Eric blogs regularlly at EricWelke.com where he recently wrote an Empower Network review.  He also provides articles and videos on affiliate marketing, network marketing and internet marketing.

The Original Post is Located Here: How To Succeed With Google Plus – An Infographic

Like all good experiments, advance planning and preparation went into the test. The group established a website of their own as a test subject. The subject was a typical small business site which begins the test ranked number three for the keyword pool cleaning Houston. The group then attacked the website with negative SEO by pointing low quality paid links at the site. They did this with thousands of these links and monitored the website ranking over a period of four weeks. The number and type of links they used are here.

• 7,000 forum profile links
• 45,000 blog comment links
• 4,000 sidebar links they describe as trashy

Their results are compelling. The end of the first week of these link attacks saw no change in the website rankings and, the website actually improved to the number two ranking by day 14 of the experiment. The test site has 52,000 bad links pointing at it by this date. Then the remaining links are added to the mix during week three and, the downward slide begins for the website. The end of week three sees the test subject drop to page two and a number 11 ranking. The slide continues and by the end of week four the test website is ranking at number 14 for the keyword.

It is clear that negative SEO does work and could become a new tactic as companies jostle for the profitable rankings. The scary part of this is the SEO group only spent $45 and four weeks of effort to drop the test site to the second page. This would indicate just how vulnerable most websites are to negative SEO.

This infographic was desined and developed by TastyPlacement, Inc.

The Original Post is Located Here: Does Negative SEO Work?

Crafting content that will earn these links is tough, so you how do you stay ahead of the game and your competitors? This infographic from Boom Online Marketing shows the importance of collecting data from successful sites in your niche and applying the lessons that you learn too your own content strategy. Using simple tools like Social Crawlytics and Open Site Explorer you can start to gather the information that you need to make more informed decisions – rather than taking a wild stab in the dark as to which kinds of content are going to work best from your niche.

Learn from your competitors mistakes, learn from the kind of content that was successful for them and work at creating the kind of content that your audience wants to see, read enjoy and share.

Data from: Boom Online

The Original Post is Located Here: Content Planning For Link Building Wins

Getting people to subscribe to your email list is tough, so be sure that you convert as much of that new audience as possible by sending an attention-grabbing welcome email. A solid welcome email may not convert them on the spot but it may get them to open your next email blast—even if they don’t receive one for a few days.

So, grab their attention and make your first lead-converting effort with one (or more) of these lead-converting welcome emails:

1. Lead-converting content promotion: use your highest converting webpages and content in your welcome email that includes your most-effective call-to-actions. Including a link to your highest-converting subject matter like ebooks, whitepaper or webinair will make it doubly effective if you can drop it casually into your content conversation.

2. Suggest a transaction: the most common reason people don’t initially buy is because they aren’t asked to buy or leaded to it. But shorter sales cycles are often created simply by asking for the business. You can build on an immediate sales suggestions by offering a time-sensitive incentive.

3. Give away an assessment or consultation: people love free stuff. Offering an assessment or consultation will not only offer them a valuable service but will give you valuable lead-gen information to plug into your sales/marketing tool.

4. Propose a survey: people love surveys almost as much as free stuff, simply for the reason that people love to talk about themselves. If you create a survey with user-oriented questions, and pose it as such, you will likely get a large amount of respondents willing to give up critical sales-cycle material. Posing this as a getting-to-know-you-survey will greatly increase your response odds.

5. Offer to personalize their content: the biggest reason for email marketing list unsubscribes is that they don’t offer the kind of content people want to see. So, there is no better time to ask them what kind of information they want, and at what frequency, than in you welcome email.

6. Promote your other marketing efforts: people may have signed up to your email marketing list without knowing that you have social media marketing, direct mail, or newsletter campaigns that offer similar information. Perhaps they have a preferred medium that is likely to convert them. All it takes is offering them multiple venues for them to choose the one that is most likely to convert them.

7. Ask them to follow you socially: while that might sound slightly stalker-esque, asking someone to follow you on their social networking accounts will encourage an immediate boost in the relationship that will catapult you halfway through the email marketing sales cycle.

8. Offer them a tour or free trial: ’nuff said.
   
   

   Fostering participation amongst new email list additions isn’t tough but it does require a concerted and immediate effort. Try one or more of the above tactics and you should see a marked improvement in new email registration participation levels.

