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 –>

Yesterday Forrester Research reported that 91% of B2B buyers are using a single class of business tools — and often using them to research and execute purchases.

What type of tools are we talking about?

Social media tools.

You heard right. Social media is no longer some fluffy domain for folks who can’t read a spreadsheet. It’s now one of the most widely used and cost-effective ways to reach new customers.

Forrester isn’t the only one coming to this conclusion. HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing report, released last month, showed that leads from inbound marketing campaigns (which include social media campaigns) are 61% less expensive than leads that come from outbound marketing campaigns.

If you’ve been holding off on social media “until it becomes mainstream,” your time is up. More than 90% of your customers are already using social media, and, as Josh Bernoff pointed out yesterday, you’re late.

Here’s a table that summarizes the Forrester report, published by Laura Ramos and Oliver Young. 

The left column lists B2B buyers’ different uses of social media, while the right lists the percent of respondents who used social media in that way. The remarkable row here is the bottom one — only 5% of B2B buyers are inactive on social media.

If you’re interested in more on this research, check out Forrester’s free webinar on the topic here. If you’re interested in getting started with Twitter, one of the most popular social media tools, check out HubSpot’s free Twitter webinar.

Webinar: Twitter for Marketing and PR

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

On our free webinar this week I mentioned “thin affiliate sites” and we also discussed it a bit on the latest IMTW Podcast (episode #11).

This is an important topic for those of you in Affiliate Marketing, so I wanted to expand on it a bit and explain exactly what it means and why you should avoid it…

Thin Affiliate Sites are basically doorway pages, or web pages/sites created solely for the purpose of being the go-between from the visitor to the merchant with no real other value added to the visitor experience.

Perry Marshall calls them an illegitimate businesses, Allan Gardyne talks about why “thin affiliate sites” are offensive to Google, and Michelle MacPhearson recently put out a video about a Social Media Slap. I put out a series last Fall on the Social Media Marketing Warning myself as well.

They’re all worth a study, and they all go hand in hand for Affiliate Marketers.

Why?

Allan Gardyne explained it well in his article, discussing Google’s perspective on Thin Affiliate Sites:

Google says: “We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it. The former ones are not Offensive and should be rated on the merits to the query. The latter ones are Offensive…

“Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. A site certainly has the right to try to earn income; we’re attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission-earning middleman.”

Google also says: “Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of a website. To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site’s existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate (merchant) were taken away?”

That probably counts out most affiliate sites. -source

These quotes were pulled from an internal document that Google uses to train human agents they hire to evaluate their search results for accuracy. You can read more about that document at the source.

The bottom line is that to be a successful affiliate, you have to add value to the sales process - and for your target market. You have to bring something to the table to add to the buying experience, whether that be helping in the decision making process, product reviews, tips on how to use the product, unique applications of the product, etc.

Otherwise you’re just throwing out affiliate links, or creating what is called “thin affiliate sites”. If there’s no added value, what reason would someone come through your link instead of just going straight to the source themselves?

And if there’s no added value for human visitors, what reason would Google have to rank your affiliate pages well?

Look at ways that you can add value to the process. Make sure your affiliate sites, or even affiliate pages on your site, could stand on their own content-wise even without the affiliate links.

Best,

Do you use online video?  How?  Have you tried viral videos?  Do you do any live streaming?  How do you track and measure video marketing?  What are your biggest challenges and successes?

Earlier this month I participated in a panel that covered these questions. A recording of the conversation is below.

Panelists

• Justin Levy, General Manager at New Marketing Labs
• Mike Volpe, VP Marketing at HubSpot
• Matt Cutler, VP Marketing & Analytics at Visible Measures
• Matt Kaplan, VP Solutions at PermissionTV

Moderator

• Matthew Mamet, Director of Product Marketing at PermissionTV

The panel was put together by Permission TV.  Thanks!

Webinar: Blogging for Business

Want to learn more about publishing a blog on your business website? Download the free webinar to learn how to create a thriving inbound marketing blog.

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

[Update: The presentation slides have been added to the end of this blog article.]

Today at 1:00pm EST, we will be giving a free webinar on how to combine SEO, blogging and social media to fully optimize your inbound marketing campaign. As a prelude, we wanted to give you a brief overview of the material that it will cover and a few tips to get you started.

More often than not, consumers are researching the blogosphere, checking out friends’ first-hand reviews or simply using Google to learn more about products and services. Smart marketers adapt to this consumer behavior by making content readily available for consumers to find, using tools like blogs, social media and SEO.

While many marketers understand the benefits of each tool, unfortunately they often aren’t used together. For example, a company may work to increase SEO, but only a handful maintain a blog. Of those who blog, only occasionally do they integrate social media.

Here is a breakdown of an easy three-part campaign that any marketer can easily adopt into his or her own strategy. Within the campaign, I will break it apart to illustrate how blogging, social media and SEO work together in each step.

1) Publish Content

• Blogging: Start by writing a great blog article. Make your content interesting and helpful.
• Social Media: Post your blog article on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and — when appropriate —  Digg. Ask people what they think!
• SEO: Make sure your content is fully keyword-optimized. Include lots of links to further information. Also, blog often to create as many pages as possible to be indexed in Google.

2) Monitor What People Say About Your Content

• Blogging: Read other people’s blogs. Respond to those people commenting on your blog. Set up an RSS feed for easier tracking. 
• Social Media: Look around on Facebook and Twitter to see who’s talking about you. Tools like search.twitter.com are great to monitor your top search terms and company name. Respond and interact with those talking about your company. Build relationships.
• SEO: Watch for Google alerts to see who is linking back to your site.

3) Promote Your Content and Content Created About You

• Blogging: When monitoring the blogosphere, did you find a blog post that you enjoyed? Write a follow-up post in your own blog and link back to them. 
• Social Media: Submit your content to Digg or StumbleUpon. Tweet about it on Twitter. Did someone write a blog post about your company or one of your products?  Promote that article through social media sites too! A third-party recommendation is invaluable. You want as many people to find it as possible. 
• SEO: By promoting a blog that links to you, you are increasing that article’s traffic, as well as the possibility that someone else will link to it. This strengthens the inbound link to your site, improving your SEO.

So what do you think? Do your campaigns use one tool more than the others? What other advice would you give to marketers looking to fully utilize all three?

Click here to sign up for today’s webinar at 1:00pm EST on How to Combine SEO, Blogging, and Social Media for Results.

Presentation Slides: How to Combine SEO, Blogging and Social Media for Results Webinar