What This Guide Will Give You: This step by step guide will give you the best tips, tools, and resources to write a great business blog post using WordPress. Important Facts: Most posts don't get found. Most posts that get found don't get clicked. Most posts that get clicked don't get read. And most posts that get read don't get shared or create subscribers. The 1% of businesses that write great posts - they do get found, clicked, read, shared, and subscribers. And that last word … [Read more...]
Ultra-Optimized WordPress Themes Pay Big Dividends
Google built a multi-hundred-billion-dollar business by providing people with highest quality search experience and results possible. They continue to be intensely committed to excelling at delivering the best search experience possible. Take a minute to read these 13 snippets I pulled from their philosophy page. Focus on the user and all else will follow. Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. It’s best to do one thing really, really well. We do … [Read more...]
The Ultimate 9 Step Inbound Marketing Strategy
The Ultimate Inbound Marketing Strategy is built around the nine-part Inbound Marketing Funnel or Pipeline. Companies that optimize all 9 segments will have growing pains! Companies that completely fail on any single segment of the pipeline will find inbound sales come to a stop. This strategy allows brands that work in local markets to add anywhere from hundreds of thousands to multi-millions in internet sales. Let's start by taking a look at the funnel. The Inbound Marketing Funnel The … [Read more...]
Inbound Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
There are multiple inbound marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure the progress of inbound marketing campaigns. These KPIs are most easily broken down into three categories - getting found, getting favored and getting fans. Get Found To track how well your brand is getting found you should keep an eye on the following KPIs in Google Analytics. Total Website Traffic Website Traffic Within City/Metro/State (For Local Inbound Marketing) Total Organic Traffic … [Read more...]
Which Paid Directories Are Worth It … and when to stay away
Knowing the difference between the paid business directory listings that help and those that hurt is invaluable. The best brands can use this to help be sure they are getting the first chance at high-value inbound searches/traffic. Three Quick Signals To Tell The Good From The Bad Built and Managed By Brands: Genuine professional directories (not to mention sustainable and scalable) allow the brands to build and edit their own listings/profiles. Paying to be part of a directory that you … [Read more...]
Inbound Marketing Resources
A growing and updated list of tools, apps, and other resources. Pre-Startup NameCheckr: Check domain and username availability across several networks. Domains, Hosting and Email Pagely: Managed WordPress hosting in the Amazon cloud. Synthesis: Hosting optimized for The Genesis Framework by Rainmaker Digital. WPengine: Blazing fast managed WordPress hosting. Pantheon: Developer hosting for WordPress and Drupal. Flywheel: Managed WordPress hosting with phone … [Read more...]
The Full Width Hands Down Best Growing Resource of Design Tips and Snippets
Below is a growing list of design tips for WordPress (and more specifically the Genesis Framework). I've provided several snippets as well. These tips and snippets are broken into 5 sections: WordPress Options ↓ Genesis Options ↓ HTML Snippets ↓ CSS Snippets ↓ HTML and CSS Snippet Combos ↓ Let's begin. WORDPRESS OPTIONS WordPress comes with a lot of built-in design options. Most of these are obvious and well known, but this is … [Read more...]
7 Steps For Choosing A Business Location Search Engines Will Love
Whether you're starting a business, changing locations, or expanding into a new market - you want a business location search engines will love. What This Guide Gives You: This short 7 step guide will help you choose the best location (steps 1 and 2) and building type (steps 3 through 7) to ensure your business location is optimized for search engines. 1. Stay In The City Limits This is probably obvious but if you want search engines to rank your brand well for "pizza chicago" it's … [Read more...]
Cheat Sheet: Brand Your Social Media Business Profiles in Less Than 20 Minutes
Properly branding your social media profiles for both mobile and desktop doesn't have to be a pain. Today we uploaded new photos to all our social profiles. It only took five minutes. How so fast? We had previously figured out the fewest number of images it would take to rebrand the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkeIn, Pinterest, and Google+) for both desktop and mobile. Free Image Editor: All your social media images can be made quickly easily using the free image editor … [Read more...]
What You Need To Know About SEO Before You Start A Local Business
I've seen it too many times. People start awesome local businesses, but with business names or domains that are not optimized for success. At least not for search engine success. Local searches can add anywhere from up to a million to much more in annual revenue for a local business. So if you're serious about attracting a lot of local search traffic - this is what you need to get right before you even open your doors. Quick Note: At a future date I may go more into why each of these tips are … [Read more...]