Keyword performance monitoring is a long-term practice you’ll want to practice continually. This doesn’t take much time at all, and it will help you keep your PPC and keyword costs (both time and money!) down at manageable levels. All the while, you’re optimizing your website for rising trends and new opportunities.

Using Google Analytics to Track and Manage Your Keywords

If you’ve somehow gotten this far without having Google Analytics installed on your website, get that done pronto! After a few weeks of use, you should have a good amount of data in Google Analytics to refer to. Monitoring your keyword performance can be a breeze with this software, as long as you know how to use it effectively.

Under Traffic Sources in Analytics, you’ll find traffic results that can be sorted by traffic sources (including search) and the keywords that brought visitors to you. With Webmaster Tools enabled, Search Engine Optimization queries and landing pages are also trackable.

Clicking through to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic should be the first major stop on your keyword-monitoring trip. This will show you all of the keywords visitors used to arrive on your site, and other detailed information about their visit. You can sort this information by:

• The number of visits each keyword produced
• The average length of your visitors’ stay per keyword
• The average number of pages viewed per visit
• The percentage of new visits to return visits
• The rate at which visitors leave your site after arriving from a keyword (drop off)

Understanding Performance: The Anatomy of a Successful Keyword

Generally speaking, successful keywords in Google Analytics have a few specific traits:

• They should produce lots of visitors.
• The visitors should view many different pages on your website upon arrival.
• They should spend a significant amount of time on-site.
• They should attract more new visitors than repeat visitors.
• They should have a low bounce rate.

That doesn’t mean a keyword is unsuccessful if it doesn’t have all of these traits. Any combination of two or three of these traits can indicate a valuable keyword you should continue to pursue. You should ask yourself which traits you value the most, and which traits produce the most conversions. Do you want people to spend a lot of quality time reading your fresh content?

With Goals established in Google Analytics, you can even monitor conversions involving a visit to a webpage—like a visitor hitting the “thank you” page after a purchase, or after subscribing to a newsletter. These conversions can be measured in your Goals, or by setting an Advanced Segment. Ron Jones at Clickz.com has an excellent explanation of how you can use Google Analytics to keep closer tabs on your keyword performance.

Monitoring Keyword Success in AdWords

Using AdWords to monitor your keywords’ success is another useful tool, though this will likely be more straightforward. When you look at your PPC campaign keywords, you’ll find similar results to those you might find in Google Analytics. These will all have a relative cost associated with them.

If you’ve gotten your conversions and sales opportunities synced up to Google Analytics and Google AdWords, you can easily estimate the cost per conversion for each of your PPC keywords, and decide which keywords are worth continuing and which ones should be cancelled. Other consumer intelligence data you might collect on your own (like exit surveys asking about keywords and likeliness to convert) can also play into your decisions to continue, start, or stop certain PPC keywords.

Google has provided their own basic rules for keyword optimization in AdWords. Decide which of your goals are most important to you, and follow Google’s instructions to get the most out of your AdWords results. For a second opinion, you can refer to Howard Tseng’s AdWords and PPC Campaign Optimization strategies and Neil Spencer’s guide to improving your AdWords Quality Score to get better ad placement in search results.

The Most Important Rule of Keyword Research

Keyword research isn’t a one-and-done thing you do when you first start a new site. Keyword research is continuous!! Whether you check daily, weekly, or monthly, you need to check your keyword performance regularly. High-performing keywords one month might not produce the same results the next month.

The internet and search engines are a very fluid market, and search behaviors are changing all the time. As more internet users access search engines on their phones and see paid and unpaid results on their other non-PC devices, the face of search engine advertising will continue to change, and keyword optimization will become more important than ever.

What are some of your favorite tools and resources for keyword research?

SearchEngineLand’s Jenny Halasz has an excellent set of questions on how to research keywords. I’ve turned the tables on these so you can ask yourself these questions and get good results, and I’ve provided a hypothetical example to help step you through the thinking behind each step.

How would you describe what your business does to someone that has never heard of you?

If you sell golf lessons, you might think that it’s a good sales pitch to tell customers that your lessons “will keep players off of the range and on the course,” or that they’ll “sink more birdies and play under par.” How many people seeking golf lessons would search for those terms, though? Wouldn’t a beginner be more likely to search for “improve your golf swing” and “become a better golfer?”

Part of online marketing is appealing to visitors that have no idea who you are and what you do, even if your products and services are specialized for a particular audience. Cut through the jargon and buzzwords in your content development, and focus on keywords that are accurate and universally understood. Building a real-world “elevator pitch” will help you focus on the keywords and phrases that matter the most in your business.

How are your offerings special? What makes your products or services stand out from your competitors?

If you take pride in selling golf lessons that are half the price of competitors’ golf lessons, your keywords can become more focused and more valuable. Instead of focusing on optimizing for “golf lessons,” you can now focus on optimizing for “cheap golf lessons.”

Stating your core values and competitive edge will help you with keyword targeting: getting specific, higher-conversion keywords out of your generic keyword lists. Fewer people may search for “cheap golf lessons,” relative to “golf lessons.” By simply adding “cheap,” it implies that they want to convert on something cost-effective, which is exactly what you offer.

What are some similar products or services that you don’t see as a competitor?

Your golf lessons would be impossible without a good set of golf clubs and golf balls—suddenly your keyword possibilities open up to include all of the various pieces of equipment your customers will need. You’ll need a venue to boot, so you can optimize your golf lesson keywords to specific local courses, driving ranges and pro shops, as well.

Complimentary products and services make excellent alternative keywords. These will help you pull visitors in from sources you might not normally tap into, and they will give you additional content marketing material to work with.

What are your most profitable products or services? Which services do you focus on the most, when, and why?

If you make the most money from your two-week golf classes, you can optimize your keywords and advertisements to attract people towards that package. You’ve enticed them with your best deal, but if they don’t have the time or money for two weeks, or want something more intensive and longer, you can provide other packages.

Even if you offer other services, you should devote the majority of your resources to promoting your most valuable packages. This ensures that the traffic you attract comes into your website already interested in your best product. Getting new visitors on-site is your biggest challenge. Remember that visitors can browse your other offerings once they arrive.

What are your ten most important keywords?

Are your golf lessons offered to people within a certain distance of you? Which cities do those people live in? Do you want to emphasize your low prices? Do you offer discounts for students? Might you potentially want to rank for golf equipment in the future, or are golf lessons the only product you want to offer in the long-term?

Determining your top ten keywords forces you to prioritize what’s most important to your business, and it will help you determine the keywords you believe will help you achieve your goals most effectively.

Turning Your Keyword List into a Keyword Strategy: Long Tail and Generic Keywords

Now that you’ve got a list of well-planned and thoroughly brainstormed keywords, it’s time to find the ones that will do the most work for your website. Do you have enough long tail keywords?

“Long tail” keywords are longer than your typical one or two word generic keywords, and they help you focus on attracting traffic from customers that are more willing to convert. Fewer people will search for these longer keywords, but long tail keywords help you earn more valuable conversions. The closer a search user is to your exact long tail keyword in their search terms, the closer they are to wanting to convert on your products and services. Long tail keywords make excellent PPC keywords, as they are not only going to cost you less money each month, but the visitors you get from them are more likely to spend money with you.

More people will search for the shorter, generic one or two word keywords, and these will likely attract more traffic, but not necessarily more conversions. They make bad PPC keywords because they’re more commonly searched, meaning they will be way more expensive per click. Optimizing your web content with these broad keywords doesn’t cost anything, however, and helps you rank better in Google.

That’s a lot to take in for today, so in our next segment, we’ll tackle data-driven keyword research. Only the most experienced content writing service could show you how easy keyword research can really be, so stick with us and we’ll help you buff up your keyword development practices.

Website Content: This is the part we love the most. Content development can be a blast when you write it naturally. Make it something real people can read, not just robots and search engine crawlers. Include keywords sparingly where they fit best—using them for headings, titles, and subheadings when applicable is even better. Just like HigherVisibility.com says, “make your content flow naturally,” and squeeze in a keyword here and there where it’s applicable.

You don’t want to focus too narrowly on just one keyword so much as you want to be relevant to many related keywords. By using a breadth of related keywords, search engines will classify you as an authority in all of your related keywords, meaning you’ll rank better for more keywords, faster. You should also be careful that you don’t stuff your content with keywords, or just make pages with nothing but high-value keywords. Google frowns on this, and it could get your site punished or removed from search results entirely.

PPC Campaigns: PPC campaigns aren’t necessarily more advanced than regular web content, but they take a different set of skills, and enough confidence in your keywords, to start betting on them. With a careful eye for details and a Google AdWords account, you can draw more visitors to your website through sponsored search engine results.

Search Engine Journal’s Wasim Ismail has an excellent guide for getting started with PPC ads. Make sure that your PPC ad has your targeted keyword somewhere within the text, either in the title or the body text. Also, make sure it directs clicks to a page that is appropriate for that keyword. We highly recommend making additional PPC landing pages specifically for similar groups of PPC ads as well. PPC landing pages should be simple, straight to the point, and should be optimized for one or more of the keywords that their respective PPC ad(s) use.

Focus on using more targeted, long tail keywords with the added contextual cues attached to them in your PPC ads. Generic, short keywords might produce lots of PPC ad hits, but not necessarily lots of conversions. Long tail keywords with specific components to them might produce relatively fewer hits overall, but more of them will result in conversions—making them more valuable.

Internal Site Structure: Many SEOs and online marketers still argue the benefits of these optimizations, but we have yet to see compelling evidence of why you shouldn’t optimize the nuts and bolts that make up your website. There are plenty of places you can put keywords that aren’t immediately apparent to your visitors, and are instead tucked away within your website’s HTML code.

Each page of your website has multiple places for text you can use for keyword optimization. Here’s a short list of tags you can use keywords in, and their limitations.

• Title tags: Put your most important keyword phrase in your title tag, or try to use it in the title of a blog post or page header. Making your most important keyword part of the most prominent area of text on the page sends a big signal to search engines that this keyword is important to you.
• Short Lists: You can include a little “short list” at the footer of your website with four or five major keywords. These are visible, and search engines will immediately know what’s most important to your optimization needs.
• Heading tags: When writing web content, like a blog or webpage, you’ll often use heading tags and text formatting to denote emphasis. Separating a section with an tag or formatting will make the formatted text stand out on the page. Adding keywords to these formatted text sections is a good way to signal search engines that these keywords are important to the page they are on.
• Alt Text image tags: Alt text is text you put in place of an image. While the image loads, visitors will see this text displayed. Alt text tells search engines what your image is, since search engines can’t “see” images themselves.
• Anchor text: Whenever you link to another page, it’s best to highlight a group of relevant words and apply the link to them. When a visitor clicks those words, they’ll know that they’re being taken to a website that’s relevant to the words they have clicked. Putting relevant keywords in that link text is another formatting signal of keyword importance to search engines.
• Meta Description: Meta Descriptions are very important; they display a clip of information about your website after a search is performed. Meta Description is the “lead in” to your site, so be sure it accurately summarizes information so that it will attract readers. While Meta Descriptions are not important to search engine rankings, they are vital part of the click-through process. One best practice is to include a keyword in the meta description…or is that because the word should actually be relevant enough that any description would naturally include it? (psst – yes!)
• Keyword Meta tag: Matt Cutts would like to have a word with you. Use the keyword meta tag at your own peril. Meta tags are commonly abused for cheap black-hat SEO gains, and since Matt’s video from 2010, Google now completely ignores the keyword meta tag altogether.

Give these tips a shot, and try to write and create web content that’s optimized with a selection of your highly researched, lead-producing keywords. If writing all these keywords is too much of a chore, just send your keywords to the professionals! Next time, we’ll look at how you can check on your keyword performance with Adwords, Google Analytics, and a little common sense.

Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of any good online marketing campaign. If you have any hopes of making it big on the internet, you’ve got to do your research, and you need to do it right. We’re here to show you how to do it right, from start to finish.

What Are Keywords, and Are They Necessary?

Keywords are more than just the words you describe your website with. Keywords are the words and phrases you anticipate other visitors and customers will use in search engines to find you. Keywords can’t only make sense to you, they have to make sense to everyone else. 90% of internet users will look for information through search engines, and you need to make sure that they can find you by optimizing for the right keywords.

Doing the research and finding the right keywords people will use to find your services is what separates the casual web users from the serious online business people. You have to know where, when, and how to move away from your own short-list of “personal favorite” keywords, and start digging into facts, figures, data points and research on real keywords that perform well. It’s tough, but it’s manageable, and you can do it with the right help.

First Steps: Understanding What Makes A Keyword “Valuable”

Which of these keywords is more valuable? “Cheap golf lessons,” or “golf lessons?”

At first glance, it’s hard to tell. There’s only one word difference between the two, “cheap.” If you had to value one phrase over the other, surely “cheap golf lessons” would be the better keyword. It conveys intent and purpose. Plus, who doesn’t like a discount?

