We’ve been reviewing the TopRank BIGLIST of  search marketing blogs  for over 2 years, starting in January 2007. In that time we’ve reviewed nearly 1,000 blogs covering internet marketing and search marketing related topics.

Blog features we like include: Design, On-topic to SEO, Social Media and Internet Marketing, an About page (for the blog specifically), Categories and Frequency (at least once per week). The only way to get added to the BIGLIST is for us to notice your blog linking to us or being mentioned on another blog that we follow. Direct requests are not accepted.  Please enjoy this week’s new additions, runner up and reinclusion to the BIGLIST.

• Daily SEO Tip - Search Marketing blog guru Loren Baker and SEO smartie, Ann Smarty have partnered to deliver practical, usefuland often creative SEO tips that are good for new pracitioners as well as experienced online marketers.

• Marketingsherpa Blog - The famous Marketing Sherpa site publishes this well written & cross referenced blog on a range of internet marketing topics from email to search engine optimization by reporters Natalie Myers, Sean Donahue and Adam T. Sutton. 

• Best Rank Blog - Mike Shannon, Zac Heisey, Guillermo Bravo & Ryan Frank post to this agency blog focusing on quality of posts over quantity, which is a good practice I think. Topics cover the gamut of tips, news, events and agency news. 

• Social Media Rockstar - With a background in SEO and Sociology, Brett Borders aka “Brett from Tibet” is a kindred spirit that also blogs with interesting articles, interviews and tips with a strong social media flavor.

• SEOAly - Alysson Fergison writes this small business SEO blog that doubles as a web site for her consulting business with posts about on and off page SEO, social media, Wordpress, a few rants and something called “Scam Watch”.

• North South Media Blog  -  This Scotland based agency blog offers tips, news, interviews and an interesting “Top SEO Companies” feature each month that ranks regional, national and international SEO agencies by keyword rankings.

• IMBroadcast Blog - David Snyder and friends at Traffic Blends publish this blog that supports the Internet Marketing Video community with a few tips about online video mixed and most posts about IM Spring Break. 

Runner Up:
(There are some blogs that posess several of the qualities we look for, but are lacking such as post frequency or design issues that warrants a mention, but not actual inclusion in the BIGLIST of SEO blogs)

• Canadian SEO Blog - Alberta based Melanie Nathan publishes a brand new and very well designed blog that offers the promise of posts on link building, interviews and miscellaneous. We’re hoping she can tap into her vast link building knowledge and post more often so the blog can get included in the BIGLIST at a future date.

Reinclusion:
(One of the reasons blogs get removed from BIGLIST of SEO blogs is lack of posting activity. If the blog owner restarts posting and contacts us, we may re-add them)

• JenSense - If you need to know about Google AdSense and affiliate marketing, then this is the blog to read. Welcome back Jennifer Slegg!

Remember, blogs included in the BIGLIST deserve a shiny new badge.

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© Lee Odden for Online Marketing Blog, 2009. |
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Most marketing experts will tell you that if you blog more frequently - or publish any original content more frequently including photos, videos, and podcasts - you will get more web traffic and subscribers to your blog (by RSS and email).

To test that hypothesis, I did a little experiment - not on the HubSpot website or blog - but on my personal website because it is a test case similar to the average small business.  

Like many small businesses, I have had my site for a long time, my site gets about 1,000 visitors per month, and I have about 500 links into my website.  From my experience this is a typical situation for many small businesses.

Normally I write about 8-10 blog articles per month.  None of them are that great because all my best content ends up on this inbound marketing blog you are reading.  So, compared to most small businesses that usually have not started to use a business blogging system, I already had an advantage because I had over 100 articles on my website.

For the experiment, I decided to write a new article every single day (even weekends) for the month of February.  The hypothesis was that by producing more content and being active in the blogosphere, more people would find me, I would have a larger footprint in the search engines, get some SEO benefits from more inbound links, have a more interesting presence in social media which would drive more traffic, and just generally power up my inbound marketing program.

Here are the results: more traffic from search engines (Google), more traffic from social media (Twitter), more blog subscribers, more website visitors.  I probably would have had more leads too if I had a decent call to action on my website and cared about leads.  

