Will Blunt says, “Today, marketers are feeling the pressure to pump out more and more content to get noticed — plus it’s got to be readable, engaging, and shareable. But maintaining a steady stream of quality blog posts can be time-consuming. The answer to this challenge isn’t to write more frequent, lower quality blog posts. Quite the opposite. You need to dedicate more time to researching and write the best and most engaging content you can. The key is to optimize your time after you hit publish. Squeeze every last drip out of the work you have done by repurposing... [...]

Rachel Sprung says, “It’s the timeless question for corporate bloggers: How many leads did your blog post generate? It’s much easier to see top-line metrics like how many visits each blog post gets, but measuring the impact further down the funnel is essential to growing your blog — and your business. But even more important than knowing the number of blog leads you have generated is being able to analyze those results and create an actionable plan for the future. After all, if you can’t make changes based on your analytics, they won’t really be that helpful. Not... [...]

HubSpot team says, “Content marketing is booming — many businesses are seeing great ROI from capitalizing on content. But like any other marketing trend, what works best is constantly evolving. To find out where you should next put your efforts, we asked 10 successful entrepreneurs what content marketing trends they were most excited about and why. 1) Branded Content Sketch Videos I really admire companies like Funny or Die and JASH who have transitioned into creating comedy sketch videos for branded content. Companies like Captain Morgan are coming up with some truly creative stuff... [...]

Ginny Soskey says, “Putting together an A+ landing page can be tricky. There are so many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, and making those elements the “best” they can be often depends on what your landing page goals are. Take form length, for example. It’s just one of the many components you need to optimize, but best practices will tell you that both short and long forms perform well — it all depends on whether you want to generate a lot of (potentially) lower quality form submissions, or a smaller number of higher quality submissions. So if you’re... [...]

Lindsay Kolowich says, “Social media networks are continuously adding cool little features here and there, and it can be tough to keep up — especially if there’s no big announcement. For instance, did you know you can reorder the sections on your Facebook business Page? That you can embed a SlideShare presentation directly into a tweet? That you can add hidden relationship notes to your LinkedIn connections? (That one’s my favorite.) There are so many cool things our favorite social networks can do that may have fallen through the cracks. To help you discover these... [...]

Erich Stefanovich says, “Hiring freelancers is an excellent way to help create the content you need with limited resources. Many marketing organizations and agencies find them essential to the way they do business. But once you’ve hired these freelancers, you’re going to have to manage them — which can be difficult when they don’t come with knowledge of the ins and outs of your business and your clients’ businesses. So how do you manage these characters of the great communication sea? In the early stages of my career, when I first entered the waters of... [...]

Pascal Landshoft says, “Salespeople are in the business of influencing people to do something which they would not have done otherwise. Even though purchasing a product or service might be in the prospect’s best interest (and it should be if the rep is doing their job correctly), it still takes some pushing to get them to realize it. At the end of the day, salespeople must influence in a way which is beneficial to the client with no hidden agenda. Here are five honest and effective tactics reps can use to increase the likelihood that prospects will buy. 1) Give to receive. If we... [...]

Brittany Leaning says, “Analytics can be a huge opportunity for both the growth of your business and of your career. According to a recent CMO Survey, CMOs report they spend 8% of their marketing budgets on marketing analytics, and spending on marketing analytics is expected to increase 60% by 2015. With bigger budgets for marketing analytics come bigger and more notable opportunities for people that know how to use them. Want to take advantage of those opportunities, but not sure your marketing analytics skills are up to snuff? Catch up on what you need to know in our ebook, How to... [...]

Ginny Soskey says, “Putting together an A+ landing page can be tricky. There are so many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, and making those elements the “best” they can be often depends on what your landing page goals are. Take form length, for example. It’s just one of the many components you need to optimize, but best practices will tell you that both short and long forms perform well — it all depends on whether you want to generate a lot of (potentially) lower quality form submissions, or a smaller number of higher quality submissions. So if you’re... [...]

Eli Schwartz says, “If your website is focused on an audience larger than just one country, you probably have spent some time thinking about the best ways to organize and optimize your site for different countries. One of the first and most important decisions most people need to make when expanding their horizons to an international audience is determining which domain structure should be used for additional languages and countries. Below, we’ll dive into your domain structure options, explain which ones you should think about choosing from an SEO-standpoint, and cover some original... [...]