4 ways to leverage email marketing with PPC

When it comes to the fast-moving world of internet marketing, everyone is looking for that competitive edge. If SEO and email marketing are already a developed part of your marketing campaign, PPC (pay-per-click) can be another useful tool to help grow both your conversions and your leads.

Use PPC to test email marketing elements

While we can use email marketing to increase leads in a variety of ways, PPC advertising offers a great way to test out the elements of your marketing emails, like landing pages or possible subject lines, before using them in a mass email. PPC gives you ample space to safely test out that edited copy, those new keywords or a new landing page and get an early peek at conversion rates. Using these tools can help optimize your message and increase its rate of success before sending it out to your entire list. That said, PPC ads are not only a great environment to test out elements of email marketing, but are versatile enough to try out nearly any element of your marketing campaign.

Build email lists with PPC

A great way for anyone to start introducing PPC into their campaign is by using it to grow your email list. While email can be used to increase both conversions and leads, PPC is a terrific way to boost both of those numbers even further. In this case, you can measure every email gained from a PPC ad as a conversion and a success toward this goal. Someone clicking on a PPC ad should arrive at a page that shows off the service or product one is offering, but with two possible ways of gathering potential customer information:

First, the primary focus of this page should always be the conversion itself. Part of this process will gather the customer’s email along with other information for things like receipts and contact or shipping information. Simple enough.

Then, you should always include a secondary call to action (CTA) that can still obtain an email conversion even if the person decides not to purchase. This shouldn’t distract from your main objective and should encourage potential customers to give you their email address and offer them something in return. An example of this might be “Sign up to be notified of future discounts” or “Sign up for news and tips” — anything that could appeal to someone interested in the ad but not quite ready to commit to what you’re offering.

Use your email marketing data to optimize your PPC ads 

The information you have gathered via sending conversion emails and looking at click-through rates isn’t just useful for your email marketing. While emails commit to a higher percentage of overall conversions for many businesses, PPC ads can be a powerful tool in gaining conversions themselves. The keywords, subjects, headlines and offers that have been successful in the past can likely be integrated into your PPC ads as well. At the least they are powerful starting benchmarks to help augment your marketing strategy. This can be great information in reaching out to a brand-new audience or wider market, and increasing your numbers across the board.

Plan PPC campaigns to boost email click-through rates 

A large part of successful advertising at its core isn’t just about the message itself and how strong it is, but about the amount of exposure to your message that your potential customers receive. Time and time again research shows us the power of the Exposure Effect, and how customers who are exposed to a product or service multiple times are simply more likely to commit to a purchase. PPC ads can provide more exposure to your message outside of your emails. You can do this by starting a PPC ad campaign that begins a day or a two before your email campaign goes out, and ends a few days afterward. The awareness and exposure of these PPC, ads coupled with your hard-hitting emails, can work well together to increase conversions.


Source

List with a Twist: 50 Creative Tips for Gathering Customer Emails

If you don’t have a strong email list for your customer base, you’re missing out on a great marketing tool that’s both reliable and free.

Compiled correctly, your list should represent a significant captive audience that’s already interested in your offerings.

 “It gives you the opportunity to contact your prospects at any point in the future with any kind of messaging you want — and you’re not bound by search engine rankings or social media algorithms,” notes Jayson DeMers in Forbes.

Building up your list can seem difficult and time-consuming, but it’s worthwhile to include only those who have chosen to engage. Buying lists from another vendor is a bad idea, since emailing anonymous contacts can come across as invasive and often results in complaints, bounced addresses and unsubscribes. Your list will be most effective if you gain trust by not sharing subscribers’ info with other firms and creating emails with useful or exclusive information and valuable offers — not just sales pitches.

“Your content needs to be amazing if you want people to stay subscribed and forward your emails to their friends, family and colleagues (not) already on your email list,” notes Andy Pitre on HubSpot.

Consider the following list of email list-generating ideas.

1)      Add an email signup offer to the back of your business cards.

2)      Include opt-in forms as well as forwarding options on every page of your website, blog and social media networks. Don’t forget “about you” sections.

3)      Include a link to your sign-up form in every personal email signature.

4)      Add your sign-up form link to all your printed receipts. Better yet, consider offering emailed receipts (vendors include Transaction Tree and yReceipts).

5)      Bring a sign-up book to tradeshows, Chamber of Commerce events and “lunch and learn” type gatherings in your local business community.

6)      Offer a birthday or anniversary club with a premium for those who sign up.

7)      Pay employees commission for valid addresses from willing subscribers.

8)      Gather addresses via a discount offer with Groupon or similar daily deal site.

9)      Solicit addresses when your business appears at fundraisers, festivals and artisan markets.

10)  Ask customers for new subscribers’ names in exchange for a discount.

11)  Retrieve bounced-back emails, sending postcards asking contacts to sign up again.

12)  Place your opt-in link in another business’ newsletter, doing the same for them.

13)  Optimize your website for your keywords, striving for the top of the organic search results for those seeking your products (see Google Adwords).

14)  Use your list of snail-mail addresses to request email opt-ins.

15)  Stage pop-up requests for those leaving your website or blog.

16)  Include forward-to-a-friend links in all emails to make them easier to share.

17)  Archive newsletters on your website so subscribers know what they’ll get.

18)  Consider a platform like BuddyPress for WordPress (and add opt-ins), creating a community that fosters interaction among customers.

19)  Ask every caller to your business if you can add them to your list.

20)  Invite customers to enter business cards into a counter fishbowl for a weekly prize drawing, logging their addresses and announcing winners in your email newsletter.

21)  At trade shows, collect business cards and (with permission) scan them for addresses.

22)  At retail locations, set out a sandwich board asking for emails.

23)  Ask for emails on the credit card receipts signed by customers.

24)  Stage a contest asking customers to produce one-minute videos about why they like your product. Others can vote for the winner on your social media pages, accessing opt-in invitations.

25)  Use your smartphone to add addresses on the go.

26)  Place opt-in invitations in product shipments.

27)  Add similar invitations to customers’ shopping bags.

28)  Nonprofits: Include an email-address line on donation envelopes/forms.

29)  Retailers: Ask customers for addresses during in-store promotional events.

30)  Solicit personal friends and business colleagues as subscribers.

