Tạp trí Internet Marketing Số 25 - AUG 2013

august 2013

SPEC
IAL
25 TH
ISSUE

>TIPS FROM
BLOGGING
EXPERTS
PAGE 12

> STAYING
AHEAD OF
THE RETAIL
REVOLUTION
PAGE 19

> TIPS FOR
BETTER
CONTENT
PAGE 22

> 9 PPC TOOLS
PAGE 24

> MEASURE
SOCIAL MEDIA
RESULTS
PAGE 28

> GOOGLE
BRANDS
PAGE 31

THE ULTIMATE BUSINESS MODEL

ANDREW & DARYL GRANT
>> THE ORIGINAL AND BEST INTERNET MARKETING MAGAZINE
DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR THE IPAD, KINDLE FIRE, ANDROID AND THE WEB

THE

>

INTERNET UPDATE

STATE OF THE INTERNET
In this section of Internet Marketing Magazine our editor Greg Cassar cover’s the facts and provides
expert commentary on what are the big plays that have recently happened online and how they
affect you.
Android Now the Dominant Player in Mobile

operating system and this will feed App Store and
iTunes sales. Only time will tell if they evolve or
not. It feels like history is repeating itself again
but this time its Android vs IOS not Windows vs Mac.
Hopefully Apple will learn second time round.
Google Gmail Changes Marketing
Gmail is the top email service provider worldwide
now at 425 million monthly users, with Hotmail and
Yahoo Mail a close second and third.

Global smartphone shipments grew 47% to hit 230
million devices in Q2 of 2013, according to a new
report from research firm Strategy Analytics. Android captured a new record market share of 80
percent.
Apple iOS reached only 14 percent global smartphone share in the quarter, its lowest level since
Q2 2010. Microsoft seems to be on the rise in 3rd
position with a 4% market share.

When Google made wholesale changes to the way it
sorted and presented the new inbox format it sent
email marketers into ‘doom and gloom’ mode over
the last month.
The reason why there was so much angst from the
international marketing community was because
email marketing promotions will now automatically
be sorted by Google and added to a new tab called
‘Promotions’.

Here at Internet Marketing Magazine we’ve road
tested all the different mobile operating systems
and still like the Apple IOS the best as far as a pure Example of new Gmail Tabs view with Promotions Tab
clean device and OS user experience. It’s a shame
to see Apple slipping down in the rankings now that Email intelligence firm Return Path has released a
Steve Jobs is gone and innovation seems almost new report looking at the early effects Gmail’s new
non-existent.
tabbed experience has had on marketers.
It seems that Apple needs to modify its marketing strategy and evolve with the times by pricing
its iPhones and iPads at roughly a quarter of their
current prices so as to get a higher adoption rate.
Our thinking behind this is that once people use
IOS they won’t want to change to any other mobile

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They reported that users who are “routinely engaged” with marketing email are reading a slightly
higher percentage of their marketing email now –
an increase of 2.11%.
Read rates have dropped to around 10% for Gmail

users who have had a “medium engagement” level
with marketing email (which makes up 88% of all
Gmail users, according to the firm).
Those with the lowest engagement level read far
fewer marketing messages dropping from 2% to
0.4%.
The new interface was rolled out on July 22nd,
and the data was collected a week later so it’s too
early to say the exact impact on email open rates
as there could also be a curiosity factor affecting
results as Gmail users want to see which emails
have been categorised as ‘Promotions’.
Yahoo Begins Recycling Old Email Addresses
Still on email, big news from Yahoo this month as
they announced they will begin recycling usernames on accounts that have been inactive for
more than a year.
It makes us wonder how this is feasible due to logins and password recovery linked to e-mail addresses, so it certainly raises some security concerns.

button and then be able to send the business owner a text.
We tested it in several
businesses in many industry verticals over
the last month. All
in all we were able to
declare the functionality an outstanding
success as all businesses we tested it on
received more leads
than the previous
month.
Over the month of
July we experienced
on average an amazing 11.5% of site visitors to one of the
mobile sites that we
built with ‘Click to
Text’ used this functionality. This comAn example of a mobile site with ‘Click
pares to 10% of moto Text’ feature
bile site visitors using
the ‘Click to Call’ functionality and 5.5% of mobile
site visitors in the sample set used the ‘Click to
Map’ feature.

So by adding ‘Click to Text’ we were able to nearly
Yahoo are planning on unsubscribing recycled ac- double the number of leads generated from the
counts from any subscriptions that they are cur- mobile sites for the businesses we implemented it
rently on and will also introduce additional checks on. In the month of August we will roll it out across
when password recovery processes are kicked off our full client base. If you want a mobile site with
to see if it’s a recycled email address.
‘Click to Text’ functionality for your business you
can check it out here (you will also see there the
I see what Yahoo is trying to do here with making new video where I talk you through the scenarios
more good user names available if people are no where we’ve found mobile sites to work effectively
longer using old email accounts but what it does and when you don’t need a dedicated mobile site).
do is create an issue of trust - I know I for certain
wouldn’t use a Yahoo email account after this, and
many others will be the same I believe.
Weekends and Personalisation Help Email Open
Rates
‘Click to Text’ is a Winner on Mobile Sites!
Last month in this section we spoke about that we
were in early days of testing ‘Click to Text’ functionality on dedicated mobile sites. This functionality enables the mobile site visitor to click one

Marketing Automation firm Eloqua (which is now
owned by Oracle) recently featured a report titled
‘40 Must-See Charts for Modern Marketers’.
Eloqua studied 1.5 Billion Email Clicks and the Volume of emails by Day of the week. What they found
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was that to achieve the best clickthrough rate marketers should send emails on weekends.

did better than no personalisation, and custom personalisation such as location did significantly better
again.

