Last Minute Lifts – How to Increase Traffic on Black Friday.

You’ve most likely been working all year to prepare for Black Friday, with fingers crossed that it will all pay off. It is finally upon us, and here are some last minute ideas and tips to make sure your Black Friday is successful and goes off without a hitch.

Be Socially Prepared

Most marketers have already spent their budget on search ads in the weeks leading up to Black Friday. A popular strategy is to bid on competitor brands, but are you applying that same strategy on social? Your social team should be primed and ready to take advantage of real-time situations occurring on social networks. A day of frenzied shopping and consuming is likely to produce a few angry tweets, product unavailability, or lack of inventory, from you or your competitors. Your team can prepare in advance by brainstorming potential situations and preparing responses, discussing what types of opportunities to look for, and how to handle negative interactions. This preparation makes an “in the moment” response easier to execute. Finally, have a social team member ready to engage with people who check-in online to your location, or work on having discounts for people who check in. Black Friday is a prime opportunity to engage with a large audience and real-time marketing is an important way to capture opportunities and create memorable, engaging moments with your customers and potential customers.

Set Up Triggered Campaigns

Consumers exhibit so many behaviors during Black Friday and you’ll want to make sure you capture all of the interesting ones and take advantage of them. For example- How many people purchased goods? How many people clicked through on your emails? How many people came from mobile? Capturing all this information will be beneficial in helping you remarket to people. Create triggered campaigns ahead of time such as abandoned cart emails, or reminders for people who opened certain coupons. If people are sharing your coupons or emails, create triggered campaigns that create additional incentives or thank them for sharing with an additional discount.

Make Your Mobile Magic

Although it is too late to create a mobile app, you can still do a couple things to up your game on mobile. The most important thing you can do is make sure your website is mobile ready and responsive. The worst experience is when you are at a store, need to search something and the website is impossible to navigate on a mobile phone. Make sure you give your potential customers a good experience regardless of where they find you.  You can also send reminders to people of coupons they have engaged with. Finally, remember that not everyone goes into stores so test your website and make sure it is ready for the increased traffic.
And finally, it is important to not just think about Black Friday as a single day of marketing. Make your successful Black Friday have a bigger impact by having a plan in place for post-Black Friday engagement. Make sure your plan answers: How are you going to engage with your customers and potential customers in a relevant and ongoing way?
Do you have any tips to add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

6 Reasons Why You Need A Marketing Dashboard For Your Business

Clive works at Cyfe. They offer a marketing dashboard that takes all of the guess work out of creating their own visual displays. Click here to learn more about us and to get a free trial.

When it comes to online marketing, your target market is active in many places – from the social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to search engines such as Google.  Many business owners are realising that they have to engage in all of the popular spaces online – neglecting one, can mean that your competition may dominate in that sphere, and that you’re simply missing out on sales.

And so you dutifully engage in all of the popular marketing channels online…
However, after a while, things can get confusing.

If you have a lot going on it can be really difficult to manage your marketing effectively, and if you don’t know how successful each marketing channel is being, you can’t possibly know where best to spend your time.

What Is A Marketing Dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is simply a graphical interface that allows you to see an overview of your entire marketing strategy – in a single view. By providing a simple interface through which you are able to view your key performance indicators at a glance you can cut out all of the data that you don’t need.

It is often said that the problem with Analytics is that there is too much information and inexperienced marketers can either get buried or just completely fail to take advantage of the data that is actually useful.

If you set up a dashboard thoughtfully, with your own goals in mind you can avoid these pitfalls – sounds good right? Let’s look at some specifics though; here are six reasons why you need a marketing dashboard for your business.

1. You See the Bigger Picture

When you’re dividing your attention between various marketing campaigns, it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees.  The philosophy is to keep shovelling and not worry about it.

Your hard work will mean more visitors and more sales, and you will be invariably right in that respect. However, why all the unnecessary hard work? A marketing dashboard forces you to zoom out and see your overall marketing strategy holistically. A marketing dashboard forces you to see everything from a distance.

Marketers are typically obsessive over details, and that’s not a bad thing, but sometimes we miss the big picture – while being able to see it makes us better at getting results.