When you look at the actual data in software like Google’s Keyword Research Tool, you might be surprised. “Golf lessons” is such a widely used keyword, you could spend far too much money on PPC ads with it. Trying to rank for this keyword is too difficult because it sees millions of searches each month—and millions of other sites are competing for those search results. It isn’t worthless, but the alternative is more appealing.

“Cheap golf lessons” is more specific, and sees a fraction of the monthly searches that its more general alternative does. Although it could be a more cost-effective PPC keyword, you might see more conversions from this keyword by using it in your content marketing optimizations. Both of these keywords could be great for on-site blog writing and content generation. If you had to choose one or the other to spend money on in a PPC campaign, the more specific the keyword, the better.

There is a difference between a keyword and a valuable keyword: a valuable keyword sends people that are more willing to convert on your products to your website, pre-qualifies visitors with added context in phrases, and helps you convert more and faster on higher-quality search results. High-value keywords might be longer than the generic keyword you initially thought you would use, but they will produce more conversions and will result in much lower PPC advertising costs overall. A plain old keyword chosen without research or strategy might eventually do all of that. If you’re lucky.

Keyword Research Is Absolutely Vital

When you get down to it, keywords are easily the most important part of your online marketing strategies. They determine how people will find you, how visible you are online, and how relevant you are in related searches. Finding valuable keywords is part scientific exploration and part creative planning, and finding valuable keywords is crucial to SEO success. Knowing how to use keywords is another valuable skill, and overdoing it can get you in trouble.

Over the next few posts, I’ll be exploring these steps further and teaching you how to get started on in-depth keyword research like the pros. After that, we’ll look at best practices for content generation: how you can use those keywords to create effective, organic, search engine optimized content that pulls customers directly to you.

Just last week, AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old explored what many other SEO and online marketing experts have suspected for some time: quality content and how your visitors engage with it really is being factored directly into your search results. In his post “Reading May Influence AuthorRank,” AJ has given everyone in the SEO industry a good look at the nuts and bolts of Google’s AuthorRank features.

This is all pretty technical stuff, but if you can wrap your head around the basics, you’ll see just how important this could be for your future search rankings.

How Quality Content and Author Rank Could Boost Your Search Traffic

The new feature that AJ explored in Google Search he’s calling “Authorship Bounce.” The feature is designed to help people keep exploring an author’s posts after they leave a website. On his post he says that the steps he took to reproduce the new results were complicated, but the idea behind the new feature is fairly simple and straightforward. Here’s how Authorship Bounce results would work in an ideal situation.

You (the visitor) search for a term or phrase you want to know more about. You find an article, click it, then spend a fair amount of time reading. You want to go back to Google to find something else, so you click the Back button on your browser. When the browser page reloads, Google has magically returned a new set of results from that same author, encouraging you to read more of what they’ve written.

Ideally, you would explore the author’s other posts as they were presented to you by Google. The time you spend on these pages sends a signal to Google that the content is valuable, high-quality material. Google awards the author with a higher AuthorRank, which factors into their overall PageRank, which in turn sends their content higher up to the top of search results.

Tests Show That This Feature Isn’t Perfect, But It’s Still Important

For one thing, AJ had a difficult time even making this result pop back up until he figured out what triggered it. This could be because of Google’s live search testing process, outlined in an official 2006 blog post: only a tiny percentage of all searches have live tests of new features appear in the subsequent results. Further investigation with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool revealed that the Authorship wasn’t correctly attributed most of the time, and that the new feature attempts to relate authors to content by following a simple “by (author name)” format rather than looking deeper (or smarter) at a page.

This isn’t a permanent feature yet, and not everyone will see this while it’s being tested, but AJ’s stumbled upon a major development that sheds light on how Google wants AuthorRank to ultimately behave in search algorithms. We already know that AuthorRank is going to be a major ranking factor in the future, even though major brands are still catching up and losing clicks to other writers in the meantime.

Instead of simply rewarding search placement based on keyword optimization, pretty page design and sheer volume of conversions and visitors, Google is making their search algorithms smarter. Google wants to make sure that they’re not pointing their users to bad content that isn’t valuable, and will use metrics like overall reading time to determine the intrinsic “value” of an article. In the near future, you’ll see articles rise to the top of search results based on how truthful, how valuable, and how useful they are to you, rather than how crafty their SEM and keyword optimizations are.

Google’s Looking For Good Behavior

Tying all of your articles and content together with your G+ Author profile will show Google that you’re serious about providing quality content to their search results. As you produce more content, you will build a reputation with Google through your G+ that will help you and your writings rocket to the top of your search results quickly and easily.

You can’t just have any content though: it has to be valuable and useful to readers in the first place. That’s why our writers and editors adhere to impeccably high work standards and only produce the best content for your website. Our content can boost your search results now, and it will only make your rankings go higher as Google relies more on quality signals to separate the best from the rest. Investing in our writing services now is an investment in the future of your Google rankings. Let us know how we can help you build a rock-solid foundation for excellent search results with our top-shelf content today.

Have you been searching for a technical writer to help you reorganize and repackage complex information? Are you having a tough time putting complicated information into words your customers can understand? Need to facilitate better communications between your business and other professionals? That’s where technical writers come in. There are all sorts of freelance technical writers ready to help you make your technical information easier to manage.

Technical writers have a few aces up their sleeve that they won’t tell clients about. There’s a certain “mystery” to technical writers and what they actually do, and having a better understanding of what you need and what qualifications your content deserves will help you make a more informed decision when hiring a technical writer. Technical writers are valuable assets, but one size certainly doesn’t fit all when it comes to finding the right person.

Here are six little-known facts about the Technical Writing profession—facts you need to know to make the most out of your time with a technical writer.

Technical Writing Is More Common Than You Think!!

It’s a common misconception that “technical writing” is reserved for mathematics, computers, and advanced sciences. Technical writing includes everything from advanced reports and studies in computational and scientific fields, educational manuals, environmental science reports, and even further into things like instruction manuals, customer help resources, and business reports. Not all technical writing is about technology—recipes are one example of non-technical technical writing.

If you need someone that can parse complex information into words that non-technical individuals can understand, you need a technical writer. A classic example of common technical writings would be the “Dummies” book series, like “Microsoft Word for Dummies,” or “Cooking for Dummies.” Technical writing explains what makes sense to some of us, to the rest of us. Nothing terribly complex about that, is there?

Technical Writers Bridge the Gap between SME’s and Everyone Else

No writer can produce written material in a vacuum, and this especially applies to technical writers. When technical writers are researching and assembling information, they refer to Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) in the field for vital details and critical information. SME’s have information that people need to know, and technical writers specialize in organizing their material, anticipating that need for detailed information, and reaching out to experts ahead of time.

The ability to cross that chasm and bring highly trained experts together with laymen consumers and clients is why technical writers are so incredibly valuable in today’s society. As our world becomes more complex, we need people that not only understand it, but can help others understand it as well. Not only do technical writers work with SME’s, they can also become an SME in their field. If your business and your content marketing hinges on your own good reputation and extensive knowledge, becoming an SME is great for social media marketing.

Technical Writers Capitalize On Being Thorough

In order to help non-technical people understand technical concepts, technical writers have to be organized. I’m not talking having separate slots for ingoing mail and outgoing mail on their desk, either. Technical writers have to handle complex information and figure out how to present it logically, in ways that make sense and can be easily followed.

Advanced science is about as clear as mud to most people. A good technical writer could walk an untrained layperson through not only the technical properties and findings of advanced scientific findings, but they can also explain the significance and meaning that these results have on the field, and on the reader. Being organized enough to identify and catalog each step and each individual finding is an absolute necessity.

Technical Writers Understand their Audience

This holds true for all kinds of writers, but especially technical writers. When documenting an assignment, technical writers have to consider the level of understanding their readers will have for the materials they’re reading.

If a technical writer is producing scientific materials for a scientific community, they might use advanced jargon and technical language with the presumption that their audience will naturally understand it. If a technical writer is producing the same scientific materials for consumers or non-technical individuals, they might tone the writing down and use more familiar, non-technical terminology, or they might provide a wealth of footnotes and a thorough glossary of terms and their definitions.

Docsymmetry’s “Audience Analysis the Easy Way” breaks the technical writing audience analysis process down into easily understood concepts, and is definitely worth taking a look at.

There Are Different Kinds of Technical Writers

The ability to relate to different audiences is why not all technical writers are created equal. Some may specialize in parsing information for nontechnical audiences. Others may specialize in advanced documentation and composition. Knowing the distinction can help save you time, money, and headaches when choosing a technical writer that suits your needs.

What’s more, some technical writers don’t even write! Many technical writers act as editors, reviewing material produced by actual professionals and helping them organize and clarify their writings. Other technical writers specialize in content generation, where they are the primary author and researcher.

Good Technical Writers Use Content Marketing Techniques

Last but not least, technical writers understand the value of text formatting, spacing, and emphasis. Good technical writers can divide their writings into more easily-understood blocks of material by using emphasized lines, subheadings, visual layout cues and other tricks content marketers use. Technical writers know they have the same tools and skills content marketers do, and some jokingly move over to “the dark side” for extra work.

Technical writers understand the value of making online content easier to read—partly because it makes sense and helps outline logical thought progressions, and also because it’s their job!

These facts aren’t necessarily something technical writers hide from their clients. They’re just a part of the job, and more often than not, technical writers take these points for granted. Technical writers are valuable assets for B2B copywriters and SEO content marketers because they can produce highly valuable, highly accessible content that can do everything. Good technical content can boost search engine results, give your business an authoritative edge over the competition, answer customer questions, and provide valuable knowledge for anyone looking for it.

If you’re in need of a technical content writing service, hire someone that actually cares about your company and your needs first and foremost!!

Google Analytics has tons of awesome features that many people don’t know about. What’s more, even if you know about tools like the Visitor Flow chart, you might not know how it works. At first glance, it might look like a huge connect-the-dots catastrophe just generated on your computer screen. Overlooking this big tangled web is a huge mistake, because it’s one of Google Analytics’ most useful features.

Ready to figure out how to interpret your Visitor Flow? This is another quick and easy Google Analytics tip you’ll be able to use in your business right away.

Visitor Flow, and What It Means For Your Website

Google released Visitor Flow as part of their analytics package back in October of 2011, so it’s still a fairly new feature. When someone arrives at your website, Visitor Flow shows you their referral point, telling you where your visitors are coming from. From there, you can see how many people click a link and go to another page within your site, and how many people leave. The progression continues as long as there are pages visitors continue to go to, showing just how far some users explore into your website.

For business owners, this information is an absolute godsend. Visitor Flow takes the individual analytics for each webpage on your site and shows you how customers relate all of them to one another. Understanding how people use your website means you’ll understand what pages are effective traffic sources and which ones aren’t. Visitor flow can show you very quickly whether or not your website is streamlined and optimized for conversions, and what you can do to improve your website.

Digging Into Your Visitor Flow For Real Insights is Easy!!!

If you’re savvy with analytics, you may only need to open the Visitor Flow window to see the information you want to see. The leftmost column shows you traffic sources. Hovering your cursor over each subsequent column will show you how many people landed on this page, how many people left your website after arriving here (in red) and how many people clicked through to another page. The green dropdown menu above the sources column lets you filter your sample size down by different data categories. With this source dropdown bar, you can see for yourself if your social media posts contribute to conversions, or how well your search and PPC campaigns are working for you.

If you want more detailed answers, you can “zoom in” on specific traffic groups simply and easily. Below the Visitors Flow title, the dropdown menus help you filter your data down to what you need to see most. You can divide your traffic into new and returning visitors, or based on the source they’ve come from. Dividing your traffic into logical groups will let you analyze visitor behaviors at a detailed level, giving you a greater understanding of how “usable” your webpages are based on where your visitors come from.

The Level of Detail slider will also let you expand or reduce all the squiggles and flow paths. You can see each and every individual visitors’ path, or you can scale down to the largest, most effective paths your traffic is following. Seeing where the majority of your traffic tends to move will show you what works best on your website, and will show you how you can improve those paths for better conversions.

As you tinker around with the flow interface, you’ll begin to see trends emerge that help you optimize and develop your content strategies. Do a disproportionate amount of your visitors leave after a page they should be converting on? It’s time to redo that conversion page. Are they dropping out of your website before they even reach an opportunity to convert? Maybe it’s time to tighten that conversion funnel up and drop some extra fluff. Caitlin vonHedemann from Spectate.com has more on how you can interpret your Visitor Flow results and really work wonders with them on your website.

As someone that has used all sorts of software and digital tools as a professional for years, I can assure you that you’ll eventually get the hang of analyzing and acting on your Visitor Flow just by playing with it every now and then. Have you had success with Visitor Flow recently? If you aren’t using it now, are you going to start?

