seo

Posted by dohertyjf

Do you have an idea of the path a user typically takes to convert on your website? Or, are you simply building traffic from one channel (probably organic) and wondering why it’s not converting better? As I’ve grown up as a marketer, I’ve begun to really appreciate the insights that data can provide us on how users interact with our sites, and more importantly, on how they convert and where the experience can be improved to increase our conversion rates, and thereby our top-line revenue from online channels.

I’ve recently been very interested in building a full marketing funnel based on Google Analytics data. While it’s one thing to be able to identify where conversion discrepancies exist, such as low-converting types of visitors, it’s quite another to build a full and informed funnel from your site’s data. In order to do this and have an accurate view of where your conversions are actually coming from, you need to first have the following in place:

• Email URL tracking: Check out Annie Cushing’s thoughts here in slides 11-14. (Actually, look at the whole deck.)
• Social network tracking (tagging parameters and using a shortener to see clickthroughs by link)
• Display tagging
• Referral links tagged (or at least be aware of HTTPS sites linking to you, like Medium)
• Paid search campaigns tagged
• Tagging on affiliates (if applicable)

You can build your campaigns here using Google’s tool.

What’s a funnel?

Before we get too far into the meat of this post, I want to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. I’m not referring to one of these. Rather, I’m referring to one of these:

The funnel is typically broken into three sections:

• Top of funnel (TOFU)
• Middle of funnel (MOFU)
• Bottom of funnel (BOFU)

The goal of this post is going to walk you through how to identify the channels that are performing best for you in each of these areas. Once you know those, you know where to invest depending on your company’s needs or priorities. Also, knowing the different areas to which you can contribute will help endear you to the people running those channels, which will help you avoid being siloed as “the SEO.” Instead, you will start to be seen as part of the marketing team, which is what you are.

Another note: I’m not teaching you how to integrate into other marketing channels in this post. Stephanie Chang did a great job of it back in July when she wrote An Introduction to Integrated Marketing and SEO: How It Works and Why It Matters. Have a read there after you’re finished here.

Understanding attribution

You may already know this, but Google Analytics offers multi-channel attribution tools within the “Conversions” section:

In the “Assisted Conversions” section, you will see a number of columns. The ones to pay attention to are:

• Assisted Conversions
• Last Click/Direct Conversions

It’s important to understand the difference between assisted conversions and last click/direct conversions. According to Google’s own Answer Bin, a channel gets credit for an assisted conversion for any touch that they bring to the site where the interaction was not the one that led directly to a conversion. Google says:

This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel assisted. If a channel appears anywhere—except as the final interaction—on a conversion path, it is considered an assist for that conversion. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the channel.

On the other side, a last click or direct conversion is a touch on the site that led directly to a sale. These are your closer, aka bottom-of-funnel channels. Google says:

This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel closed or completed. The final click or direct visit before a conversion gets Last Interaction credit for that conversion. The higher these numbers, the more important the channel’s role in driving completion of sales and conversions.

Make sense? Great. Let’s build a funnel.

Identifying channels based on funnel level

As I said above, we’re going to use Google Analytics to identify the channels in the different levels of your funnel. If you use a different Analytics platform, like Omniture or Piwik, write a guide using that and I’ll be happy to share it out.

Top of funnel

The top of your marketing funnel is where the first interactions with your brand take place. This is typically attributed to search or organic, but is that really the case for your website?

First, let’s identify the most common channels that people use to discover your site. To do this, go to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages. Set your secondary dimension to “Medium.” You’ll see something like this:

Now, export this data to Excel (I’ve provided a spreadsheet at the end that you can plug this data into) and pivot it to see which mediums are driving your best traffic. If you want to get super fancy, break it down by type of page as well.

Here’s how that pivot table is set up:

For the site shown in these screenshots it is indeed PPC and organic search. But just knowing the channel isn’t enough, so let’s take it a step further to see where the different channels are driving traffic. You’ll either need to manually classify your pages (if you have relatively few like in my example) or write an Excel script to do this automagically.

I now know that referral is the primary driver of traffic and that the majority goes to the homepage. One specific referral, which I tagged with a Medium of “Link,” sends the best traffic directly to conversion pages (which might not necessarily be the best place for people to land for their first interaction):

Middle of funnel

The middle of your funnel is the area where people are moving from a first brand interaction to an initial sale, or if they have already made a purchase, towards another sale. What we’re looking for in the data here is channels that are not necessarily our primary first- or last-touch drivers. Rather, these are the channels where the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-time visitors come from in order to interact with your content again.

We can figure out the most popular and most effective middle-of-funnel channels a couple of different ways. The first, and by far the easiest, is by comparing different types of attribution to discover which channels get more credit based on first click, linear (where each channel gets equal credit), and last-click. To learn what each of the different attribution models really means, check out the Google support page.

By sorting the Model Comparison Tool in Analytics by Linear (high to low), you can find the channels that perform best when given equal credit independent of where they are in the funnel.

