Hello and Happy Tuesday!
This week in Internet marketing, we've gathered some of the best stories from around the web. We're looking at the best tools for email marketing, as well as tips that will indirectly improve your search rankings, and a recipe for the most precise remarketing campaigns. We're also looking at a guide to building backlinks from resource pages, and using guest blogging to generate leads.
The 10 Best Tools for Email Marketing
Using email as a marketing tool to reach out to your community is an easy and savvy way of reaching your community, and there are a number of platforms to help you get the job done. But depending on the type of project, the size of the company, and the goals of the campaign, some tools are better than others. For example, Mail Chimp is easy to use and a great place to start—if your distribution list has fewer than 500 subscribers, you can send it out through Mail Chimp for free. For mailers that contain a lot of graphics and design, Constant Contact is a great choice. This handy guide will help you identify the best tools that suit your needs.
4 Indirect Ways to Improve Your Search Rankings
So you're looking to boost your search rankings, but you also want a well-rounded SEO strategy with impacts and benefits beyond rankings. For example, the internet is an incredible medium for directly contacting and interacting with a customer after a sale, which is a great strategy for customer retention and satisfaction. But in instances when a customer replies that they are happy with your product or service, it doesn't hurt to ask if they will also write a positive review on Yelp or a similar site. This not only builds trust with other potential customers, but a few well-placed reviews can also have a great impact on search rankings. You can also try seeking out great writers and designers to partner with on content because they'll be very likely to link to the work in their portfolio, which means guaranteed high-quality backlinks to your site.
The 4 Cs: A recipe for precise remarketing campaigns
In remarketing campaigns, it's essential to categorize and organize all visitors as accurately as possible, so you can retarget accordingly. The 4 "C"s of remarketing stand for content, cookie duration, creative and context. For example, "content" includes any visitors who have been to your site, and can then be categorized depending on whether they visited the hope page, product pages, etc. "Cookie duration" categorizes visitors depending on how long its been since they were on your page. A visitor who made it to your product or service page two days ago will be much more likely to convert than a person who visited your home page last month. This level of insight will help you prioritize your budget and ad spend.
Resource Page Link Building: The Definitive Guide
Getting linked to from a resource page, meaning a site that is helpful and informative as opposed to sales-focussed, is a great way to build trust and authority in your field and to boost your rankings. Start by identifying some resource pages from which you'd like to be linked to—look for sites that have a precedent of posting similar content, and ask yourself whether your content is really relevant to that page's audience. For example, if the page you're looking at only links to scholarly journals, your site may not be quite the right fit.
How to Use Guest Blogging for Lead Generation
If Content is King, can it be true that guest blogging is dead? When guest blogging is done well, its reach and impact can have a great benefit on your site's rankings. Guest blogging continues to be a strategy based around getting backlinks, but it's equally important to publish on authoritative sites that demand you provide well-written articles that offer a fresh and interesting perspective. Delve into a very specific topic, cover it thoroughly, and aim to have the piece published on a site with domain authority and an engaged social following.
Check out these additional articles for more Internet marketing news!
How to Achieve 100/100 with the Google Page Speed Test Tool
How to Attract the Right Facebook Fans for Your Small Business
Organic Rankings Now Affect Local, Google Says