31)  Send requests to other Chamber of Commerce members.

32)  Offer a free e-book or informational guide for signing up.

33)  When speaking at an event, offer listeners a free consultation with newsletter subscription.

34)  Conducting a survey? Include email sign-up info.

35)  Include an opt-in form on invoices.

36)  Place an opt-in on your WordPress site or blog.

37)  Give discounts when a customer buys from you and then mentions it on Foursquare via their mobile device. Get the address for the “mayor” and give them a big discount each month.

38)  Offer insightful comments on blogs or forums your prospects or customers would visit, adding links to your opt-in form.

39)  Make sure your website’s sign-up landing page is appealing, easy to use and outlines the value of signing up. Note that requesting too much information too soon discourages sign ups.

40)  Create a video about your business, adding a URL to your opt-in form and posting it on YouTube. You can also add note boxes and speech bubbles using YouTube’s “Annotations” function, and/or link your video to another video, playlist, YouTube channel, or Google+ profile involving your business.

41)  Make sure even transactional emails (i.e. order information or shipping updates) include a link to your email sign-up.

42)  Survey current email subscribers about likes and dislikes, using the data to create more effective email content and up-front value propositions.

43)  Online tool Rafflecopter runs Facebook giveaways that automatically glean email addresses from participants, starting at $13/month.

44)  Online tool Justuno automatically provides customers a coupon code for your products or services if they provide their email; price is up to $40/month for small businesses.

45)  Online tool Binkd gathers email addresses from participants who tweet a message about your brand, then you randomly select a prize winner. Price: Up to $2 per day.

46)  Online tool Woobox sets up Facebook quizzes participants can share on their timelines, then you gather emails and draw prize winners. Small businesses spend about $49 to $99 each month.

47)  On Pinterest, pin coupon codes, e-books, guides, video series, online training seminars, checklists and webinars, and include calls to action for your email list.

48)  While it may seem counterintuitive, weed out the disinterested parties by sending contacts a new opt-in promising to remove their name if they don’t respond.

49)  Publish links to your opt-in page on your LinkedIn company page and/or in relevant discussions on LinkedIn.

50)  Co-host a project like an e-book or webinar with an appropriate business partner, then cross-market it with both businesses to solicit emails.

Finally, understand that maintaining a viable email list is bound to be more a marathon than a sprint.
“Your email marketing database degrades by about 22.5 percent every year,” notes Pitre. “Your contacts’ email addresses change as they move from one company to another, opt-out of your email communication, or abandon that old AOL address they only use to fill out forms on websites. As a marketer, it’s your job to make sure you’re constantly adding fresh contacts to your email marketing campaigns so you can keep your numbers moving up and to the right.”


Source

5 of Our Favorite Ways to Make Money From Home

Working from home in pajamas is the dream of many out there trapped in the rat race. The great news is that it's not hard to get started. Below are some of our favorite ways to make money from home. 

Find a Passive Income Stream

What's "passive income"? It's simple -- finding a way to earn money while you sleep, of course! 

There's a saying in the corporate world: "Don't make yourself irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted." As an entrepreneur, this is still true in its own way.

Let's think of "being promoted" as earning more and working less. You can raise your prices, but until you can remove yourself from being directly involved in doing the work that generates the income, there's always going to be a limit to how much you can earn, and it can only increase very slowly.

More on passive income here. 

Do Affiliate Marketing the Smart Way 

Affiliate marketing is sometimes touted as "get rich quick schemes" by shady sites offering pyramid schemes that promise quick cash for little effort. Make no mistake -- successful affiliate marketers put in a lot of effort toward building an audience and quality content that will bring in sustainable passive income. Expect to do a lot of legwork up front -- but if you play your cards right you can build a solid source of revenue over time

Learn to be a successful affiliate marketer here.

Build a Blog on a Speciality Niche 

If you create a speciality blog that brings in a reasonable amount of traffic, you can enjoy income on ads you place on the site.

One good way is to craft a speciality blog with product reviews and recommendations. Be sure to pick a topic that you enjoy and know something about. If you can't stay passionate about the topic, that will show, and it also won't hold your interest. Choose a narrow enough niche to be distinctive, e.g., bands from your city, left-handed guitarists, music for a certain kind of dancing, authors of a certain religion, books about arts & crafts, etc.

More here. 

Make Money Doing Something You Love

You don't have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for websites, presentations, brochures and so on, and are willing to pay for the right image. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as anyone else of having your image picked. Just be careful that you don't have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people's faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but just about anything else is fair game, and I promise - you'd be amazed what people need pictures of, so don't make any assumptions. If it's a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime,  and iStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it's truly "set it and forget it".

More ways to make money online here. 

Build an Information Products Business 

If you have a knack for teaching or making complex material more digestible, consider the field of information products.

You can create your own webinar or ebook using low-cost tools, such as Camtasia, YouTube, and Powerpoint. If you are interested in using the resources of a larger company, new educational startups like 

Udemy and Skillshare allow anyone to create and sell classes through their platform. Though they take a small percentage of your profits, you can take advantage of their built-in communities and marketing lists.

How to get started: Read our guide to information products.

Source

4 Big Tips for More Email Clicks

 You’re sending your emails, checking your stats; everything is clicking along for your email marketing. But wait, no, things aren’t clicking along; in fact, your clicks seem low compared to the number of people who opened your email. What’s one to do? Well, you shouldn’t write off the importance of click throughs, because they represent email readers who are interested and engaged in your business. Email opens are important, but once someone’s read your email, you also need him/her to take action (sign up, buy, donate, watch, read) and that requires a click to your website. So how do you get readers to click through? Here are 4 big tips:

1. Include More Links – Many people simply don’t add enough links within their email to give readers the opportunity to click on. Add two to three links per section or paragraph, and link all of your headlines and images. Make sure your links go directly to the product or article you’re speaking of – don’t drop them on the home page of your site and hope they find the product/service/blog post you want them to see. They never will, and will leave your website not having taken the action you desire. Try linking these elements in your emails to increase your clicks:

• Headlines and subheads
• Pre-header
• Call to action buttons
• Table of contents
• Logo
• Header/footer
• Images
• Keywords or phrases (ex: practical tips, here’s how, 5 ways)
• Text appropriate for a link (i.e, product name, company name)
• Testimonials or customer ratings

2. Improve Your Call to Action (CTA) – No matter what kind of email you’re sending, there’s a purpose or action you want your readers to take. This is your call to action – the action you want your recipients to take. If you’re seeing lower click through numbers than you expect, check out your CTA, as it could be the culprit. If you haven’t given your readers something to do, say, “Read More!” or “Watch this Video,” it could be that they don’t know how, or aren’t encouraged to get more info mentioned in your email.

