HubSpot Shares Some Social Media Tips - Five Easy Steps

I do love HubSpot because they are so very nice about sharing information. Sure, they hope you will sign up for their services but they are not close to the vest and not helpful. They are doing this right. I have attended a few of their webinars - also very good information.
Thank you, HubSpot!

How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 5 Easy Steps Monitoring your social media presence is incredibly important - but many business owners and marketers are concerned it will take too much time. You don't need a whole team devoted to social media monitoring - with some tools and these free tips, even one single person can keep an eye on your social media presence. Cover these 5 steps over a cup of coffee and you'll build social media into a healthy daily inbound marketing routine! 1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company ( 2 minutes ): Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time. 2) Scan Google Alerts ( 1.5 minutes ): Check Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms in a Google Alert and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away! 3) Check Facebook stats ( 1 minute ): Visit your Company Page's Faacebook Insights. This can be found under the page's main photo if you are an admin for your page. Scan your active users and interaction stats. Check out your wall posts or new discussions if you have them enabled for your page. 4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions ( 3 minutes ): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website or a relevant blog post that might be helpful to your audience. 5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Digg and others ( 2.5 minutes ): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too! Want to monitor, engage, and measure your social media presence all with one tool? HubSpot's inbound marketing software makes this easy. Our Inbound Marketing Specialists can show you a demonstration of the tools with some of your very own brand and industry keywords.

How To Find Out How Much Your Blog is Worth

I found this link on Mom Blog Magazine. It's a site provides web analysis of your blog including social media, SEO, web, and traffic analysis. Additionally, the site tells you how much your site can earn in advertising revenue.

Get your blog’s analysis at http://www.sitetrail.com/analysis

It's a good starting point for seeing how much your blog is worth and how much you can charge for ads!

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering LinkedIn (From HubSpot)

20 Hidden LinkedIn Tricks

1. Claim your vanity URL. Make your profile look more professional and easier to share by claiming your LinkedIn vanity URL. Instead of a URL with a million confusing numbers at the end, it will look nice and clean like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelavaughan. Do so by going here and clicking "customize your public profile URL" down on the right-hand side.

2. Make your blog/website links sexier. Instead of using the default "My Website"-type anchor text links in your LinkedIn profile, you can change the anchor text to make those links more appealing to people who view your profile. So if you want to increase clicks on the website links you can display on your profile, change the link's anchor text to something more attention-grabbing than the standard options LinkedIn provides. For example, if you want to include a link to your blog, rather than choosing LinkedIn's standard "Blog" anchor text, customize it to include keywords that indicate what your blog is about, like "Internet Marketing Blog." Each profile can display up to 3 website links like this, and they can be customized by editing your profile, clicking edit on your website links, and selecting "Other" in the drop-down menu to customize the anchor text.

3. Search engine optimize your profile. You can also optimize your profile to get found by people searching LinkedIn for key terms with which you want to be associated. Add these keywords to various sections of your profile such as your headline or summary.

4. Take advantage of "Saved Searches." LinkedIn allows users to create up to 3 saved searches. After conducting a search, clicking the “Save This Search” option allows you to save a search and easily run it again later. You can also choose to receive weekly or monthly reminders via email once new members in the network match your saved search criteria. Just click on the “Saved Searches” tab on the Advanced Search options page and select one of your saved searches to run again.

5. Track company buzz. Company Buzz is a helpful application that allows you to track what people are saying about your company and related topics on Twitter. Just install the application and customize your topics to view tweets, trends, and top keywords.

6. Use applications. Speaking of Company Buzz, have you looked through the other applications available to you on LinkedIn? Browse the Application Directory, and consider adding the SlideShare application or linking your blog to showcase your presentations and blog articles on your profile. The Events application is also a great way to see what events your connections are attending and find other popular industry events to attend.

7. Use OpenLink to send messages to people to whom you're not connected. LinkedIn only allows you to send messages to people with which you share a first degree connection, but did you know some people let you send them messages anyway, even if you're not connected? The ability to be part of the OpenLink network is only available to premium account holders, but it allows them to be available for messaging by any other LinkedIn member if they choose to be. OpenLink members will appear with an icon that looks like a small ring of dots next to their name in search results and on their profile.

8. Check in on "Network Updates." Found on your LinkedIn homepage, Network Updates are kind of like your Facebook news feed. Check these periodically for a quick snapshot of what your connections are up to and sharing.