When you ask most business owners and beginning online marketers what a “Sitemap” is, you usually get two responses. “What’s that?” or “That’s just too complicated for us.” Sitemaps for your website aren’t impossible to make, and they certainly aren’t a waste of time. To understand why you need to make your own Sitemap today, you need to understand what they are and how they work.

Today I’m taking an in-depth look at what makes a Sitemap so valuable to anyone’s website, and how you can make one in about five minutes. This is definitely an opportunity you should leap on if you’re trying to improve your website!

The Basics: What Is a Sitemap?

The short answer: a Sitemap (with a capital S, according to Google) is a piece of extra site information that tells search engines more about your website. Your Sitemap tells Google how your website is structured, how it functions, and how to sort and categorize your own traffic.

Your website is indexed and ranked by automatic search engine crawlers, not real people—and in order to get better, more accurate search engine placement, you need to work with those automatic crawlers and tell them everything they want to know and then some. If you scratch their back, they’ll scratch yours: by giving search engine indexing systems better information, they’ll know how to best use your information, resulting in better, more relevant results from your search engine performance.

Sitemaps come in two styles: a human-readable site index gives your actual visitors a convenient location to click to all of the major webpages on your site. An XML Sitemap is more thorough and designed more for search engine information. By indexing your XML Sitemap, web crawlers can more accurately organize and index your website, which will help them deliver more search engine traffic directly to you. We’re looking at the XML style today. These aren’t difficult to make with the right tools, and require zero web coding experience.

Building Your XML Sitemap Is As Simple As Pressing Start

Producing an XML Sitemap couldn’t be easier. There are dozens of free tools online that will generate one for you, or let you download a tool that walks you through the same process. Google has an extensive list of XML Sitemap generators you can choose from, or you can skip the tough choices and try xml-sitemaps.com and GSiteCrawler. You might not even need one of these generators if your website or blog can produce RSS feeds, but keep on reading to see why.

Once you’ve got a Sitemap generator selected, you don’t have to do too much to get your Sitemap file. Input your full web address and adjust any settings you feel are applicable to your website. “Change frequency” is one you should pay attention to: if you publish lots of content multiple times each day, you might want to set your update frequency to Hourly. If you update your site or your blog only a few times throughout the week, Weekly would be best. If you only update a few times each month, Monthly update frequency is fine. Telling search engines how often they should update your search index can dramatically boost your SERPs results, so choose a setting that best fits your update behaviors.

Once everything is set up, click the start button and your XML Sitemap generator will get to work. This is where the “almost” five minutes comes in: it takes less than that to do these steps, but then you have to wait. Depending on the size of your site and the number of pages you have, it could take a few seconds or half an hour to complete. Leave it running and come back to it later, because once it’s done, you can save the finished .xml file and use it right away.

It’s Time To Release Your XML Sitemap Into The Wild

After generating an XML Sitemap file, you need to put it into a few places. First and foremost, it needs to go on your website. If you have access to your web server (which you should!!), upload your .xml file to the top-most directory. This is where your homepage file sits—you shouldn’t be in any folders and there shouldn’t be any other folders “ahead” of this location. Upload your XML Sitemap to this location and it’s good to go. On their next indexing pass, search engine crawlers will see this file and add it to their information about your site.

The next step is to submit your XML Sitemap to search engines. All standard search engines accept XML Sitemaps, and Google accepts other file formats as well. If your blog system produces an RSS or Atom feed and all of your updates regularly occur on that blog, you can simply submit that feed to Google as your blog’s Sitemap without using an XML Sitemap generator.

In Google’s Webmaster Tools, under the Optimization tab, click Sitemaps. Bing has its own webmaster tools you’ll have to sign up for, but submitting a Sitemap to Bing is similar to the Google process, and also submits your XML Sitemap to both Bing and Yahoo! in the process. Submitting a feed or an XML Sitemap to these search engines kind of does their job for them—it alerts their systems that you’ve updated your Sitemap, and they need to update their index information on you.

Once you’ve submitted your XML Sitemap to search engines, you’re done. Pretty easy, right? In about five minutes (give or take!) you’ve got a handy little file that will help you tell search engines exactly how you want them to treat you. If you’re wondering how you could possibly optimize your website further, developing and updating your Sitemap is a good start.

Once you have a Sitemap done, it’s time to plug in content and get your site updated! Did you find this helpful? Let us know!!

Social media often seems like a hit-or-miss practice, but with Real-Time Analytics, it doesn’t have to be. If you know how to post to Facebook, and you can understand basic analytics, it’s simple. Today I’m going to take a closer look at how you can use Real-Time Analytics and social media to speed your lead cycle up and encourage visitors to convert.

Social Media and Real-Time Analytics Go Hand-In-Hand

Social media happens at the speed of life. Your Twitter and Facebook information feeds are constantly updating, and it can seem almost insurmountable to market your business on these services without some kind of advanced training. Google published a blog post specifically about measuring social value in Google Analytics, but only with traditional analytics. Monitoring your social media posts by the usual metrics—Likes, favorites, retweets, shares, etc.—doesn’t show you everything you need to know. That’s where Real-Time Analytics comes in.

With Real-Time Analytics, you’ll see clicks, and where those clicks are going. You can watch as people interact with your posts, explore your website, and cruise around on your blog. Looking at what people are doing on the other end of your social media posts is far more valuable to your conversion performance than drumming up some likes or favorites. With Real-Time Analytics, you’re not just letting your message run wild in the open. You can act, watch, and react to how people interact with your brand and your social media efforts.

How To Use Social Media for Business Conversions

Whenever you decide to start up your social media apps and programs, you should start Real-Time Analytics up with it. Take a look at what’s happening on your website before you hop on, and then take note of the changes in your most interesting and engaging content as you start posting to social media. Visitors won’t show up instantly, but you’ll see a gradual uptick in traffic whenever you post to social media: assuming you’re doing it right.

As you watch your real-time results while you tweet, you’ll need to ask yourself how people are interacting with your website. Are they moving into your conversion funnels like you want them to? Are they clicking a conversion link that takes them to another page? Or are they leaving as soon as they arrive? You can think of the traffic you’re watching in real-time as a “test group” that will let you see how effective your website is. If you notice that many of your visitors stop short of converting on the same page, or you notice any other trends in their behavior, you can use that to your advantage when you go back into your website to make improvements.

Another cool tactic is to have social promotional events and react to customer behavior while you do it. Often, social media promotional events involve lots of different posts throughout the day. Instead of pulling content out of thin air, you can watch your real-time metrics with each new post you make, and then focus on what attracts the most attention from previous post reactions. You can also use this information as a supplement when making new target profiles to focus on in future campaigns: your observations can tell you more about the kinds of people that engage with you over social media.

Whether you’re building your brand by yourself, you’re trying to optimize your lead cycle for a larger company, or you’re trying to turn your customers into loyal advocates, you should know from experience just how important it is to react to your customers in real time. With Real-Time Analytics, social media, and compelling content that drives conversions, you can do exactly that. Have you found any cool insights or made any surprising discoveries with Real-Time Analytics?

In one camp, there are search engine marketers that swear by short-term strategies, and that’s how they say they can put any business in the web search spotlight. In another camp, there are content marketers that say long-term strategies are the way to go, and that once you eventually make it to the top, you’ll stay there longer. Zerys emphasizes long-term and “evergreen” content over short term tactics. Then there are others like Evan Carmichael that say the right blend of both is the best solution, and all sorts of differing opinions in between.

I’m not about to try and decide which solutions are more “right” than the others. All you need to concern yourself with is figuring out what works best for you. Let’s take a look at how to use your content marketing analytics to test and measure just how valuable your strategies are in the short-term and in the long-term.

“Short Term” Solutions

Depending on who you ask, “short term SEO” is a dirty word. US Interactive Media says short term SEO strategies “lead to long-term disaster.” Typically, companies sell short term solutions as software packages, because they’ve found a weakness in search engine systems that they can exploit for cheap, easy rankings. Search engines have gotten smarter about this recently, especially with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates. “Hacks” and other tricks will often get you in trouble or even delisted with search engines, so you have to keep your short term solutions honest.

Content curation, social media posts, and PPC campaigns are all effective short-term solutions. Social media moves faster and earns you tons of referrals, PPC makes you show up in search results faster, and content curation gives you the benefit of latching on to current events and interesting content varieties.

Link building is often mentioned by some SEO and SEM strategists as a short-term fix as well, but automated and heavy-handed linking could get you tossed out of search results. Even SEOMoz says link building is no good. Link building should be a natural part of your short-term content strategy: include links where they make sense or when you should cite something for a healthy link profile, and don’t overdo it.

Testing your short-term solutions’ success requires careful research into your Google Analytics, and knowing how to ask the right questions and find the answers you want.

In Google Analytics, check your Overview dashboard. From the time you started your short-term strategies, have your average traffic ratings gone up?

If so, you should check your Traffic Sources Overview dashboard. You can look at your daily and monthly performance, or set your own custom date range.

Click Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals. Where is this new traffic coming from? The Source data will tell you. What landing pages are they arriving on? Click the Landing Page data tab.

Click Traffic Sources > Search > Keyword. Are you appearing in keyword searches you were optimizing for? Click Paid under Search to see if your PPC ads are bringing in traffc. (Looking at your Google AdWords dashboard will tell you more about this.) Have your referrals from social media domains like t.co (Twitter) or Facebook increased? Are you getting more content from outside sources from your curated content? By adjusting a few date ranges, you can plot out and visualize your analytics movement easily in Google Analytics.

A/B and multivariate testing are also an excellent way to measure overall short-term performance in Google Analytics. Search Engine Land has an excellent article on how to do exactly that.

Long Term Solutions

Long term solutions are healthier, and more SEO professionals prefer long-term solutions to short-term fixes. Why? Anything you do as a short-term fix contributes to your long-term plans. Once you post something, it’s going to stay there, and its lifespan will last as long as Google can see it and categorize it when your content is indexed for search rankings.

Long term solutions include value-adding content marketing, search engine optimization, regularly blogging for business, and pretty much any of the aforementioned short-term solutions when they’re practiced consistently. “Unhealthy” short-term solutions can really mess up your long-term goals, but those constant, healthy short-term solutions will only add to your long-term goals.

Testing your long-term solutions’ effectiveness is a similar process to short-term testing, but you’ll have to use a broader date range. Measure three months, five months, and more when you can. If you aren’t seeing a steady increase in your results, something’s not working.

To further examine your long-term improvements, check out Visitors Flow under the Audience tab. This incredibly useful visualization shows you how your users “flow” through your website, how often they leave a page after arriving on it, and where they go on their second, third, fourth pages and so on.

If you’ve established goals in Google Analytics, you can also use the Conversions tab to get a similar visitor flow chart specifically tailored to your various conversion paths. Visualizing your goal funnel activities will show you where your weakest links in the conversion funnel really are. Check out Digital Third Coast’s stellar article on how to monitor your long-term SEO performance for more on this.

If these tips sound deceptively easy, it’s probably because checking all this information is really easy to begin with!! Knowing where to start is half the battle when it comes to managing your own analytics and website improvements. Having quality content that drives long-term success is the other half of that struggle. If you follow this list and ask the right questions, you’ll master the analytics end in no time. And with help from our talented writers, you’ll have the other half of the equation covered!

Content marketing is a big investment of time, effort, and money. Just about anyone blogging for business can appreciate that, even online marketing veterans. Sometimes you just want to let somebody else put new material up on your blog. If you think it’s just a pipe dream, think again: not only is this a viable solution to adding extra content to your blogroll, it’s recommended!!

Inviting bloggers and professionals outside your business to contribute guest posts to your blog is an excellent way to fill your editorial calendar and improve your website performance. Outside voices contributing to your blog will help you build authority in your field, and that authority will help you boost your SERPs placement in no time. Many of the biggest names in the online marketing industry make the most of guest posts. SEOMoz created the YouMoz blog, an entire standalone blog for SEOMoz users to share their insights with the community at large. Check out our interview with Straight North about how our peers handle guest posting, too!

As great as guest posts are, you can’t just go off inviting all manner of guests into your blog without some serious planning ahead of time. Here’s how to do it right the first time, every time.

Take A Look At Your Most Successful Content

Google Analytics is absolutely your go-to solution for online insights, and that’s true for guest posting too. For this to work, we have to assume that you’ve been practicing healthy, consistent content marketing practices for some time now. If you browse over to the Content tab of your Analytics dashboard, click Site Content, then All Pages, you’ll get a detailed breakdown of your most popular content within the timeframe you’ve indicated. Be sure you set your timeframe to a span of multiple months to get a long-term look at what content is most successful over the long-term for your needs.

The URLs you see are all your most-trafficked webpages. You can navigate out to those using the arrow icon next to a URL string just to see what it refers to. Whether you take a sample from your top five pieces of content, or your top fifty, these are your most popular pages. You’ll want to start taking notes here. What are your most widely-visited content pages about? What keywords did you optimize for in each piece? By selecting different Primary Dimensions, directly above the results table, you can answer all of these questions and create a detailed summary of what your successful content is “about.”