Keep your CTA clear, to the point and have one ultimate call to action per email. Don’t add too many conflicting main call to actions in your email (ex: Sign up here, watch this, buy now, read this). If you give people too many options, they won’t choose anything! One easy way to draw attention to your CTA and help encourage clicks is to use a button. You can have your button say whatever you need it to say, but again, make it clear and concise. We have a free button tool to help you create the right button for you: buttons.verticalresponse.com. Here are some fun and effective examples of CTA buttons:

3. Mobilize Your Email – Your readers want your email to be full of great info and easy to read. About half of all emails are now being read on some kind of mobile device, so you need an email that works well on any platform it’s being read on. So be sure to use a mobile friendly template if you’re using an email service, or keep your email to a one-column layout at the very least. Using CTA buttons can help your mobile readers a lot, as it’s much easier to tap a button on a smaller screen than it is to touch a text link. And again, keep your CTA clear because your mobile readers won’t spend as much time reading your email on that small screen, so tell them what you need them to do right away.

4. Work on Your Subject Line – While your subject line is a big part of what gets your emails opened, it can also contribute to your click through if it’s compelling enough and has a call to action. Try adding a call to action in your pre-header text as well, to give your readers a reason to open your email and click through. And while you’re at it, double check that the info you include in your email is what you promised when your readers signed up for your list. If you’ve started to wander off topic, it could be that your readers have lost interest in the email, and aren’t clicking through.

Try one, or even better, all of these suggestions and see if your click through numbers go up – We bet they will!

Source

101 (Neatly Organized) Marketing Tools For Nearly Any Marketing Task

Looking for a definitive list of “marketing tools”? Then look no further.

We’ve painstakingly researched, refined and distilled hundreds of them.

The result: this fully-categorised list of what we believe to be 100 of the best tools out there.

But, before we get to the tools, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:
It would be impossible to create a list of every tool, so this wasn’t our focus. We instead focussed on collating the most popular and widely-used tools (and categorizing them).
We’ve put a lot of focus on SEO tools. Why? Because we’re talking about online marketing here, and SEO is a HUGE part of it.

OK, let’s get to the tools!

Analytics Tools

Without analytics, there’s no way of knowing how your visitors are reaching or interacting with your website.

And, if you don’t know this, you’ll be in the dark about what’s working and what isn’t.

This is a dangerous place to be, as it can lead to all kinds of errors.

For example, you may continue spending money on that PPC campaign that isn’t generating a return on investment. Or keep creating content that nobody is actually reading.

Analytics tools allow you to gain insight into these areas, so you can base your marketing strategy on cold, hard data (rather than guessing).

They can tell you where your visitors came from, who they are, and the traffic sources that convert best.



And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

These days, there’s an analytics tool for virtually everything.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Google Analytics — comprehensive analytics platform from Google (we recommend all websites use this!)

KISSMetrics — digs deeper into your visitors/customers behavior.

MixPanel — helps you learn more about your users. Great for product development and/or increasing conversions.

HotJar — shows how visitors are using your website with heatmaps.

Competitive Research Tools

Sometimes, you’ll be working on a site and realize one thing: your competition is absolutely crushing it.



It can be depressing, but remember this:

If you can just reverse engineer what they’re doing (i.e. everything responsible for their success), you can then implement similar tactics on your site.

But, here’s the problem: it’s almost impossible to do manually.

This is where tools come in handy.

Competitive research tools can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about your competitors, including:
Which content has the most backlinks?
Which content has the most social shares?
What terms are they bidding on in AdWords?
What keywords are they ranking for?

It’s also possible to identify “content gaps” (i.e. content your competitor has, yet you don’t) for your own site.

Here are our favorites:

SimilarWeb — estimates traffic and engagement statistics for any website.

SEMRush — shows the keywords your competitors are ranking for, the terms they’re targeting with ads and much more.

Ahrefs — lets you see who’s linking to your competitors, their most popular content, and more.

SpyFu — spy on your competitors and find their most profitable keywords (in both organic and paid search).

Link Prospecting Tools

Building backlinks is never an easy task.

It takes time, effort and a meticulously personalized approach to outreach.

Even then, you’re still only going to convert a handful of your prospects.

Therefore, successful link building requires two things:
A large list of prospects.
A way to meticulously vet these prospects.



Here are a few of the best tools for any serious link prospector:

Google Results Extractor (by Chris Ainsworth) — scrapes Google search results into a neat, copyable list.

LinkClump — lets you open a bunch of links in one fell swoop (perfect for vetting large lists of prospects).

Check My Links (for Chrome) — checks for broken links on any web page from within your browser.

NoFollow (for Chrome) — check for nofollowed links on any web page (i.e. links that pass no SEO value).

SEERS SEO Toolbox — adds insanely useful SEO-focussed formulas to Google Sheets.

URL Profiler — crawls and scrapes content from websites. It can also pull in data from Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, and a ton of other data sources.

Backlink Research Tools

Links remain one of the most important ranking factors.

Many studies (including our own) have confirmed this.

But, building links (without buying them!) can be extremely difficult.

And, if you don’t have access to a backlink research tool, it will be even harder.

Why? Because nearly all link building strategies that work (e.g. broken link building, etc.) rely heavily on data from such tools.

For example, you might want to reverse engineer the top 10 Google results (in order to figure out why they’re ranking) then copy their strategy.

But, with links (still) being a crucial ranking factor, you can bet that any site ranking in the top 10 has a ton of links.

So, you’ll probably need to reverse engineer (and copy) their backlinks to stand any chance of outranking them.

And the only way to find out who links to a particular piece of content is by using a backlink research tool.



Without relying on metrics (e.g. DR, UR, etc.) from such tools, it’s also pretty difficult to figure out the potential value of a link.