9. Be identifiable. Find out who's checking out your profile by allowing others to see who you are if you view theirs. When you click the information under "Who's Viewed My Profile" on your profile page, you'll be able to view users who have looked at your profile, stats on your profile's number of views, and its appearances in search recently. To change this, go into your settings and click "See what others see when you've viewed their profile."

10. Export connections. Want to transfer your LinkedIn connections to another contact management system? LinkedIn enables you to easily export your connections. Just click on "Contacts," "My Connections," and then scroll down and click "Export Connections." You have the option of either exporting as a .CSV or .VCF file.

11. Easily find email contacts on LinkedIn. Speaking of connections, the LinkedIn Companion for Firefox is a great plugin that helps you identify the LinkedIn profiles of people who are emailing you. It also enables you to easily access other LinkedIn features via your browser.

12. Leverage the power of LinkedIn Groups. Did you know that if you're a member of the same group as another user, you can bypass the need to be a first degree connection in order to message them? In addition, group members are also able to view the profiles of other members of the same group without being connected. Join more groups to enable more messaging and profile viewership capabilities.

13. Take advantage of advanced search options. LinkedIn's Advanced Search feature provides a much richer search experience. For example, say you want to find out if you're connected to anyone that works at a specific company. Type the company name in the company field in Advanced Search, then sort the results by "Relationship" to see if you have any first or second degree connections to any employees.

14. Link your Twitter account to LinkedIn. Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter, and vice versa. Learn how to connect your Twitter account here.

15. Quickly turn your LinkedIn profile into a resume. LinkedIn enables you to turn your profile into a resume-friendly format in seconds with its Resume Builder tool. Just choose a resume template, edit it, and export it as a PDF that you can print, email, and share.

16. Add a video to your Company Page. Make your business' Company Page more interactive by adding video. To do so, visit your Company Page as a page admin, click your Products tab and, under the "Admin Tools" drop-down menu, click "Add a product or service." This enables you to create a new entry that features your video (or you can add a video to any existing product/service pages you've set up previously). Currently, LinkedIn only supports videos that have been uploaded to YouTube.

17. Rearrange your profile. LinkedIn enables users to reorder the sections of their profile in any way they prefer. When in edit mode on your profile, simply hover your mouse over the title of each section. Your mouse will turn into a four-arrowed icon, at which point you can click then drag and drop to another position on your profile.

18. Extend the life of your questions. After a period of time, the opportunity closes for users to answer questions that are posed in the Answers feature of LinkedIn. To extend the life of the questions you ask and enable more time for users to provide answers, click on the "My Q&A" tab within Answers, click on the question you'd like to revive, and click "re-open this question to answers," which will open it up again for 7 more days.

19. Share questions or your answers to others' questions. Besides the ability to ask questions, LinkedIn Answers also offers a great opportunity for users to share their expertise and thought leadership as well as link to content they've created that helps to answer others' questions. Have you provided a helpful answer to another's question lately? When you're on the question's page, click "Share This" beneath the question. You then have the option to share the question via LinkedIn message with up to 200 of your connections, bookmark it on Delicious, or grab the permalink to share in other ways.

20. Use LinkedIn Today to keep track of industry news. LinkedIn Today is an awesome feature that provides you with the most popular stories that are shared on LinkedIn. Use it to stay on top of news occurring about marketing, the internet, computer software, etc. You can also sign up for email summary notifications of LinkedIn Today news.

Photo Credit: Steven Depolo

5 Easy Ways to Boost SEO (From Social Media Today)

Finding the keys to search engine optimization (SEO) can seem as difficult as decoding the Enigma machine. Businesses today clamor to solve the riddle, figure out the formula, and rise to the top of that first page on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

A high ranking in search results for relevant keywords secures more than online real estate, it secures profits, because many consumers and businesses use search engines as the first step in a purchasing decision. Informous sees this in action every day: our industry specific search engine has already generated scores of qualified leads for our listed companies, most beginning with links from search engines.

Our business deals with packaging and plastics companies, but in many industries, search rank for relevant keywords can be the difference between leads going to your company—or to your competitors.  Leads can come from broad terms such as “cartoning machinery,” as well as very specific ones such as “vertical insert injection molding machines,” so search engine optimization is a great first step to increasing sales.

Excelling at SEO involves a lot of time and expertise, but there are some relatively easy ways to begin to improve your results. A lot of what Informous does to improve search rankings for our listed companies is proprietary, but we’re sharing a few secrets today to get you started.

Below are some initial ways to get better SEO results:

1. A little keyword research makes a big difference. Keyword research can be as simple as a team brainstorm, or as complex as using custom, proprietary tools. When you think about keywords, don’t just think about your company name—think about your products, and how people would try to find them.  For example, if you sell labeling equipment, think about keywords like “buying labeling equipment” or “labeling equipment [insert your geographic region].”