This is very similar to the marketing ROI that other companies report from implementing inbound marketing.

Metric	January	February	Change
Total articles (end of month)	112	140	25% increase
Visitors from Google search	326	377	16% increase
Visitors from Twitter	302	333	10% increase
Average website visitors / day	45	55	23% increase
Blog subscribers (RSS & email)	165	246	49% increase

 

The marketing takeaway? Publish more content to give a boost to your inbound marketing program!

Webinar: Advanced Business Blogging

Learn how to build your business blog into an inbound marketing machine. Download the free webinar to learn how to create a thriving blog.

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

HubSpot TV Episode #30 - March 6, 2009
(Show Legnth: 23 minutes 59 seconds)

Intro

• How to interact on Twitter: @karenrubin and @mvolpe
• Remember to subscribe in iTunes. Leave a 5 star review!
• Inbound Marketing Summit special ticket giveway (San Francisco Event: April 28-29, 2009)
  Competition Rules: Write a blog post about your favorite example of inbound marketing! (Read Karen’s example.)  In that blog post, you must link to HubSpot TV and the IMS.
  Make sure we can find you!

Mail Bag

Headlines

Facebook Makes Changes for Global Domination

• Facebook Announcement Overview
• Summary of Business Benefits
• Facebook Product Guide
• It now has more
  Twitter-like integration, it’s easier to post lots of information, easier to
  filter what you see, and there’s more data available for businesses. 
• Facebook Tips & Tricks - How to Launch a Facebook Business Page: Webinar on using Facebook for Business
• Marketing Takeaway: Get your business on Facebook and read the HubSpot blog article to make the most of the new features.
  

DMA Cuts More Employees, Cancels Event

• DMNews: DMA Makes Second Round of Cutbacks
• 50 people laid off in past 5 months, only 86 employees left
• They say they are looking
  for “less dependence on the more volatile parts of our traditional
  revenue, especially our large portfolio of conferences and events.”
• Marketing Takeaway: Traditional direct marketing industry is taking a hit. However, the Inbound Marketing Summit is growing 3x in 2009!

Skittles Says “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Website”

• Skittles’ Social Media Campaign: FTW or Epic Fail?
• Marketers Praise Skittles’ Gutsy Site Move
• Very bold. Is it on brand? Is it too much?
• It got people talking, however were they the right people?
• Marketing Takeaway: If
  you take inbound marketing to the extreme, you might not need a
  website at all. However, this probably only works for big consumer mainstream brands.
  

Marketing Tip of the Week

•  Get your business on Facebook!

Forum Fodder

• Anne from Novo Solutions asks: “What is a good bounce rate?” and “What is an average B2B lead conversion rate?”
• Bounce
  rate and conversion rate depend not only on the content of the
  page or website–but also on the type of traffic going to the website.
• B2B
  website overall, a 2-4% site conversion rate is about average. However, when using
  HubSpot software and methodology, you should strive for better than
  this.
• For landing pages, conversion varies greatly by the source of traffic. From my experience, landing page conversion rates for B2B companies include:
  • AdWords / Paid Search: 8-12%
  • Banner Ads: 5-20%
  • Links from your website/blog: 5-25%
  • Opt-in follow-up Email marketing: 20-40%
  • HubSpot’s overall website conversion rate is 15-25% because we drive so much traffic to targeted landing pages. (We have over 75!) Each landing page is targeted to the source of traffic going to it, so our landing page conversion rate is often over 50%. From my experience it is really hard to get a landing page to convert at over 60%.

Conclusion

Webinar: How to Use Facebook for Business

Want to learn more about using Facebook for business? Download the free webinar for all the basics of using Facebook as part of the inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

 

Transparency is a powerful thing.  Especially in an industry where no one really trusts any of the vendors.

You know all the jokes about Chinese restaurants serving dog and cat instead of chicken.

What if you opened a Chinese restaurant, and had a big glass window giving a view into the kitchen from the main dining room?

People would talk about it.  They would like it.  Even if your kitchen were no cleaner than other kitchens, the fact that you let them look says something.

It also would change the way your staff worked.  They know customers are looking at them while they cook your food.  The wait staff and the manager could be watching too.  The kitchen staff would cut a lot fewer corners.