So, here are our 3 favorite backlink research tools:

Ahrefs Site Explorer — finds backlinks pointing to any domain or URL. It also has great filtering, shows anchor text, and even surrounding link text. Yeah, we’re biased, but this guy isn’t.

Majestic — the closest competitor to Ahrefs when it comes to “backlink research”. It has a few useful metrics such as TrustFlow and CitationFlow.

Open Site Explorer (from Moz) — backlink checker created by Moz.com. It has the smallest index of the three.

Keyword Research/Discovery Tools

Many people begin creating content without first conducting keyword research.

This is a big mistake.

Without comprehensive keyword research, your content typically won’t stand a chance of ranking for anything worthwhile.

And, if it doesn’t rank for the right terms (i.e. the keywords/phrases your target audience are searching for), you won’t get the traffic you deserve.

This means that the time, money, and effort you put into creating your content will be wasted.

Keyword research is actually a two-step process, consisting of:
Discovery
Research

Sidenote.Here’s a great 19-step process if you’re seriously about learning more, but we’ll keep things simple for the purpose this post.

Discovery involves finding as many keywords (related to your niche) as possible.

Finding related keywords from a “seed” keyword is one way of doing this.



Research involves looking at things like search volume (i.e. how many people search for a keyword each month) and keyword difficulty (i.e. the effort required to rank for a keyword).



And using this information to decide which keywords to target.

Both of these processes are equally important, so here are our favorite keyword discovery/research tools:

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer — grabs search volume and keyword difficult for any keyword. It also suggests related keywords and has great filtering options.

SEMRush — show a ton of information for any keyword (including search volume).

Long Tail Pro — grabs keyword volume, determines keyword competitiveness, and pulls in metrics from Majestic.

KeywordTool.io — amends your seed keyword with hundreds of variations, then scrapes Google’s related searches to find thousands of similar keywords.

AnswerThePublic.com — finds questions people are actually searching for (from your seed keyword).

On-Page SEO / Crawl Tools

Most “on-page SEO” tasks fall into one of these two buckets:
Finding errors (or optimization opportunities)
Fixing them

When you’re working with a small website (<5 pages), manually searching for and fixing problems is pretty easily done.

You load up a page, inspect the HTML, and note down any areas for improvement.

Simple.

But, with a large site (say 10k+ pages), doing this manually could easily take weeks or even months. It would also be pretty boring.

This is where web crawlers and various other on-page tools are needed.

Web crawlers make finding errors en masse as simple as hitting a “crawl” button — the program does all the work for you.



But, there’s another problem: big sites typically have big (i.e. many) problems.

Diving into the HTML to fix hundreds of problems would be pretty time-consuming. Fortunately there are a tons of other on-page tools/plugins that make life a lot easier.

Here are a few must-have tools:

Screaming Frog — powerful website crawling application that’s perfect for discovering on-site issues (e.g. broken links, etc.)

DeepCrawl — powerful industry-leading website crawler (also cloud-based, unlike Screaming Frog)

Yoast SEO (WordPress Plugin) — gives you the ability to easily edit on-page meta information (e.g. title, description, etc.) without sifting through the code.

OnPage.org — crawls your website, finds on-site/technical errors, and kicks back a detailed report.

Beam Us Up — powerful crawling application (somewhat similar to Screaming Frog, but 100% free),

Xenu Link Sleuth — lightweight website crawler with a focus on finding broken links (only for Windows).

Rank Tracking Tools

Knowing where you rank for your target keywords is super-important.

Without tracking this information, you’ll never know where to prioritize your efforts.

For example, if you rank #1 for a particular keyword, you probably don’t need to launch a massive link building campaign for that page/keyword (as it can’t get any higher).

But, if you’re ranking at the bottom of page 2, that page may benefit from such a campaign.



What’s more, if you have clients, they’re going to expect a “ranking” report every month.

And, with most websites ranking for hundreds — sometimes even thousands — of keywords, it would be crazily time-consuming to do this manually.

So, here are a few of the best rank tracking tools on the market:

Pro Rank Tracker — track up to 50,000 keywords with daily automatic updates. They also support both local and mobile rank tracking.

STAT — track an unlimited number of keywords, all with daily tracking. Mobile and local SERPs included.

SERPWoo — track up to 4,000 keywords (includes mobile + local). It also lets you track the top 100 positions for any query.

AWR Cloud — daily rankings for desktop, mobile and local searches. You can also generate white label ranking reports.

Accuranker — fast rank checker (updates in seconds). It also tracks social metrics and integrates with Google Analytics.

Content Research Tools

Millions of blog posts are published every single day.

And here’s the truth: most of them go completely unnoticed.

Why? Because most people never research the type of content that is likely to work well in their industry.

They simply start writing and hope for the best.

So unless you want to waste time creating content that your target audience won’t care about, you need to do your research.

This is where content research tools come in.

These tools allow you to gain insight into your industry before you write a single word.

Just type in a keyword or phrase and you’ll be able to see things like:
Number of social shares
Number of backlinks/referring domains
The exact wording your target audience uses when searching for a topic



And from this, you can make informed, data-driven decisions about the best way to attack your chosen keywords/topics.

Here are a few of our favorite tools:

Buzzsumo — easily find content with the most social shares and backlinks (you can also filter by content type and time period).

Ahrefs (Content Explorer) — find niche-specific content with the most social shares, backlinks, and traffic. Also lets you get super-granular with the filtering (e.g. filter by publish date, languages, etc.)

Reddit — popular community site where you can find tried and tested ideas for your content.

Email Discovery/Verification Tools

Many marketers still search for email addresses manually.

They spend countless hours sifting through hundreds of websites, social profiles, and other web properties, searching for that elusive email address.

This takes a ton of time.

Simply finding the contact information for, say, 100 people can easily set you back a full working day.

This is where “email discovery/verification tools” come in handy.

Using super-smart algorithms, they visit, parse, and scrape sites to gather contact information.

Many of them will find a person’s email address in seconds — all you need is their name and website.



But, here’s the bad news:

None of these tools are 100% accurate (most claim 80–90% accuracy), so occasionally they won’t find anything.

This is where email guessing and validation tools come in handy.