Be sure to take a look at KISSmetrics’ guest posting primer for more details on how to use Google Analytics to measure and identify your most valuable topics, sources, and contributors.

Plan Out How You Can Develop Authoritative Content

Once you know what content you need to focus on, you can start developing a post calendar focusing just on this successful series of topics. Part of this calendar development should be a plan to increase the amount of content you publish that’s related to you successful content. How do you push more content out than you’re used to, though? By filling in the holes with content curation, guest posting, and other supplementary content.

Estimate about how much content you can produce on your own related to your specialty topic of choice, and then assume that guest bloggers can produce the same amount as you can. (Guest bloggers are busy people too, after all!) Then start filling in gaps and additional publishing spaces with guest posts and curated content. Once you have a filled content calendar, you can determine from the number of guest posts about how many guest posters you’ll need to find.

Find Bloggers and Professionals That Specialize In Your Successful Content

Once you know how many guest bloggers you need, it’s time to find them. This isn’t very different than finding material to curate content with, but involves the extra effort of reaching out to these writers and inviting them. There are plenty of useful sites and communities for finding guest post authors. You can post open invitations on your website for guest bloggers, cruise around on Pinterest for opportunities, or your visitors may opt in to be considered for a position themselves!

Contact blog authors and professionals you think are worth your time, and offer them a guest blogging opportunity. (Highlighting your average visitor count each month is a good incentive to bring people on board!) Give them a clear assignment, a keyword list you’re focusing on, and a due date. It’s often best to give guest bloggers a good two weeks’ notice, and if you can, detailed assignments with topics you’d like them to specifically write about. They are doing this for little or no compensation, after all—make it as easy as possible to get your work done!

These Strategies Grow On Themselves Over Time!

With a team of guest blog writing specialists feeding your blog with additional content, your website will become an authoritative resource online in no time. By producing more content in less time on topics you already are attracting traffic for, you’ll quickly become an authoritative voice, and more search users will look to you and your collection of relevant, professional blog posts for the information they need.

What’s more, after your first set of guest posts ends, you can repeat this process and evaluate what guest posts produced the most results, allowing you to further optimize and develop new content for the next cycle. Looking for more consistent work from guest posters that want your blog to succeed? Hire some of the best guest posters around!

This is a great example of how NOT to keyword research, but it’s the approach many small businesses still take today. Haphazard keyword research is usually a result of just not knowing enough about how search engines work, and it can be a very costly mistake. This is exactly why businesses hire SEO and content writing services to help reorganize their online efforts! SEO’s have a tough time convincing new clients there’s more to the process than just what you see on the surface.

Today we’ll do exactly that, and take a closer look at the work you’ve got to put into your keywords to capitalize on your conversions.

Looking Before You Leap: Keyword Researching Basics

That bad example of keyword selecting isn’t entirely useless…it’s just the first step in a long process. You’ll need to cook up a basic set of keywords you want to focus on going into your research. Brainstorming hinges on a couple of fundamental ideas:

• Your keywords should be relevant to your business and your content
• Your keywords should be related to what potential visitors are looking for from your company
• Your keywords should be accurate descriptions of what customers will find when they click through
• Your keywords need to be in line with your overall goals—to produce cost-effective conversions or sales from traffic each keyword brings you.

Once you have your basic list, it’s time to start digging. There are a few ways to do this, and I want to look at two of the most popular methods.

Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool

Google AdWords has one of the most powerful keyword research tools available for all AdWords users. Anyone can sign up for AdWords and use its wealth of information to their advantage, and their Keyword Research Tool is part of the entire free package.

Simply plug in your keyword, and you’ll get a detailed list of relevant keywords and phrases spun off of your original entry. You’ll also see the “Competitive” ranking for each word or phrase, along with the number of monthly global and local searches.

You’re tapping into the collected search knowledge of the world’s most trafficked search engine for your research: all the results come directly from Google’s own search data. This is excellent intelligence you can use towards your keyword decisions. To back up your findings, you can also use Google AdWords Traffic Estimator and Google Trends to compare, simulate, and measure your best keyword options.

SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tester

SEOmoz is one of the most trusted names in SEO and conversion optimization strategies, and their Keyword Difficulty Tester gives you more detailed, advanced information that AdWords won’t. Instead of just a relative word ranking for difficulty, you get an actual percentage of difficulty you’ll come up against in optimizing for a keyword. You can also see detailed results for the pages that rank for those keywords, the domain authority and page authority scores you’re up against, and all sorts of other good data points.

SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tester hooks into Google’s data using their Search Keyword API, so you’re getting the same quality of data you would get from AdWords, but with more in-depth results. The depth and value you get comes with a price tag: the Keyword Difficulty Tester is limited to Pro accounts now, so you’ll have to get one for your business or agree to share one with someone…or just hope it’s released to the public again soon.

Other Keyword Testing Tools

There are plenty of others out there, like Microsoft AdCenter’s Keyword Generation Tool, Wordtracker, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and many more. If you aren’t happy with Google or SEOmoz, you can shop around for the best fit for your business. Keep in mind that many of these alternative tools use search engine data from Bing, Yahoo!, Dogpile, and other less-trafficked search engines.

I’ve Got All This Data…Now What?

From these results, you can narrow down your keyword focus to a few phrases you want to work on. You can choose a blend of highly competitive and not-so-competitive keywords, and some in between for a wider spectrum of optimization results, or focus on optimizing for easy-entry keywords to shoot for more returns in a less competitive space. Whatever you do, you don’t want to aim for the wrong set of keywords and end up spending more money on ads and optimizations that don’t turn into better conversions for you.

You can set up keyword tests in Google AdWords by making your PPC ads show up for “exact match” searches, then watch your click-throughs and conversions each month. Be warned: you can potentially lose money doing this if you aren’t careful. These are pay-per-click ads, after all! so don’t focus on a keyword that’s so broad that it attracts way more clicks than conversions. After you’ve gotten a nice data sample over a couple weeks of testing, you can evaluate exactly how “valuable” your search results are based on your conversions from each keyword or PPC ad.

Words of Advice

• Be sure you incorporate “long tail” keywords into your optimizations. Broad, “popular” keywords don’t account for the one-off searches that are three, four, or more words long. If you look for these long tail results in your analytics and focus on them in your future optimizations, you’ll be sure to capitalize on your efforts if and when that long tail keyword comes up again.
• SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin had an interesting find in his article “Be Careful Using AdWords for Keyword Research.” He essentially found that Google AdWords doesn’t necessarily show you the keywords that are best for you, just the searches that are highest numerically. You’ll have to follow his tips on how to dig further into AdWords for your more valuable keywords.
• Semantic keyword research is something you ought to consider if keyword research is something you enjoy. That’s a whole different barrel of monkeys that we’ll get into soon.

Let us know if our blog helped you improve your keywords!

Last week, the Google Analytics Team sent out an email explaining new features to their Real-Time data. If you manage your own site analytics using Google Analytics, you’re familiar with just how useful the service can be. You might not be familiar with their Real-Time Analytics feature, a well-kept secret that can give you a totally different perspective on your website.

Real-Time Analytics lets you see exactly what’s happening on your website live, in real time—hence the name! You can see how many people are browsing your site, which pages are being viewed, where they’re from, and how they found you all on one easy to read, constantly updating dashboard.

If you didn’t know about Real-Time Analytics, you can check it out by going to the Home screen on your Analytics dashboard by clicking the button on the top bar, then click Real-Time Analytics. You’ll see a live monitor of what’s happening on your website at the moment. Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s what the new Real-Time Data Segmentation feature allows you to do with your site data, and how you can use it to improve your website’s performance.

Live Visitors Can Show You What Works and What Doesn’t Work

Watching your visitors cruise around your website in your Real-Time dashboard is the digital equivalent of peering over their shoulder, and you can gain a lot of insight into how your website “works” for them by keeping an eye on their behavior.

When a visitor arrives, you’ll see the page they’re on pop into the Top Active Pages list. If you’re running a campaign or publishing new content, you should see lots of people arriving on that piece of content. If they’re supposed to click through to another website, and many of them aren’t following through, it may mean that they aren’t interested in the offer you’re making them…or it could mean something is wrong with your promotion.

Social media is another great example of using Real-Time data to measure your success. Whenever you post a new Tweet or Facebook post, if it directs people back to your website, you can see exactly how many people act on it immediately after you publish it. Watching visitors arrive on your website after publishing to social media is exciting…watching them explore the rest of your site or click into a conversion funnel is even more exciting!

Google Helps You Dig into Your Data as It Happens

Just a week from yesterday Monday, Google’s own Justin Cutroni summed up the new features in Real-Time analytics on his Google Plus page. Previously you just had a broad overview of your site’s live performance, and although you could organize this data based on what was most important, you couldn’t drill down into it for specific insights.

With these new segmentation features recently rolled out in Google Analytics, you can now do exactly that. If you want to know how much exposure you’re getting from a particular geographic region, you can look at your performance by geographic location. If you’re curious as to how well your content performs in regions you’re targeting, you can watch who finds you, and how they’re finding you. Want to know how you can improve your organic search results for your hometown? Just take a look at how people find you throughout the day within your region.

No matter how big or small your business is, content marketing is all about knowing your visitors, and knowing how to provide them with what they need. What better way to figure that out than to watch them live, actively interacting with your business online? With Real-Time Analytics and its new features, you can do exactly that.

It’s tough to explain in words just how cool Real-Time Analytics really is, so check it out for yourself if you have the chance. Let us know how you make use of GA Real-Time in your business!

If your website is too difficult to use, or your potential customers aren’t able to navigate their way to your conversion opportunities, it doesn’t matter how much optimization you do. You could have the highest search ranking on the planet, or the biggest wealth of awesome content, and still not see your conversions rise if your website is too tough to figure out.

Conversion optimization is a little-known practice that small business owners and marketers can use to make their websites perform excellently. Here’s a list of our five favorite optimization products and services you can use to quickly reorganize your site for better conversions, or steadily hone your presence in the long-term for consistently better results.

Google Analytics Content Experiments

Formerly known as the Google Website Optimizer, Google Analytics Content Experiments is a free, easy way to run A/B and multivariate tests with your Google Analytics-enabled website. You can run up to five different versions of a page, then determine which of the five produced the most conversions.

Pros: It’s FREE!! And it’s built in to Google Analytics, something just about every SEO loves. You’re in complete control.

Cons: You’ll have to crank webpage variations on your own: no easy menus, no simplified WYSIWYG editors. Total control is kind of a downside, too: you have to interpret your own data without any simplified, “pretty” metrics.

Small Business Notes: If you’re a web developer or you at least know your hand around a site editor, you can use Content Experiments to your heart’s content. If you’re not technologically-inclined, you should maybe choose a more expensive, simplified conversion optimization system.

KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics is all about digging up actionable data you can use instantly. With KISSmetrics, you’ll be able to valuate and monitor the potential price of your conversions, and drill your data into actionable metrics you can use to make important decisions. KISSmetrics focuses less on your site data, and more on the people using your site: track visitors’ lifecycles, improve your visitor retention capabilities, proactively A/B test, and see how your improvements contribute to all of your data all at once.

Pros: KISSmetrics is one of the most trusted names in conversion optimization, and their products are perfect for just about any business. Their services help you analyze visitor behavior based on your current data so you can identify patterns that are helping—or hurting—your conversion efforts.

Cons: Their lowest monthly plan is cheaper than most other competitors, but beyond that, prices are higher than average. You most certainly get what you’re paying for, though!

Small Business Notes: KISSmetrics will actively work with you to decide what plan is best for your business during your 14-day free trial. You can also have a demo customized specifically for your business if you’d like.

Optimizely

Optimizely is an awesome WYSIWYG A/B testing suite that lets you visually reorganize your webpages and actively track the results of your modifications. Optimizely makes conversion optimization easy by letting you manage and run A/B content tests quickly and easily on your own.

Pros: Dead-simple drag-and-drop modifications to all your webpages let you reorganize for better conversions on the fly.

Cons: Optimizely is strictly an A/B testing service. If you’re a data person, Optimizely may not provide the wealth of data that other services like KISSmetrics offer. The price tag is also relatively steep if you don’t know what you’re getting into.

Small Business Notes: If you’re in charge of all your own conversion optimizations, this can be an excellent all-in-one optimization suite. No website coding experience required!

UserTesting

UserTesting is an entirely different approach to conversion optimization. Instead of using your website’s analytics data, UserTesting puts a real person in front of your website, and lets you see the results while they simulate a conversion event. Real live people are recorded while they browse your website, and you’re given the user video to determine how you can improve on that visitor’s experience.

Pros: It’s exactly like looking over your real customers’ shoulders as they follow your conversion funnel. You get a full video with audio of the user talking you through their experience from their perspective, along with a written summary of problems they encounter.