Just by making your cooking process more transparent, you could really change your restaurant’s business.

What can you make more transparent in your business?  How can you build more trust with your customers?  Here’s an example.

Photo credit: avlxyz

Webinar: Rethinking Marketing

Want to learn more about how you can use inbound marketing to grow your business? Download the free webinar to learn how to turn your website into an internet marketing machine.

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>

Early yesterday afternoon, the social mediasphere started buzzing with talk about Facebook’s changes to Business Pages.

The changes are pretty exciting (despite the all-too-predictable uproar that comes with Facebook’s updates, I am often a fan of the changes they make). In a nutshell, Business Pages will now look and function a lot more like personal profiles. Oh boy, that’s just what we needed, more confusion about the difference between Profiles and Pages.

But, like I said, I’m excited about the changes. And here’s why: there are a lot more opportunities now available to businesess. So here are my:

Top 4 New Facebook Page Features Businesses Will Love

1. Enhanced wall takes center stage.

Facebook Pages used to look like … basically, an old version of a Facebook Profile, which was flat (everything on one page). With the new tab layout, the Wall is the first thing a Fan sees when they visit your Page, and they can then navigate to tabs with your other content (photos, discussions, etc. - customizable by Page admins).

What does this mean for businesses?

Businesses that create content on a regular basis will really benefit here. The Wall is a place that aggregates posts by the Page or about the Page. This includes any content shared by you (links, photos, videos, AND short text-only messages) and posts by your Fans, left for you. With this change, the Wall updates that you post will publish to your Fans’ news feeds, and posts by your Fans will go to their friends’ news feeds. The more content you create and the more you engage with your Fans, the more people you will be able to reach on a more regular basis.

2. Move to tabbed layout.

By moving from a single page layout to a tabbed layout, you might expect to get less visibility for each section of your Page (photos, discussions, etc.) but, just as with personal Profiles, you can add tabs for different applications (like discussions).

What does this mean for businesses?

Tabs will actually help users engage more with a Page. Instead of hoping users scroll down your ever-growing Page of applications, and choose to engage with you somehow, you make it easy for users to navigate to the sections of your Page that your Fans are most interested in, or that you want to highlight in the Page navigation.

3. Landing pages, landing pages and more landing pages!

With the move to tabbed layout, each tab has a unique URL to which you can send people. Also, while the Wall is the default landing page for Fans (so that they see the most recently added content), you can set the default landing page for non-Fans who visit your Page.

What does this mean for businesses?

Businesses will now be able to better promote different portions of their Page by driving ad traffic or potential new Fans to specific Page sections. Using landing pages (in the traditional sense and in this Facebook case) can improve conversion rates (to Fans, leads, etc.) dramatically for a business.

4. More graphs and numbers for the data-addicted marketer.

If you know us, you wouldn’t be surprised by the geeky emails my coworkers and I send around to each other. “Facebook now allows you to track video views over time! And export the data!” “Awesome!!” As part of the changes to Pages, Facebook will also provide lots more juicy data (via Facebook Insights). This includes a particularly juicy metric: the number of Facebook users who start and stop viewing your news feed posts.

What does this mean for businesses?

Any good marketer should be measuring their marketing efforts. Now Facebook makes this easier, letting you track video views, comments posted, news feed posts viewed, all in addition to the standard metrics of page views and unique visitors.

Want more?

Want to read more about Facebook Pages and the changes coming? Facebook put out a document about all the changes, which is great if you’re new to Facebook Pages, or a veteran. Mashable also did a good write-up of the changes to Facebook Pages and their implications.

In addition to the changes to Facebook Pages, the user homepage is also getting a new design that resembles a much more Twitter-like layout, further showing Facebook’s move towards even more of an emphasis on publishing content and conversations.

To see the new Facebook Business Page layout in action, check out the HubSpot Facebook Page. Let us know what more you’d like to see on the Page!

Webinar: How to Use Facebook for Business

Want to learn more about using Facebook for business? Download the free webinar for all the basics of using Facebook as part of the inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Become a Fan on Facebook Get inside info and advance notice of HubSpot’s free marketing webinars, ebooks and more. Click here –>