Another interesting finding based on over 200m
emails was that personalised subject lines were key
to best performing email open rates. Subject lines
that were personalised with the recipients name

Interestingly adding the recipients company name or
an exclamation mark had a negative effect on email
open rates.

From the Desk of the Editor
This is a milestone issue for Internet Marketing Magazine as it is now our 25th issue. A big thanks go out
to all our loyal readers and contributors.

and you can spare 1 minute of your time to click
this link to give us a quick honest review that would
be greatly appreciated (click ‘view in iTunes’ then
scroll down and click ‘write a review’, thanks :).

If you haven’t got access to the member’s area
please feel free to do at http://internetmarketing- We hope you get great value from Internet Marketing
mag.net/become-member (it’s free). This month’s Magazine. Wishing you the best of success online,
complete audio interview with Andrew and Daryl
Grant has now been added. It has lots of sections in Regards,
it that were not included in the magazine, so be sure
to check it out.
A special thanks to those who have left reviews in the
apple platforms as it really helps us out. If you are
getting good value from Internet Marketing Magazine

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august 2013

GregCassar
Greg Cassar

Internet Marketing Strategist & Editor
Internet Marketing Magazine

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EXPERT INTERVIEW

ANDREW & DARYL GRANT
THE ULTIMATE BUSINESS MODEL

An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar
Andrew and Daryl Grant are Internet marketers and educators with a long history of success online. Coming from a business consulting background, Andrew and Daryl turned to the Internet and
were able to create a passive income stream to leave their consulting business behind after making
$250,000 in sales in their first 12 months online.
This has now grown to be a multi-million dollar business, and has positioned them to enjoy two to
three months’ international travel a year with their family.
From coaching so many students, what are the
traits that you’ve seen consistently in your students who are successful online?
Daryl/Andrew: That’s really interesting, and it
happens time and again. We can give exactly the
same message to two different people and they get
completely different results.

right, or spending months and months building the
perfect product, forgetting about the fact that
that’s only a tiny part of the job. The key to success is actually getting out there and marketing
it.

The next success factor is avoiding the ‘BSOs’.
Bright Shiny Objects are plentiful online. Internet
marketers are particularly good at selling Bright
A lot of it comes down to mindset, and we’ll cover Shiny Objects too. It’s about applying the 80/20
more of that in a moment. In terms of what the principle, knowing that 20% of what you do will get
successful people do, for me it comes down to just you 80% of the results.
a few things.
Also being able to recognize what is a Bright Shiny
First up, they follow a proven system. They don’t Object and what is something that is going to make
try and reinvent the wheel, they don’t try and take you successful. Bright Shiny Objects tend to be the
something and go, “Oh, I can make it cleverer.” next cool marketing strategy that’s come along that
They just follow the bouncing ball.
someone’s trying to flog you.
The other problem that people sometimes come up
with is they learn from a number of different mentors, and they try and cobble together a few different things. They end up creating what we call
a Frankenstein business, which is a little bit of everything and none of it works. Whoever’s system
you’re following, make sure you follow it through.
That’s probably the biggest factor in creating success.
The second one is where the focus is. The most successful people focus 90% on their marketing, 10% on
their product. Most people don’t have the courage
to do that, they actually spend a lot more time fiddling around, trying to get the product absolutely

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When I first started doing this I used to think mindset was an important part of it. As I’ve become
more successful in what we’re doing, and as I talk
to other successful people both online and offline,
I’m more and more of the belief that mindset is
about 80 to 90% of the game, it really is.
I don’t underestimate strategies and tactics or the
actual doing of the stuff, but unless you bring the
right mindset to your efforts - you can have the
best efforts in the world, but the mindset is like
the magic sauce that makes it all happen.
You teach a concept which is ‘fail like a champion’. Why do you believe it’s important that entrepreneurs fail sometimes along the way?

“

You can have the best
efforts in the world, but
the mindset is like the
magic sauce that makes it
all happen.

“

If you spend all your time just chasing the next
promotion, then you’re never really going to create a stable business. A stable business is built on a
solid ‘want’ that people are passionate about, that
they’re prepared to pay money for, and where you
have a unique solution.

The reason that, I’d rather fail a few times and get
the right one than not fail at all is because when
I fail a few times I work out where it’s working. It
gives me more understanding of the marketplace,
what they don’t like, as well as what they do like.
If you just hit it right the first time, it’s very hard
to replicate your success, because you don’t really
get an understanding of what they don’t like. Then
next time they’re coming you’re just taking a stab
in the dark again when you do things.
Greg: We’ve worked with entrepreneurs like that,
who smacked it out of the park on the first time
and then maybe sold the business or whatever, and
then went into another market, and at a subconscious level they just assumed they were going to
smack it out of the park again, and it’s not always
the case.

Andrew/Daryl: The ‘fail like a champion’ is that
you have to understand that in whatever it is that
you’re doing, particularly online, that you will do
stuff which will not work. You will try a marketing
campaign, you’ll try some ads, you’ll do an opt-in We’ve got this concept we call ‘The Internet
page or whatever it might be, headline, and it will Ducks’ that all need to line up. Whether it’s the
not work.
right market want, price point, product, strategy,
timing etc. If they’re not all there, then it’s harder
You won’t get it right 100% of the time. In fact, to smack it out of the park.
you’ll probably get it wrong more than you get it
right. Now if you have the mindset that ‘champions We teach people to ‘run your winners long and cut
get it right all the time, and therefore if I’m not your losers short’. One thing I learned from the
getting it right I must be a loser or there is some- ‘Lean Start-up’ book is get things to the market
thing wrong with me’ then what happens is that quickly, and if it’s not working, be ready to pivot.
you quickly fail and you quickly give up. You don’t
continue on.
As a team, you have generated a massive inWhat champions understand is that failure is a part come over time from what you term ‘The Ultiof success. It’s actually not only a part of success, mate Business Model’. Many people may not have
it’s a critical part of success, where you have to fail heard that term before. Could you please dea number of times before you can actually identify scribe what is the Ultimate Business Model, and
what actually works.
how it came about?
We call it ‘testing and measuring’ in our system.
Failure has to happen for you to be able to be successful and understand and know what you’ve done
that’s successful.

