Amplified Content Marketing

by Michael Stuart

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Master influencer marketing and grow your brand

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Influencer Marketing in 2017 results from a survey of top marketers across industries  how 86% of marketers use the channel, with content being the top driver, illustrating that influencer marketing and content marketing are often done together.

Top reasons marketers use influencer marketing:

  • 89% to create brand content
  • 77% to drive engagement
  • 56% to drive traffic to websites or landing pages.

The best influencer content tends to be organic.

While you want to give influencers some brand guidelines and talk about business goals, you’ll get the best results when you select the right influencers and trust them to engage in whatever way they feel resonates with your audience.

 


You chose them for influence; give them the freedom to use it.

Invite your influencers to use their voices to amplify what they’re seeing and trust that what they say will elevate your brand’s thought leadership.

Influencers don’t want to merely repeat brand messages, they want to share their insights and voice, often on partner networks.

Influencer marketing’s real value with the greatest impact comes from influencers building relationships with potential customers and repeat interactions with the audience.

Reference ibm.com

Michael Stuart
1stonlinetech

Top 12 Landing Page Benefits

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A landing page is a webpage made to convert visitors to customers by a specific marketing campaign. Landing Pages increase the conversion rates of campaigns run in online medians like: Display networks, Social Media, Content Marketing and Email Marketing



Top 12 Landing Page Benefits

  1. Customization Landing Pages allows you emphasize different aspects of your offer to targeted audience segments.
  2. Focus Simplify navigation to guide visitors to a desired response.
  3. Efficiency Use more efficient language on Landing Pages with a clear call to action.
  4. Branding Use a noticeable and easy to remember domain to communicates the name of the product or its benefits.
  5. Control Use tools to manage campaigns and Landing Pages that integrate into your workflow and CRM with an API hub like Zapier.
  6. Focus on Keywords Multiply the presence of your company in the search results with keyword specific domains.
  7. Agility You create Landing Page A/B tests to gauge effectiveness and incrementally improve results over time.
  8. Flexible Continuously improve landing pages based on the results of A/B tests.
  9. ROI The ROI of your campaign increases with conversion rate.
  10. Cost building a landing page it is a low cost simple task today and it is easy to justify the cost
  11. Personalization Adapt marketing campaigns for a specific products, promotions or services.
  12. Lead Generation Ask for more information over time to personalize future content and promotions.




Referral spam is compromising the accuracy of most Google Analytics reports!

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What Google referral spam is, how to identify it in your reports, methods to clean up historical reports and prevent referral spam from effecting reports in the future.

Starting in 2014, there was a full-frontal assault of fake referral spam masquerading as legitimate website visitors compromising the accuracy of our Google Analytics reports!
While we thought Google would fix it, a solution still has not arrived, and so we are on our own.

The problem was, and still is, most marketers don’t know what referral spam is, how to spot it, or how to remove it.

  • This presents a major problem when businesses and marketers begin using these inaccurate Google Analytics reports to make conversion rate optimization decisions on A/B tests, landing page optimization, and more.
  • Worse yet, many marketers are unknowingly presenting traffic numbers to bosses and stakeholders that could be off by up to 60%!
  • There are a few proven strategies to eliminate Google Analytics referral spam.

What Is Referral Spam?

  • The majority of referral spam never actually visits your website which is why some marketers refer to it as “Ghost” spam. Even though this traffic never visits your website it still appears in your reports as legitimate traffic affecting total sessions, bounce rate, time on site, conversion rates and more.
  • On small business websites, this traffic can account for over 60% of daily sessions which causes major problems in month-to-month reporting, A/B testing, or other conversion rate optimization tests.
  • If this traffic never visits your website, why does it show up in Google Analytics?
  • The spammers use a Google developer tool called the Measurement Protocol.
     Among other legitimate uses, this allows developers and businesses to track behavior of their customers from a wide variety of different offline data sources and send that raw data to their Google Analytics account. Unfortunately, this also opens the door for crafty spammers to force raw data into Analytics accounts by randomly attacking UA tracking codes, completely bypassing the website.

referral-spam

How to Identify Referral Spam

  • There are a lot of ways to identify referral spam but the quickest is to review your traffic reports by clicking Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
  • If the referring domain URL isn’t a big enough giveaway of the traffic source being spam, simply visiting the URL should remove all doubt.

How to remove Fake Traffic From Google Analytics?


Three filters will block most future traffic from domains which are currently known to send referral spam.