2. It Makes Your Marketing More Efficient

When you look at the big picture you will notice trends and patterns that were out of view prior to your dashboard usage. These insights will allow you to allocate more of your energy and budget to the more effective campaigns, which makes your marketing more efficient.

Marketing isn’t just about seeing what works; it’s about realising what doesn’t work and where trends lie. If you notice that a traffic source is declining, then either the strategy needs to be tweaked, or perhaps efforts in that channel need to be withdrawn, so that your resources can be spent in more successful areas.

Trends are far easier to spot on a line graph than looking at a list of numbers. When you compare different sets of data in a comparative line graph, you can focus on the important trends and spot patterns and relationships that you might otherwise miss.

Needless to say, the true power of spotting trends is that they enable you to make predictions. For example, you may be seeing an upward trend in sales generated from Facebook.  From that analysis, you may decide to double your advertising budget for the Facebook platform.

If changes happen slowly you might not notice a gradual decline in traffic from Twitter (for instance), but your dashboard will make it obvious and give you time to plan ahead by finding new alternatives or adjusting your Twitter strategy.

3. Monitor and Compare Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

If you manage a website, your KPIs are likely to be numbers of visitors and sales generated.  A KPI line graph can show you a comparison of the two.  You can see if there are any trends with these two.

Which KPIs matters the most will depend on your business and there are plenty of things you might choose to track. The charts above show a helpful visualisation of how your conversion rate and your conversion volume might interact and how different traffic sources might convert differently.

If your sales suddenly spike but your overall conversion rate slightly drops you can derive that whatever caused your traffic space sent a slightly lower than usual quality of traffic, or maybe that your website is not well targeted for that particular traffic segment..?

4. Which Marketing Channels are the Most Effective?

When your website is taking in traffic from several sources, you need to be able to track :
•    how many visitors each channel brings in
•    how many sales are generated from each channel
•    the resulting conversion rate using the above two metrics

You can plug this data into your dashboard, and then compare each channel to one another. It’s simple really, but if you can directly compare traffic volume, cost of traffic and sales/revenue generated you can easily see which marketing channels are really worth your attention.

5. Conversion Rate Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel graphic shows you a breakdown of your visitors / leads versus customers, and repeat business.  A graphical representation of this data (literally as a funnel) can be quite a striking view, and a focal point that you can shape your improvements in conversion rates around.

This way of viewing your data allows you to quickly see which areas of your website are underperforming, where you are losing the most conversions and therefore where you could perform the easiest improvements.

6. Find Out More About Your Target Market

The more you know about your target market, the better you can serve them.  The better you can serve them, the more sales you’re going to make through repeat sales, word of mouth and recommendations.

A marketing dashboard can give you insights into your target market:

•    where do they spend the most time online?
•    do they respond well to email marketing campaigns
•    or are they more active on Facebook?
•    are Twitter users more likely to buy on your site than Google Adwords referees?

This kind of information can help your tailor your future marketing strategies and help better serve your target market.

You may have an unusually low click-through rate on your email marketing campaign, but strong engagement on Twitter.

While the low click-through rate for your mailings may indicate that the content of the email could be improved, it might simply indicate that your demographic is far less likely to respond to email newsletters in the first place.

The very same market may be far more active on social networks.

This kind of comparison is made a lot easier with a marketing dashboard and without one you may miss the indirect comparison and hence the trend. In this scenario you would likely want to tone down the email marketing and focus on other ways to make contact.

Summary
In simple terms, a dashboard is a tool to help you see what you need to see quickly and efficiently. Certainly you could check all of this stuff via analytics and your various other data sources, but having it in one place saves time.

To really make the most of the opportunity it is important that you only view actionable data. Filter out any stats that don’t have the potential to give you actionable insights.

In other words; when you view a stat, ask yourself “so what?”

You should aim to come up with a simple set of decision questions around each data point. Or in other words: “if this then that”

For example:
If my Twitter traffic does not consistently increase over time then I will reconsider my posting schedule and try alternative platforms.

