Guest post by Joel Runyon of Impossible HQ.
About a month ago, I was getting ready to launch my first product ever – Impossible TRI – a triathlon training program. I had everything in place. I had written 25,000-30,000 words, created training programs, done interviews, had them transcribed, and got it all designed into one sexy program. When I went to put it up for sale, I realized there was one small problem.
I didn’t have a landing page. How was I going to sell this thing?
I tried for a while to make landing pages based on my blog’s template, but I quickly realized I would either have to make custom templates for my theme or just use a standard blog post template for my sales page – both of which were not ideal.
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Guest post by Brad Shorr from Straight North.
Everybody knows social media and SEO are connected, but how? The better you understand the nature and strength of the various connections, the better you can focus your efforts on activities that get results.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to sort things out because the social-SEO relationship is becoming more intertwined (some would say, muddled) all the time. In this post, I’ll bring up a few points we’ve been discussing at our agency as we try to respond to the changing environment.
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One of the first thing I quickly realized when I started my first business was this: I do NOT want to chase business.
I’m not that old by the way, that was 12 years ago. The landscape was completely different even though it wasn’t that long ago. I think I shared this with you before, I got started by doing some small print ads on local magazines and ended up producing my own TV spots and running them on national networks. I had to learn everything from writing to casting, producing and even doing my own media buys and running all kinds of reports.
I did all that just to avoid chasing business. The end result was about 600 incoming daily calls.
I did learn how to generate a lead through Inbound Marketing. But there was something I figured out besides making the phone ring 600 times in a day. The quality of the lead generated through inbound is much much higher than outbound, where you are pretty much trying to convince a person about something they did not ask for.
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This is a guestpost by Brad Shorr from Straight North.
Don’t get me wrong: I love SEO and we do a lot of SEO work. However some businesses turn SEO into an obsession, and that’s a big mistake.
The fatal flaw of an SEO fixation is that it takes your eye off the ball. SEO is about traffic. Traffic is important, but it’s not the goal. The fundamental purpose of Internet marketing, as I see it anyway, is conversion.
First CRO, Then SEO
A typical scenario, and one that makes no sense to me, is when a firm spends tons on SEO and pennies on conversion rate optimization (CRO). They’re driving more traffic to their site – but so what? If their lead generation site features ho-hum offers or no offers at all, people won’t inquire. If their e-commerce site has baffling navigation, people won’t buy.
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This is a guestpost by Bradley Gauthier, a Digital Nomad.
As the social web becomes more important for online success, I’ve noticed a major flaw within Internet marketing:
Most online content marketers have it wrong.
Or at least partly wrong.
But before you storm off for the pitchforks and torches, let me explain through a quick story:
The Band Promoter
A few years ago, my roommate at the time was obsessed with a band. He owned all their albums and memorized the lyrics to every song.
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You probably already read a thousand posts about how to promote your blog.
Every blog about blogging has published one and, hell, I probably have written something about it too. And yet, how to put my blog on the map is one of the most frequent questions I get from clients and friends. I don’t blame you, blogging is one of the hottest marketing vehicles nowadays (I heard).
Commenting, guest posting, free gifts, you name it. If you ask me, all good advice. I’m not about to tell you not to do those things because I truly believe they help get some visibility back to your blog. Allow me a couple of minutes to make my point.
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Usually when other blogs post your content is a good thing, you increase your visibility, you get some extra traffic and depending on the blog, it could even be good for your search engine ranking.
But wait! There is also a negative side to it. There is a fine line between aggregation and just hijacking content. In this posts we’ll review two different real-life scenarios based on the same piece of content and we’ll discuss the etiquette for good honest aggregation, what not to do and how if affects the source.
We’ll take one of SocialMouths posts from just a few days ago: 13 Quick Tips To Write A Successful Post, a piece that was republished by a few blogs in different ways.
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This is a guest post by Zac Grace of 
Don’t Listen To Anybody – The Weirdest Advice You’ll Ever Get About Promoting Your Blog
Every blog about blogging has published one and, hell, I probably have written something about it too. And yet, how to put my blog on the map is one of the most frequent questions I get from clients and friends. I don’t blame you, blogging is one of the hottest marketing vehicles nowadays (I heard).
Commenting, guest posting, free gifts, you name it. If you ask me, all good advice. I’m not about to tell you not to do those things because I truly believe they help get some visibility back to your blog. Allow me a couple of minutes to make my point.
Read more…