Here are our 5 favorites:

Hunter.io (formerly EmailHunter.co) — tackles both email discovery and verification. It has a clean UI, API access (which works in Google Sheets), and a Chrome extension.

Voila Norbert — discovers and verifies email addresses (very similar to Hunter.io). It has an API, but no Chrome extension.

FindThat.Email — claims an 85% delivery rate on all email addresses it finds. No API access, but there’s a Chrome extension. It also works within Ahrefs Dashboard.

MailTester.com — will verify the existence of an email address by pinging the server. It’s ugly, but it works.

Guesser.email — does what it says on the tin: it’s guesses someone’s email address (from their name and website).

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing tools have come a long way over the last few years.

No longer are they restricted to bland broadcast emails (i.e. an “email blast” to your entire list).



You can now:
Segment easily
Get extremely granular with campaign monitoring
Create smart action-based autoresponder sequences

This is why email is reported to have a 3800% ROI.

So, if you’re serious about email marketing, you need to invest in email marketing tools.

Here are a few of our favorites:

MailChimp — email marketing made simple. Offers easy integration with a ton of third-party apps/services (e.g. UnBounce, WordPress, etc.)

ConvertKit — conversion focussed email marketing for bloggers.

InfusionSoft — email marketing platform focussed on smart automation (also incorporates a CRM).

GetResponse — claims to be the “world’s easiest email marketing” platform. It also offers some automation features (although not as advanced as InfusionSoft).

Outreach Tools

Manual outreach is one of the most effective ways to promote new content.

It’s also a great way to build links.

But, if you take the fully manual approach, it can take hours to compose and send just a few outreach emails.

This is because generic email tools (e.g. Gmail) aren’t built for mass outreach. So, you’ll end up writing each and every email from scratch (this is crazily time-consuming).

Outreach tools make everything much simpler and quicker.

Many have features such as auto follow-ups, email open tracking, pre-built templates, and even mail-merge capabilities.



They can also drastically simplify the process of discovering relevant prospects.

Some even allow you to discover hundreds (or even thousands) of targeted prospects in seconds.

Here are our favorites:

Buzzstream — find prospects and send outreach emails with ease. Includes a basic CRM and lets you track all emails sent.

Pitchbox — outreach platform focussed on automation and scaling.

ContentMarketer.io — lets you send and track outreach emails using Gmail. Includes a ton of templates.

JustReachOut.io — allows you to discover and pitch to journalists easily. Integrates with HARO.

NinjaOutreach — all-in-one influencer discovery and outreach management tool.

Local SEO Tools

If you’re involved in “local” SEO, things like citation building, reviews, and reputation management will be a big part of your life.

But, here’s the problem: these tasks can be extremely time-consuming, boring, and repetitive.

For example, It can take hours to find local citation opportunities. And when you do find them, you’ll then have to spend even more time submitting to each of them. One. By. One.

It’s the same story with local blogger outreach, attracting reviews, and virtually any other “local SEO” task, too.

But, what if all this could be simplified, or perhaps even automated?

With “local SEO” tools, you can automate tasks such as, local rank tracking, and even finding local citations.



Here are a few useful “local SEO” tools:

BrightLocal — pulls your local SEO data into one dashboard. Offers a ton of tools including citation auditing and online review monitoring.

WhiteSpark — offers three main tools: local citation builder; reputation builder; and local rank tracker. There’s also a link prospector.

Moz Local — helps you ensure that your local business listings are accurate and correct.

FreeReviewMonitoring.com — monitors your businesses reviews on all the major review sites, daily.

Mobile Analytics Tools

If you don’t know exactly how people are using your mobile app, something needs to change.

Sure, looking at the number of downloads gives you a basic insight.

But, if you’re looking to optimize your app for UX (as you should be) or analyze where mobile users are falling out of your funnel, you need to dig deeper.

This is exactly what mobile analytics tools allow you to do.

They’ll help you figure out who your users really are; what they’re clicking; and even the exact features they’re using.

You can then use this data to improve UX, guide your feature implementation strategy, and even increase your bottom-line.

Here are a few great tools:

Apsalar — app analytics platform focussed on ROI. Assesses return on ad spend (ROAS) and helps with remarketing.

LeanPlum — comprehensive mobile analytics platform that helps to drive app engagement and ROI.

App Annie — app analytics and marketing data intelligence platform.

Online Mention Tracking Tools

Most businesses are constantly being mentioned online.

Some people will be talking about their experience(s) with you, others will be asking questions about your product in forums, and so forth.

Now, it’s easy to see how monitoring these mentions could be beneficial; for example:
You could follow-up and answer questions from potential customers in forums
You could reclaim links from those mentioning you, but not linking to your site (thus helping with SEO)
You could promote future content to those who’ve mentioned you in the past

But monitoring these mentions manually is literally impossible.

The solution: mention tracking tools.

These tools constantly monitor the web for mentions of, well, whatever you ask them to monitor the web for.

You can enter brand keywords (e.g. “Ahrefs”), competitor keywords (e.g. “SEMRush”), or even topics (e.g. “marketing tools”).



Whenever they spot a new mention, they’ll let you know.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Google Alerts — lets you monitor the web for any keyword/phrase (completely free!).

Ahrefs (Alerts) — monitor alerts for any query and get updates in real-time (or daily/weekly).

Mention — monitors mentions of your brand on the web. It also helps uncover influencers and allows you to react instantly.

TalkWalker — listens for brand mentions on social platforms. It also tells you whether those mentions are positive or negative.

Social Mention — real-time keyword monitoring and analysis.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Facebook has 1.7+ billion monthly active users.

Twitter has 313 million.

Even Pinterest has 100+ million.

So it’s clear that social media marketing is a must for all businesses, regardless of size.

But, managing a Facebook page, Twitter account, Pinterest board, and LinkedIn group is a time-consuming process.

And here’s the truth: most small business owners simply don’t have the time or budget to do this.

I mean, if you’re doing everything manually, it can easily take an hour just to post one link across all your social media channels.

Luckily, social media marketing tools can help streamline the process.

Not only can they help with management, but many use smart algorithms to determine the best time for posting.

They even automate the entire process.



Here are a few of the best:

Buffer — allows you to queue your social media posts and publish to multiple platforms in one place.