Cons: You’re looking at a one-time fee of $39 per visitor, and your results are entirely based on how specific you are when you plan the test. If you’re too vague, you might not get the results you want.

Small Business Notes: If you’re curious for an objective third party’s opinion on your website, this is the place to find that extra input. UserTesting will help make your results as valuable as possible, and if you think you can benefit from their services, it’s worth a shot.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is another visually-oriented optimization app suite. Instead of giving you one-time results from a user, though, CrazyEgg helps you track all of your visitors and plots out a “heat map” of their usage results. With CrazyEgg’s services, you can see where your users click on your website, where their eyes land most often, and what visually engages your customers on each of your webpages.

Pros: Visual user tracking over time can show you exactly where your users go first, what they look at, and where they’re most focused. Analyze your current effectiveness and future modifications and see the results for yourself.

Cons: Your results from CrazyEgg are going to be entirely visual. You’ll have to have the design sense to fix your webpages so users click where you want them to click, and look where you want them to look.

Small Business Notes: CrazyEgg combines the visual aspect of UserTesting results with the data-based results of KISSmetrics. If you want a little bit of real user data and a little visual feedback to give focus to your webpage iterations, this is a great product.

Conversion optimization techniques like multivariate testing and content reiteration are some of the most widely overlooked practices in online marketing today, and using them is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your website’s performance. If your site content isn’t up to par, we can help you write what your customers want to read. If you think your webpage design just isn’t cutting it, one of these services will give you exactly what you need to rake in more conversions each month.

It sounds kind of silly, but this is a serious problem. Writers quickly realize that they can’t always write about what they love, and it usually hits pretty early on in their careers. It makes professionals-in-training upset, frustrated and dismayed, and can even make them doubt their abilities. We’re all writers at Content Equals Money, and we’ve all hit that wall at one point or another. If we’ve learned anything in our careers, it’s that you can most definitely overcome those “impossible” topics and write professionally about anything, even if you aren’t interested. Here’s how.

Develop A Routine For Success

It’s a common misconception that freelancers are all manic, freewheeling jittery types that have all sorts of hidden productivity potential locked up behind unsustainable and ridiculous work ethics, or a lack thereof. We get a bad rap for being the last ones to leave Starbucks, living nocturnal lives by the light of a computer screen between strong doses of caffeine.

I love the Men With Pens’ “Secret to Easy-Breezy Writing,” because it’s so straightforward. Their first suggestion above anything else is to simply make yourself form a routine that works for you. Don’t just roll out of bed and start writing, make yourself stick to a regimented schedule and don’t stray from it.

Get Into (Or Out Of) That Key Moment

Writers often have a “moment” when they’re working on an assignment. When you enjoy what you’re writing, that moment is a celebration of everything coming together. That’s the moment you start to realize your stray thoughts and loose ends are weaving together, and you can see the full “shape” of your article even when it’s only halfway done.

When you aren’t interested in what you’re writing, this moment is a huge groan. All you can do is ask yourself, “why am I doing this?” Your thoughts are all over the place, you’re having trouble bringing it all together, and your piece can become a big jumbled mess. When you have that moment where your concentration crumbles, you’ve got to condition yourself to fight that urge to do nothing and maintain your focus on finishing the task at hand.

Fellow writers over at Toilet Paper Entrepreneur (yes, seriously!) have an excellent list of 63 ways to retain your focus when you’re just about to snap. All these are community sourced from other writers within the TPM community, so you know that even if they sound crazy, these ideas can work for you.

Surround Yourself with Research

If nothing else, content writers are also excellent researchers. High frequency marketing requires lots of new content every week, and that content needs link building efforts in and out of your website. To source that good content and build those links, you’ve got to dig it up first. Content writers usually find themselves building huge collections of tabs and internet browser windows with relevant work information that they want to cite, save for later, or just read over for inspiration…or at least I do. (Right now I have about 50 tabs open!)

This is an excellent way to keep yourself distracted from not wanting to actually do something. Instead of being fixated on what you don’t want to do, focus on finding all kinds of information that will help you get it done. That one missing bit of inspiration that will help you make sense of your dilemma could be just a few clicks away. Copyblogger has some excellent tips on how to be a great researcher that are definitely worth checking out.

Focus On Your Strengths, Not The Assignment

It’s easy for writers to work under the assumption that they’re only truly good at writing what they’re interested in. Prior to, and even during their professional experience, their entire writing background has been largely focused on subjects they’re interested in. When they come upon an assignment they simply aren’t interested in, they think it reflects poorly on them, and that they’re somehow less capable because they can’t seem to write about the topic.

Telling yourself that you’re a good writer despite a “bad” or boring topic is difficult for many writers. Confidence in your own abilities, independent of your subject, is a difficult skill that writers take for granted until they’re given a tough subject. That’s exactly what you have to do, though; and you can do it by writing for your readers, not yourself.

Laurie at The Adventurous Writer has a great set of recommendations on how to conquer boring topics that all relate back to the idea of having confidence in your abilities. You can find new ways to make yourself more interested in the topic, ask intriguing questions and answer them in your writing, or find ways to make the subject more relatable to your audience. All of Laurie’s tips are completely independent of the subject: they focus entirely on your confidence as a writer, and challenging yourself to make a boring topic interesting.

It’s Not Just Indifference: Writers Hate Being Caught Off-Guard

When you get down to it, this problem happens because uninteresting topics catch writers off-guard. Content writers can write for days on their favorite subjects, but writers don’t always get to write about what they love, especially now with the news industry in the state it’s in. That’s true for just about every profession, though: carpenters don’t always get to build their dream homes, musicians don’t always get to record the music they want to play, and business people certainly don’t always manage and sell their favorite products.

But really, comparing an uninterested writer to an uninterested carpenter isn’t a fair comparison to make. Even if carpenters don’t feel like working sometimes, they have plans, blueprints, and a general idea of what lumber goes where. Writers hit a wall when they have a topic they’re not interested in because they often have no meaningful reference point of entry, be it positive or negative, into the subject. It’s kind of like handing a carpenter a toolbox full of plumber’s tools, or handing a musician an instrument they’ve never heard of, and telling them to get to work.

With the right attitude, thorough preparation and steady discipline, writers can make their own blueprints for success with any topic. We have to do it every day, and that’s exactly why our clients love our writing services. If you’re having trouble maintaining a business blog or creating new content for your websites, we know you probably love the topics you want to write about. We want to love those topics too, and after getting to know you and your business personally, we’ll have a better appreciation for what your content means to you—and that’s never boring.

There’s a lot of tech out there, and chances are, nine times out of ten your children know way more about it than you do. That doesn’t mean you should be completely clueless when you make an essential school purchase for your student: if they know so much about this stuff, surely it can’t be that hard, right?

Here’s our handy guide of stuff your college student will absolutely love.

Laptops: Getting The Best Bang For Your Buck

Laptops are an essential part of the school experience now. Your kids are going to have to write papers, do research, and check email during school—not to mention keep up with friends on social media. These are essential for college students, but even high school students are finding that they’re an essential piece of their school experience.

Finding the right hardware to power your collegiate—or college-bound—student’s assignments is absolutely necessary. Here are the vital specs you should look for, no matter what you end up buying.

· RAM: 4GB is recommended for just about everything and will run just about everything you throw at it smoothly. 6 to 8GB is even better. (My high-end work/production PC runs on 8GB RAM, to give you a reference point!)

· Processor: Most retail laptops have Intel Core i3, i5, or i7 multi-core processors. An i3 dual-core would be suitable for students just starting high school. College-bound students will need more powerful processors, like an i5 or i7 quad-core. Processor speed (typically somewhere between 2.8GHz and 3.1GHz) is a basic game of numbers: the faster the better.

· Digital Storage: Just about every laptop on the market comes with 500GB of storage at the minimum. 1TB is double that. More is better than less, so it’s a simple numbers game again. If your student takes lots of pictures or has a massive music collection, they’ll thank you for all the storage space you can get them.

The cool tech guys over at gdgt have rated some of the best laptops on the market, including Apple Macbooks, and you can browse by price and review score before you buy. Definitely check their reviews before making a final decision.

Smartphones: Keeping In Touch, Staying In Style

College students are wild about smartphones. Sure, they’re trendy and new, but they’re also valuable tools for just about every aspect of the college experience. Smartphones are actually becoming educational tools, and more adventurous students are finding ways to enhance their learning experience with smartphone apps that help them practice, study and learn new things.

If you’re looking for a lower-price solution, Android phones are your best bet. Phones like the Samsung Galaxy SIII, HTC One X (which I personally use!), and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the “official” Google phone, are all great choices. If you don’t end up getting one of these, make sure that you get a phone with “Ice Cream Sandwich” or “Jelly Bean,” the latest upgrades to the Android platform. Buying a new phone with an old operating system is awful.

Apple’s popular iPhone is another option, but parents ought to wait if they can for just a little longer. Rumors have it that Apple is going to launch their newest iPhone some time in September, right around the corner. If you want your kids to have the absolute latest, hold off. If you want a better deal on an older device, the iPhone 4 and 4S are still excellent devices and are relatively inexpensive through most carriers.

Tablets: Not Quite A Computer, but More Than a Smartphone

iPads and Android tablets are excellent choices for students looking for a tablet to fill out their gadget collection. These ultraportable devices have bigger screens to handle more work, but have the convenience of smartphone touchscreens built in.

Apple’s iPad is still one of the best-selling tablets on the market, largely due to the popular brand name and reputation for reliable, stable software. Android offerings are comparable in quality and can’t be beat in price, though the overall experience is different. Great Android tablets like the Google Nexus 7, the Transformer Pad 300, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 all offer similar functionality at a fraction of the cost of an iPad.

Apps Make Your Gadgets Perfect Study Tools

No smartphone or tablet is complete without apps that let you use all these neat technologies to your benefit. Here are a few great apps your student can use to turn all their devices into studying machines.

Dropbox is an excellent solution for file storage, and is the easiest cloud-storage system on the market today. Dropbox can sync files across Macs, PCs, tablets, and smartphones for a complete experience. As long as you have a device on you with Dropbox, you’ll never be too far from all those important homework assignments.

MathStudio is a great app that lets you turn your smart devices and your computer into an easy-to-use graphic calculator. $20 for this app is a fraction of the price you might pay for a collegiate graphic calculator, and you’ll have all of the same features at your disposal. Be sure that you clear your devices for use during class before you replace those expensive graphic calculators with your phone, though—colleges don’t like suspicious classroom activity.

We love Evernote at CEM, and it’s just as useful in school settings as it is for our work. It’s like Dropbox, but for notes: sync your notes across all your devices for ease of access from wherever you are. Evernote Peek for the iPad lets you turn your notes into simple study flash cards you can use to prepare for quizzes and tests, to boot.

Odds and Ends For College Students

Sending your kids off to college can be an adventure, and you want to make sure that you send them with everything they need to succeed in all their classes.

If your college-bound student is a heavy sleeper, you can set them up with Clocky. This goofy little robot clock rolls off the night stand and makes all sorts of noise, forcing even the heaviest sleepers to get out of bed to deal with it.

Even brand new college dorms are cramped, and a home-cooked meal is hard to come by when there’s hardly any room to keep food. Fortunately ThinkGeek’s 3 in 1 Breakfast Station solves that problem by cramming breakfast cooking essentials into one tiny footprint. This little cooker can sit on top of a mini-fridge and turn it into a cubby-hole kitchen.

This buying guide is just a start…we’re sure that your college student has plenty of other awesome ideas in mind. Let us know in the comments if there are any unexpected essentials your college student wanted this year!

Are you having a tough time increasing your site’s conversion rate? Business owners rack their brains all the time trying to figure out just how to improve their website, but where do you start? Do you write more blog content? Do you change some design choices? Do you redo some product page content? What’s keeping people from following through and converting on your deals?

If you can’t figure out why your advertising catches more traffic than any of your other pages, but people aren’t making it all the way to the end of your website’s conversion funnel, maybe it’s because they aren’t even going beyond your landing pages to begin with. Maybe the problem doesn’t lie with your website proper, but instead with the landing pages inviting them into your site.

Landing pages are notorious for bad design. These bad designs can actively chase people away from your website, and the choices you make for your landing pages can potentially cut the legs out from under your business conversions if you aren’t careful. Here are some Do’s and Don’ts for landing page success.

DON’T Hurt Your Customers’ Eyes with Bright Colors

Rosetta Stone, one of the most widely used language learning software packages available, has had a major problem with their color coordination over the years. Rosetta Stone’s “primary color,” the color they use for their branding, packaging, brand-related highlights, and just about everything else, is bright yellow. I’m sure there’s some sort of connotation behind the stark yellow they use: color theory dictates that yellow is the color of “happiness, joy, intellect, and energy.”

When Rosetta Stone began adapting their marketing efforts for the internet, they used their trademark yellow for their website’s background color. The result was truly painful: black text surrounded by a large smattering of harsh yellow. Their landing page was not the landing page you wanted to run into in a dark room. On a bright screen, it almost blinded customers.