Daryl: We call it the Ultimate Business Model because in 15 years as management consultants, we
have never see anything that creates so much

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money so quickly and so easily. We’ve looked at
thousands of businesses, literally.
The Ultimate Business Model is a system that we almost came across by accident. These days, we have
it all systemized and we teach it as a system to colleagues and clients, but it’s a way to make a six to
seven figure income in three to six months.
I think the least amount of money we’ve ever
made with it is about $49,000 in six months. The
record at the moment stands at about $3.5 million in six months. It’s a pretty powerful system,
and pretty exciting.
In terms of where it came from, we were running
an event. Andrew came to me and he said, “I think
at this event we’re running we should try and sell
something. I think we should try and sell a high
level coaching program for $10,000.”

I went off my head with “Who would ever pay us
$10,000 to coach them? You’ve got to be kidding
me. We’re going to be laughed off the stage.”
Andrew said, “Look, let’s just give it a go”. I’m
thinking, ‘Oh, well maybe we’ll make three or four
sales and maybe $30 or $40,000. We’ll cover the
cost of running the event.’
We ended up making 52 sales at $10,000 each. We’d
suddenly gone to half a million dollars in a weekend.
Now, you want your comfort zone stretched? Try
making half a million dollars in a weekend. It just
completely blew us away. Anyone whose business
has grown rapidly, you’ll know the pluses and the
minuses that that can actually generate. It was really being thrown in the deep end.
But it was fantastic. We got into gear, put our systems in place, and made that happen.
Three months later we did it again, and this time
we’d put the price up to $17,000, more of a structure and a system based on what we’d learned over
the three months and from doing it the first time.
We did $2.4 million and at that point we knew it
wasn’t a fluke, and that we could actually roll it out
across a whole bunch of different industries, which
we have.
These days, it’s where we tend to put most of our
efforts. We do a lot of these by joint venture, so
we’ll find someone who potentially has a high levelcoaching program that they could be offering, and
we just wrap our system around that and help them
to be successful with it.
It’s got multiple components to it, so for people
who don’t know exactly what we’re talking about,
at a high level, what’s the different parts of this
recipe to make it work?
Daryl: The core of it, and where you make the biggest chunk of money, is when you sell a high level
coaching program. Obviously you don’t sell that in
a vacuum.

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What we do is we start by building a free list, and then offer to them a
small continuity product. Typically a membership site at $49 a month.
What that does is it pulls the people out of the free list who have demonstrated that they’re interested in and willing to pay money for the
particular subject.
Once we’ve identified them, what we’ll do is we’ll offer to them tickets
to an event. It’s not your typical multi-speaker type event. It’s three
days of really good, solid content with you as the expert on stage.
On the morning of day three, we make an offer for a high level coaching program. We’ve done everything from $10,000 to $50,000 with the
high level coaching. We find that the results are pretty similar. Using
our system, we have typically a 20 to 30% conversion rate of people putting their hand up and saying ‘yes, I’d like to be part of that coaching
program’.

For members of the Internet marketing magazine community, if they
want to find you online, where’s the best way to go to grab some
more information about you and what you teach?
Andrew/Daryl:
Our business is OurInternetSecrets.com, and you
can just go there. We’ve got there a beginner’s guide, so a quick start
guide to making money online. It talks about how to sell little one off
information products using our system.

If people are interested in the Ultimate Business Model though, which
is where I think the excitement is these days, then go to OurInternetSecrets.com/UltimateBusinessModel

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BLOGGING

16 TOP TIPS FROM BLOGGING
EXPERTS FOR BEGINNERS
By Belle Beth Cooper

I’ve heard blogging referred to
a couple of times recently as a
mixture between an art and a science. If this is true (and I think it
is), there’s no ‘right way’ to approach blogging if you want to be
successful. There are plenty of
people who’ve done a great job of
it though, and I thought it would
be useful to learn from them.
These 16 bloggers shared one important tip each for blogging beginners. No doubt, even if you’re
not a beginner these tips will
probably prove to be useful.

Tweets. In one example, here on
FastCompany a lot of people requested a post that features more
women entrepreneurs:
Now, a few weeks later adding
such an article where just women
contributed and built great businesses was a big hit:

on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
with an engaging quote. If people respond well to it, than this
is probably a great topic to write
about. An example for this comes
from Andrew Chen who famously
“tests” his blogpost ideas on Twitter first.
And so does Joel here at Buffer.
Take this example from a recent
Twitter post of his, where he simply tweeted one quote to see how
well people liked a topic before
he blogged about it:

1. Get ideas
from your au- 2. Understand your audience
dience
“Understand
“Create blog
your
audiposts that anence
betswer the most
ter than they
interesting
u n d e r s t a n d 3. Write for yourself first
questions from
themselves.
“Write for yourpeople you enIt takes a lot
self first & foregage with on social media.” -Dave
of upfront remost. Ignore the
Larson, founder of @tweetsmart- search, and often means being a
fact that anyone
er
member of the very tribe you’re
else will read
trying to lead – but it pays off.”
what you write;
-Brian Clark, founder and CEO,
just focus on
Copyblogger
your thoughts,
ideas, opinions and figure out how
Understanding your audience bet- to put those into words. Write it
ter means you’ll have a better and they will come.” -Adii Pienidea of what blog content will aar, founder of PublicBeta
This can be a great way to gather resonate with them, which is a
ideas of what topics people would good start when you get to writ- Adii’s experience in writing for
most like to read about, which ing blog posts.
himself firstly has made a differwill help your blog grow! One of
ence to his blog in ways he didn’t
the best ways I’ve seen this in ac- A great technique for doing this expect: “Yes, since I’ve been writtion is through blog comments or is to simply ask your readers first ing for myself, I’ve found that I