CoSchedule — lets you build a smart content marketing editorial calendar.

HootSuite — helps you to manage all your social platforms from one place.

FollowerWonk — helps you to analyze your twitter followers (e.g. who they are, and where they’re from). Also useful for discovering “influencers”.

Landing Page Tools

Landing pages have one job: to convert visitors into leads.

In fact, a good landing page should convert at 20%-40%.

But, here’s the problem: each time you promote something new (e.g. ebook, webinar, “cheat sheet”, etc.), you’ll need a completely redesigned landing page.

But, most businesses can’t afford to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for a custom landing page design every few weeks.

Landing page tools solve this problem by offering sets of pre-designed, easily editable landing page templates.



Most also keep track of conversion rates, allowing you to gain some insight into how well your pages are converting.

Some even allow you to create and optimize entire funnels, which ultimately leads to a nice increase in revenue (when used wisely).

Here are a few we love:

LeadPages — a landing page builder (with a ton of templates!). Integrates with most email marketing platforms.

ClickFunnels — map out your entire funnel and build all the landing pages (and more) you need.

UnBounce — a simple landing page builder with over 200 templates.

Instapage — build, publish and continually test (with A/B testing) landing pages.

A/B Testing Tools

Most people are quite “trigger happy” with their ideas.

For example, when they have an idea for increasing conversions on their sales page, they’ll waste no time implementing that idea.

This is a huge mistake.

Why?

Because that change could just as easily decrease conversions. And if that happens, it will have a negative effect on your bottom-line.

A/B testing solves this problem by offering a data-driven approach to any changes.

Here’s how it works:

Instead of simply implementing a change and hoping for the best, A/B testing tools will create two versions of a page.

The first version is the original page (no changes), and the second is identical to the first, but with one change.

These two pages are then tested against each other — you can then choose whichever performed best as the winner.



Here are a few great A/B testing tools:

VWO — easily run A/B tests (and multivariate tests) on your website. It also helps you target and personalize content to different types of visitor.

Optimizely — run A/B tests and personalize web content with ease.

Convert.com — enterprise-level A/B testing with “seamless” Google Analytics integration.

Marketing Automation Tools

Most businesses use a ton of different marketing tools.

But, there’s a problem: most of these tools aren’t very good at talking to each other.

For example, if a customer purchases something via PayPal, getting that information into your CRM can often be a manual, time-consuming process.

Wouldn’t it be easier if these services could talk to each other?

Marketing automation tools make use of APIs and other smart technology to connect seemingly unrelated tools to one-another.

So, automatically importing form-fill data (e.g. from TypeForm) into a spreadsheet (e.g. Google Sheets), for example, is now possible.



And that’s just one example — you can create your own triggers and actions to do almost anything you can imagine.

Here are a few of the best tools:

IFTTT — connect hundreds of different services with a simple “If [THIS] then [THAT]” formula.

Zapier — automate tasks between seemingly unrelated apps with “zaps”.

Marketo — create, automate and measure marketing campaigns (across a number of different channels).

Center.io — automate tasks based on the actions your leads take (created by LeadPages).

Hubspot Marketing — all-in-one marketing automation platform (it literally does everything).

Webinar Tools

Webinars are powerful lead generation tools.

According to these stats, 20%-40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads.

So, if you can get 100 people to attend your webinar, that’s potentially 20–40 qualified leads for your business.

Convert those leads at, say, 50%, and that’ll be 10–20 new clients.

For an SEO company charging a monthly retainer of $500 (which is apparently the most common figure), that could be an additional $5k-$10k in MRR from hosting just one webinar.

But, here’s the issue: many businesses struggle with the technicalities of hosting a webinar.

Luckily, webinar software has come a long way over the years. There are now many webinar tools that are both feature-packed and easy-to-use.

Some of them even help you to monetize your webinars with certain features.



Here are a few of the best:

WebinarJam — an enhanced version of Google Hangouts, heavily focussed on increasing webinar revenue.

GoToWebinar — lets you host and record webinars with live Q&A’s (and much more!).

ClickWebinar — lets you educate your prospects with branded webinars.

WebinarNinja — create a webinar in as little as 10 seconds.

Lead Capture Tools

Traffic is great, but it doesn’t always directly correlate with revenue.

Some sites get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month and only make a few hundred dollars. Others receive a fraction of that and make tens of thousands.

So what gives?

Well, the sites making real money are typically the ones that understand the importance of lead generation.

Remember, you can have all the traffic in the world but if it doesn’t convert, you’re fighting a losing battle.

Lead generation tools essentially help you to convert visitors into business leads.

They make implementing common lead acquisition strategies (e.g. content upgrades; overlays; pop-ups, etc.) easier by handling the technicalities.

Most have a user-friendly UI, which allows you to implement advanced lead generation tactics in seconds (without needing to know how to code).



Here are a few of the best:

SumoMe — a suite of lead generation tools (including various opt-ins).

OptinMonster — build, test and analyze lead generation forms.

Thrive Leads — add “content upgrades” and other opt-ins to your WordPress website with ease.

PPC Management Tools

Facebook alone earned $1.51 billion in revenue (from advertising) in the first 3 months of 2016.

And Google’s ad revenue recently hit $19 billion.

With PPC networks like this (and yes, Facebook and Google are effectively PPC networks) making such astronomical amounts, it’s clear that PPC advertising can be hugely profitable for businesses.

If it wasn’t, businesses wouldn’t be willingly handing over such crazy sums to these companies.

But, here’s the problem: when you start to scale your PPC spend, things become increasingly difficult to manage.

It gets to a stage where your messy spreadsheet just won’t cut it.

This is where PPC management tools come in super-useful, as they drastically simplify the management process.

But, that’s just one feature.

Many of these tools also have sophisticated algorithms built-in. These constantly analyze campaign performance and give you recommendations for improvements (e.g. cutting that unprofitable ad before it costs you dearly).



Here are a couple of must-have tools for those involved in PPC:

WordStream — helps you create, manage and optimize your PPC campaigns.

AdEspresso — optimization tools for Facebook ads (includes A/B testing and detailed analytics).

Optmyzr — manage and optimize PPC campaigns (including keyword, bid, and ad optimization).

CRM Tools

Sales management can be a messy process.