Rosetta Stone’s Landing Pages, then and now

Rosetta Stone now has more muted, darker colors on their splash pages. They still use their favorite yellow shade, but now it’s reserved for less obtrusive highlights, and not main splash backgrounds. Take some advice from Rosetta Stone’s new designs: it’s a good idea to avoid blowing your customers’ eyes out. You can still use bright colors, but make sure they’re relatively muted. More robust colors should be faded to look white and soft. Darker colors should be muted towards a neutral grey to give them character and make them easy on the eyes. If that makes no sense to you, head to your local art or paint supply store, and they can point you in the right direction.

DO Make Lots of Little Single-Keyword Landing Pages

Sometimes business owners forget that they don’t have to be incredibly conservative with their web space. Web hosting plans today offer tons of storage space for very little every month, and you can usually add huge amounts of space for a little more every month if you absolutely need it. Many business owners tend to be uncomfortable and unfamiliar with this idea, and apply physical limitations they’re used to with stock and products to digital space. Putting everything right in front of the customer works great in physical space, but on the internet, it’s awful.

The best approach to your landing pages is to have lots of little pages that laser-focus on one or two central topics you want to optimize for. If you have fifty different PPC keyword ads, and you direct all of these ads back to the same landing page, you’re going to have to optimize that landing page for fifty different things. That’s about as unhealthy as you can get when it comes to content optimization, and it results in a cluttered mess of links and content mashed together that’s completely impossible to navigate.

DON’T Make Your Landing Pages Too Hard To Use: The UX Solution

When you cram all of your landing page content into one big page, you naturally get that aforementioned cluttered mess of links and content that’s completely impossible to use. Just because you’ve created multiple smaller, leaner pages, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve made your pages any easier to use, though. Ease-of-use optimization goes beyond pure content optimization and dips into user experience designing.

User experience design (or “UX” for short) is so important that there’s an entire UX industry that has sprung up out of website design services. UX engineers are online architects; they look at an entire webpage as a functional unit, and tweak the design based on changes that they believe will be best for their users. UX designers have their own methodology towards content optimization. Take UX Magazine’s article on optimizing landing pages, for example.

In the original landing page, the page only informs the visitor about the company’s achievements and how they can benefit from the company’s actions, without any striking call to action or impressing visual cues. The optimized landing page has striking visual cues, direct explanations of benefits, dynamic text formatting, and repositioned content that makes much more sense for readers.

UX optimization might be a little different and more technically-inclined than pure content optimization, but it adheres to the same basic principles of analysis, testing, and revising your landing page designs. In the article’s example, the entire user experience of the special promotion landing page is enhanced with a combination of content optimizations, visual cues, stylistic reorganization and fundamental objective shifts. In laymen’s terms: UX designers take major creative liberties to change everything about a page, right down to the fundamental objective of what the page should accomplish.

If you are the only person controlling your landing page designs, you should take the same creative liberties with your landing pages to find what works best for your bottom line.

DO What’s Best For Your Landing Pages, Not What’s Best For Somebody Else’s

When business owners aren’t sure how to design something for their website, they look to Google. Not to search around for ideas, even—they look literally at Google for design ideas. Google’s super-minimalistic design aesthetic is something many people appreciate and want to make their own. If you think Google’s minimalistic designs mean that your landing pages all need to be empty, white spaces with little splashes of text and color, you haven’t been paying attention to Google lately.

This sounds obvious, but lots of landing pages are still made this way. They’re short, clunky pages cobbled together from other parts of the parent website proper, or hacked up pieces and ideas stolen from other websites. Finding what’s best for your landing pages takes time, and a willingness to step outside of what works for other websites to find what works specifically for your business. Which leads us to my next point…

DON’T Forget to A/B Test

A/B testing is one of the best things you can do for your landing pages. Assuming you’re using landing pages as a destination for your PPC campaigns, you already have a dedicated traffic source for your landing pages to test with. Landing pages don’t require very much content, and you should be able to turn multiple landing pages around in a relatively small amount of time.

When you A/B test your landing pages, make major changes. Make one landing page that has more text content, and one that has more multimedia content. Make a landing page that has a completely different background color than your others. Make a landing page with a big call to action in the middle of the page, instead of a smaller one tucked in a corner.

Keep a close eye on your testing traffic results. Know how many hits the pages get and how many customers click through to your offers. Once you find something that works, continue tweaking it for maximum effectiveness.

Landing pages are an important part of your overall online marketing plan. PPC ad campaigns have to redirect visitors somewhere, so that somewhere ought to be a site that you have control over, and one that encourages the visitor to convert. If you aren’t developing landing pages, you’ve got to get started on those now. Conversion based copy is part of how landing pages attract new business, and if you’re having trouble developing content that improves your website’s performance, you know who you need to see.

Content scraping is when a website automatically rips your writing off or a blog author knowingly copies your work, word for word, and republishes it on their blog. They might change a few words to throw you off and make themselves feel like they aren’t cheating the system, but the structure of the post and the points being made are yours.

So, does that mean it’s scraping when your content is stolen without attribution, but it’s content curation when the proper attribution is given? Some marketers and bloggers group content curation with content scraping. Some call it “overrated plagiarism” or “the arterial plaque of the Internet.” For all its detractors, though, content curation has just as many advocates, if not more.

Let’s look at why scraping and curation get tangled up, how you can make sure your conversion strategies don’t make you act like a scraper, and how to really sock it to ’em if you find somebody scraping your content.

How Content Scraping Affects Your Website

To see how scraping hurts you, you have to understand why content curation helps you.

Attributed content is okay because it helps Google link your content back to you and someone else’s content back to them. Google typically gives all parties involved extra ranking credit if they share each other’s content, attribute properly and are in good standing with Google’s indexers. Content syndication and curation usually helps all parties involved by making everyone involved look better, based on everyone’s good reputations combined.

Scrapers hurt your website because Google sees the same content in two places, without any explanation for why and how it got there. When there’s no clear attribution, Google’s search indexing robots start to suspect something fishy, and they attempt to punish the scraper by comparing post timestamps. If for some reason Google can’t determine on its own that your site originally made the post and the scraper site stole it from you, Google just dishes out punishments to everyone involved.

Syndication and content curation might be similar to scraping, but proper attribution makes all the difference. The sites you link to aren’t the only things that matter when it comes to curation; you have to keep an eye on spammy sites linking back to you. It’s a two-way street, which makes it all the more confusing.

Content Curation Marketing Practices That Won’t Make You Look Like a Scraper

Do you remember how often you had to cite your sources for school essays you wrote way back in the day? Citation ensures that your readers know where you found and borrowed someone else’s idea. Attribution serves exactly the same purpose. Clear attribution links back to the original source must be added to curated content, or you’re committing a flagrant act of scraping, punishable by total search engine delisting…basically, death.

Mashable has an excellent primer on how to be a valuable content curator. I love their concise points, but I’m going to try and wrap them all up in one little idea:

Curated content must be cited within the context of something you’ve created.

It sounds a little gimmicky, but it’s easy in practice. When you curate content, you shouldn’t be just dumping someone else’s text on to your site. You can borrow direct text in clearly-defined quotations, or you can borrow ideas you found from someone else. You can post excerpts from a news piece, or snippets of someone’s points from their blog post, for example.

When you do this, you absolutely must link back to the sources, and you need to explain to your readers why you’re borrowing this content: what does it mean to you; why are you sharing it with them? Providing your own input helps to advance the conversation and add your voice to the content you’re sharing: that’s the whole point of content curation marketing.

Content Syndication: An Exception To The Rule

Content syndication sites are a special exemption to the rules of content curation, and you should use these sites to your benefit. Syndication sites take your content in its entirety and republish it, word for word, on their site. It’s not considered content scraping because syndicators provide extensive attribution links back to the author of the piece, the site it was originally hosted on, and all other relevant information. Syndicators also republish work that makes sense within their own context, so their audience is already qualified and will be interested in your content from the start.

Content syndication is a powerful tool you can use to increase your traffic and your conversions with minimal effort. Syndicators put your content directly in front of their audience, which could include thousands of people that don’t know who you are…yet. Links pointing directly back to your website are generously provided, and readers that find you through a syndication service can find you quickly and easily.

The biggest downside to syndication is when the syndicator is larger and commands more authority than your own site. If they naturally rank better than you, your content might actually boost your syndicating site above your own site, even though they’re using your content. You don’t necessarily want to boost your syndicator’s SERPs ratings above your own because it could make your site look somehow less authoritative by comparison.

Content Scrapers Making Your Life Miserable? Here’s How To Fight Back

When I looked around for advice on how to deal with scrapers, I found this great discussion from Webmaster World about a real-life scraper situation. There are a lot of great suggestions in this thread, and I’m going to add a few of my own tricks to give you a complete toolkit for dealing with annoying scrapers.

The Cease And Desist Escalation Method

If you find a scraper stealing your content for their webpage, you can look up any documented data on who owns the website with a simple, easy WHOIS search. This can potentially net you the first and last name, IP address, web hosting company, and other vital info on the jerk that owns the offending website. Once you’ve got their info, use a preformatted C&D from PlagiarismToday and send a letter to the site owner, with a CC: to the site’s hosting company.

Unfortunately many scrapers already disregard standard legal processes, and if their hosting company doesn’t care either, you may have to take matters into your own hands.

Sneaky Trick #1: Blowing Up Scrapers’ Websites With Hidden Embeds

If you’ve got a pesky scraper that is copying all of your content verbatim, without hosting your images on their site, your scraper is doing some seriously bad stuff to your site. They’re not only stealing your content, but they’re using up your monthly bandwidth by “hotlinking” your images and leaching your web server’s bandwidth. You can use this to your advantage and really mess with scrapers, though.

Make an image file on your privately-controlled server that is a simple 1×1 blank pixel. Embed that tiny pixel in the middle of your content, or in multiple places throughout the content as “bait.” If and when your scraper strikes again, check the source code for your stolen content on their site, and look for those pixels you embedded.

If they’re still there, your plan will work. Edit your invisible pixels out of your own content, then make another image file with the same filename and file type as the 1×1 pixel invisible square. Make it a massive image—thousands of pixels tall and wide, something as disruptive as possible. Replace the invisible pixel file with your new disruptive mega-picture, and make sure it matches the tiny pixel image’s file name.

Once you upload it, refresh your scraper’s website. If they’re hotlinking to you, your hidden pixels will make their content page blow up, and your stolen content becomes completely unreadable.

You can also set up an automatic anti-hotlinking countermeasure with some simple server-side file editing. Courtesy of brand designer David Airey, here’s a full write up on how to protect your site from hotlinking with htaccess editing.

Sneaky Trick #2: Impersonate Your Scraper and Get Yourself In Trouble

Another clever trick is to make a fake Google account, then hop on Google’s Support Forums impersonating your scraper. Make a bunch of threads asking “why did my site lose ranking? Why am I not getting any more search traffic?” Provide links to your scraper’s website, and basically disrupt Google’s support forums as much as possible under the guise of your scraper.

This will put your scraper’s site directly in front of Google moderators and engineers, and grabs their attention to your scraper’s dirty dealings. This crafty method forces Google to deal with your scraper problems, and can potentially put the scraper on a fast-track to total delisting in search results.

Cool Trick #3: Help Google Fight Back By “Donating” Scrapers

As a final note, one member of that scraper discussion linked to a form Google made for content creators. Google’s own Matt Cutts tweeted back in August of 2011 “We need datapoints for testing,” and included a link to Google’s own scraper reporting page. If you find a scraper stealing your content, “donating” your scraper will help Google study scrapers’ tendencies and build a better search algorithm that identifies and punishes scrapers.

When it comes to content, borrowing content is okay in small amounts, but you really need to produce a lot of your own material. If writing and producing new content isn’t your forte, or you just don’t have time to do it as much as you’d like to, our professional content writing services can fill in the blanks in your business blogging calendar. Leave the writing to us, and save the content curation—the fun part—all to yourself!

Unfortunately, the only way to hide from your competition is to not compete at all, but that works both ways. You can usually take a look at how your competitors use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites to get insider information on their strategies and how they attract their leads. Their content should usually relate back to their overall conversion goals, and you can spot their objectives and who their target audiences are based on their content, and the feedback they receive.

Today, I’d like to take that neat little tip one step further, and show you how to be a clever competitor. (No, this isn’t Hacking 101, sorry, wrong blog.) All that social evidence you can dig up on your competitors can be used to help you grow and succeed. They’re your competitor because their customers are your customers, right? Here’s how you can create new customer target profiles for customers, then hit them with effective marketing that pulls them back to you.