But this doesn’t give us great insight into which channels perform best in the middle. Rather, it’s telling us which channels account for the most revenue overall (which is still important to know), and the place doesn’t matter. In the above example, for Distilled that’s Direct, then email, organic search, and referral, in that order.

To find which channels are the most popular for your users to come back, we need to do some manipulation in Excel (my favorite tool) to clean out the first- and last-touch interactions in the Top Conversion Paths report.

What you want to do now is expand the number of rows in Analytics to account for as many of your paths as possible. For most sites the 5,000-row limit in Analytics will suffice.

Download all of your conversion paths into Excel. You’ll have one column with the complete paths, followed by the following columns:

• Conversions
• Conversion Value

To wrangle the data into the format we need, I also added the following columns:

• Top
  • Direct
  • Organic Search
  • Social
• Middle
  • Organic to Organic
  • Direct to Email
  • Direct to Organic
• Bottom
  • Email
  • Organic
  • Direct

Now we can build out a marketing plan depending on our needs.

Excel sheet

I promised you an Excel sheet that I have put together for you. Note that it does not automatically clean out your very long conversion paths, but use the parameters given above to narrow down your data to make it actionable if that makes sense for your business.

That said, you can download the spreadsheet here.

Bonus Excel sheet to find profitability by # of touches

I mentioned above about finding the number of touches that perform best for you. Here is a quick and dirty spreadsheet that allows you to do just this. Basically, the sheet looks at the number of touches and averages the conversion amount for each bucket. You can see the results on the far right.

To use this sheet for yourself, download your Multi Channel Funnel groupings in Analytics (you need to have ecommerce enabled) and enter your data into the sheet.

Download this bonus spreadsheet here.

Example and conclusion

If we are trying to convert more people to DistilledU, through that goal I know that Organic converts best for us on the last touch. This means that we need to invest in content that drives people towards a conversion through organic, so either blog content with a call to action or larger content teaching people SEO. We know that email converts 4th best for DU, but it works well higher in the funnel to convert people eventually. Therefore, we need to get more people onto our DistilledU email list.

Direct traffic converts well, of course; people are coming to the site because they know about it. Therefore we need to get top-of-mind and convert them into email and RSS subscribers so that they become familiar with our content and eventually buy through email or search.

We’ve built our funnel. You should go and build yours. I’d love to hear what insights you have.

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Posted by MarkTraphagen

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

One of the toughest Google Authorship troubleshooting requests we get at the Google Authorship and Author Rank community on Google+ concerns misattribution of Authorship in Google search results.

Misattribution (Google Search showing an author photo of someone other than the actual author of a content piece) occurs because over the past year-and-a-half or so Google has become more aggressive in trying to attribute Authorship. In many cases, Google will take what appears to be an “educated guess” at the author of a piece.

But sometimes, the fault of misattribution is more the site’s responsibility, and that’s when some careful troubleshooting (ok, outright sleuthing!) can often uncover the problem.

Here’s an example mystery attribution that we were able to track down and solve:

Community moderator Ann Smarty asked us to look at this result for a search for “Time-Saving Apps for Social Media Promotion”:

A very nice Google Authorship rich snippet search result, right? Only one problem. Nwosu Mavtrevor is not the author of that article! A woman named Anna Fox is, as the author box at the bottom of the article clearly displays:

So how did Google switch authors?

Step one in our investigation was to do a quick on-page search to see whether Mr. Mavtrevor’s name appeared anywhere on the same page as Ms. Fox’s article. In the majority of mis-attribution cases it turns out that Google grabbed the displayed author from that author’s name appearing somewhere on the content page.

Sure enough, there was Mr. Mavtrevor, early in the post’s comment thread:

But out of all the commenters on that page, why did Google latch on to his name for attributing authorship to the page? His comment isn’t even the first one in the thread.

Perhaps Mr. Mavtrevor has claimed Authorship for the same domain. So our next step was to search for him on Google+. Thankfully he has a rather unique name, so we quickly located his Google+ profile.

Sure enough, Mr. Mavtrevor has the netmediablog.com site listed in the Contributor To section of his profile links:

The Contributor To section of a Google+ profile is where Google looks for content that the profile owner claims to have authored. The other half of the required two-way linkage is a link back from that domain to the same Google+ profile.

So why has Mr. Navtrevor put Netmediablog in his Contributor To links? Because he legitimately is an author there!

Mystery solved! Er…not so fast…

Normally at this point, I would declare case closed and ask my Mr. Watson to write it up in his journal. But there’s more to this case.

Usually a misattribution like this where two people have linked their Contributor To to the same site occurs when the page author does not have a clear byline on the page. Google’s recent Authorship FAQ recommends “[s]howing a clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the same name as used on their Google+ profile.” Doing that usually clears up most misattribution problems of this type.

But not in this case. Ms. Fox has a byline at the top of the article, and the name exactly matches her Google+ profile name:

So what gives now? How could Google possibly misattribute this article when it appears that every clue to its real authorship is right there on the page?

The answer was just a click away.

