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Which WordPress Plugins Should You Use and Why
Every WordPress Site Needs Plugins But which ones? And why? Last night I met someone who was confused about this. I told him I would send him a list of which WordPress Plugins I run on my site, with an explanation as to what they do and why they matter. This morning I decided it…
In Closing: Your High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
Getting your USP right is not quick and is not easy, but when you get it dialed in right, it carries your business. It explains to people in very few seconds what your company is all about. It allows people to know what you can do for them, without requiring them to think. But…. Getting…
How to Communicate Your High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
Communicating your USP starts while you’re testing it, and continues after you think you’ve got it right. When you come to the realization you’ve got a product that solves a real solution and you’ve dialed in your messaging (via A/B testing) to where people are responding and buying, you get active. You talk to people…
How to Test Your High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
Once you’ve developed what you think is a good USP, how do you test it? There are two ways that make sense. Of course, if you think of more, let me know….. Talk to People Which people? With the people you previously interviewed. How do you test it? Setup another interview and this time tell…
How to Craft a High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
Once you’ve got background information on the whole USP thing, how do you craft YOURS? I found a great method described in a blog post titled 5 Ways to Develop a Unique Selling Proposition. The title is, however, a bit misleading. In two ways: 1) It’s not that you pick the one you like best.…
How to Figure Out a High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
So…. How do you create a great USP? The short answer is….. Slowly, through iterations. But…. And this is critical….. If you don’t have data to back up your USP, you don’t actually have a USP. If you’re declaring your USP and you don’t have data to back up with you’re saying, you’re just making…
Examples of Fantastic and Terrible Unique Selling Propositions
Some brands have experienced impressive growth during periods where they used a really effective Unique Selling Proposition (USP), then lost market share later when they stopped. This has occurred often enough that there seems to be a clear pattern. Having said that, the people who changed the USP later thought for whatever reasons, they were…
Very Important Ideas About High Growth Unique Selling Propositions
Sometimes, for your message to get through, it’s necessary to (metaphorically speaking) hit someone over the head with a message that effectively says “What you know is wrong”. Dispelling Myths A YouTube science educator named Derek Muller has a Ph.D. in teaching physics through video. His PhD thesis is titled Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics…
How The Customer Factory Helps You Achieve Massive Growth
When you get your USP right, EVERY “flow” of The Customer Factory is better. Monitoring The Customer Factory for your business tells you if your USP is working. The Customer Factory I learned this idea from Ada Ryland here in Austin, TX who provides consulting services to early stage startups. She did mentioned who she…
How Your Unique Selling Proposition Fuels Massive Growth
How are your USP and your UVP different? It depends who you ask. When you Google for USP vs UVP, you get various answers. Some people say they’re different. Others say they’re the same thing. My personal favorite is from the website of Jill Konrath, a Sales Strategist. Her definitions are: UVP: A clear statement…
Why a Great Unique Selling Proposition Creates Massive Growth
This article provides examples of how a USP that IS MEANINGFUL, has created massive growth for companies. These are real examples taken from real companies (some old, some new), whose USPs helped them achieve dominance in their markets. This article is part of a series of articles. To read the lead article in the series,…
Creating Your Unique Selling Proposition (Brand Strategy)
A great Unique Selling Proposition (USP) will cause the market to pull your business along. You’ll have trouble keeping up. A mediocre one makes you just like everyone else. Your USP, is the simple idea that explains to someone in very few words what your business does for them that they won’t get from someone else. A…
How to generate high quality leads with contextual marketing
What Contextual Marketing is Not Contextual marketing is neither Outbound Marketing, nor Inbound Marketing, both of which provide a lower ROI today. To better understand Contextual Marketing, it’s important to first understand the other forms of marketing. Outbound Marketing Outbound Marketing is composed of “traditional” forms of mass media marketing, such as TV/radio/yellow pages/newspaper ads…
How to increase blog traffic with controversial topics
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics The topic of using controversy to grow blog traffic and generate leads is, in and of itself, controversial. I’ve read articles online that talk about how well it works. I’ve read others about how well it backfires. I’ve seen opinions that you should DEFINITELY do it, and I’ve seen other…
How to increase leads and revenue with Pipeline Marketing
What is Pipeline Marketing? At its core, Pipeline Marketing is nothing more than the attribution of “credit” for generating revenue, across various activities that are required to capture a lead, nurture a lead, close a sale, and even later resell or upsell the customer. How Does it Differ from Lead Generation? With Lead Generation, the…
Link Building Tools for Better SEO
What Are Links? The word “link” is an abbreviation of hyperlink, and hyper means “jump”. A hyperlink is a jump from one web page to another. Components of a Link Links have two parts. Anchor text On the web page the link originates FROM, the anchor text is the text that “anchors” the link. It is…
The Big List of Content Marketing Tools
This post started as a simple rant about how most Content Marketing tools are too expensive and too complicated for small businesses to make effective use of them, and somehow morphed into a Big List of Content Marketing Tools, with a special emphasis on tools that are less expensive, perhaps even in the range that…
What is data-driven content? How is it relevant to your audience?