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write more and I publish more often. I think though
that the main reason for that is that I don’t decide
whether to publishing something based on the traction / reception that the post will receive within my
audience; instead if I want to publish something, I
do so. For myself.”
4. Build your email list
“Start building your email list
from day one. Even if you don’t
plan on selling anything, having
an email list allows you to promote your new content to your
audience directly without worrying about search rankings,
Facebook EdgeRank, or other
online roadblocks in communications.” - Kristi Hines, freelance writer and professional blogger
When you’re asking readers to sign up for your email
list, you might want to try experimenting with different language. Willy Franzen found that his subscription rate jumped 254% higher when he changed
his call-to-action from “subscribe by email” to “get
jobs by email”:

time each day showing your current readers that
you value them too and you’ll find that they will
help you grow your blog.” -Darren Rowse, founder
of ProBlogger
Focusing on your readers is a great way to get to
know them better (see tip #2). I love the way Daniel
Burstein describes blog readers’ expectations of you
as a blogger: “A blog is really two things. One, simply a piece of technology, a platform. But, two, it is
a promise in the minds of most readers, who expect
that the blog should have actual content with some
elements of value that is hyper-targeted to their
needs. Much like with a newspaper. Readers don’t
just look at a newspaper as newsprint that is delivered on their driveway every morning. They look at
it as valuable information about their city, where
they live, and the things that they do.”
6. Focus on building an amazing call-to-action
“I screwed up for years. I’d blog
and blog. Some of my posts were
doing very well on places like
Hacker News, but I had such hard
time getting return visitors. And
very few people bothered to follow me on Twitter.
Don’t rely on people to do the
work to find your Twitter account. Don’t rely on
them to do the work to find your details in a sidebar.
People are blind to sidebars. Thanks banner ads!
Finish your blog post with some kind of call to action
to signup for an email list or follow you on Twitter.
When I started doing this, I immediately increased
my Twitter followers by 335% in the first 7 days.”
-Nate Kontny, founder of Draft

Using this phrase more clearly tells Willy’s readers
what they’re signing up for, which clearly worked
well!

Nate uses a simple call-to-action on his blog now,
that looks like this:

5. Love your existing readers
“Love the readers you already
have. A lot of bloggers get quite
obsessed with finding new readers
– to the point that they ignore the
ones they already have. Yes – do
try to find new readers but spend
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This particular technique we’ve also tested here on
the Buffer blog and found it to work amazingly well
to bring attention to other blog posts we’ve written,
like this:

or to Buffer product features, like this:

9. Give away your knowledge
“Don’t be afraid to showcase what you know. Too
many bloggers hold back the good
7. Give stuff away
stuff out of fear of giving away
“Give away free content that adds
the “secret sauce.” There is no sevalue to people’s lives ‘until it hurts’
cret sauce in a world where everyand they will love you and become
one has high speed Internet access
loyal fans.” -Jeff Bullas, blogger and
at all times. Today, you want to
author of Blogging the Smart Way
give away information snacks to
sell knowledge meals.” -Jay Baer,
A great example of this is the re- author of Youtility
search done by Incentivibe, who found that adding
a giveaway contest pop-up to the bottom-right of Jay’s advice is to share the knowledge you have,
their website led to 125% more email subscribers.
rather than keeping it tucked away for a rainy day.
Chris Guillebeau follows this advice by offering two
free, downloadable PDFs to his readers. Chris also
does what Jay calls giving away “information snacks
to sell knowledge meals.” On both of the free PDF
download pages, Chris markets his book on the righthand side.

8. Be consistent
“Consistency is one of the most important things that bloggers tend to
forget. It’s much easier to lose your
traffic than it is to build it up, so
make sure you consistently blog.” - 10. Be true to your voice
Neil Patel, founder of KISSmetrics
“Stay true to yourself and your
voice. People don’t care to folA study by Hubspot showed that consistent blogging
low sites so much as they care
actually leads to higher subscriber growth rates:
to follow people.” -Chris Pirillo,
founder and CEO, LockerGnome
“Over a two-month span, businesses that published
blog entries on a regular basis (more than once a
Another blogger who advocates
week) added subscribers over twice as fast as those
the importance of the writer’s
companies that added content once a month.”
voice is Jeff Goins. He says that your voice is the

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12. Give your email list priority
“If you’re blogging to create a busi“Writing isn’t about picking the right topic; it’s
ness, a movement, or to support
about finding the right voice. What matters, what
a cause, then you need to build
readers really resonate with, isn’t so much what you
an email list. It’s not an option. I
say, but how.”
don’t even consider my blog to be
my community, my email list is my
11. Give it time – This is why
community. Caring about these
“Plan to invest in blogging for
people, writing for them, and dea long time before you see a
livering value to them should be
return. The web is a big, noisy your number one goal.” -James Clear, entrepreneur,
place and unless you’re willing weightlifter and travel photographer
to invest more over a greater period of time than others, you’ll When the New York Public Library focused on growfind success nearly impossible. If ing email subscription rates, this simple home page
you’re seeking short-term ROI, design with information about what readers could
or a quick path to recognition, blogging is the wrong expect to receive boosted numbers by 52.8% over
path. But if you can stick it out for years without a more complicated version with less information
results and constantly learn, iterate, and improve, about the actual newsletter:
you can achieve something remarkable.” -Rand
Fishkin, CEO of Moz
most important, yet over-looked part of blogging:

Rand shared these great images with us from his
wife’s travel blog, Everywhereist, which shows just
how long it can take to see a return on your efforts:

13. Write catchy headlines
“No matter how great your content is, it won’t matter unless
you have an amazing headline.
People have a split second to
decide if they should click on
your post, and your headline will
make them decide. The headline
is also essential in making it easy
and desirable for people to share
your post. Keep your headlines SPUB: simple, powerful, useful and bold.” -Dave Kerpen, author and
CEO of Likeable Local
Something we do at Buffer is to test several different headlines for each of our blog posts to determine which ones works best.