Step 1: Social Competitive Analysis

This is where a lot of the dirty, hands-on work happens, even if it isn’t nearly as dirty as you might think. Hubspot’s Jon Mehlman outlines the process pretty well in his blog post, “How to Stalk Your Competitors in Social Media (So You Can Crush Them).” The title ought to tell you exactly how effective this method is. Start by organizing your competitors by name in a spreadsheet, on paper, or in your head if you’re especially cunning.

From there, it’s time to search like mad. Find your competitors’ social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, BO.LT, Plurk, RSS, Blogger, Twylah; find your competitors anywhere and everywhere they are. Then, take note of their social vital signs:

· the number of fans/followers/subscribers they have

· their posting frequency (X amount of posts per day, per week, etc.)

· the kind of content they share (As in, links to their branded websites? Links to news? Pictures? Be descriptive and observe carefully here)

· the amount of original content against the amount of curated content from somewhere else

· their use of various service features (are they making the best of their Facebook Timeline banner? Do they use advanced Twitter features like Favs, Retweets, or Lists? Do they use social sharing buttons on their branded website?)

· and finally, their fan/follower engagement amount: how quickly do they respond to fans, how frequently, and how effectively?

A lot of this information is probably measured and tracked with advanced software…somewhere. Somewhere you probably don’t have access to, and shouldn’t, because that isn’t your data. You can try out free comparison apps like SimplyMeasured and their various free social media reporting tools, or subscribe to a paid monitoring service that will cough up their third-party comparisons for a fee. Or you can do what I like the most: just eyeball it and measure your competition using relative comparisons on pen and paper.

Step 2: Bringing All Your Evidence Together Into a Target Profile

The information you gather from your competitor’s social media profiles is information that tells you all sorts of things about the kind of people they’re targeting—and the kind of people you need to target too. Are your competitors actively engaging with internet socialites? Are they a relatively quiet online brand? Frequency of internet use, willingness to engage with brands, and attitudes towards brands all are key pieces of demographic information that will tell you volumes about the customers you want to target.

Your investigation also serves a secondary purpose: it should reveal opportunities your competitors may be passing up that you can take advantage of. Browse through your competition’s social networking interactions and try to sniff out any hints of highly positive or highly negative interactions. Did a customer come to your competitor’s page to chew them out for bad service? That’s a potentially lucrative new marketing angle for you: you do X, Y, and Z better than the competition. Praise can work the same way: customers that praise competition for doing a good job are identifying what they value, and what you should emphasize in your marketing to attract those customers.

Step 3: Turning That Target Profile into an Action Plan

You’ve looked at your competitor’s social engagement, and you’ve identified the kind of customers they cater to. Now it’s time to use that information for your own gain. If you find that your competition excels in one social media outlet over another, or lacks in one potentially lucrative area, you need to take advantage of those missed opportunities for yourself. If your competition posts infrequently, or they don’t respond to their customers’ interactions, you should post more frequently than the other guys, and be sure to reach out to your customers promptly and effectively.

It’s a little tough to spell out an exact plan of attack here, because every individual competitor is going to be different, and everyone’s particular situation will be unique. What I can say for sure, though, is that there are some things you can bank on if you make a genuine effort to investigate your competition:

· You’ll begin to see your competition’s social media strengths—and their weaknesses.

· You’ll have a better idea of the kind of customers they are marketing to—there might be a valuable market out there that you haven’t tapped into yet.

· You’ll have more detailed insight into how your competition reaches their target audience—you might simply validate everything you’re doing as more effective than their efforts, or you might pick up some new strategies.

Use your observations and the data you gathered and compare their social vital signs to your own. Do they outperform you? Are you outperforming them? Figure out why, and formulate a plan on how you can catch up to them, or how you can increase your lead.

Most Importantly: Don’t Get Too Fixated On The Competition

There’s one thing you absolutely need to take away from this article: make sure you’re focused on yourself, not your competitor. These are all great tips on how to sneak up on and gain ground against your competition, but your marketing goals shouldn’t be to simply outperform your competition. If you’re too fixated on your competitors, their actions will eventually start to dictate your business decisions. Don’t let your competition drag you around on a short leash!

Make sure that you focus on improving your own business, not mimicking what your competition does. Watch what your competitors do online, take ideas and practices you like from them, and add those to your own bag of tricks. If you have multiple competitors, you can follow these steps and take their best practices, then fold them all into your own.

Do that enough, and do it consistently, and you’ll start pulling customers back into your camp thanks to the power of a positive social presence. For more on improving your social media presence, check out our other tips on how to improve your social networking presence.

Out of everything we usually recommend, A/B testing is the one thing most people aren’t willing—or simply aren’t able—to give a fair shake. We can sympathize with just how difficult it really is, it’s tough for us too! Not only does it take time to tweak and edit the same thing over and over, it takes more time to study the short and long-term changes. If you don’t have very much traffic coming to your website, that study process can take weeks and months, not days.

If you’re ready to try A/B testing for better results, but you just don’t have the traffic to adequately test your changes, this is the article for you. Today I’m going to take a look at A/B testing tips and how you can optimize your variation testing and attract a little more traffic at the same time.

PPC Campaigns Attract Valuable Test Traffic at A Small Cost

One of the first and most directly valuable traffic-building methods for A/B testing would be attaching a PPC campaign to your tests. For instance: you’re testing the conversion potential for a few variations of a landing page. You can create a PPC campaign that will catch traffic from Google Search results and direct them straight to that landing page you’re testing out. Switch the landing page out after it’s had enough time to accumulate some traffic, and measure the click-through or conversion results you got from each page.

The obvious benefit to a PPC campaign for testing purposes is that you’ll be pulling traffic through paid advertising. On paper, you’re killing two birds with one stone: advertising your site and your services, while A/B testing your content at the same time. You want to be careful, though, that you keep an eye on your day-to-day results and that you’ve optimized your test content for conversion effectiveness. Testing can actually hurt your bottom line if it turns out your tested content causes you to lose conversions instead of gain them.

Qualitative Results Are Fair Game in Low-Traffic A/B Testing

Web developers, content writers, and small business owners alike know that sometimes, you just have to rely on their gut instinct. Giff Constable at Proof NYC and his peers agree: when you have to move forward now rather than later, qualitative observations backed with a little bit of test data are worth it, especially if waiting for enough quantitative data would lead you to the same decision.

Making a qualitative decision for the sake of simply making a decision should be a point that you come back to later in the website’s lifecycle. Any good marketer will tell you that A/B testing never truly “ends.” You’ll want to constantly change and revisit your entire website piece by piece, and optimize with new strategies and insights you’ve learned over the lifespan of your website. If you make a call early on based on a hunch or a good feeling towards one variation over the others, be sure that you revisit this soon after you’ve accumulated more traffic data to see whether your decision holds up in the long-term.

Web Testing Services Help You Visualize Your Conversion Effectiveness

There are plenty of services for businesses of all sizes that do nothing but test other websites. User testing is an important aspect of website optimization: you can do all the technical optimization you want, but it won’t mean anything if your end-users have a hard time navigating your sites. Websites like UserTesting.com, Loop11.com, and YouEye.com send real users to your website and employ different kinds of tracking and testing methods to show you exactly how people use your website.

These tests are usually more expensive than your average PPC campaign and other paid advertising tools, and you won’t attract extra visitors to your website in the process. That doesn’t mean these services aren’t worth the money: you’ll receive a video or a document that shows you exactly how the average user behaves on your website, as if you were standing over their shoulder watching. These real-time tests will often help you spot crucial design flaws that are keeping you from earning the business conversions you’ve hoped for.

A/B Testing is Absolutely Worth Your Time

Major international companies often employ large focus groups to determine whether or not a product is a profitable venture before it goes to market. For years, big businesses had focus group testing exclusively to themselves: small businesses had no choice but to put a new product on the market and hope it wasn’t dead on arrival. Thanks to the internet, small businesses and startups can take advantage of the power of instantaneous focus group testing—but only if they’re willing to put in the effort.

A/B Testing is a steady process that requires a good eye for website usability, decent data, and the willingness to spend a little up front to maximize your potential to earn more in the long run. If this sounds like something you need to do, take these tips and give A/B testing a shot. If you’re in need of new content to test for your website, you know who to call.

Lead scoring is part of this process. Scoring is how you keep track of those leads, where they’re at in your sales cycle, and whether or not they’re ready for a sales proposition. You can literally apply a numeric score to prospective leads based on their activity in your store or online presence: do they visit often? Do they ask lots of questions about a product? Do they browse multiple product pages, or have they subscribed to your newsletter? These are all consumer signals, kind of like sales “body language,” that will tell you how close they are to actually converting—and at what point can you step in and make something happen sooner.

There are all sorts of CRM and data tracking software available, but they usually come with a steep monthly fee. Here’s how you can score and track your leads without pricy software, whether your small business runs out of a physical location or completely online.

Physical Locations: The Walk-In Lead Evaluation

When you’re physically in your store with your customers, you have the benefit of that physical interaction—being able to observe their behaviors and gauge how ready they are to buy. You might not even think about it, but chances are, you’re probably sizing up customers to determine just how “ready” they are for you to swoop in and try to make a sale. That’s lead scoring!

If you want to make your personal strategies more clear to your other employees or you just want to keep yourself organized, you can use a spreadsheet or a pad and paper to keep track of how you monitor customers.

What you’ll want to do first is determine the overall goals for your lead nurturing, or what exactly you want your customers to do. Once you have that goal in place, you should come up with a scoring system that progresses them towards that end result. If your goal is to have your customer buy a product, your scoring system will revolve around how willing they appear to be to make that purchase.

Your numbers can be arbitrary, but they need to make enough sense that when they add up, you have a clear picture of how far along they are towards making a purchase. Walking in the door could be 20 points, for instance. (If they try to sell you something in your own store, minus 20 points.) Browsing your products for 1, 2, or even 5 minutes should be a certain amount of points, and that’s a factor that can add up. Asking questions about a product can add a certain amount of points.

For instance, if it only takes two or three minutes for a customer to decide on what they want in your store, and you have a customer that has been there for 5 or 10 minutes, chances are they’re a potentially hot lead: their “score” should be relatively high due to the points they’ve accumulated for each minute they’ve been there. The customer that has browsed for 5 or 10 minutes longer than it usually takes typical customers has higher priority than the customer that just walked in: this is a no-brainer in practice, but is this an explicit part of your policies, or just something you expect your employees to understand?

Online Businesses Have It Harder, But No-Cost Lead Scoring Isn’t Impossible

Obviously, online businesses don’t have the benefit of physically observing visitors; that’s the tradeoff for having an always-on, 24/7 virtual storefront. That doesn’t mean you have no idea who your visitors are, and no means to enact some form of lead nurturing to ease them along towards a sales goal.

Online lead nurturing requires the careful use of analytics data, and laser-focused PPC campaigns to identify and pre-qualify your leads upon entry. You’ll want to look for your analytics for any trends that indicate interest from a certain group of visitors. Should you build something into your website that pops an offer up in front of visitors after they read multiple product pages? Are you getting a large amount of traffic from a keyword you’ve optimized for?

Once you spot trends in your analytics, your next move should be to create promotions and advertisements that capitalize on those trends. For instance: you might find in your analytics data that you have a large number of visitors coming to you daily from the Portland, Oregon area. Do you have PPC ads that are optimized for Portland? Could you put a special promotional offer up on your homepage specifically catering to Portland residents?

That attention to geographic location, a seemingly minor detail, will focus your marketing efforts specifically towards a region with your most active leads. Those active leads will see your special promotions specifically catered to them, and will be encouraged to act on them. By encouraging more conversions through careful content targeting, you’ve successfully nurtured online leads.

Digging up trends in your analytics by yourself isn’t the easiest practice, and luckily there are a few free CRM and lead management solutions available that can do it for you. Salesforce.com Free Edition is a great start for small businesses that need to get more out of their analytics data. Zoho also offers a free version of their business CRM software specifically for small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs. We use Chartbeat at Content Equals Money, but it’s a paid service after your 30-day trial ends. These tools will make it easier than ever to keep an eye on your incoming traffic, spot which leads are hotter than others, and figure out exactly when you can reach out and close a deal between them.

Whether your business is online or down the street from your customers, it’s important to know when and how to seal the deal, and turn prospective leads into successful conversions. Lead nurturing strategies and lead scoring techniques help business owners and employees determine how “hot” a customer is, and how willing they are to make that purchase. Businesses that focus on lead nurturing throughout their entire content marketing strategy will rarely see themselves hurting for business, and will be more adequately prepared to stay afloat during rainy days.

Today I’d like to clear up some of that confusion and look at something that is absolutely essential to content marketing: content reach. “Reach” is exactly what it sounds like: how far your content “reaches” out to readers. Measuring your reach is part analytics and part common sense. Let’s take a look at how you can use both to improve your lead nurturing strategies and increase your conversions naturally and effectively.

Using Analytics To Calculate Your Reach

You don’t have to dig too far to get the data you need to figure out reach: you can start by simply going to the first default dashboard, the Overview page, in Google Analytics. Your Google Analytics Overview page gives you some key pieces of information: a graph showing per-day traffic activity, the percentage of new and returning visitors, and your unique visitors.