First filter click the Admin tab, select your Filtered View, click Filters, and enter a name for your filter keeping in mind there will be several.
In the Filter Pattern field, copy and paste the string below:

  • dailyrank|100dollars-seo|semalt|anticrawler|sitevaluation|buttons-for-website|buttons-for-your-website|-musicas*-gratis|best-seo-offer|best-seo-solution|savetubevideo|ranksonic|offers.bycontext|7makemoneyonline|kambasoft|medispainstitute
  • Since there is a character limit to the Filter Pattern field create a second filter: 127.0.0.1|justprofit.xyz|nexus.search-helper.ru|rankings-analytics.com|videos-for-your-business|adviceforum.info|video—production|success-seo|sharemyfile.ru|seo-platform|dbutton.net|wordpress-crew.net|rankscanner|doktoronline.no|o00.in
  • Third Filter: top1-seo-service.com|fast-wordpress-start.com|rankings-analytics.com|uptimebot.net|^scripted.com|uptimechecker.com

The fourth is a Hostname Filter.
  • This can be seen in your Network report by clicking Audience > Technology > Network and selecting the Hostname tab.
  • The Hostname Filter eliminates this spam from your reports by including only the traffic that reaches your website by requesting your actual domain name.
  • The difference here is you must select Include, choose Hostname for the Filter Field and enter your hostname in the Filter Pattern.

How Do I Clean Old Google Analytics Reports?

  • While the above mentioned filters will only fight future referral spam, you can still remove spam from historical reports using a single Custom Segment.
  • Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Once there, click + Add Segment > + New Segment and recreate the four filters above as a single Custom Segment.
  • Click Conditions, and on the first filter select Hostname > Matches Regex and enter the hostname(s) you used in your fourth filter above.

Click the + Add Filter button.

  • Source > Matches Regex and paste the same list of spam domains from the first filter you created.
  • Click the OR button and repeat this filter two more times with the respective list of spam domains.

Notice the circular graph to the right reflect a smaller amount of traffic. This is the amount of site traffic that remains after all referral spam has been removed. Once you save this filter, you can apply it to any report and any time frame.



THE EASIER ALTERNATE METHOD

Google Analytics spam shows up with bogus referrers, events, and other junk data. Referral spam in web analytics reports has been around for a long time, but it started showing up in Google around the end of 2014. Google is working on the issue and seems to be blocking some of it, but new spam continues to crop up. This method will stop current spammers, and can be re-run again in the future as new spammers arise.

This tool will automatically insert filters to block new referral spam: https://www.quantable.com/ga-filter/spam-filter.php

It uses two different methods in combination:
  • Blocking analytics calls from sites other than your own (or other hosts you select, the tool will walk you through the sites calling your GA). This eliminates most of the so-called “ghost” referrals where your site was never involved in the measurement calls.
  • Explicitly blocking other spammers that get around the hostname-limitation method. Usually these are bots that actually are hitting your site and firing the GA sensor as normal but are still junk traffic that we’d all like to filter out. If you already have existing spam filters these new filters should not conflict with them.


ANOTHER ALTERNATE METHOD WITH MORE OPTIONS

  • This tool lets you automatically create and link referral spam filters to your Google Analytics profiles.
  • The list of spam sources is derived from friends at Lone Goat and Analytics Canvas.
  • To create and link these filters, you will need EDIT access in the Google Analytics accounts you want to modify.
  • This tool will only allow you to access privileged accounts.
  • Note that any existing filters with the names sa_Spam_filter_#N will be updated if there is a mismatch.




Sources:
www.simoahava.com/analytics/spam-filter-insertion-tool
blog.kissmetrics.com/removing-google-analytics-referral-spam
www.quantable.com/analytics/google-analytics-referral-spam-filter-wizard