If you want to go beyond a brainstorm, but don’t want to break the bank, Google Adwords and KeywordSpy are great resources.  Google Adwords‘ free “keyword tool” displays both the search volume and competition for keywords.  KeywordSpy shows the keywords that are working for your competitors—some KeywordSpy tools are free, others are not.

Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to target, you should use them throughout your SEO efforts. Optimizing your site with the right keywords will drive more qualified traffic, and get your business more leads.

2. Change up your titles. Make sure that every page on your site has a different title that showcases the relevant keywords for that page.  This sounds simple, but it’s often forgotten. Not only are titles highly important in search algorithms, they are the first thing that people see when they look at a page of search results. Changing the title of each page can give a website a huge boost in search engine rankings.

By title, we mean the text that goes on top of your browser, not the title on the page itself. Illustrated below:

3. Make sure you have the right metadata. The titles mentioned above are one kind of metadata, but meta-descriptions and keywords are also important. Many web designers will not include meta-descriptions and keywords in their code.  These descriptions and keywords aren’t visible to your visitors, but provide important clues for search engines as to what information is contained on the page.  Meta descriptions are especially important, because they usually appear on search engines, right below the title (see below picture). Those descriptions are your first chance to grab the attention of a potential client or customer.

4. Link building. Search engines determine their rankings partly by relevance of content, and partly by how many other sites link to your site.  Whether links are on a site like Informous, on social media properties, or in a comment on a blog, links back to your website will help your search engine rankings. Also make sure that your website is linking to itself.  Wikipedia does so well in search rankings party because it is chock full of internal links.

5. Grade your website. Use the fantastic free tools available to help you analyze your website.Woorank.com gives some great SEO advice, as does HubSpot’s Website Grader. These tools analyze almost every aspect of SEO on your website.

Though SEO is a highly complex and constantly changing field, the basics, such as the five outlined above, remain keystones of success.  Without a solid foundation, advanced SEO strategy has nothing to stand on.

If you are a packaging or plastics company, and you want to let Informous do some heavy lifting for your SEO efforts, you can get a free listing today, or invest in one of our upgrade packages. Other industries--look out for our future plans!

And last of all, we want to hear from you. What SEO tactics have worked for your company?

Post originally appeared on the Informous Blog. 

How to Really Build Traffic to Your Blog

My first blog has been up for just one and a half years and while my traffic has hit 1200 page views a day on occasion. I know that it's not close to the 35,000 unique visitors that FashionToast gets, but I can tell you that I worked like a maniac to build my meager 1000 page views.  Emphasis on the maniac because my blog group had to do an intervention to make me focus on editorial themes and quality over quantity. My newest blog is taking the same traffic trajectory but the difference is that I am posting only three times a week which is much less than I've ever dared do on my parenting blog.

So, here's my two cents:

With 3.5 million mommy blogs, you have to focus on a niche with consistent editorial themes. I as your infrequent reader should be able to rattle of an elevator blurb on what you care about if you are doing this correctly.

Branding is important. Does your blog title reflect your niche? How about your tagline? And did you make sure your meta description is your updated tagline? Did you map your URL to get rid of the "WordPress/Blogspot/LiveJournal?" Please do,

Now that you have a niche, tell me what to expect with an editorial calendar and regular unique features. You can deviate, god knows I do, but the reader who found you through Google wants more content of similar ilk.

A picture speaks a thousand words. Include at least one image or video and don't forget to put in alt text behind the image. That's good for SEO. (I know that I don't do this much on this blog but it is my third one and we treat it like an ignored stepchild).

Check your blog load speed time. Tools for that include Pingdom and Website Speed Test. Google punishes blogs with slow load times and so do readers.

Give readers many different options to follow your blog? An RSS feed does not work for everyone. Do you offer the feed via email? You can do this free using Feedburner. Pimping instructions here. Are there links to Twitter and Facebook? And also from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn back to your blog? Don't make it difficult for me to get your content. Networked Blogs through Facebook is another must have. And my pet peeve? Is your Twitter handle different from your blog name and/or Facebook page? Why? That makes me crazy!

An investment in a professional blog template is a small price to pay for displaying more content. Some come built in with great SEO. I am fond of Woo Themes.

Is there a search box for your blog on your blog? How can I find older posts without the capability? It's a widget you add that you most likely have.

Are your posts either very useful or very entertaining? Will I learn something from each one? The longer it takes you to create your post, the higher value added it likely is.