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Here’s an example of what that might look like:

15. Keep it short

“Biggest lesson I learned in my
past year of blogging. Keep it
in the 1–2 minutes read-time
length.” -Derek Sivers, founder
of Wood Egg

Working out the best length for
your blog posts can be tricky.
You generally need about 300 words minimum to get
indexed by search engines, but otherwise the length
of your post is up to what you think feels best.
Derek Sivers noticed recently that his shorter posts
were much better received by readers and seemed
to be shared more, unlike his longer posts:
You can read more about this particular approach in
more depth here: A scientific guide to writing great
headlines on Twitter, Facebook and your Blog
14. Be Yourself

“There isn’t one specific set of
rules to be successful in blogging. When I started blogging, I
had the opportunity to learn
from experienced and successful bloggers in the industry.
One of the best lessons I’ve
learned from them is to simply
be me. I didn’t have to be too
“professional” or use “big words” to impress others. I had to simply be me.

“When I’ve written articles that were too long or
had too many ideas, they didn’t get much of a reaction.
When I read books, I often feel bad for the brilliant
idea buried on page 217. Who will hear it?
Stop the orchestra. Solo that motif. Repeat it. Let
the other instruments build upon it.
The web is such a great way to do this.
Present a single idea, one at a time, and let others
build upon it.”

According to this Chartbeat graph below, many visitors to your site won’t bother scrolling, and most
visitors won’t read more than about 60% of what
By being me, I enjoyed writing and the process you’ve written. Keeping it short and sharp then,
more. It had me writing more than I usually would could be worthwhile.
too. If you look at the the most successful writers
like Seth Godin and Chris Brogan you’ll notice that
they are different and unique in their own ways.”
-Aaron Lee, social media manager, entrepreneur
and blogger
Moz CEO Rand Fishkin agrees that telling your company’s story is important, as opposed to following a
formula for successful blogging:
“Emotion and storytelling have been part of how
we communicate with each other and inspire action
for thousands of years.”

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If you’re looking for a general guide to blog post length, Joe Pulizzi’s blog post, “A blog post is like a miniskirt” might be useful:
“ A blog post is like a miniskirt.
It has to be short enough to be interesting, but long enough to
cover the subject.”
16. Make it worth referencing – here is how:
“One thing I always try to keep in mind before
publishing a post is would anyone want to “cite”
this for any reason? Just like interesting research
is great because it leaves you with a fascinating
finding or an idea, I like for my posts to be the
same. That doesn’t mean relying on research, but
simply making sure each post has an original lesson or actionable item, making it ‘citable’ on the web.” -Gregory
Ciotti, marketing strategist at Help Scout
Our very own Buffer co-founder Leo has written about a similar
thing before:
“When writing a post, I get into a mindset to answer just this 1
question with a Yes: “Would anyone email this article to a friend?”
It’s an extremely simple proposition. Yet, it has changed my writing completely. If I put myself into a reader’s head going through
a post and seeing whether someone will say “Oh, this is interesting, John will really like this”, then I go ahead and publish it. It’s
almost like an invisible threshold to pass. I need to improve the
post until this level is reached. I will iterate, find more research,
get more examples, until I can truly imagine this happening.”
I’m sure there are lots more great tips out there about building a
blog. What’s your favorite?
Image credits: David G. Larson, Copyblogger, The WordPress Podcast, Party Biz
Connect, Darren Rowse, Nate Kontny, Jeff Bullas, FounderTips, Social Media
Examiner, Chris Pirillo, LinkJuice, James Clear, Dave Kerpen, Joshua Titsworth,
Derek Sivers, Unbounce

Belle Beth Cooper

is the Content Crafter at Buffer, a new and smarter way to
share what you want to share on Social Media. She is also
part of Hello Code, where she’s working on a quantified self
project called Exist.

august 2013

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18

august 2013

ADVERTISEMENT

>

RETAIL

STAYING AHEAD OF
THE RETAIL REVOLUTION
Christopher Morley
Australia recently held a version of Cyber Monday
called Click Frenzy; whilst the organizer’s site, and
many big retailer’s sites, crashed under the pressure
– it highlighted that consumers have a comfort and
a desire to shop online.

The key going forward will be by being transparent
in as many channels as possible – popping up wherever the consumer is in a meaningful way. I believe
there are 5 key areas to ensuring today’s retailers
survive the revolution and avoid the guillotine.
1: Customer Service – We all know the key to ongoing sales is service – the better this is performed the
more likely a customer is to return. Figures show
that even if a consumer is disappointed with product
but happy with the service they are more likely to
return to your store than if they were happy with the
product but disappointed with the service.

Like all revolutions, new efficiencies, concepts, practices and attitudes take over the old guard – most
revolutions see some of the old guard fall behind and
not make it through to the other side – the Guillotine
was pretty handy putting an end to many. In store
shopping will never disappear, but it will change –
like the way we shop – they way we are marketed to
and our expectations. Older thinking retailers have
seen online as the enemy or the competition; trying to maintain their status quo on traditional ways
of thinking, not understanding the groundswell of
change around them – not dissimilar to Marie Antoinette. It is important that these retailers stop worrying about potential ‘cannabilisation’ of sales and
embrace the new way of shopping.