Your unique visitor count is the number of people seeing your site during your sampled time period: how many people are seeing your content directly, or are exploring the rest of your website. The percentage of new visitors to returning visitors shows you how many of those unique hits are from new potential leads, and how many are from returning customers or previous visitors. The graph is one of the most useful tools for calculating reach: it shows you exactly how many visitors arrived after you posted your content.

To make your life easier in Google Analytics, the Timeline graph now has a built-in Annotation function. Just double-click any point on the graph and you can enter a text annotation to that data point. For that traffic spike I saw thanks to a single blog post, I annotated that day with the title and link of my blog post, so I would remember in the future just how I earned that spike.

Using Common Sense and Observation To “Get A Feel” For Your Reach

If you aren’t a big analytics person, you can usually tell whether or not your marketing is working based on overall activity at your business. If you’re getting more calls about a specific product, your content marketing for that product must be reaching more interested people than you usually hit. If you share your content on social networks, you can usually see in your notifications when and where your content is shared—the more shares you get, the wider your content marketing reach becomes.

Sometimes writers and business bloggers can just “feel” when a post is good, not necessarily because they wrote it and liked it, but because of the response it gets once it’s posted. If you make a blog post and you get a lot of activity in the comments, you’re not only reaching those commenters, but you’re making such an impact that they feel compelled to respond. This feedback comes back to you and informs you of what kinds of content works better than others for your business. Marketing feedback loops between consumers and businesses are a common, and super-valuable concept worth pursuing as a content marketer.

Let Me Show You How Blending Big Data and Common Sense Observation Works

Following your data and going on your intuition are okay by themselves, but you’re better off combining both for a proof-backed observational measurement of your own. Here’s a real-life example of how I use data and common sense to measure my personal blog’s reach.

This data is from my personal blog’s analytics data over a three-day period. I posted a topical response to something happening that day, and ended up attracting some 1000+ views on that post alone during that afternoon. You can see the initial spike when I first posted it to my blog, and then as it slowly drops off over the next 6 hours, there’s another huge spike in the middle. That’s from when I posted a link to my article to Twitter and asked my followers to read and share it.

All the new and return visitors in the pie chart are within the span of 24 hours before and after that post. You can’t see it here, but my conversions improved after this post too: I picked up a handful of new subscribers on my blog, and have noticed a slight uptick in new subscribers even weeks after this initial post.

Looking at this visualization of a single post’s traffic performance throughout the day gives me a much better idea of just how wide my reach is. I didn’t even need to dig too far into my data for this, either: all I had to do was look at my overall traffic stats, my social shares, and the number of interactions I received directly on my blog post. Once you plot your actions out on a timeline and measure that up against your hourly analytics data, you can see exactly how far your content goes each and every time you post it.

All It Takes Is A Little Effort and Basic Analytics Work

If you’re the type that likes to use tools and measurement equipment to keep more detailed data, there are plenty of tools for you. Bit.ly’s link shortening services also feature a full range of tracking services to keep tabs on how many clicks your links get. Facebook Insights does the same trick, but for Facebook interactions; and Crowdbooster keeps an eye on your Twitter performance.

If you don’t feel like signing up for new services and just want to use what you’ve got already, that’s fine too. All you need to keep tabs on your content performance is a log of your content activity—in your brain, on paper, in a spreadsheet, wherever you need to put it—and a way to stack it up against timestamps on your analytics data.

With that information, you can see how your traffic ebbs and flows with each new piece of content you post, and based on the performance of each new piece, you can get a better understanding of what attracts more leads and better business to your website. This is valuable information you can use to write better content in the future, or pass along to content marketing services so they have a better understanding of what they can do to help you succeed. Give it a shot for yourself, and let us know what works best for you!

This new feature isn’t an expected update, but it isn’t a surprising one, either. Google has touted the benefits of Google Plus for content producers and search engine marketers since the service was first created. This new cross-platform integration is just another new feature in a long list of future updates that will tie Google Plus more seamlessly into the Google Search experience.

Skeptics have questioned the usefulness and relevance of this update since it went live. If you’re still not sure how it works, or you aren’t sure how it can benefit you, keep on reading and you’ll see just how great this new update actually is.

How To Link Your Blogger and Google Plus Accounts

Personal bloggers with a Blogger page under their own name have been able to tie their Google Plus profile to their Blogger page for some time now, and already know just how useful these benefits are. With this new update, you aren’t restricted to your personal blogs anymore: you can link any blog you contribute to with a branded Google Plus for Business page for your business or organization.

To link your blog and your Plus profile, go to your Blogger dashboard and check out the Google+ tab. If you’re a personal blogger, you may already have options here, because your personal Google Plus and Blogger pages have been synced already. If your Blogger page is for a business, and you haven’t made a Google Plus page or you need to link your business Plus page with your Blogger account, the “Upgrade to Google+” button will help you get everything set up.

The Benefits of Syncing Blogger and Google Plus

We talk a lot about Rel=Author here, and while this isn’t the same exact thing, it’s designed to accomplish the same result. Linking a professional Google Plus page with a professional Blogger blog helps Google’s search crawlers associate each page with rich data points and relevant information. Google Plus used to be just for professional profiles, but since they’ve opened up for businesses now, making a business page is a great way to help Google put your company on the map.

For business owners, this means that Google is basically handing you a brand new tool to make your business more relevant and improve your search rankings quickly and easily. If your business doesn’t have a blog, you can start one in Blogger, link it to a Google Plus for Businesses page, and enjoy all the benefits of both sites for your search relevance. As you publish more content on your Blogger page, you’ll see your business page popping up more and more in search results—and so will your potential customers.

Do you have a Blogger account? How about a Google Plus profile for your business? If you said “no” to both, maybe it’s time to follow Google’s lead and help them help you earn more new leads online.

We talk about integrating services and checking dashboards and relying on big data all the time at Content Equals Money. We can talk until we’re blue in the face when it comes to tracking visitors, improving lead nurturing, and monitoring website effectiveness. We love all this stuff, but there’s a slight detail we tend to forget about: it’s difficult to learn how to use it all the first time around. It’s all pretty useful stuff when you know how to navigate all of the different data points, but there’s one thing you have to know before any of it really starts to become useful: how to bring it all together.

You have all of this valuable data within your site metrics, your social interactions, and your response data from other content marketing efforts like email response and offline promotional materials. The trick is getting it all in one place so you can interpret all of your statistics and act on everything, instead of just a few insights gained from disparate, disconnected sources. There is all sorts of software that will help you do this, but you’ll easily pay upwards of $100 every month, if not more.

Today I’m going to look at building your own “Poor Man’s Dashboard.” With these free or relatively inexpensive tools, you’ll unlock your data’s full potential at a fraction of the cost major businesses and enterprises pay to do the same.

Inexpensive Apps That Do It All (Or Most of It)

You don’t have to go out and pay $100 every month to get awesome analytics software that helps you understand your site data more easily. In fact, for the price of a monthly magazine, you can get a powerful software suite that does all the heavy lifting for you, leaving you with more time to act on your data without wasting extra time figuring it all out.

ChartBeat is a great service that lets you monitor an incredible amount of space for not a lot of cash. Full disclosure: we personally use Chartbeat here at CEM, but it’s first for our recommendation not because we’re fans, but because of the price: $9.95 each month will provide most small businesses with more than enough site tracking potential. Chartbeat can condense all your site, social, and search data into one easy-to-read space that updates in real-time and shows you exactly what you should act on.

HootSuite is another great data monitoring service that gives you a few options for exactly what you want to track and hone in on. HootSuite is free for most beginning users, but offers a more advanced plan—that includes Google Analytics integration—for only $9.99 per month. HootSuite began as a Twitter client and exploded into an entire social media management service of its own, so if you’re looking for a social dashboard, HootSuite is great.

“Freemium” Alternatives: Pay A Little, Pay a Lot, or Pay Nothing At All

There are other free alternatives that we like, too: StatCounter and Piwik are good, free site statistics tracking apps—Piwik does require an extra amount of work to set up and get going, but it lets you fully own and manage your site’s data yourself.

Nimble is an awesome, free all-in-one communications dashboard that combines social media profiles, email, and organization tools all in one place—and it also lets you integrate your outside data from other powerful lead tracking services like HubSpot. MapMyUser is a neat little tool that helps you pinpoint where in the world your traffic is coming from, which can help you pin down demographic data and allow you to make more informed marketing decisions in the future.

If you’re a stickler for familiar tools, you can create custom dashboards within Google Analytics that show you exactly what you need to see, if you don’t mind spending the time to set it up. You can also download useful dashboards other users have made—like this one, a Google Analytics dash that focuses entirely on Social Media metrics.

Bringing It All Together

Knowing about all these services and finding out which is best for you is the hardest part of putting together a “poor man’s dashboard.” Once you’ve found services you like, all you have to do is sign up on them and synchronize your accounts and data across each one. There are a few tips you can use to bring them all together.

The best suggestion is to download an alternative web browser that is your “dashboard” browser, not your web surfing browser. (Keeping the two separate will keep you focused!) I recommend Google Chrome, but any other browser will do. Firefox and Opera are two other great browsers.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed a new browser, sign into all your new tracking services and group them all on the same window as tabs, in the order you want them to usually be in. Then, make a new Bookmarks folder called “Website Dashboard,” and add all of your new monitoring apps in this Bookmark folder.

I recommend Chrome because of the next step: whenever you want to check your website data, all you have to do is open one of those bookmarks—or all of them! In Chrome, middle-clicking a bookmark folder will open all the websites within it in one window. With one click, you have instant access to all of your necessary data; all it takes is a little effort getting everything set up beforehand.

This all sounds easy on paper, and it’s pretty easy when you actually sit down and do it. All it takes is a little patience and effort—just like content marketing! If you’re strained for either, and coming up with all your own content marketing and SEO writing seems impossible, maybe it’s time to offload some of your online marketing efforts to the pros!

The concept behind VidyoWay is simple: bring all sorts of different platforms and video conferencing services into one unified system. Corporate video conference solutions like Microsoft Lync, Cisco services, Polycom, and others tend to be a pain to use, and they don’t mesh well with smaller-scale services and new technologies. Connectivity problems could mean the difference between healthy or rocky internal and B2B conversions, and video conferencing systems are often too great of an expense to justify constant replacement and upgrading to keep up with current technology.

VidyoWay Brings Everyone Into The Same Conference Easily

Vidyo has created a virtual gateway that bridges the gap between all kinds of conferencing technology, so businesses can spend less time working out video conferencing problems and more time doing actual business. With VidyoWay, video conferencing is possible from any and every imaginable setup—you can hop in from your smartphone while your business partners use their corporate video conferencing system to talk to a startup connected via PC.

On the free software, up to 9 HD-quality participants can take part in a video conference—an amazing service for something that costs nothing out of pocket. VidyoWay’s flexibility is what video conference operators have dreamed of—and best of all, it’s free! The service isn’t ad-supported, and it’s not subsidized by selling user data out to third parties or any other shady dealings. Vidyo already has a firm footing in their business space thanks to their incredible corporate-scale services.

Why Is VidyoWay Free? It’s Part of Their Conversion Strategy

Not only is Vidyo not monetizing their VidyoWay platform now, they won’t be making any monetization attempts in the future for the exact same reasons. Vidyo’s corporate services are their primary revenue source, outside of venture funding—which they’ve been receiving plenty of. Just this past May, Vidyo secured $22.5 million from networking company Juniper, on top of the $97 million they’ve raised to date from other venture firms.

VidyoWay is a powerful competitor in spaces previously dominated by Microsoft, Cisco, and other major networking companies. VidyoWay’s free service will provide companies with a glimpse—a powerful one, but still just a peek—into the full range of services Vidyo can provide companies. The idea is to get companies comfortable with the free service, then encourage them to pay into a more robust list of services and features. Vidyo offers products that are much easier to sell through demonstration, and what better way to demo a product than allowing businesses to deploy it themselves for free?

Vidyo Has High Hopes And A Disruptive Product

Vidyo’s goals with VidyoWay and their other corporate products are fairly simple: they want to make video conferencing easier by routing all their users through to the same place. “The business process to achieve interconnectivity is very costly and cumbersome,” says Vidyo’s CEO and co-founder Ofer Shapiro. “VidyoWay provides true free connectivity to legacy systems through a free conference room in the cloud.”

Breaking into the teleconferencing business with a service like VidyoWay is a perfect example of how technology can shake up any market space. VidyoWay is a total software solution—no moving parts, no physical production—that can threaten other competitors’ hardware AND software products. Major brands have to reevaluate their services now that Vidyo has a product that threatens to cut into their back-end services and steal their front-end solutions all at the same time.

If you’re interested in giving Vidyo a shot, you can visit their website here: http://www.vidyo.com/.