    For more email marketing tips, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: 8 Tips for Lead-Converting Welcome Emails

Growing your list is easier than you think, it just takes a concerted effort…of following these 18 proven-effective methods of growing your email marketing list:

1. Create a new offer. Offers get stale just like email addresses, social followers and bread. Creating a new free offer like an ebook, whitepaper or app will appeal to new users, and if you require an email address (with proof/double opt-in) for download your list will quickly grow.
2. Be useful, host an informative online webinair and require email addresses for registration.
3. Create a free, online tool, like a calculator, that requires email registration for use.
4. Use email-registration required QR codes.
5. Host a contest or sweepstakes. Promote it via your website and social networking sites and require email registration for entrance. Offer to your current email list that referrals are worth extra entry tickets. Be real and follow through with the prize because phony contests will lose users quick time.
6. Offer incentive-driven email signups on your social networking pages. If you’ve done this already, do it again because you likely missed somebody.
7. Create an alliance with a partner or affiliate website/company and cross advertise on email and social media blasts. It will give you an entirely new untapped market.
8. Use offline events to collect email addresses, like trade shows, corporate events, charity events, etc.
9. Ask current email subscribers to pass along your emails to friends who might be interested in your products/services. Be sure to add a ‘subscribe’ button to that email.
10. Run a paid ad campaign with email capture or use AdWords to link to one of your website page that gets the highest email subscribe returns.
11. Create another email subscription type that offers different products/information/services to your current one. You might just catch entirely new types of users.
12. Guest post on a popular blog in your vertical and include an email-subscription call-to-action button.
13. Sign up to new social networks like Pinterest and promote your email subscription there, especially to user and interest groups.
14. Put an email-subscription call-to-action button in a YouTube video you create then promote it across social networks and related internet sites.
15. Bring your offline online by encouraging your direct mail and newsletter subscribers to join your email list and social pages (play up the environmental angle by reminding them it saves trees).
16. Host an online or offline charity event and encourage attendees to sign up to your email list. Consider saying for every email added you will donate $X to the charity—it is underhanded but successful.
17. Re-engage old email lists with a new email marketing campaign that focuses on more relevant and fresher content.
18. Host a group event or webinair with like-minded companies (but not direct competitors of course) and share email subscribes.

If you have the time to implement all of the above you will breathe new life into your email marketing list. Be sure not to lose the momentum though and begin exciting new campaigns and blasts immediately. Don’t forget to enter them all into your sales or CRM tool to ensure that leads are followed through on.

For more tips n’ tricks for stealthy email marketers, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: 18 Ninja-like Tips to Grow your Email Marketing List

Email marketing may be a great strategy, but here is the problem: Many webmasters do not know where to put the optin box on their website or how to increase optin rates.

If you aren’t getting any email subcribers, your efforts are futile at best.

Here are some tips to increasing your optin rate:

Prominence

Your optin must be displayed in a prominent place where your visitors can see it. Do not hide it off in the corner and blend it in with the rest of the site. The optin graphics should jump out at the visitor and compel them to join your list.

Locations

There are several locations to place the email optin box.

1. Header – The header is the top section of your website and one of the first elements a visitor sees. Marketers usually add the box to the right side away from the logo or contact information.

Beware of optin boxes cluttering the header. Even though the optin is front and center, the excess clutter can deter eyeballs. A better choice may be right under the header, but above the main content. This is a popular area to feature an optin and garner more subscribers.

2. Sidebar – The sidebar is another valuable location for most websites. It is also high-converting because visitors see the optin on every web page.

3. Below Blog Post – The footer location is perfect for blogs because it is natural for readers to finish the article and wonder what to do next. The only caveat is that you are adding more choices for your reader once they finish your article. They can either post a comment, share the article, or optin to your list. Chances are, they will only complete one item.

4. About Page – This one isn’t as popular, but it may work well for personal brands. If you are branding yourself, you will have a lot of visitors visit your “About” page. Try an optin on this page and measure the conversions. You just may be surprised.

Design

The colors and design of the optin box should stand out from the website background. Add professional graphics and TELL the potential subscriber what they can expect after opting in. Remember that people consider their names and email addresses as private information. You must give them a good reason to opt in and divulge their personal data.

List a privacy statement and assure your potential subscribers their email addresses will never be shared or sold. And do not request more information than a name and email address. Many internet users are not even comfortable offering those details.

Freebie

Incentives are crucial to attract people to sign up for your email list. Give away a free ebook, white paper, interview, or audio to entice your website visitors to subscribe. Consider it an exchange of value. You are offering your visitors a free gift in exchange for their email address which is very valuable to them because they are allowing you to invade their space and time with your email messages.

Test

If you don’t know where to begin, add your optin list to one of the above locations and test it. Change its location and see if you experience an increase or decrease in conversions.

Where is the optin on your website? Are there any other locations you would consider?