Online can serve a customer better than in store
– the resources required to do so and the efficiencies of the service can ensure a customer’s questions and needs are answered more quickly and in
a meaningful way. Live chat will be a minimum for
this – but better integration between on and off line
offerings will help ensure survival. Pureplay online
sellers know the advantages of having in store pick
up as well as in store returns – and is why global
eCommerce giant Amazon is looking at having physical store presences. Combining the service offerings
from online to in store and vice versa will help cater
to the consumers growing needs. In a time poor society, an ability to initiate a return for item online
rather than going back into the store will be beneficial as well as an expectation.
2: Engagement – We are all creatures who need
social interaction; yet we are still surprised when
someone else mentions us on twitter, replies to our
Facebook queries and even sends an email and it is
this level of multi faceted engagement that will be
appreciated by consumers. The online model offers
new and innovative ways to connect with the consumers and bring them back in store -create that
excitement and interest; retailers have a chance to
be closer to their consumers than ever before – so
utilise it.
august 2013

19

The engagement needs to help connect online to
in store experience and offerings – little things like
hashtags in change rooms and encouraging showrooming – it’s going to happen anyway – so own it
and try and win them over. An ability to upload an
in store wish list to a mobile device, an ability to
use data on a mobile device such as measurements
and past purchases for increased in store experience using coupons, customer data, geo location
and future offers.

ing more time; and retailers need to move with this
too – because if a consumer is online – they can
purchase. Retailers also need to approach mobile
marketing differently – the advertising they undertake needs to be device and web specific, we are
also seeing video making a comeback into popularity with brands, a renaissance if you will.

User generated content is only just starting to poke
its head out – and this will increase; this plays well
for another retail saying – when people talk, people
buy. Retailers who give consumers a voice will be
well rewarded.
3: Connectivity – Many call it multi-channel – tomorrow it will just be Retail – that being an in
store presence, on line, mobile and tablet. These
different platforms all have varying demands and
different presentation capabilities; currently too
many businesses are not what I would call responsive – they rely on developers and coders to constantly resize and adjust for the different formats
and abilities. The retailers of tomorrow will need
to have responsive sites that can automatically
adjust, present and engage with the consumer ensuring the offer and the quality experience is the
same no matter what the platform. Mobile and tablet growth of late has been astronomical – and it
is not a sound use of resources to have developers
constantly resizing site content – the model needs
to be reversed.
Closely connected to engagement and customer
service will be retailers ability to geo target and
change its look and feel based on location. It might
be raining in Melbourne and sunny in Sydney – so
why should the website look the same for users in
different locations – present jackets in Melbourne
and shorts in Sydney – the more personalized and
location specific presentation, the more likely to
convert; and the more people who shop on their
mobiles, the more geo location presentation will
flourish.

The personalization levels of advertising are currently only just beginning to be taken advantage
of, concepts such as re-targeting, specific emails
for cart abandonment, enticements to return, encouraging to share are all going to be mandatory in
the future.
With the ability to access more and more data
through multiple shopping portals retailers will
know more about certain consumers than even
their spouses and use the information to specifically target and personalize advertisements. Target
in the USA are so good at this – they knew when a
teenage girl was pregnant before the girl’s father
did – sparking an interesting discussion between
Dad – Target and then Dad – Daughter.

5: Supply and Distribution – Online shopping has
opened the ability to buy numerous brands and
ranges that were never before possible to millions
of people worldwide. And retailers will be keen to
4: Dynamic Advertising – Next year in Australia it is keep this trend going – a decentralized approach
expected that the money spent on online advertis- to warehousing and distribution will be needed and
ing will surpass television advertising – a sign that offer benefits to the retailer.
marketers understand where consumers are spend-

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august 2013

A decentralized approach can lead to more personalization opportunities, it is more efficient in the
long run, it helps to cross the numerous multiple
channels of purchase and helps give ownership of
the consumer to local stores – this is of particular
benefit to Australian retailers where the franchise
model is prevalent.
Supply chains that are closer to the end destination offer increased service ability and help spread
the risk whilst being scalable for future expansion.
Many retail adages will remain true – such as service; but we will likely see smaller retail spaces,
the use of in store online shopping, increased use
of data by retailers, greater use of technology and
retailers beginning to understand that digital is the
fabric through which the consumer experience is
woven. In our digital age being right is temporary –
leadership in the digital age is likely to be short – it

>

is important retailers look for new ideas and challenges in order to keep inline with the revolution
and avoid the guillotine.
Christopher Morley

Chris Morley has been helping Australian
businesses improve their online strategies,
revenue and process for nearly 10 years;
working with retailers and brands of all
sizes to increase their online footprint
and market share in a meaningful and
manageable way. Chris has worked with
Australia Post, Deals Direct, OO.com.
au, Cadbury and others on various online
projects; always bringing his passion and enthusiasm for
eCommerce and digital marketing to each and every role.
Chris holds the position of General Manager with Online
Market Experts and also acts as senior consultant for the
blueprint for success document that the business provides
for numerous businesses.

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21

>

CONTENT CREATION

9 ACTIONABLE TIPS
FOR BETTER CONTENT
By Julian True Flynn

1) Expressive text
Use a lot of expressive text (bold,
italic, underline, strikethrough).
2) Grab quotes from figures in
the niche
Have your VA do the same thing
to interviews (written or video) with popular figures in your
niche. You should also put these
into a similar styled spreadsheet
that you can look back to when
writing content or you can tell
your writers to use 1 per post.
3) Make sure everyone can see
your content
Not really a user experience tip
and more for linkbuilding, but
creating a branded slideshow
template that you can then take
all your informational site videos and change them into PDF’s.
Repurposing content is very easy
low hanging fruit for getting
more content on your PDF sharing profiles to make them more
valuable as well as increasing the
exposure of your content for users as some don’t like to watch
videos and rather read.
4) Free stock like photos
Use sites like Foter or Photopin
for free photos on blog posts.
There’s some sites where I just
use clip art too and it works fine,
more for older people/adult consumers. I highly recommend adding unique images to the table
too so when people steal them
you can shake them down for a

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august 2013

backlink (another easy way to
get links). Hopefully the images
you’re getting from these free
sites you’re editing them in a
way so they’re at least unique to
Google as well.