SEO Tools

Which SEO Tools Do You Prefer? Here are My Favorites

Seo tools helps the webmasters and internet marketers to take effective business decisions by helping them gather useful web metrics in order to ease up their tasks. Every internet marketer regularly use some or the other SEO tools in order to compete with their competitors. Here are the top SEO tools which I recommend apart from Google Webmasters Tools and Google Analytics which most of us use: 

Image credit: Siancore.com

On Site Analysis

Woorank - Provides instant website review.

Marketing Grader - Provides an overview on how good your marketing efforts are and grades you on a score of 100.

Screamingfrog- It lets you quickly analyze all the faulty elements present in your website like duplicate pages and robots.txt error. When you wish to check the meta details of a large site having thousands of pages then this tool is worth trying.

Sitetrail - Helpful tool providing analysis of important metrics like traffic, link, server, 

revenue, content, hosting, color etc.

Seoptimer- Quickly analyzes the basis SEO factors and provides a PDF version of the final generated report.

TrafficTravis- Performs a complete SEO health check even monitoring your Adwords competitors.

Seoworkers- It analyzes the HTTP headers, robots directives and other technical aspects related to SEO auditing.

Lipperhey- Allows you to enter 5 search queries for which you want to rank and provides you with the details of your competitors.

Spydermate-  A low budget SEO tool that geenerates powerful SEO reports based on all the aspects of SEO.

Upcity- Provides you with a basic SEO report card. 

Backlink Analysis

Ahrefs- The big daddy of backlink analysis tools which offers a comprehensive and detailed report on the type of backlinks for any domain.

Majesticseo- It allows you to compare the backlink history of 5 domains side by side.

Opensiteexplorer- One of the best tools for link researched straight from the house of Moz.

Analyzebacklinks- A free to use tool for getting an idea of the type of links your competitor is having.

linkdiagnosis- Another free backlink checker tool offering basic optiond.

Link Building

Buzzstream- I simply love this tool as it makes the tasks of outreaching and list building so easy. 

Wordtracker- The oldest and the most trusted link building platform offering great resources and prospects for creating backlinks.

Ontolo- The instant prospector of Ontolo easily outlines the best available resources for getting a backlink.

Raventools- The Link Manager module of Raven Tools is simply awesome storing, categorizing and monitoring your link building needs. 

Citationlabs- It provides best list of resources for your link approach. The list offers both citations 

and backlink resources.

Link Auditing Tools

Linkdetox- Awesome tool for finding out all the low quality links pointing to your site. 

Linkrisk- It monitors the link profile of the site and finds out all the sources which are necessary for the evaluation of a low quality link profile.

Complete SEO Software (Tool)

Moz- The world's most loved SEO tool backed by the reputation of Rand Fishkin. All the top brands use Moz in order to improve their inbound marketing efforts.

IBP- One of the oldest and most preferred downloadable SEO software is International Business Promoter. It offers a wide array of essential SEO metrics to take action on.

Hubspot- One of the most popular SEO software recommended by SEO experts. It provides data and insights for optimizing your site for high value keywords.

Please share your favorite SEO tool in the comments below.

SEO Services In India

SEO: The Benefits of Directory Submissions

Directory Submission is one of the finest strategies for your website to get popular on the web. It is the fundamental step taken by marketers to improve link popularity of a website. This wonderful method helps in gaining quality one-way incoming backlinks which play crucial role in optimization procedure. The quality of the incoming links greatly enhances search engine rankings and internet visibility of your site. In other words, Directory Submission refers to the process of adding your website to a web directory. The whole procedure involves submitting your website URL along with other details of your website to the most appropriate category.

The charges for performing directory submission for a website URL mainly depends on the number of directories it uses. When you submit links to directories it acts as the directions for the search engines. The more the frequency of links in your site, the more the internet visibility and rankings. As the ranking of your site increases, search engines visit your page more frequently considering it the most important, appropriate and relevant site.

Types of Directory Submission

Basically, there are three major types of directory submission which are:

1. Basic Directory Submission 
   This kind of directory submission enables you to use single URL, multiple titles and single description to be submitted in different directories. This is ideal if you target for specific keywords.
2. Normal Directory Submission 
   The normal form of directory submission allows you to use multiple descriptions along with single URL and multiple titles. This is useful if you want to naturalize the backlinks generated.
3. Multiple URL Directory Submission 
   It allows the users to use up to 10 internal URLs within same site along with multiple descriptions and multiple titles. This is highly suitable for spreading backlinks to different pages of same site.