Good marketing nowadays revolves around inbound marketing. And the good news is

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Good marketing nowadays revolves around inbound marketing. And the good news is that if you have a blog, you are already on your way toward creating a great inbound marketing strategy.
Iinternet marketing gameplan by http://www.1stonlinetech.com
Checklist for Launching an Inbound Marketing Plan in WordPress
1) Attract: Get to know your ideal target audience and create content that speaks directly to them by solving their biggest pain points and uses a language they can relate to.
2) Convert: Convert your visitors into leads by capturing their contact information
  • Include forms on your site where visitors can submit their information such as their name and email address.Tools: PopUp Pro, LeadIn, SideOffer
  • Include calls-to-action which will encourage visitors to take action such as share your content on social media, sign up for your free offer or download a free resource.Tools: MaxButtons, Inbound Now
  • Create dedicated landing pages where you can expand on your offer and describe all the benefits. Include a form where users submit their information.Tools: Unbounce Landing Pages, WordPress Landing Pages
3) Close: Convert leads into actual customers.
  • Use CRM software to keep track of all the important details and interactions with your contacts.Tools: HubSpot CRM
  • Analyze. Use analytics software such as Google Analytics or Crazy Egg to understand how visitors are interacting with your website and how well your sales team is doing.Tools: Google Analytics, CrazyEgg, KISSMetrics
  • Automate. Use email and marketing automation to further build trust with contacts who aren’t ready to buy yet and to target the right message that relates to the needs and the lifecycle stage of each lead.Tools: MailChimp, Active Campaign, ConvertKit
4) Delight: Continue to engage with your customers by creating new offers and gradually transform them into your loyal fans which will act as your promoters.
  • Use surveys . Ask for feedback to ensure you are giving your customers what they want.Tools: PollDaddy, SurveyMonkey
  • Use smart calls to action and smart content. Make sure your calls to action and your content is geared towards your ideal content based on their interests and their lifecycle stage.
  • Social Monitoring. Keep track of social conversations and reach out with relevant content when your customers ask a question.Tools: Hootsuite, Cyfe, Simply Measured