The Original Post is Located Here: Tips and Tricks to Optimizing Your Email Optin Box

In honor of this inbound imbecility we’ve put together the 3 most-common inbound marketing botches. Oh and we threw in their solutions, just for good measure:

1. Blah Blah Blah Text
Website text that blah blah blah’s on forever won’t win you any customers. Mumbo-jumbo technical jargon won’t win you customers either. A major sin of inbound marketers is trying to put too much into too small a space. Instead use the age-old acronym K.I.S.S.

Quick Fix: A quick customer-driven text test will go a long way to taking out the blah blah blah from your website. This is especially important for your landing page(s).

2. Self-Indulgent ‘About Us’ Pages
If blah blah blah text is a killer, self-indulgent ‘about us’ pages is the Charles Manson of conversion-killing pages.

Quick Fix: Read your ‘about us’ page. If you yawned at any point then the superficial junk needs to be trashed. Show the page to the most honest person you know and get them to strike-out the fluff. Then give whatever is left to the best wordsmith or marketing hype person you know and see what they can do with it. If you don’t know anyone like that then just try and fill it with honest words and put some verbs in it. If you’re stuck on what to write, use this basic outline: a one- or two-sentence elevator pitch on your company, then a second paragraph on your company’s directives and finally include a sub-navigation menu at the bottom to lead people to your winning, high-converting content.

3. Boring Product Pages
It sure is hard to convert visitors to customers and drive sales if your content doesn’t move them. Your best foot-forward in terms of sales are your website’s product pages, so make sure they are catchy, memorable and actionable. A great way to figure out if your product pages are as dull as Quaker meeting is to ask a few people to read your product pages and parrot the info back to you without peeking at the page again. If they can do it, congrats your content is decent. If they can’t remember a thing then you really aren’t getting the point across.

Quick Fix: Be more direct with your product pages, cut out the jargon and consider using just 2-4 bulleted points to list product features or benefits.

Pretty easy to make these common mistakes huh? You likely had at least one ah-ha moment in there, and if you did—no worries, after all this is a list of the most-common mistakes. Even experienced internet marketers make them.

To find out more internet marketing mistakes you could be making, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: The 3 Most-Common Screw Ups in Inbound Marketing

Here are the important lead-nurturing metrics to keep track of to ensure your sales success record:

List Segmentation Metrics
How well you are segmenting your lists will determine how well you can nurture your sales leads. You can use your analytics tool in two ways to determine your lead-nurturing segmentation success. First, use your analytics tool to determine if any of your list segments are under-performing others. As a safe rule of thumb your unsubscribe rates should be less than 1% across all segments. If one section is higher then another it means you haven’t been nurturing your leads in that specific lead-nurturing sector. The second way to measure your segmentation success is by checking your click-through rates. Your click-through rates should also be reasonably uniform across your various segments.

Action Item: If your click-throughs and unsubscribes are not uniform (or are uniformly poor performing) then you need to reconsider your segmentation strategy.

Time-to-Customer Conversion Metrics
Nothing says good lead-nurturing skills like a quick time-to-customer conversion rates. Use your time-to-customer conversion speed in your metrics tool to see if your conversion rate has increased over time—as it should have—or if you have stagnated and could use a lead-nurturing pick me up. For more lead-nurturing internet marketing tips, click here.

Qualified Lead Generation Metrics
To be successful in lead-nurturing, you need to have a sufficient group of leads to nurture through the sales process—without them you are just chasing your own tail. If you haven’t defined what a ‘qualified’ lead is, do that now. Next, figure out how many of your sales leads are truly qualified. This will help determine your true time-to-customer conversion rate and boost your overall lead-nurturing success.

Also, apply your qualified lead definition and generation techniques to your segmentation metric to ensure that you are nurturing qualified leads across all segmented lead-nurturing campaigns (if you haven’t segmented your lead-nurturing campaigns yet, consider that now). If your qualified leads are unbalanced then you will need to redefine how you earn your leads. This may involve strategizing with others in your marketing or sales departments.

Cost-per-Customer Metrics
In order for your lead-nurturing to be effective you need to have a reasonable cost-per-customer conversion rate. To measure this use closed-loop analytics to see how many leads actually turn into customers. Note: in this step the speed with which they convert matters less than the conversion itself. If the time invested in lead-nurturing costs more (on a wage per hour basis) then your conversions earns, you will need to re-examine your lead-nurturing strategy—especially the quality of leads being worked on. When measuring your cost-per-customer lead-gen ratio you should look at the cost ratio over time because a decreasing cost-per-customer means significantly more success than the current ratio alone.