Data-Driven Content: The New Buzz Phrase Data-driven content is when you pay close attention to the analytics of what you publish (blog posts, social media updates, etc), learn what people show the most interest in, and use that information to guide what you then publish. That’s about it. While it’s a new phrase it’s an…
What is semantic search? How to do SEO like a professional
What is Semantic SEO? The commonly cited concise definition of semantic SEO is a bit cryptic. “Semantic search is a search or a question or an action that produces meaningful results, even when the retrieved items contain none of the query terms, or the search involves no query text at all.” Tamas Doszkocs But I…
How to increase user interaction on your business website
Best Way to Increase Web Visitor Interaction Increasing visitor interaction has a wide range of benefits online. All other things being equal (which is never fully the case, but the guidelines still hold true) websites that have more visitor interaction rank higher. The aspects of user interaction which directly support your SEO are: Links to…
Should you use a script for your videos? if yes, How to..
You WILL be doing video! Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next year (probably by next year), but you will be doing video, and sooner than you think. Why? The cost of creating video has never been cheaper. YouTube is the second most used search engine on the planet. Young people like videos…
How to Sell More Easily and Naturally with Presuppositions
Presuppositional Phrases are the Language of Advertising “Nothing whitens better than Crest” “Why suffer another summer?” “This year, I’ll stop asking ‘Do I look fat’?” Notice the first statement does NOT state that Crest whitens better, yet it is implied. On a marketing and advertising podcast I listened to months ago, the guy who created…
What Is Internal Linking and Why Is It Important for SEO?
Overview The internal link structure of your website has a HUGE effect on your SEO. Ideally your internal link structure should be a hierarchy, not a web. The diagram below shows a nice hierarchy of internal links. Snippet posts link to pillar posts which in turn link to landing pages, which in this example link…
How to choose the right CRO metrics for improved conversions
Conversions and Micro Conversions For a business website, having visitors show up to your website is only the first step. To turn website visitors into prospects, you need some of your website visitors to take the actions you’ve defined. You need to implement conversion (in some form) so you either get contact information which allows…
The importance of creating customer focused content and how to
Better Marketing through Customer Focus We’re busy. We’re bombarded with marketing messages all day, every day. We’re very good at filtering them out. Until we let one through. Customers have different behaviors and preferences. They need to be motivated along their buying journey in a chain of steps for them to make a purchase. Think…
How to continuously improve your content with Deming lessons
Who was Deming? W. Edwards Deming was an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, and a management consultant. He transformed Japanese manufacturing after World War II after American manufacturers thought his ideas were a little weird. Too weird to take seriously. Having said that, I’m old enough to remember when Japanese manufactured products were a joke. When…
Need strong SEO? Here is how to set up your WordPress site
Overview While having a website that is properly setup for SEO does not guarantee SEO success, having one that is designed and/or setup poorly can guarantee failure. While the bulk of the work of SEO is publishing quality content at regular (and preferably frequent) intervals, it’s critical the SEO setup of your website be done…
How to… The Anatomy of writing the best blog post possible
Background We all want to write good blog posts, and most of us fail to do so. The vast majority of what businesses publish on the Internet is crap. While it’s important to avoid publishing crap, most businesses fail. The prior post (which is linked to below) describes the advantages I(in terms of content quality)…
How to write the best blog posts possible with storytelling
What makes the best blog post, best? Best is a subjective term, yet the title of this post implies you can follow a “recipe” to create posts of high value that deserve to be called “the best”. To be fair, this post teaches ONE method (not THE method) of creating a high quality blog post.…
Find better citation links with mozbar domain authority
What is Domain Authority? It is an integer, between 1 and 100, that was created by Moz (an SEO tool vendor located in Seattle, WA) that provides an indication of the authority of the domain in question. Higher numbers indicate domains with more authority. Few sites have a domain authority (DA) of 100, and to…
Google Reveals How to Rank High with Quality Website Content
Content Quality? Beyond the obvious idea of higher quality content being “better”, it’s important to understand WHY Google is so focused on the concept of content quality and how this is core to their business model. If you have not yet read part 1 of this article, you should do so as it gives you…
E-A-T- How to meet the needs of quality raters and users
Your website content needs to EAT to thrive. Yes you got it right, we’re talking about E-A-T. Google states that E-A-T is among the top 3 considerations for determining Content Quality. E-A-T is a significant factor in determining the “value” of a website. So what is E-A-T? E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.” Let’s break it more. Expert –…
Customer Journey
The customer journey is the steps taken and decisions made by a prospect in the course of deciding to buy whatever it is that you sell. The main purpose of defining your customer journey is to guide your sales and marketing team in generating and nurturing leads. For both big and small businesses, a great customer…