Page vs. domain authorship

Google allows for there to be a “default” Authorship for a site. Usually this is the Authorship profile (if any) associated with the home page of the domain.

When we clicked on Anna Fox’s byline on her article, instead of going to a unique author page for her as we expected, the link takes us to the blog’s home page. And the source code for the home page shows that Mr. Mavtrevor has his authorship markup on it, and thus is seen as the default author for site.

So it was our conclusion that Google followed the byline link to the home page and picked up the authorship attribution from there.

An ounce of prevention

Let’s get to some practical takeaways from this investigation that can help prevent Authorship misattribution, particularly for multi-author sites.

1. Give each author on your site a unique author page. Most up-to-date Wordpress themes and frameworks (such as Genesis) include the option to set up unique author pages (under the Users tab). These templates automatically create a byline on each page created by a certain author, and the byline automatically links to that author’s author page. When this is the case, each author only needs to link to her or his Google+ profile once from their unique author page (and of course, link back from the Contributor To section of their G+ profiles) and they are done. Google will follow the links from their bylines to their author pages to their G+ profiles.

If your site doesn’t have such a theme, you should consider coding in author pages that are linked to by each author’s content.

2. Make sure each author’s byline name exactly matches her or his Google+ name. As mentioned above, Google now recommends that as a best practice. In most cases where we’ve seen misattribution just adding the byline name (in the form “by firstname lastname”), and placing it at the beginning of the content, are enough to correct the problem. The only reason that didn’t work in our test case above was the fact that the byline linked to the site’s home page.

3. Avoid using domain authorship attribution. Even though many themes and plugins (such as the popular Yoast SEO Plugin) offer the option to set up authorship for the home page/domain, we now recommend against using it. Google recently made clear that Authorship should only be applied when “[t]he URL/page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn’t a list of articles or an updating feed.” In addition, they noted that, “Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases”

Since home pages, and about pages and such don’t fit the descriptions above, authorship is not intended for them. My concern in light of these guidelines is primarily with watering down one’s Author Rank (if and when that becomes a reality). But in terms of our present topic, I also believe that refraining from attributing authorship to a homepage or entire domain will help avoid misattribution issues of the type we saw above.

Conclusion

Google Authorship is an evolving product. It has already gone through some major changes since the summer of 2011 when it first went public. We can expect that as time goes by Google will get better and better at correct author attribution. In the meantime, though, it is best to be vigilant for misattributions of your content, and to employ a triage similar to the one we walked through in this post when they happen. Follow the best practices we outlines above, and there’s hope that you’ll head those issues off before they happen.

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Posted by randfish

Most conversations about links today involve terms like “better links,” or “high-quality links.” Those are the kinds we all hope to earn, but what exactly defines a “better link?” How do we know whether a link qualifies, or is only so-so?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand clears up the confusion and offers a few clear attributes of better links, walking us through three great ways to find them.

PRO Tip: Learn more about reclaiming links at Moz Academy.

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

Video Transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by NiftyMarketing

Mike’s disclaimer: This is not a post about how awesome I am, or how there is only one way to build an internet marketing agency. It’s a combination of stories and thoughts about what I have gone through building Nifty Marketing.

When I started in 2009 there was very little information online about starting, running, or growing an Internet Marketing Agency. The ones that did exist were from superstars that charged a billion dollars an hour. I am not a superstar. My company started in Burley, Idaho. Here’s a rap about my town I wrote.

My hope with this post is that a few of you who are out there hustling will benefit from doing some of the things that I did, and most of the things that I didn’t.

Start smart

I was in my final semester at BYU-Idaho and had accepted a job to be the chief marketing officer of Rove Pest Control after spending my summers during college as a door-to-door salesman for them. I thought my future was set. But, due to some changes at Rove I knew that I was going to have to have to find a different career. My wife was pregnant, we had just started building a house in Burley, and I had a full load of credits. My two favorite classes were a basic HTML class (that used Don’t Make Me Think as the textbook) and a web business class for which we had to start an online business and make/lose money. Naturally, as any true Idahoan would do, I started HugeIdahoPotato.com and sold potatoes bigger than heads to people across the country. The website sucks; I’m pretty sure I got it penalized within a year of creating it. But I fell in love with internet marketing in the process of building that site, and I keep it up as a remembrance of where I started.

Lesson 1: Start with a reason that’s more than money

After making around $100 on the site I knew that I had found my career choice. I also knew that I was going to live in Burley, Idaho, and that I wanted to bring non-agricultural jobs to the town. I can’t tell you how sad it is for many of my friends who grew up in a town they knew they couldn’t move back to if they wanted to make a decent living. I wanted to change that. I still do. It’s one of the main driving points for me. Of course you need to make money, but if that is the only thing you are looking for as a business owner then eventually you will fail. You will make decisions that aren’t for your clients, or for your staff, or for the community; you will get short-term gains and create a long term failure.