There are five core ideas behind inbound marketing:
  • Content Creation and Distribution. Creating content that is bound to attract your ideal clients by solving their immediate problems, concerns, and needs then sharing that content far and wide
  • Lifecycle Marketing. Ideally, you want your targeted leads to become your biggest fans who will go on to spread the word about you. However, they don’t just appear out of nowhere. Each lead you attract through inbound marketing will start off as a stranger. The goal is to transform each of those leads into a repeat visitor, who will become your customer and then promoter.
  • Personalization. We established that your content needs to speak to your ideal customer. As time progresses, you will learn more and more about their specific needs and then you can utilize that knowledge to further refine your content.
  • Multi-channel. Inbound marketing is not tied to one specific platform, rather it approaches people where they are, on the platform in which they feel most comfortable interacting with you.
  • Integration. Creating content, sharing the content across different channels and analyzing how well that content is doing – all that integrates together to allow you to put your focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.
By focusing your efforts on inbound marketing, you are no longer a noise they’ve learned to tune out. Instead, your message becomes something they want to hear, something they want to learn more about, and that’s hard to ignore.
How Does it Work?
When it comes to inbound marketing, there are 4 key actions you need to take to capitalize on your marketing strategy.
Attract Even though you might think you want to be found by as many people as possible that is not the right course of action. You want to be found by people who are most likely to become leads and ultimately, your ideal customers.
Some of the most important tools to attract them to your site include:
  • Blogging. If you already have a blog, then you have an excellent start. Blogging is one of the easiest methods to create content that speaks and educates your target audience.
  • SEO. In today’s day and age, each and every one of your customers will begin their search online — either to find out how to solve a particular problem, compare products and services, or to find out more about a particular product. As a website owner, you should focus your efforts on selecting the right keywords and then create content, build links, and optimize pages around those terms.
  • Pages. In correlation to blogging and SEO, the static pages on your website should be optimized for your target audience as well. Rather than simply stating what you offer in dry corporate–speak, you need to speak directly to your target audience by explaining how you can help solve their needs in a language that they can relate to.
  • Social Publishing. Social media should be a natural extension of your blog. This is where they get to see the face behind the brand so do your best to represent your website in the best light. Aside from sharing relevant and valuable content, share content you know your audience would benefit from and don’t forget to engage in the conversation. This means responding to any questions you might get on social media as well as encouraging and being a part of the conversation.
Convert Now that you have their attention, it’s time to convert those visitors into leads. This involves gathering their contact information. Ideally, you will have their full name, address, and email. At the very least, you can get by with just their email address.
When it comes to converting visitors to leads, the best assets include:
  • Forms. These are usually email signup forms where you ask for their email (most often their name, too) in exchange for a download. A good place to feature a signup form is below a blog post or in your sidebar, and to repeat it again in the footer of your website. As with anything, your forms should be easy to fill out and stand out from the rest of your content.
  • Calls-to-Action. Calls-to-Action or CTAs are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action with words such as “Download my Checklist to Complete XYZ” or “Sign up for a live workshop.” Sometimes they include a form, and often they lead to a separate form where visitors can submit their information.
  • Landing Pages. Landing pages serve a specific purpose–and that is to convert visitors to leads. This is where you expand on the offer in the call-to-action and where you include another form where the user can submit their information. The information submitted on the landing page can be as simple as a form including a name and an email field, or it can be somewhat longer including more specific information that can be used by your sales team. Landing pages should not include anything else other than your offer and the form so distractions are minimized.
Once your visitors have filled out the form on your site, they become contacts. It’s your responsibility to keep track of those leads in one place by using a custom marketing database. Make sure that every interaction you’ve had with your contacts is documented and that it makes sense for you. In the long run, that information can be used to optimize your future interactions with leads and visitors.
Close The next step in inbound marketing strategy is to convert your contacts into actual customers. This can be achieved through various marketing tools which include:
  • CRM Software. Customer Relationship Management software allows you to keep track of all the important details about all your contacts, companies, and deals in your sales pipeline. Above all, it makes it easy to get in touch with your ideal audience at the right time.
  • Closed-loop Reporting. This allows you to analyze your marketing efforts and see which one of those methods works best to bring in new leads, how well your sales team is doing to convert those leads into customers, and much more. When you integrate this with your CRM software you can have a snapshot of your marketing strategy at a glance at all times.
  • Email. If your visitors aren’t ready to become clients yet, email can be an effective tool to build trust and ease their decision to make a purchase.
  • Marketing Automation. This includes creating a series of automated email messages that relate to the needs and the lifecycle stage of each lead. The content of the messages will be different depending on where and when a visitor actually converted into a lead and that’s one of the biggest benefits of inbound marketing.
Delight At this stage of your inbound marketing plan, your tools should include:
  • Surveys. Asking your current customers for feedback is the best way to ensure you are providing them with what they are looking for instead of randomly guessing and hoping to hit the target.
  • Smart calls-to-action. By smart, I mean calls-to-action that are specific to your ideal customer depending on the lifecycle stage.
  • Smart content. Content that is geared towards your ideal customers’ interests and challenges written in a language that’s familiar to them.
  • Social Monitoring. This is also sometimes called Social Listening, which refers to actively keeping track of social conversations that matter to you, listening to customers’ questions and comments, and then reaching out to them with relevant content.
What Goes Into an Inbound Marketing Plan?
Creating remarkable content Long gone are the days when it was enough to churn out content filled with keywords. The competition is tough and you need to make sure your content stands out from the rest. This comes by creating content that is targeted to your ideal buyer persona – content that inspires, entertains, provokes, and educates.
Using the power of visuals In the age of short attention spans, images really do speak more than words. A number of studies have shown that the average attention span is just 8 seconds so make sure those 8 seconds count. Creating highly engaging visual content that begs to be shared is a good way to get the attention of your target audience. This includes not only photos but infographics, slideshows, videos – anything that will make you stand out from your competition.
Mastering CTA Your Calls-to-Action shouldn’t be ignored. Spend as much time on crafting compelling CTAs as you do on creating your content and your visuals. The last thing you want is to spend hours on an epic blog post and infographic only to have people leave your site because your CTA wasn’t clear, or worse, weak.
Utilizing the power of analytics You won’t know how it works unless you gather and measure data. It’s important to know which pages on your site brought in the most leads, where they clicked, and where they dropped off. Similarly, you want to know how many of your contacts actually turned into customers, at which point on your site they converted, and where they were when they left. You won’t know any of that without analytics software. Google Analytics is great for tracking your website and more sophisticated tools like CrazyEgg can show you exactly where your visitors are clicking.
Implement testing After you have results gathered from analytics, you can start testing different variations of your marketing strategy. This is often referred to as A/B testing and you can set up tests for almost anything, your headlines, your CTAs, content, the color of buttons, and so forth. This is a valuable part of any marketing plan because it lets you tweak until you get that perfect solution that is guaranteed to convert.
Getting the right people on your team As a website owner, you already wear many hats and not all of us are born marketers. Knowing when to bring people on your team to help with your marketing efforts is a smart decision. However, you should be careful to hire those whose skill set not only matches your strategy, but also those whose vision and value align with yours. They should also be ready to continually learn and improve so you can update your marketing plan as your goals grow.
SEO The best way to attract visitors to your site is by optimizing your SEO efforts. By that, I mean researching your keywords and then planning your content around them. However, your SEO efforts should be boosted by using a plugin such as our own SmartCrawl SEO plugin or All In One SEO.
Content Structure Another important factor when it comes to SEO is your content structure. This means setting up a customized permalink structure for your blog as well as creating categories for your content. You can then include categories in your permalinks since URLs are important factors in search rankings. By doing this you inform not only the search engines but your visitors as well how a particular blog post relates to other content on your site.
Image Optimization When it comes to image optimization for inbound marketing you need to make sure that your images are compressed and load fast and that their names include words that can help you get found online. It’s one of the most overlooked aspects of proper inbound marketing and yet the way you handle images matters for several reasons:
  • Image size affects page load time which in turn affects search engine results.
  • Properly named and tagged images can show up in image search results where there is often less competition.
  • Images increase engagement. According to a study done by MarketMeSuite content with images attracted 94% more pageviews than content without images.
  • Enter Media File Renamer. Media File Renamer is a plugin that automatically renames your media filenames depending on their titles. When files are renamed, the references to it such as posts, pages, custom types, and their metadata are also updated.
Social Media Integration Finally, no inbound marketing strategy would be complete without integrating social media. After all, you want your content not only to be found, but also shared on social media so your message can reach even more targeted leads.
  • For the last step, your WordPress website should include social media sharing buttons which make sure your content appears correctly no matter which social network your content gets shared on.
  • For a complete list of the best social media sharing plugins check out our ultimate collection of social media sharing plugins.
source: premium.wpmudev.org/blog/inbound-marketing-checklist/