You should be incorporating lead-nurturing metrics into your weekly or monthly analytics use. Heck, you’re running analytics anyways—might as well keep an eye out for your lead-nurturing success.

The Original Post is Located Here: Lead-Nurturing Metrics You Might Not Know You’re Measuring

Evernote is a fantastic little piece of software that can help you sort emails, use virtual post-its, have a virtual whiteboard, make to-do lists and more. Unfortunately it can be a little intimidating because of its flexibility and magical Gandalf-the-White-Wizard powers, but once you wrap your head around it you will never go back. Once you have yourself organized, and hooked-on, Evernote you will notice a marked improvement in your workflow and you’ll be able to take on an increased workload (or you can sit back with a beer with the extra time…either way).

What YOU Can Do With It:

1. Create Content
Evernote is a bang-up tool for for capturing ideas and turning them into content. Its digital notebook qualities remind me of a real notebook. You know, like pen and paper. You can use it to draft and store articles and blog posts, store ideas for future content and save inspirational articles that you hope to rip-off one day. This may sound a lot like a word processing software, but trust me—Evernote makes the experience much cooler.

2. To-Do Lists
If you’re like me and constantly have ten things on the go, or at least rattling around in your brain somewhere, then you will love Evernote’s to-do list capabilities. It is a great way not only put all your duties down on paper so that they get done but you can also link it to other items in Evernote like content ideas or webpages. Via Evernote smartphone apps you can even take the list with you on the go.

3. Take Notes
With the virtual whiteboard you can jot down notes in meetings or while you are on the go then send the note to yourself later (with a pop-up reminder if your not putting it on your to-do list). It looks cool (especially on an iPad) so pulling up Evernote won’t get you any heckles from onlookers.

4. Inbox Triage
Hopefully your inbox doesn’t look like mine, but if it does then you NEED Evernote’s Inbox Zero tool. Inbox Zero tool will assist you in deleting, delegating, responding to, and acting on your emails. You can even assign tasks to your to-do list within Evernote from your inbox. Sweet.

5. Idea List
You likely have lots of great ideas that flash into you head daily. You also likely rarely write them down and even more rarely act upon them (or remember to). By creating an idea list you will be able to easily access a quick backlog of ideas. Perhaps you could even put down the i’ve-got-too-much-time-on-my-hands beer and get to work putting these into action.

6. Collaboration
Through Evernote you can collaborate with your team and share all your Evernote content, schedules, to-do lists, etc. It doesn’t take all the endless revisions that other collaborative software makes you go through so its a realistic tool for collaborating.

Evernote can really tie all your tasks into one and help get you motivated to be more pro-active in the things that matter and cut down on you reactive time.

For more tips on how to improve your mojo as an internet marketer, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: 6 Ways Marketers Can Use Evernote to Organize Their Lives

Now—let’s teach you how to use it.

If you’re like most of our readers, you learn by doing (aka trial-by-error). And you’re likely doing some things incorrectly (no worries—we all did in the beginning). The best way to find and fix those errors is to treat your marketing automation tool like your analytics tool, meaning you use measurable metrics to measure your success (or lack thereof initially).

There are four main metrics to look at when gauging your marketing automation strategy:

1. Activity
Activity measuring is a no-brainer. Before you start delving into the abyss of marketing automation metrics lets figure out how much your staff is actually using it. This is critically important because you need to ensure you have a good cross-section of data to ensure that your metrics are meaningful. Your ‘activity’ is comprised of two things: the quantity of emails sent and the quality of behavioral triggers,

2. Response
The amount of activity is what sets the stage for your response metric. Activity is the effort and response is the effect. Your response can be measured via your open rate, click-through rte, conversions, reconversions, site traffic and unsubscribe rates—pretty much all the stats you are already familiar with as an internet marketer.

3. Efficiency
If activity is the effort and response is the effect, then efficiency is the result. This is the metric that will likely be most important (but can’t really be measured without the first two metrics) as it gives you the ROI for your marketing automation tool. This can be measured via: cost per customer, qualified leads generated and overall marketing-automation induced sales.

4. Value
Value is the sum of all the metrics listed above as it measures the overall effect, efficiency and ROI of you tool. These metrics will help you determine your overall value: generated revenue. Cost of investment (compared to generated revenue) and closing rate on marketing-automation-tool sourced leads.

How-To Specifics:
In terms of how to specifically run each metric, this will be different depending on which marketing automation tool you are using. Most software makes this super easy and will have a drop-down menu of options, but if yours doesn’t then you will need to consult the software manual or creator’s website.

For more tips, tricks and strategies for successful internet marketing, click here.

The Original Post is Located Here: 4 Metrics to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Automation Tool