It’s usually fine in the early days (when you’re dealing with very few customers).

But, when you start getting more leads, things can turn to chaos pretty quickly.

I mean, when you’ve got a few thousand people in your sales funnel (all at different stages), you need a robust management system.

Without one, customers are going to fall through the cracks, and you’ll be leaving money on the table.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools solve this problem by pulling all your data into one robust management application.

You can then keep track of every touchpoint, every interaction, and every sale in one place.

Many also automatically pull in data from other platforms (e.g. MailChimp).



Here are a few of the best:

Salesforce — possibly the most powerful CRM application on the planet.

Hubspot CRM — 100% free CRM for up to a million contacts.

Close.io — a CRM for salespeople (focussed on helping you make more sales).

Pipedrive — a sales management application for small businesses.

Customer Communication Tools

Many marketers spend the bulk of their time chasing new leads but remember: existing customers are the lifeblood of your business.

Here’s a quote from Market Metrics:

The probability of converting an existing customer is 60 percent to 70 percent. The probability of converting a new prospect, on the other hand, is only 5 percent to 20 percent


Market Metrics

Clearly then, it’s important to keep in contact with your existing customers.

But how do you do this, at scale?

Customer communication tools solve this by automating the customer communication process.

So, we’re talking things like website live chats (that ping you on demand).

And even fully-automated marketing solutions that send personalized messages to customers based on their activities.



Here are a few great tools to consider:

Intercom — communicate, engage with and solve the problems of your visitors (in real-time).

LiveChat — clutter-free live messaging application for your website.

Customer.io — automate your customer communication based on visitor engagement.

Miscellaneous (but still useful) Tools

And, finally…

Here are the tools that didn’t fit neatly into the categories above, but are still super-useful:

Google Tag Assistant — a Chrome extension for troubleshooting the installation of various tags in Google Tag Manager (e.g. Google Analytics).

DownNotifier.com — alerts you when your website is down. Simple.

BuiltWith — find out what any website is built with (e.g. WordPress, Magento, etc.).

Microdata Generator (by Schema.org) — a structured data generator for (almost) anything you could ever need!

JetPack (for WordPress) — speeds up image loading, adds extra security, and gives visitor stats for self-hosted WordPress websites.

WebCodeTools.com — generate web code for just about anything you can imagine!

Did We Miss Anything?
Leave us a comment and let us know.

Source

SEO vs. PPC: Pros, cons & an integrated approach

A question we are often asked is, “Which is better: SEO or PPC?” This is not a question with a general answer, as it really, truly depends on your current situation, objectives and marketplace.

Certainly, we are big on SEO at Bowler Hat. My experience in this industry over nearly 17 years shows me that when done well, organic search delivers more volume at a better cost per lead than paid search.

However, this is not the marketing Wild West it once was. New businesses can have a hard time getting started with SEO, and paid search can offer a fast track to search marketing when done correctly.

For me, this all comes back to your digital marketing strategy. Understanding your prospective customers and how they use the web is key to determining whether paid search, organic search or a combination of both is the best approach for your unique and ever-changing situation.

In this post, I am going to look at the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC as a marketing strategy and provide some tips in choosing the right channel for your business. Where both organic and paid are suitable, we will take a look at how to integrate SEO and PPC for improved results from your search marketing efforts.
SEO: Improve your organic traffic

What are the pros and cons of organic traffic from search engines? Let’s begin with the pros:

Awareness. Visibility in search engines for your targeted keywords puts your business in front of potential customers in much the same way as if you were to advertise, and it drives brand awareness.

Branding. Visibility around commercial search terms and informational queries related to your business area can have a positive branding benefit. Your brand can become associated with and trusted by searchers who are asking questions as they conduct the research that will lead to a purchase. You can become an authoritative voice around a given topic.

Credibility and trust. Having your site return in the organic results can influence your perceived credibility with an audience looking for your services. Many users skip ads and trust organic results more highly. Being visible gives your business that all-important stamp of approval. Also having strong review and reputation signals in place will deliver further benefit.

Website traffic. Increasing website traffic provides you with more opportunities to drive awareness of your business and educate a prospect as to why they would buy from you.

Cost per click. Traffic from organic search is free… sort of. Developing that visibility will take time and effort (money), but there is not a direct charge for each impression or click.

Return on investment (ROI). Organic search engine traffic can provide an improved ROI over traditional forms of paid media and certainly improve upon PPC.

Cost. While SEO is neither cheap nor easy, it will generally be more cost-effective than all other marketing tactics for delivering brand awareness and relevant traffic to your website.

Sustainability. Unlike paid search marketing, organic traffic does not dry up the moment you stop paying. As such, efforts to develop organic traffic can sustain a business when marketing spend is cut back.

Improved click-through rate (CTR). A higher percentage of users click on the organic results. While there are exceptions to this rule, you will generate more clicks from a highly placed organic listing than from a highly placed paid ad.

More clicks overall. To maximize visibility and clicks, you will want to have listings in the paid and organic results. Keyword-level experimentation is needed here to see if you are paying for clicks you would get for free or increasing overall clicks and CTR in both paid and organic — but to truly maximize results, strong visibility in paid and organic is needed.

Scope. There are so many new queries every day that to maximize scope, you will need strong organic visibility. You will not want to pay for all kinds of clicks either or advertise every piece of content on your website.

Strategic advantage. Visibility in organic search is not quick or easy — which is a good and a bad thing. Once you have established yourself in the organic results, your competitors can’t simply buy their way in (assuming you have done things the right way). This can provide a strategic advantage over the competition if they are relying on paid search.

It is not all sunshine and rainbows, though, and there are certainly cons to SEO. In many cases, organic traffic can be slow to come by, and you may be wildly outgunned. If you are just starting out, and the keywords you are targeting show results dominated by titans like Amazon and eBay, then you may need to rethink your strategy.

You may also need to develop content assets to achieve strong organic visibility. Not all businesses have the in-house resources to tackle content development, and this can pose a problem. Tactics such as safe, sustainable link building can be difficult to master, and often, a strategy is needed, along with expert support.

