hey, would you like this? Would you share this? What is it that you didn't like about this content? Does this solve a specific need for you?

You can do that with StumbleUpon Paid Discovery. Start collecting data on the users that would visit your content, and then it helps you build a business case saying that these people would be interested in this content.

By the same token, you can also use Facebook ads to do this. Like I said, Facebook ads allow you to really granularly target your audiences. They've gotten increasingly more sophisticated with their ad targeting options. In fact, at this point, the ad targeting very much aligns with standard market research in that you can target based on income, education, and so on and so forth.

If you're going after the B2C clientele, that's probably your best bet, using Facebook. If you're going after the B2B clientele, then LinkedIn ads make the most sense. You can also target very specifically on firmographics rather than just demographics. In both of these cases, you're going to then continue to use UserReport to collect that data via these custom surveys on your site.

Additionally, you can use SurveyMonkey Audience. I love this tool because you can, again, very much target very specific demographics and ask them direct questions. What you can do is host that piece of content in the survey, have them take the time to review it and fill out the questionnaire, and then, boom, you get your results right away.

Competitive analysis

Those are different ways you can do surveying to understand whether your content's going to perform. But, of course, competitive analysis is a really good way to make a case. I worked on a brand called LG back in the day. The best way to get them to do anything was to show them that Samsung was doing it.

By that very same token, you can use a tool like Social Crawlytics. What that tool does is crawls the site and identifies the social shares of every piece of content on that site. You can do that for your site and a competitor's site and see what's working, what isn't, and quickly identify what you can create that is similar to what they've made.

Additionally, you can use BuzzSumo, which kind of takes out the legwork out of that, because they've indexed a lot of content. They've pulled out the semantic relationships from that content, the entities. You can search by keyword for different pieces of content and then see what's the most popular content that fits that keyword. Now their index isn't huge, but they have a lot of content, especially around the SEO space, that you can look at. So you can quickly identify what's working for other people and then make your case that way.

Finally, you can use any of the link indices -- Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic. All of these tools, if you go to the top pages reports for the different competitors, you can quickly see what's working and what's not, and then you have those metrics to make that business case.

Pose/review discussions

One of the other tactics that I really love to use to identify content that will work is by using the different discussion sites. Quora is a really good one. You can actually identify questions that people have already asked in the past and then see how many people have responded to that. You can see whether or not it's a popular question that you can then use into your content.

You can actually pose your own questions, see how many people follow the question and how many people answer the question. Then, you can look at those people that are following the question and see what their demographics are and, boom, another solid business case based on actual data.

The finally, Reddit is really good for this as well. People love to get in discussions on Reddit. We've posed questions in the past, and people have given really passionate responses. Then there have been cases where we've posed questions and we got no response. Once you know it's crickets, it's not a good piece of content to launch.

People components

Business case

These are all the content and metric components of this. But what you really need to focus on, when you're trying to get buy-in for this type of content internally, is the people components. When you're building business cases and you're dealing with a variety of people, your boss in fact, you've got to think about what metric is the one that helps him get to his bonus, and how does the content that you're looking to create help fulfill that metric.

In most cases, those metrics aren't necessarily channel metrics. It's not: Are we going to be number one for this keyword? Are we going to get more visits from organic search or more likes in social media? It goes back to things that affect the business.

In the case of a SaaS company, it can be: Okay, how does this contribute to our cost of acquisition versus our LTV ratio? Does this lower our cost of acquisition because we're going to get a wide range of people that are going to ingest this content and then come back to the site, ending up signing up? Then, is it reaching the right side of our audience that is high value a customer? Is it the one that has the bigger long-term value or lifetime value?

Think about those metrics rather than, oh, we're going to get some more likes and shares, because these metrics are typically the ones that go back to the metrics that help your boss hit his bonus.

Also, is there a conversion rate based on your existing content on your own site? I've talked at length about doing content on that's both qualitatively and quantitatively, in a guest post that I did forCopyblogger, which will be below in the description, about doing content audits where you can identify what is performing and what's not, and then see what types of content you may want to create in the future.

Using that as a framework to work with, you can then look at these content ideas that you've gotten on this side and see, okay, we have content that fits this, and generally the conversion rate is X. So you can make some sort of prediction based on the search volume and the keywords that go with this piece of content, or the amount of traffic you're likely to get from social media to go with this content, and then back that into the conversion rate and then get back to these business level metrics that we talked about before.

Finally, or the last two things rather, how does this map to your brand's story? A lot of the times when you're talking about content, you're talking about the brand messaging architecture, the voice, the tone. What are the brand's goals? What is the brand trying to put out there?

Moz is really good at developing a good brand story. They have Roger that they weave into a lot of things. How does your piece of content go with that brand's story? Again, back to the Moz example, they're about doing better marketing.

My Whiteboard Friday here goes with that idea. So it's really easy for me to make a business case for this piece of content to align with the business. How does your piece of content fit that brand's story?

Then, finally, what phase in the funnel does this piece of content serve?

Because ultimately, at the end of the day, we're always trying to market something. We're marketers. We're trying to move people through the funnel.

So, if you've identified in your content audits that, oh, we're missing a lot of stuff for the decision phase, so this content will specifically speak to that decision phase. Here are all the metrics that go with it. Now, we have a strong business case.

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-prove-roi-potential-of-content-campaigns-whiteboard-friday