Benefits of Directory submission

• Increases backlinks of website
• Helps in permanent listing in others website
• Uses Anchor texts for hyperlinks to your website link popularity
• Niche Directory Website list helps to get relevant backlinks
• Guarantees in effective search engine indexing

Directory submissions give you one-way links

Search engines give importance to the number of inbound links to your site and from web directories you get one-way inbound links. Web directories, while including your links, don’t expect you to put their link on your website. Search engines discourage link-exchange tactics but they consider one-way inbound links with high regard.

Directory submissions allow the anchor text of your choice

When you submit your links to web directories they allow you to enter a site title (site title is different from the URL) that can contain your keywords. This generates SEO anchor text for you and this helps you improve your search engine rankings.

Directory submissions are mostly free

Yes, you don’t have to pay for most of the web directory submissions. There are some highly professional web directories that charge a high premium for adding your links but their number is miniscule compared to free directories.

Directory submissions send you targeted traffic

The organization of web directories make people find the right links under the right categories. Even if you, inadvertently of course, submit your link under a wrong category, there is a great possibility that the human editor will place your link under the correct category.

Importance

Directory submission plays an essential role in promoting new ventures as the websites gain global recognition on the internet through this technique. With this useful technique, you not only gain volume traffic but also targeted traffic which help your site to be at the top and get popular in the search engines. Therefore, visitors having interest in your site will visit it through the links in the directory which engage more visitors by pulling their attention.

SEO Experts: SEO Training

Off-Page SEO Techniques to Build Your Website  Online Reputation 

As we all know, the Search Engine Optimization field is booming day to day with new inventions and innovations. People may not know that much of what they have learned yesterday will be out of date by tomorrow. Unless one updates his knowledge by reading SEO news/articles, there is no doubt he'll lag back in the SEO race.

Being an SEO Professional, I hereby suggest some the factors that deal with off-page SEO. I found this forum to be the best suited place for sharing. Below is a list of some things most people may be familiar with, but I have also added a few advanced things that you may not know. Try these Advanced Off-Page SEO Strategies to market your website, get ranked in search engines, and to build online reputation (branding) for your company/website so that you can survive in this competitive SEO world.

Note: These things have to be done after the completion of on-page SEO. Before doing these things you must be aware of your competitors who can able build a negative reputation against your company/website.

1). Community Creation in Social Networking Sites

Also known as online reputation management, this is the first and foremost step with which you have to initiate your process. Try to become a member of the most popular social networking sites like Orkut, Myspace, Facebook, Linked In, Ecademy, etc., and create a profile of your own. By doing this you can extend your network online, get connect with your friends, share things with each other, and promote your company/website to build an online reputation. This is most likely the same as Web 2.0 (Participatory Web), which means you have to show your active participation on a regular basis.

2). Blogging

This is one of the most powerful ways to promote your company/website online. Write a blog of your own for your company/website and include lots of unique content. Be precise in what you're trying to convey for the users in your blog entry and promote your blog in blog directories and blog search engines. You can also promote your blog/website by posting comments in other service-related blogs which allow links in the comments section that are crawlable by the search engines (these blogs are commonly identified as Do-Follow Blogs). If you're not very good at writing content for blog posts, hire a guest blogger for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view.

3). Forum Postings

Create a forum/online discussion board of your own and start a discussion or share topics with your friends. You can also post/reply to a thread in other service-related pre-existing forums that allow links in your signature which can be crawled by the search engines (aka "Do-Follow Forums").

4). Search Engine Submission

Submit your website to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alexa, Alltheweb, Lycos, Excite, etc., to get listed for free.

5). Directory Submission

Many people may say that directory submission is dead. As far as I'm concerned it is still alive. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it. Submit your websites to the topmost quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, ZoomInfo, One Mission, Pegasus, etc. Nowadays many web directories may offer paid listings but don't go for it.

6). Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is yet another powerful way of promoting your website, but nowadays most people are spamming social bookmarking sites without knowing how to use them. Since content in these websites update frequently, search engines like these types of sites and often visit them (this is commonly termed as Tagsonomy & Folksonomy in Web 2.0). Do some social bookmarking in popular bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc. You should be very careful while doing this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to broadcast your news on a wide area network. This may increase your website traffic based on how effectively you have participated.

6). Link Exchange

Exchange links with service-related websites (this is commonly termed as Thematic Link Exchange) that can help increase your link popularity, which is a major factor of Google's PageRank algorithm. Beware of Black-Hats while doing exchanges.

7). Link Baiting

Suppose you have copied/published another website's news or content in your blog/website. Don't forget to place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to increase your link popularity.

8). Cross-Linking

Link to internal pages within your site wherever necessary (this is commonly termed Internal Linking). This increases your internal link popularity ,which is another major factor of Google Page Rank algorithm. The best known example of successful internal linking is Wikipedia. Also try to get a content link from websites/blogs that are related to your site theme. Try getting a link from within their site content using a targeted keyword as anchor text (much like Wikipedia does). We know that this strategy can often be hard to implement, but these types of links have more weight from a search engine point of view.

9). Photo Sharing

Publish/share your website product pictures and make them public. Let your friends see them and comment on them too, which will help drive traffic towards your website. Do this in major photo sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, Picli, etc.

10). Video Promotions

Like with photo sharing, you can publish/share your product videos, expert opinions, and reviews of your product and make them public in YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, etc.

11). Business Reviews

Write reviews about others businesses or ask your friends/clients to write a review of your business in major business review sites like RateitAll, Shvoong, Kaboodle, Stylefeeder, etc. 

12). Local Listings & Yellow Pages

Instead of going global and facing huge competition, make your website local so that search engines can easily view your website and fetch the content. This will help you to reach a targeted audience. Submit your website to Google Local, Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Superpages, Hotfrog, etc. 

13). Article Submission

Write articles of your own and submit them to popular article sites like Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, Buzzle, etc. This will help you to attain some deep links for your website (though it's usually a slower process).

14). Press Release Promotion

If you are a business/service provider then go for PR submission in popular PR websites like 1888pressrelease, Open PR, PR Leap, etc. This will help you to publish your site in Google News.

15). Classifieds Submission

Do some classifieds submissions to advertise your products for free. Try Craigslist and other major classifieds sites like Kugli, Myspace, iMadespace, Vivastreet, etc. 

16). Social Shopping Network

If you own an e-commerce website, this is a good strategy for advertising and easily branding your products for free. Submit your products to Google Product Search, Yahoo Online Shopping, MSN Online Shopping, and other major social shopping network sites like Kaboodle, Style Feeder, Wists, Five Limes, Buzz Shout, Ohmybuzz, etc.

17). Answers

Participate in Answers by asking and answering relevant questions and placing a link to your website in the source section if necessary. If you don't spam, this is another great way to increase your link popularity (Yahoo Answers, Cha-Cha, Answer Bag, etc.) 

18). Document Sharing

Share your website documents like business documents, information brochures, and slides in Google Docs, Slide Share, etc. This will help you brand your website.

19) CSS, W3C & RSS Directories Submission

If you have a web design site or offer services related to web design, submit your website to CSS and W3C website directories which may drive traffic towards your website. Also submit your website to RSS feed directories which, again, will help you attain more traffic.

20). Widget / Gadget Development

Develop some interactive and innovative widget/gadget applications (such as an online poll or game widgets) for your website and publish them on your blog/website or in other popular social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. Let your friends and others vote/play/use the widget/application, which will help you increase your branding and website visits.

21). PPC(Per Pay Click) Ad Campaign

When none of the above strategies work for you, go for a PPC ad campaign with your targeted keywords. Remember that you have to pay to drive more traffic towards your website through PPC.

Note: Always keep in mind that you have to be very careful while implementing these strategies. You should not spam or overdo it. Whatever you do, just plan and execute. Otherwise, you can see adverse effects.

Thanks for reading!