Forbes Editorial Calendar: 5 Lessons For Yearly Blog Planning
You can learn a lot from the Forbes editorial calendar. Planning for the upcoming year, instead of just weeks or months, is a powerful tool.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
If you’ve added “be better at planning our editorial content” to your 2016 goals, this article is a good place to turn for motivation.
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A Guide to Social Media Etiquette
There are a few good practices that can go a long way to keeping your nose clean. Here is a guide to social media etiquette containing logical tips that will help your social media strategy and avoid any mistakes.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Nice summary of how to make the most of social media for your business – without offending or losing prospects and customers.
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Social Media: Eight Hand-picked Image Tools
In general, images in social media posts help to achieve greater success than plain text posts. Here are 8 tools – all either free or with a free option – to try.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Do you use any of these tools? PicMonkey is our go-to image site, and we love Canva, too. There are some other great finds in this list which you can be sure we’re in the process of testing out, like Get Funky!
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How Much are Your Sales Leads Really Worth?
Every day, marketing and sales professionals in thousands of companies make significant investments to acquire and develop sales leads. The ultimate objective is to grow revenues and profits by winning new customers.
Unfortunately, these investment decisions are often made without a clear and accurate understanding of how valuable leads actually are. When marketing and sales leaders don’t know the true value of their sales leads, they can invest too little and miss out on profitable new revenues, or they can invest too much and acquire customers that are unprofitable.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The author believes determining the value of sales leads is a four-step process, which he explains and details.
In the post referenced here, he discusses the first two steps. In a subsequent post, he concludes with his last two steps.
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5 Reasons Brands Should Use Email in 2016
Social media may seem more exciting, but studies prove that most people prefer good old-fashioned email. Need more convincing? Read on.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Agreed. Email is one of the essentials of marketing and will continue to be a cornerstone of any solid marketing plan.
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Introducing New Tools for Nonprofits
Now testing two features to help charities raise awareness and funds directly on Facebook.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Do you follow any nonprofits on Facebook? What do you think about being able to support your favorite nonprofit without leaving the social site?
Facebook is often the “go to” social network for nonprofits – and now there are two new features that they can take advantage of to help raise funds: a dedicated place to raise funds from a nonprofit’s Page for a specific campaign and a Donate button that’s available on Pages and in posts. :+1:
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15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs
It’s been a long time since we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO–the structure of domain names and URLs–and I think it’s high time to revisit.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
They offer both common-sense (e.g., #2) and search engine specific advice (e.g., #10) on the 15 best ways to construct web addresses (URLs) for your key, natural search pages:
#1: Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain
#2: The more readable by human beings, the better
#3: Keywords in URLs: still a good thing
#4: Multiple URLs serving the same content? Canonicalize ’em!
#5: Exclude dynamic parameters when possible
#6: Shorter > longer
#7: Match URLs to titles most of the time
#8: Including stop words isn’t necessary
#9: Remove/control for unwieldy punctuation characters
#10: Limit redirection hops to two or fewer
#11: Fewer folders is generally better
#12: Avoid hashes in URLs that create separate/unique content
#13: Be wary of case sensitivity
#14: Hyphens and underscores are preferred word separators
#15: Keyword stuffing and repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy.
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How Airlines Are Using Social Media for Seat Selection
It’s called “social seating”
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Using your social media profiles to select who you sit next to on your next flight. Wow. What do you think?
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Google’s Natural Language Search Gets Smarter
Google is now smarter at understanding queries that include superlatives and times, as well as more complicated questions.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
If natural search traffic is important to you and you have not yet reevaluated your SEO strategy, this story makes it abundantly clear that now is the time to do so!
Why? Because you are shooting yourself in the foot if you’re still focusing on traditional keywords instead of semantics.
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9 Ways Small Businesses Can Be Big on Google
With diligent attention to the tricks of the online business trade, smaller businesses can climb to that coveted first spot on the search page.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
With smart planning, small businesses can have a strong presence even with a limited budget. Taking advantage of online opportunities is key. Here are 9 ways to make sure your SEO efforts pay off:
- Include customer reviews and ratings to each product you sell
- Use a variety of images and/or videos for each product
- Build links to specific product pages instead of just your homepage or other high-level pages (a.k.a. deep-linking)
- Use descriptive language for your product listings, making sure to include a variety of keywords related to your products
- Encrypt your ecommerce site to signal to Google and your users that your site is trustworthy and secure
- If you have a brick and mortar store, be sure to include location-specific keywords on your site
- Claim and complete your Google My Business page.
- Make your NAP (name, address, phone number) consistent everywhere online
- Focus most of your SEO efforts on local, from building links from other local sites and making sure your on-page factors include your location (content, H1/H2 tags, title tags, etc.) to getting reviews from local review sites
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