5) Gather pre-made headlines
Collect headline outlines from
places like Copyblogger to use
when creating your blog posts.
This makes your title tags more
clickable in search results and
more likely to be clicked when
shared socially.
6) Make your content easier to
read
If you ask me no site should have
anything less than size 14 font
and 16 line height for the content you want users to read.
7) Link to other websites and
let them know
End your content by linking out

to other reliable and non-competing websites and then email
them letting them know you
mentioned them and they should
share it.
8) Who doesn’t love statistics?
Have your VA browse through
search terms like, “*your niche*
statistics” and have them collect
any catchy numbers and put into
a spreadsheet with the quote
and the link to where they found
it so you can reference it in your
content. I do this for each silo on
my website and create a sheet
in the spreadsheet for each one.
I personally use a Zoho doc or a
Google Drive so writers can easily reference it.
9) Lists are skim-friendly
Add a list whenever possible.

Julian True Flynn

has
three
years
experience with online
marketing, and doing
it professionally for
a year. Seeing the
progression of the
popular search engine
Google, Julian saw
that linkbuilding was falling behind
and quality content was becoming
the new ‘it‘ for ranking websites.
Now he focuses heavily on creating
an awesome user experience on small
business’s blogs, optimizing them for
search engines, and then integrating
that with social media to get the most
amount of traffic possible.

Make Your Website Easy to Read
& Effective on all Mobile Phones

august 2013

23

>

PPC TOOLS

9 PPC TOOLS THAT WILL GIVE
YOU A LEG UP ON THE COMPETITION
By Adam Kreitman

And Optimizely is a fantastic tool
to help you easily split test landing pages… with no programming
necessary!
The way it works is you enter the
URL of your landing page and Optimizely will upload the page into
their system.

In the cutthroat world of PPC advertising, you need every advantage you can get to stay ahead of
the competition.
Below are 9 tools that will help
give you an edge in the setup,
management and optimization of
PPC campaigns… either by saving
you time, making your job easier
and/or providing revealing data
most of your competition don’t
have access to.

clear winner and loser? Well, you
can either do the math or you can
make things easy on yourself by
using the free tool at splittester.
com.

It’s a very simple tool to use. All
you do is enter how many clicks
each ad has received, along with
its clickthough rate. Then you
click the “Calculate” button and
you instantly get results that tells
you, in percentage terms, how
confident you should be that the
Splittester.com
ads will have different response
Split testing is one of the most rates over the long haul.
important actions involved in optimizing anAdWords campaign. It Optimizely
basically involves taking two ads It’s great to send highly qualified
and having them battle it out to traffic from your PPC campaigns
see which one performs the best to your website. However, success
over time.
ultimately comes down to your
website and how efficient it is at
When you have a clear winner, converting that traffic into leads
you delete the losing ad, replace and sales.
it with new ad variation and start
a new split test.
So as important as it is to split test
ads, it’s also extremely important
But how do you know when a test to split test your landing pages.
has run its course and you have a

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august 2013

Then you can edit text (even on
call-to-action buttons), resize/rearrange/remove page elements,
change colors, etc. And it’s all
done in a WYSIWYG editor.
Once you make changes to your
page, you put a single line of
code on your landing page and
Optimizely runs a split test of
your landing page for you to see
whether the changes improved
conversions or not.
I’ve not come across an easier
way to split test landing pages
than this.
Google Keyword Planner
This is a relatively new tool offered (free) by Google. This tool
(which can be accessed from
within your AdWords account) essentially combines Google’s Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator
into one.
There are a few ways to use it to
build your AdWords campaign.
First, you can type “seed” keyword ideas or a website URL and
the Planner will give you a bunch
of ideas for related keywords. It

even creates sample ad groups you could add to
your campaign. This is particularly useful for brainstorming keyword and ad group ideas.
When you find ad group/keyword ideas you like,
you can add them to your “Plan” and, based on your
bid range, the tool will give you estimates of what
the clicks, costs, etc., will be if you added those
keywords/ad groups to your campaign.

I use AdWords Editor more than any of the other
tools mentioned in this article. If you spend any
amount of time working in AdWords, using AdWords
Editor is a must!
AdWords Wrapper
Let’s say you have a long list of keywords you want
to add to your campaign. And you want to add them
as both Exact Match and Modified Broad Match keywords. It could take a while to do this manually.
But with this handy AdWords Wrapper tool, it’ll take
seconds. All you do is paste a list of keywords and
then select what Match Type variations you want
the list converted into. You can instantly build lists
that include Exact, Phrase, Broad and/or Modified
Broad Match keywords.

Another great feature of the Planner is you can get
traffic estimates for specific cities, metro areas,
etc. (In the Google Keyword Tool, you could only
get traffic estimates for the entire U.S. or worldwide.)

This screenshot from Mike’s Marketing Tools, gives
you an idea of how it works:

This could be a very nice enhancement for those
of you running local campaigns (though I have not
tested it out enough to say how accurate the data
is).
Already have a list of keywords? Great… simply upload them to the Planner and get estimates of how
those keywords would perform BEFORE you add
them to the campaign (understanding that estimates are just that, estimates, and should be taken
with a big grain of salt).
AdWords Editor
AdWords Editor is a free desktop software application that allows you to build and edit campaigns
offline. This tool will easily save you hours if you
manage large and/or a lot of AdWords campaigns
(Microsoft has an equivalent application called Bing
Ad Editor).
Things that would take hours to do in the online
AdWords interface can take you minutes in AdWords
Editor because you can quickly copy/paste/drag
keywords, ads, ad groups, campaigns, etc. You can
also import and export data so you can massage it
in Excel and/or share it with others who are helping
to manage the accounts.