Organic traffic may also largely come in via informational or pre-purchase research queries. This is valuable traffic, but a more staged approach may be required to nurture those users to a purchase. This is a cornerstone activity in digital marketing; however, it is not always easy, and it is not a good fit for all businesses.
PPC: Laser-targeted visibility

How does paid search differ from organic search? With click-through rates and trust heavily stacked in favor of organic search, why would a business look at paid search? Here are some of the benefits PPC offers:

Position on the page. Paid search dominates above-the-fold content. With typically four ads on desktop and three on mobile, a user will always see the paid search ads, even if they choose to scroll past them.

Improved ads. PPC ads are just that: advertisements. As such, you have far more granular control and more space for delivering your marketing messages. Calls, locations, sitelinks, pricing and bullet points (callouts) are just some of the options for creating ads that dominate the page.



Visual product ads. Where you sell a product, Google provides the option of visual shopping ads (Product Listing Ads, or PLAs) that can help a user see what they will be clicking on. This kind of ad can really improve the click-through rate by offering a feature not available in organic search.



Brand visibility. Running paid search advertisements gets you seen by the right people. Even if they back off and conduct a brand search before clicking to your site, that visibility will pay dividends to your marketing.

Budget. PPC allows for a tight control of budget. Determine how much you are willing to spend per day (ideally with some initial and ideal ideas of returns), and set that fixed limit.

Targeting. PPC provides a laser-targeted way to get in front of potential customers. Ads can be targeted by search keywords, time of day, day of the week, geography, language, device and audiences based on previous visits. Organic traffic, by comparison, is far more scattershot.

Speed. While developing good organic visibility can take time, a PPC campaign can be created in days and ramped up in weeks. There is no faster way to get in front of customers at the very moment they are primed to buy than paid search engine advertising.

Agile. Speed provides agility. Want to test a new product? A new marketing message? You can get rapid feedback on a new product launch (or minimum viable product) by running a short PPC ad campaign.

Marketing intelligence. Where organic largely hides keyword data in the name of privacy, there is no such restriction with paid search. With conversion tracking and a solid integration with analytics software (like Google Analytics), we can determine what keywords convert and at what percentage and cost. This intelligence can be fed directly into organic search (SEO) marketing and can inform all other advertising to improve results across the board.

A/B testing. Easily split-test ads, landing pages, and even call-to-action buttons to determine where the very best results lie. Again, this information can be fed back into all other digital (and traditional) marketing endeavors.

Stability. AdWords does not suffer the same turbulence that the organic results can suffer from. There are changes, but they tend to have a far lower impact and are more easily managed. Careful use of match types and analysis of the search term reports allow for the removal of junk search and an increase in ROI over time.

Cost. Despite what many advertisers believe, a PPC account that’s well set up and managed can be a low-cost way to generate leads for your business. If you are a local business targeting a small geographic area and a small set of keywords, you may find that you can generate more than enough leads without breaking the bank. Additionally, over time, accounts can be further optimized to drive down costs and increase return.

As with organic search, there are many benefits to paid search advertising or PPC. However, there are also some pitfalls for advertisers to be wary of.

PPC can be expensive. It is not always the case, but costs can quickly add up. If you are targeting entire countries or running international campaigns, those costs can spiral.

Paid search advertising is, as the name suggests, paid — so it requires constant investment. Stop paying the piper, and your ads go away and your lead generation dries up. So long as you have a solid acquisition cost, then this should not be a problem, but in contrast to SEO, it can feel like a bad deal. Of course, SEO should be ongoing to keep the opposition at bay, but organic traffic can be a little more robust.

There are various options for search advertising with PPC, and making smart choices here will influence results. If you see product listings dominating the screen for your keywords, then text ads may not perform so well. Likewise, if you run product ads, and only text ads are returned, then these ads may not deliver the goods.

It is not unusual to get into bidding wars with other advertisers, which can drive costs up. As you start to run your ads, often you are taking a bite out of some other advertisers’ digital apple. Doing so can result in some spiraling costs.

Strategically, PPC is relatively easy to copy. If a competitor notices you are running ads, they can run ads. Your messaging can be imitated. Your entire funnel can be easily evaluated by competitors. This is the digital marketing landscape, and you have to accept that to some extent.

Successful PPC needs skilled management and optimization — from monitoring bids, Quality Scores, positions and click-through rates. Some of this can be done with scripts, but if you are too busy to do this properly, ensure you have an expert on hand to take care of keeping your account in tip-top shape.
SEO or PPC?

It’s just not possible to answer this question without taking the unique situation of a given business into consideration.

A hyper-local business with little competition and a requirement for just a few leads per week could likely develop good visibility in the local and organic search results with a little spend or some DIY SEO.

A new e-commerce store that is competing with a page of results from Amazon, eBay and other major department stores and online retailers is likely going to struggle in organic search (in the short term, at least).

Do you need leads now? Are you looking at the long game? Do you have much in the way of website authority? What is the competition like in organic search? What is the cost per click in paid search?

A clear digital marketing strategy and clear short- and long-term goals are essential in making an SEO or PPC decision here.
SEO and PPC

In an ideal world, we would look at both SEO and PPC. They both have pros and cons and work best when supporting each other synergistically. Where you can get SEO and PPC working together, you will often be able to drive results that are greater than their component parts.

The benefits of running SEO and PPC together include:
Keyword and conversion data from PPC can be fed into organic search (SEO).
The total volume of traffic can be increased by targeting clicks in paid and organic for high-performing keywords.
High-cost keywords, high-volume or low-converting (yet still important) keywords can be moved from PPC to organic search.
A/B testing of ad copy and landing pages can be fed into your organic listing and landing pages.
Remarketing allows you to stay in front of visitors after an initial touch via organic search and customize messaging around their engagement with your site.
Test your keyword strategy in PPC before committing to long-term SEO strategies.
Target users at all stages of the customer journey from research to comparison to purchase with commercial keywords.
Increase confidence and awareness by having both strong organic and paid visibility.

In our experience with hundreds of businesses, an integrated search strategy that looks at both SEO and PPC is the optimal approach. Results are improved in each channel by utilizing both paid and organic. This will not be right for every business, but for high-growth, aggressive marketing, you will want to develop a holistic search engine strategy rather than look at SEO or PPC in isolation.

What are your experiences? I would love to hear your successes and lessons from using SEO, PPC or SEO and PPC.

Source