Lesson 2: Start by interning/working at an agency

This is possibly my biggest regret of my career. I started Nifty Marketing with literally no experience at all. I had no friends in the industry, I had no idea what I was doing, how SEO companies were structured, or even how to do anything beyond what I had learned in college. I dove into blogs, but at that time I didn’t know who to trust and read some really awful advice. I was not a good SEO. I was not a good PPC advertiser. I could have saved myself at least two years if I had worked for someone who could have pointed me in the right direction first.

Lesson 3: Focus on something specific

Business wasn’t going very well. I had a few clients, and I decided I needed some help, so I signed up for SEOBook. There was a feedback forum, so I posted my super-awful website for Nifty Marketing. I didn’t even own the domain at the time. (I had TheNiftyWay.com, and it wasn’t until later—by some good grace of the heavens—that the person who owned NiftyMarketing.com let it go, and I bought it for $7.99 with a GoDaddy code.) When I posted my site on SEOBook, I got brutal feedback. People told me it sucked. But someone in the forum said something that changed my life forever.

He said something like:

“You offer SEO, Web Design, and PPC. That is exactly the same as 100,000s of companies around the world, who by the looks of things are better than you at it. What can you be the best at? What can you become known for?”

The comment hit me like a ton of bricks. The few clients I had at the time were really small businesses in Idaho, and I had been spending a lot of time in Google Maps. I realized that I enjoyed that aspect of marketing, and was getting clients ranked. So, I redesigned my site, changed my messaging, and decided to focus. I became a local SEO.

Lesson 4: Start with networking, not cold calls

I remember quite vividly trying to use my door-to-door sales skills to try and cold call businesses to get work. I grabbed a phone book and called people with big ads and no websites because I figured that they had budget. What I found was that I was caller #5 for that week offering the same thing as everyone else. Worst of all, everyone “knew a guy who knows a guy who could do it” for them. So, I put away the phonebook and started talking to my friends and asking if they knew people who needed websites and marketing. That’s when leads started coming in. Then, I wrote an email to David Mihm on August 7, 2009, and asked him how I could become an expert in the local search field. This was his response:

The best advice I can give you is to optimize the local listings of a bunch of clients. The more you “play” in the space, the better you’ll get at teasing out the parts of the algorithm that really matter.

Beyond that, subscribe to these blogs:

http://www.blumenthals.com/blog
http://www.localsearchnews.net [Editor’s note: This site isn’t around anymore.]
http://gesterling.wordpress.com
http://www.searchinfluence.com/blog
http://solaswebdesign.net/wordpress
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com
http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com
http://www.sixthmanmarketing.com/blog
http://www.expand2web.com/blog
http://www.devbasu.com
http://www.martijnbeijk.com
http://www.seoverflow.com/blog

I immediately dove into every one of these sites and learned everything I possibly could about local search. I took notes, and then I started testing and haven’t ever stopped.

While doing that, I realized the most valuable networking lesson I ever learned was to simply share. I started blogging, which led to guest posts on SEJ, and I attended a few small conferences, one of which was the first ever LocalU. I offered to help any way that I could. Fast forward to 2013, and I am a LocalU Faculty Member and speak at conferences year-round. It isn’t because I am special. It’s because I am passionate about the space and I am willing to share information and help as much as I can. Almost every client we have at Nifty Marketing comes as a referral from clients, friends, blog posts, webinars, and conferences. Not one client came from a cold call. I will forever be in debt to David Mihm and the rest of the local search community for teaching me such a valuable lesson.

Lesson 5: It’s good to have funding, it’s better to have partners, and it’s best to bootstrap alone

From the first year of my business until now I have had opportunities to get funding and take on partners. I have never done it. I am not saying that it’s bad to do either of these things, but if you take a close look at our industry you will see that a lot of funded companies and partnerships don’t make it.

I remember very clearly going to dinner with some guys from Blueglass in my first year and thinking, “Man, I wish I could be part of that company.” And while I respect the founders a great deal they took a massive risk and it didn’t workout. Many of them had successful businesses before then, and while the idea of a Mega Company that can make tens or hundreds of millions is alluring, the chance of you being successful and earning more on your own is better. Sure, extremely fast growth and funding means you come to market quicker. But by growing at the slow rate of 2x per year (which isn’t that slow), I have been able to continually innovate and offer better services without taking do-or-die risks.

I am very glad I bootstrapped. I own 100% of my company. I can make 100% of the decisions about its future. I don’t have to pay a silent partner a large chunk that makes cash flow an issue. I don’t have to make short-term decisions for a board that hurts the long-term vision I have. And I make enough that I stopped caring about the money around year three; slow and steady wins the prize.

I know that there are many successful companies that haven’t gone the way of solo bootstrapping. At the top of the partnership list for me is Avalaunch Media. But in order to do what they have done you have get big enough to support multiple owners and find amazing partners that can all pull in the same direction. With around 50% of marriages failing, how many partnerships in business actually work out? They are definitely not the norm, and I respect them immensely for it.