Are your posts evergreen? You'll want to post at least once a week on something that has appeal long after you've posted. That is a huge way to build traffic that works for me.

Are you filling out post summaries and an inordinate number of tags? I don't know Google's super secret search algorithms but I think it can't hurt. Synonyms of key words are also good.

Are you leaving comments--at least five a day? What? Why not? It really works you know.

Your social media presence will directly correlate to your blog traffic. Get more Twitter followers. Join relevant online communities. Discipline yourself to do a little of this every day. The tortoise does win the race after all.

Work your pr contacts in real life. Nothing drives traffic than mentions or features elsewhere. Karma counts. Be nice and use your good manners when communicating online.

At the end of the day focus on great content. Quality will always matter more than quantity.

It's fine to repurpose great content you find. Check their copyright policy (I'm not one to talk), just excerpt a paragraph or so, link back and give credit where it is due. If you say really nice things about the author of the content, chances are you won't get a wrist slap.

Combining ideas from several sources is another way to use great content but make it your own.

I think it all boils down to three words: quality, consistency, and techy (blog speed, SEO, etc.)

My parting words are that growing your traffic is a lot like losing weight. Sometimes you work really hard and the needle doesn't budge but if you keep at it and change your daily habits bit by bit, the change is enormous over a long period of time.

Feedburner Subscription Box: Making It Smaller

If you use FeedBurner for email subscriptions to your blog (and why not? It works really well and it's free!), you might not like how the FeedBurner standard subscription box is huge because it takes up valuable real estate on your sidebar.

I read a bunch of posts on how to pimp it, and to make things easier, I am just giving you the code for the modifications that I've made. Be sure to save your FEED ID number before you start to customize. Alternately, you can get it from your FeedBurner account.

My Old Feedburner Email Subscription Box was much wider and has a FeedBurner message at the bottom:

FREE UPDATES!

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

My New FeedBurner Email Subscription Box is more narrow:

• FREE UPDATES!

Step 1: Cut and paste your feedburner code into a safe place.
Step 2: If you like my form, cut and paste the code below.

I can't figure out a way to put up the code so that it can be cut and pasted. I know there is a way, but I just don't know it. Leave a comment and I'll email the code to you, I guess. I also got the code from the links below which is easy to cut/paste but you'll have to make all the changes yourself.

Step 3: Put in your Feed ID.
Step 4: Save and close

This post is by PragmaticMom. Who knew what she could manipulate HTML code?! Not really, but she can fake it when necessary.

p.s. Useful Posts on Topic:

How to Customize Your Feedburner Email Subscription Form, Part I
How to Customize The Feedburner Subscription Email Form for Your Blog

Creating a Cache Folder for HyperCache

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to speed up the load time on my blog. One way is to use a good cache plugin. I tried several (W3-Total Cache and WP Super Cache) and ended up with HyperCache after a long round of help desk support calls to the manager at my old hosting company.

When the Hyper Cache plugin updated, I got a red error message which is very stressful. It said:

Hyper Cache was not able to create the folder "cache" in its installation dir. Create it by hand and make it writable.


Here's the Idiot Proof way of fixing it if your web host help desk support can not do it for you. Note that Go Daddy was useless but StableHost fixed it for me!


1) Go to Go Daddy and log in (always easier than it sounds)
2) Go to My Account
3) Under the left hand side bar, go to HOSTING under MY PRODUCTS
4) Select your domain name and hit LAUNCH
5) Go to FTP File Manager. It's a large button on the upper left hand side.
6) The plugins folder is under wp-content
7) Open the plugins in folder
8) Find the HyperCache folder
8) Now hit button on the top left hand of the screen called CREATE NEW DIRECTORY
9) Call this directory: cache
10) Now hit Permissions button
11) You are about to do something called giving 777 permission which is fancy talk for read/write/execute
11) Check the boxes below so that Read, Write and Execute are all checked.

Web user permissions

Read  Write  Execute(Directory)

Owner permissions

Read  Write  Execute(Directory)

12) Log into your wordpress blog.

13) Go to Hypercache plugin and hit SETTINGS

14) This will ask you to clear your cache. You say yes and the annoying red error sign will go away. Phew!

That was fun, huh? Congratulate yourself on your newfound tech geek skills and enjoy the rest of your day!

p.s. This is a great post by WP Garage if you are also trying to get your blog to load faster. Just be cautious with the WordPress Clean Options Plugin. I used this and wiped out some of my posts such that they were in my Wordpress files but they loaded as blank pages. It took hours and hours of time to fix this issue and was NOT fun!