Snippet Post
Snippet posts are fairly short posts and either answer one question or convey one main idea. They are contrasted with Pillar Posts which are longer, better researched, and convey more information. Snippet posts are generally 200 to 300 words long, and are for SEO purposes are published frequently (preferably multiple times each day). Snippet posts are not…
SERP (Search Engine Result Page)
SERP (Search Engine Result Page) A SERP (Search Engine Result Page) is the page Google (and the other search engines) return to you in response to a search query. Users enters their search query upon which the search engine presents them with a SERP. SERP’s are unique. All search engines customize the experience for their…
Private Blog Network
A Private Blog Network is a privately owned network of servers that has obtained high domain authority via some means (generally via what where called Black Hat SEO techniques) and from which links to other websites were sold. Private Blog Networks were rendered ineffective in 2013 or 2014 via one of the Google algorithm updates, yet…
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free software provided by Google to help us monitor measure activity on our websites. It has more features than I can list in this short glossary entry, but it becomes easy to know things like: What sources of traffic bring people to your website. What pages on your website people are loading. What…
Outbound Links
Overview Outbound links are links from pages on your website to web pages on other websites. All things being equal (which of course they never really are) pages with an outbound link or two rank higher than pages without outbound links. Studies also show outbound links provide people a greater sense of credibility as other…
Brand Publishing
Brand Publishing Brand publishing describes how businesses (brands) directly publish content for their customers, their prospects, and to the world at large. Brand journalism is simply the strategy of telling out your story in the style of journalism. Primarily this is done through their blog website, and is also done via social media networking sites. This is…
Plugins
WordPress is a web server framework that provides a specific set of functionality. A plugin is a piece of software specifically made to extend the capabilities of WordPress sites. It is like a small program that is self-contained, packaged, and serves one very well defined function. Installing WordPress plugins (or removing them) is really simple…
Internal Link Structure
Internal Link Structure The internal link structure of your website is literally the structure of all the internal links of your website. An “internal link” is nothing more than a link that originates on one page of your website and points to another page on the same website. By page I mean webpage, not WordPress page. In…
Internal Links
What are Internal links? Internal links are links from pages on your website to other pages on the same website. Not only does your website need these internal links, it needs an internal link structure where the pillar posts you publish often link to the snippet posts you publish less often. This internal link structure raises the authority of…
Google Sandbox Effect
Google Sandbox Effect The Google Sandbox Effect describes a phenomenon where new sites rank very poorly until suddenly, one day the levels of visitors who arrive via organic search increases dramatically almost overnight for no apparent reason. The Google Sandbox effect acts as a temporary filter for new sites. It seems new sites are not…
PageRank
PageRank is THE original search signal and is still one of the strongest. Links were so critical to Google in the early days that the search engine was called Backrub before the name was changed to Google. When the Google search engine was brand new, it was based exclusively on every page and every link…
Pillar posts
A pillar post is one that is well researched, well written, longer (than a snippet post) and reads more like a white paper or tutorial than a snippet. A pillar post is a substantive and informative piece of content on a specific topic. While Snippet Posts are generally 200 to 300 words long, pillar posts are generally much longer. At…
Google Plus
Google Plus is the social media networking site from Google. In the same way that Facebook is at facebook.com, Google Plus is at plus.google.com. However it is a mistake to think of Google Plus as “just” another social media networking sites. Google Plus Circles The reason Google Plus is not “just” another social media networking sites is…
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In common usage the phrase seems to have different meanings to different people. There are two definitions I accept. They are similar to each other, but not exact. Definition #1 SEO is the technical aspects of making your website easy for the search engines to search and index, and the…
Landing page
A landing page is a page on a website that encourages the website visitor to take a specific action, which either results in them: 1) leaving some contact information, or 2) buying something. Examples of specific actions are: Subscribe to an email newslettter Register for a webinar Download an eBook (in exchange for an email…
Conversion
Conversion is often considered to be when someone completes a purchase. While this is true, conversion is also the smaller steps people take during their buying process. When someone goes through the process of deciding to buy from you, they follow a certain procedure, whether they’re aware of this or not. While that procedure may…
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is the process of attracting your audience to your website through a structured and methodical system of publishing useful and interesting articles and stories to your website, and sharing the best of those articles with others. The core activity of Inbound Marketing in publishing. Publishing to a website is called blogging. For that…