Grow smarter

Lesson 6: You are in the business of providing a service, not SEO

I remember becoming a good SEO. I also remember getting amazing results for clients and still getting complaints from them. I thought they were the problem. Then I realized I was. I thought back to the days of pest control and remember the company training techs to take their time at customers’ houses. You see, you could service a house in 15 minutes or even less if you hustled. But if you did that, customers would complain that the work was sloppy and it shouldn’t cost so much. Instead, you should take your time, get down on your hands and knees, and look around. Take notes and pace yourself. Then, customers felt like the service was worth it. They weren’t paying for the product. They could buy the product at Home Depot. They were paying for the service.

Comparing this to Internet marketing, I knew I had done a great job gaining more traffic, but the clients had no idea what was being done. They didn’t understand what they were paying for and subsequently thought that I was unnecessary. Most small businesses don’t care or understand what a title tag, meta description, an exact match, a naked URL, duplicate content, etc is. So telling them you changed/created these in a report without actually showing them physical pictures is pointless.

We started creating custom reports with tons of arrows and screenshots explaining the work that we were doing. We starting giving them a complete list of the links and citations we were building. We stopped sending over a raw list of traffic counts and started providing analysis of the traffic that websites were getting, and our clients stopped complaining that they didn’t know what we were doing. Clear communication is what the business of service is all about.

Lesson 7: Read The E-myth

I was doing everything myself. Everything. Then, I tried to have some people on oDesk help me. My wife even did some of the citation work. The only problem was all the information was in my head. I had very little of the processes and information organized, and I didn’t have time to focus on organization when I had so much client work, sales, and bookkeeping to do. That is what The E-myth is about. It talks about the difference between being a technician and being a business owner. It talks about the need to build your business like a franchise with training manuals, easy to follow processes, and the need to not burn yourself or your first few employees out.

When I read this book, I changed my business, and I have never looked back. We were able to start hiring people locally instead of having contractors on oDesk, and we centralized information and grew. While we aren’t perfect at systems and delegation, we could have never grown without improvement in those areas. It’s still the case.

Lesson 8: Raise your prices; raise your minimums

When I was the only employee in my company, doing everything myself, I could still make good margins and be the lowest price around. I took clients at $200-$500 per month, built some websites, and put tons of hours in, and as long as I could get to where I had $40-50k per year in revenue, I had a decent wage for Burley. That was my first goal. I could be flexible with what I made and could literally have no cost other than a couple of tools and my personal time. Employees, though, cost more than time. Employees cost money. And regardless of how much money you bring in, an employee’s wage is constant. If I wanted employees that were good, there way no way I could maintain my pricing and minimums, providing the level of service that was needed. We had to raise prices. We changed our minimum to $1,500 and determined that we would do work for no less than $100 per hour. The types of clients got better, and we had enough revenue to bring in talented people who increased the quality of our work. I know that many SEO firms/companies can charge a lot more than $100 per hour, and we do as well, depending on the type of project—but for the average small/medium business this is a price that they can afford and you can do good work for.

Lesson 9: Learn when to pass on bad clients

When I was hungry I took whatever client walked through the door. I took abuse. Emails that called me names, clients who would not listen to my advice and would then blame me when things went wrong. Clients that paid three or four months late but would complain when I didn’t answer my phone on the first ring.

I kept them because I felt like I had to have the revenue. What I didn’t realize is that if I had taken the time I was putting into their project and put it elsewhere, I could have replaced the revenue plus a lot more and had a much better quality of life.

If you are not happy, then no amount of money will make up for it, so fire your bad clients, pass on the red flags, and figure something else out. Remember Lesson 1.

Retain

Lesson 10: Be trustworthy

The fastest way to lose clients and employees is to lie to them. If you want both to stick with you through thick and thin, then there has to be 100% trust. I personally think that the more transparent you can be all around the more you will be trusted.

One of our core values at Nifty is to be “willingly naked.” Not literally, but figuratively. We have to be willing to share what we learn, take feedback, tell our clients the brutal truth even if we know they don’t want to hear it. But you have to be willing to take feedback yourself.

Lesson 11: Reward your team

I am not going to pretend to be good at this. I know I should say “thank you” about a thousand times more than I do. Instead, I find myself more apt to criticize when things go poorly. It’s something I am hoping to constantly get better at. The team at Nifty is amazing and they take a ton of stress, responsibility, and problems on themselves and do an awesome job.

Here’s a few things that I have done at times:

• Thank-you gift cards
• Revenue sharing
• Company lunches
• Pop-Tarts (long story)
• Big Christmas parties
• The best office in Burley, Idaho (complete with a moose, a monster, bricks, and staked firewood)

Lesson 12: Auto-renew your contracts

When it comes to smaller businesses, I have found that month-to-month contracts that auto-renew and are paid by automatic credit card last longer than contracts that are 3, 6, or 12 months with renegotiations required. Bottom line, people don’t like re-signing up for a committed amount of time. Especially small business owners who believe the word “contract” is a cuss word.