The Future Of Marketing Automation

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According to industry expert David Raab, almost 70 percent of marketers are either unhappy or only marginally happy with their marketing automation software. According to Bluewolf’s new “State of Salesforce” study, only 7 percent are seeing good, measurable ROI from those investments.
Marketing Automation Market Share (Source: Datanyze)
Marketing Automation Market Share (Source: Datanyze)
A key contributor to the current state of marketing automation is the fact that its roots stem from email blasting. As these systems layered in landing pages and forms, web activity data, triggers, etc. over time, they became bloated from trying to do too much and began to over-promise and under-deliver.
There is a Lack of Automation in Marketing Automation
The biggest problem is that these rules are hard-coded to specific user actions based on an aspirational understanding of what constitutes a good lead, versus based on what the data says.
It is time to reinvent marketing automation. Platforms should provide scalable, incredibly fast and responsive database and workflow systems. They should be thinner and optimize for tracking the data about your leads and customers.
They should provide clean APIs (that are from the 21st century) so third parties can build specialized, best-in-breed experiences on top of them.
The good news is key ingredients are now coming together to prime a major shift in this direction – including vast external data sources, advanced data science and thousands of niche, more focused marketing apps. Over the next three years, we’ll see a new generation materialize.

Predictive-First

Rather than trying to house everything in one monolithic marketing automation system, tomorrow’s platforms will be more intelligent and thinner, plugging in many smaller specialized applications. They’ll use a wealth of data to deliver relevant recommendations across your key customer touchpoints.

The data science available to decipher all of the signals out there has evolved dramatically through major advances in practical machine learning (think Netflix movie recommendations). And with cheaper computing infrastructure, modeling can be scaled and personalized to each individual company.
  • Predictive intelligence is now table stakes for all businesses, and new platforms in combination with niche apps will make it more accessible and actionable end-to-end.
  • Predictive systems can learn, adapt and improve on their own with every customer action.
Next-generation marketing platforms offer powerful open APIs
so any company can build very focused and insightful best-of-breed tools that are better than a non-intelligent version from one of today’s all-encompassing platforms.
There are now almost 2,000 different marketing technologies out there – thanks to the rise of SaaS CRM and marketing automation, and the launch of the Salesforce AppExchange platform.
There have been billion dollar businesses built on AppExchange, but we don’t see major successes like that built on marketing automation platforms because their ecosystems and APIs are still in their infancy. That’s a shame since there are so many best-of-breed apps out there that outdo the default or missing functionality in marketing automation.

Just as the rise of cloud computing has ushered in the “end of software,” predictive platforms are poised to revolutionize the marketing automation category. In the future, marketing will be about much more than managing campaigns and tracking prospects’ behaviors.

New platforms will help you reimagine your workflows, programs and actions in the context of increasingly powerful predictive insights. They’ll bridge the gap with sales by bringing CRM and marketing automation closer together with predictive as the glue.

Our best shot at changing the game is to make predictive a layer in a thinner, more scalable data platform, and to tie in best-of-breed applications that are optimized to drive more conversions and wins.
Source: techcrunch.com/2015/04/23/the-future-of-marketing-automation/