Change

Lesson 13: Never stop learning new things

There are many search companies that fall behind. It’s because they don’t change. They keep blasting away at the same spammy links, the same old school designs, and the same tactics from 5-10 years ago, and they wonder why a massive amount of their client portfolio drops in rankings.

I personally start every morning by reading blogs, and I have for years. The staff spends the first part of every day doing the same thing, and we pass around articles that make an impression. It keeps us constantly thinking about innovation and learning from our great community. Another way to keep up is to constantly pitch to speak at conferences. You have deadlines around which you can build tests and case studies, and you will do everything you possibly can to be up on the latest news in the industry because you never know what questions the attendees might ask you.

Lesson 14: Request feedback

The best way to find issues in your organization is to request feedback from your staff and clients. The other day, we had a client that paused his account. This is usually a soft way to end the relationship. But, upon asking for his feedback, he said he loved working with his project manager and the work we had done, saying he would be back on track in 2 months. Then he mentioned he was hoping for faster results on a side project we were doing for him. Whose fault was it that he felt that way? It was ours. I took the opportunity to clear up the miscommunication and he was very grateful for it. If we hadn’t asked for the feedback, we might not have ever heard from him again and he definitely would have had the issue on his mind.

Lesson 15: Be pleased, but never satisfied

Nobody is perfect. Which means there is always room for improvement. There is always more than can be done, and there is always a better way. The day you stop growing and say that “it’s good enough” is the day that a competitor is going to come in and do more that you are willing to.

We have redone our proposal process multiple times. We haven’t ever been bad at it, but every time we go back to the drawing boards there is something more that we find that helps to bring in better clients. Right now we are testing out a live walk-through of the proposal, as compared to just sending over a PDF and asking for questions.

SAVE

Lesson 16: Content isn’t king, cash is

If you want to run a successful business of any type, then ensure that you aren’t running cash-poor. I have followed Dave Ramsey’s personal financial guidelines for my business and find that it’s very conservative. While it might limit the speed at which we grow, it eliminates a massive amount of risk.

Dave recommends having a personal emergency fund (and in this case business fund) of 3-6 months of expenses on hand at all times. That means that if you are going to pay yourself (your only start-up expense) $3,000 per month, then you should have between $9,000-$18,000 in cash before starting up. At $65,000 per month of expenses, you should have between $195,000-$390,000 in reserves. That’s a lot of cash on hand for a small business, but if clients unexpectedly drop, or major industry changes necessitate a completely new model, you will have the cash to make good decisions and not desperate ones. I started out around the six-month reserve when I was smaller, and as time has gone by and we have a more diversified revenue stream, I am comfortable between 3-4 months of cash on hand.

Lesson 17: Pay yourself modestly, and get out of personal debt

I pay myself $4,000 per month. The rest goes to growing the business, savings, and other ventures. Now, you need to realize that I live in Burley, Idaho, and it’s literally hard to spend money here. I could pay myself $2,000 if it wasn’t for Amazon Prime. But, at a very young age, my wife and I decided that we would have no personal debt and worked really hard to pay off our house and buy cars with cash.

I know many financial experts will tell you that leveraging your home is the best financing you have but let me tell you that the freedom of owning your house outright means that you can make better business decisions over the course of your life. You wont have the “what if I lose my family’s home” question circling around in the back of your mind and you can actually take bigger risks, and never make business financial decisions based off of your personal financial needs.

Lesson 18: Don’t sign up for every Internet marketing tool under the sun

Tool subscriptions are reoccurring costs. It’s very easy to spend thousands of dollars a month on different tools you don’t have the cash to do that when you start up. When I first started, I only used Raven Tools, but quickly added a list of 10 to 15 tools like Moz. Occasionally, we have to go through the list of tools and find out what we are actually using and get rid of the rest. I’m not going to pretend there is one tool to rule them all, because everyone has very different needs. The key is to quickly identify which tools work for you and which don’t, and to stop paying monthly for the ones that don’t.

Lesson 19: Diversify

If you get to where you own a successful guest-blogging company, or a successful SEO company, or a successful content-marketing company, or whatever niche you decide to work in, then realize the problem with a niche is that you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If that basket disappears, you’re screwed.

Try going after more than one niche. We opened a division focused on SEO and website development for lawyers called NiftyLaw.com. I also owned a newspaper in my home town, and am working on some new projects so that I am not 100% reliant on Internet marketing revenue.

Lesson 20: Find a few things to help save yourself

Owning a business is hard work. It’s mentally draining, and it’s very hard to shut down your mind after constantly thinking. There will be times where you need to save yourself from burning out, so ensure that you have hobbies that can get your mind completely off of work. I golf, mountain bike, and travel with my family. I also don’t do any work on Sundays at all.

Overall

I have loved starting an Internet marketing company. It’s been hard; I’m going gray and I’m only 29.

I know that you might not agree with certain things I think are important, and that’s fine. The best part about business is that it’s a “choose your own adventure” storybook with no “right” answers.

Please add your own questions and advice in the comments. I hope that this is a post that can have more insight in the comments than the article itself, and I look forward to learning from all of you!

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Posted by TakeshiYoung

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

An introduction to Tumblr

There are so many social media platforms out there today that online marketers have to be concerned about when promoting content online, that it can be easy to overlook some of the important ones.

Tumblr is one of those social networks which is often overlooked, but which has tremendous potential for SEO and social media marketing. I myself was slow to adopt Tumblr as a social media platform, but once I started using it I became hooked by its power and simplicity. Hopefully by the end of this post, you’ll feel the same.

In this post today I will be covering 1) What Tumblr is and how it works, 2) The benefits of Tumblr compared to other social networks, and 3) Actionable advice on how you can use Tumblr for online marketing, including specific content ideas.

Sounds good? Let’s get started.

Why should I care about Tumblr?

Before we get too far, let me provide some stats about Tumblr which should help put things into perspective:

• 130.5 million blogs on Tumblr, as of August 2013
• 28th highest traffic site on the web according to Comscore
• 300 million unique monthly visitors according to Yahoo
• 50% of Tumblr users are under the age of 25
• 53.5% of Tumblr visitors are female

As you can see, the numbers are massive. There are now over 130 million Tumblr blogs (known as “tumblrogs”), which makes Tumblr the largest hosted blog platform on the web, compared to the 70 million blogs hosted on Wordpress.com. It has 300 million monthly visitors, basically 15% of all Internet users. And it has a demographic that is unique in that 50% of the users are under 25, many of whom are teenagers (whereas teens are reportedly ditching Facebook in droves).

Big brands have taken notice of this too. In May, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion (the largest purchase of a consumer Internet company since Google bought YouTube), and many of the world’s largest brands already have a presence on Tumblr.

Clearly, if you’re not on Tumblr by now, you’re falling behind the curve.

What is Tumblr?

So what the heck is this Tumblr thing anyway? It can be hard to describe Tumblr because it combines the functionality of many different kinds of sites.

The way I like to think of Tumblr is as a cross between Wordpress and Facebook– Tumblr has all the blogging functionality of a blog platform such as Wordpress, but also includes all the features of a social site such as hashtags, following, sharing, and liking. Tumblr is similar to Pinterest in many ways, except instead of multiple boards you have a single blog.

So although Tumblr is one of the most popular blogging (or microblogging) platforms on the web, it goes beyond just being a blog and allows users to share and like each other’s content, follow other Tumblr blogs, and discover new content through hashtags. It’s a blog platform with built-in social functionality and incredible viral potential.

The benefits of Tumblr

Ok, so now we have a better idea of what Tumblr is and why it’s important, but what are the benefits of Tumblr compared to other social networks and blogging platforms? There are 5 key benefits:

1) Dofollow links

First the biggie. Links from Tumblr, unlike most other social networks are dofollow. Tumblr is at its core a blogging platform, and you have full control of how your tumblrog appears, including using dofollow links on your site.

Where things get interesting is when you consider the social aspect of Tumblr. Tumblr has social sharing functionality (called “reblogging” in Tumblr parlance) built right in, and if you have a popular post it will be reposted to many other tumblrogs.

The thing is that each of these reblogs is a dofollow backlink to your original post! That means if you have a post that is reblogged 100 times, your tumblr blog just got 100 dofollow backlinks! For even more fun, you can include a link within the post itself. By doing so, both your original post on Tumblr, and the site linked to within the post will receive the backlinks.

Just imagine if every time your content got shared on Facebook, all those shares were dofollow backlinks. Wouldn’t that be nice? With Tumblr, this is the case. The same is also true with Google+ (Pinterest also recently dofollowed their links), but Tumblr has a more active user community and it’s much easier to have your content go viral on Tumblr.

Of course, you will want to be careful about what kind of anchor text you’re using in this post-Penguin world, but if you’re looking for some easy, dofollow backlinks, Tumblr is the place to get them.

2) Great content discovery

Another great benefit of Tumblr is that it has a great content discovery system built into it, thanks to its use of hashtags. If you’re ever looking for great images or memes, try searching Tumblr for the hashtag, and you’ll find some good material.

The great thing about Tumblr is that people actually use hashtags for content discovery (unlike, say, Facebook). This means that by using relevant and popular tags, it’s super easy for your content to get discovered on Tumblr, even if you don’t have many followers.

I have literally created brand new tumblrogs from scratch, and received dozens of reblogs for my content, even though I had zero followers. And remember, on Tumblr reblogs are dofollow backlinks. This is definitely not the case on social networks such as Facebook, where your content probably isn’t going to get a lot of love unless you already have a large number of followers.

3) Content testing ground

Another use for Tumblr is as a content testing ground. If you do a lot of social media marketing, you probably have tons of memes and images that you are considering posting to your Facebook page, or you if you create your own memes you may have different variations of a meme that you might want to test.

One of the ways that I like to use Tumblr is as a testing ground for new content that I’ve created. Tumblr’s dashboard is chronological like Twitter vs the more curated approach of Facebook’s news feed, and the upshot of this is that you can post a lot more content at once to Tumblr than you would want to on Facebook. Tumblr fans are more forgiving of less-than-outstanding content because they can simply scroll past it, similar to how users browse Pinterest.

This makes Tumblr a great place to post a lot of content to find which pieces perform the best. Then you can take the most popular pieces and repost them to your other social media profiles such as Facebook. And all the content you produce on Tumblr has a chance of being discovered later, thanks to the use of hashtags.

4) Microsites

Tumblr is the most popular microblogging platforms on the planet, which also makes it an ideal platform for setting up microsites. You won’t get the same amount of flexibility as you would with say a self-hosted Wordpress blog, but tumblrogs are quick to set up, simple to manage, and free. And if you want to switch from using a tumblr.com subdomain to your own domain name, it’s easy to switch to a domain name you own in the Tumblr settings.

Using Tumblr for microsites is a great way to build up a collection of web properties with decent PageRank that you can then point back to your main site. If you consistently post high quality content, it’s easy to get these tumblrogs to PR2 – PR4 within a few months.

Microsites are also a great option if your main brand is super serious, and you don’t necessarily want to associate it with memes and other silly content that does well on Tumblr.

5) Branding

Last, but certainly not least, Tumblr is another tool in your arsenal to promote your brand online. In addition to the other major social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr provides another opportunity for you to establish your web presence. It’s another chance for your to engage with fans, build relationships with potential customers, and get your brand name out there, especially if you want to target a younger demographic. As the online marketer Pat Flynn always says, the best marketing strategy online is to Be Everywhere.

Content ideas for Tumblr

Hopefully by now you’re convinced of what a great opportunity Tumblr is for link building, content marketing, and branding. You may have even gone ahead and created your own tumblrog. Good work. But what kind of content does well on Tumblr?

Tumblr, like most other social sites, is a visual medium. That means that captivating images and pictures will do better on Tumblr than long form text. If you’re already conducting successful social media campaigns on sites such as Facebook and Google+, then reusing the same content you’re posting there is a good strategy.

If you want some specific example of content to post on Tumblr, here are 4 types of content that I’ve found perform extremely well Tumblr:

1) Memes

Memes are my favorite type of content to promote on social media. Memes are just the ideal type of content for people to consume and share via social media channels, and they’re viral almost by definition. You can have a lot of success just by curating funny memes related to your niche that you find across the web, but the greatest potential lies in creating your own. If you want to try your hand at making memes with some serious viral potential, check out this post I wrote for the Moz blog.

2) Photos/illustrations

As with Pinterest and Facebook, compelling images are some of the most popular pieces of content on Tumblr. This is especially true since there is a huge userbase of teenagers with attention spans that are shorter than even most Twitter addicts.

Creating great photos isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible to do if you have a access to a DSLR. Even if your camera equipment isn’t up to snuff, apps such as Instagram can take your ordinary photos and give them a vintage feel that appeals to the teen and hipster demographic.

Drawings and illustrations also do very well on Tumblr, and if you have an in-house graphic design team, definitely leverage that. Even if you don’t have graphical talent, you can go to sites such as Fiverr, Elance, and DeviantArt to get custom artwork created for you that’s specific to your niche.

If all else fails, you can just curate other people’s photos and artwork and see some results, but always be mindful of any copyright issues, and give credit where credit is due.

3) Quotes

Quotes are an amazingly easy type of content to create that surprisingly few marketers are taking advantage of. Quotes are great because they’re simple to create, even if you don’t even have any graphical talent. Just take an inspirational quote, put it over an attractive image (or even just a plain background), and you suddenly have a piece of content that can go viral not just on Tumblr, but on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ as well. It’s super easy.

4) Animated GIFs

Like Google+, Tumblr allows you to use animated GIFs in your posts. These are incredibly popular with Tumblr users.

Now, creating animated GIFs is beyond my abilities, but it’s really simple to just take existing animated GIFs, add a clever caption to them, and post them on your tumblrog. Instant backlinks, guaranteed.

When my client asks me why their rankings fluctuate every day, I’m like…

For a great example of this, check out the This Advertising Life Tumblr. It’s an incredibly funny site, and has a PageRank of 5 to boot. You can easily find great animated GIFs to use by searching Tumblr for tags such as “animated GIF” or simply “GIF”. There are also sites such as ForGIFS which contain nothing but funny animated GIFs.

Wrap-up

Tumblr is one of the largest social media and blogging platforms in the world, yet it is often ignored by online marketers. Hopefully this post has showed you why you should add Tumblr to your marketing mix, as well as provided you with concrete content ideas you can use to drive success on your tumblrog.

I have built dozens of Tumblr blogs over the past year, and I can guarantee you that if you use the content ideas above, and post on a consistent basis, you will be able to build up a large following on Tumblr and build some strong backlinks to your sites, as well as promote your content and build your brand online.

If you have any questions, feel free to post in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. You can also check out more of my ramblings on my blog. This post was adapted from a presentation I delivered at SMX Toronto.

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