august 2013

25

I’ve used other “wrapper” tools before, but this is
the first one I’ve come across that makes creating
the Modified Broad Match keywords a snap.
Microsoft Excel
Yes, Excel! There’s no shortage of ways to use Excel to help with AdWords… from planning and organizing your campaigns to quickly creating/editing
large numbers of ads and keywords to calculating
key metrics, like Profit Per Impression, that you
can’t get directly from AdWords or Analytics.
But my favorite use of Excel is using pivot tables to
analyze data. Some of the ways to use pivot tables
include…
• Compare how specific ad copy (headlines,
description lines, etc.) are performing across an
entire campaign
• See how different match types are performing
• Check the Quality Score of keywords
• Analyze the performance of specific placements on the Display network
• And much more!

attention when it comes to Quality Score.
When using the Report Analyzer, you end up with a
color-coded spreadsheet that highlights profitable/
unprofitable ad copy, search queries, landing pages,
placements, etc.
Both tools allow you to quickly focus on the areas
of your campaign that need the most attention and
will give you the biggest bang for your buck when it
comes to optimization.
iSpionage
iSpionage is a “spy” tool that lets you keep track
of what your competitors are doing when it comes
to PPC (both in Google and Bing/Yahoo) as well as
SEO.

The beauty of pivot tables is how they allow you
to easily organize and manipulate large amounts of
data from AdWords and quickly see meaningful data
you can use to optimize campaigns.
Certified Knowledge
Certified Knowledge was created by Brad Geddes,
generally considered the most knowledgeable and
influential PPC pro around.
The paid membership area of the site includes an
incredibly detailed education area with just about
everything you need to know to become a PPC expert, a message board where Brad hangs out and
answers questions, and some great PPC tools.
The tools include a Keyword Mixer, Mass Ad Copy
Creator, and Geographic Keyword Finder. But the
two that are my favorite are the Quality Score Analyzer and Report Analyzer.
For both of these reports, you simply upload a report (ie. Search Term Report, Ad Report) from your
AdWords account and the tools do the rest.
In the Quality Score Analyzer, you end up with a list
of ad groups (sorted by priority) that need the most

26

august 2013

Here are a few ways I use iSpionage to help with
campaigns…
• Keyword research
You can enter competitors’ websites and iSpionage will give you an idea of what keywords
they’re bidding on/ranking for. This list is often
helpful in finding long tail keywords and filling
in the gaps from some of the other keyword research tools.
• Keep tabs on competitors
Want to know what changes your competitors are
making in their accounts? You can monitor them
in iSpionage and see things like what new ads
they’re running and what new keywords they’re
bidding on.
• Keep tabs on specific keywords
If there are certain keywords that are very important to your business, you can track them within
iSpionage. This will let you see things like where
you rank vs. your competition, Impression Share
for both your ads and your competition’s ads and
see how these things change over time.

AdGooRoo
AdGooRoo claims to have the world’s largest search AdGooRoo is a bit on the pricey side but is well
intelligence database that looks at over 900,000 worth it for agencies and larger advertisers.
PPC advertisers across 14 search engines. For PPC
campaigns, its SEM Insight™ is the most helpful tool
that puts all AdGooRoo’s data to work for you.
This article is originally published on CrazyEgg.com
Here are some of the ways AdGooRoo can help manage campaigns:
• Analyzing competitor’s campaigns/data to
see what strategies they’re using that are work- Adam Kreitman
coaches business owners on how to make
ing for them
• Identifying keywords in your campaign that their websites more compelling to their
prospects.. and to Google. He owns Words
have a low impression share
That Click, a firm specializing in Conversion
• A campaign alerts function that scans your Optimization and managing Google
AdWords campaigns for small businesses.
account daily for common problems, and
• A “Top Ad Copy” report that shows the top Follow him on Google+
ads in a market and much more.

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27

>

SOCIAL MEDIA

3 SIMPLE WAYS TO MEASURE
YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS
By Rick Mulready
Are you looking for better ways to measure your
social media activities?
Do you know if your social media efforts are worthwhile?
Social media measurement is one of the most frustrating challenges business face.
In this article I’ll show you three simple measurement strategies that fit into one of can your future campaigns.
Why Measure?
In order to measure the effectiveness of your social
campaigns, it’s critical that youknow your objective.
Ask yourself why you are considering including social media in your overall marketing campaign in
the first place. How will your efforts impact your
revenue and grow your business?

#1: Quantify Your Social Media Listening
“What you’re doing [on social media] needs to have
impact. It needs to actually have revenue. And often times we try to make it fuzzy about that.” –
Frank Eliason, Citi’s Director, Global Social Media
(@FrankEliason)

Listening is one of the most often overlooked uses
of social media, yet it’s probably the most important. If you’re not listening to your customers,
You’ll want to put a measurable outcome in place you’re missing the point of social media.
along with a timeframe in which to achieve the
But how do you measure listening and how does it
goal.
impact your revenue?
Now you can determine which social In this example, we’re going to look at using Twitter
media platform aligns to answer that question.
with your objectives.
• In Twitter’s search field, enter your business
name.
For example, if you’re

trying to reach a female audience and
your business lends
well to pictures and
images, you might want to consider Pinterest.
If you’re a business-to-business brand marketing
an upcoming conference, you’ll want to consider
LinkedIn.

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august 2013

• You can then select whether you want to view
Twitter’s “top” tweets about your business, “all”
tweets containing your business name or tweets
that contain your business name from only those
people you follow.

• As you filter the tweets, look through them
and decide whom you’d like to follow. These are
likely either potential customers or your current
customers.
• Monitor their tweets on a daily basis. Engage with them, answering their questions, adding value and helping them whenever possible.
Twitter’s Advanced Search is powerful too, especially if you’re a local business. You can use it to
search specific terms related to your business
that people who are near your location are talking
about.
Twitter is an amazing tool for providing real-time
customer service. You can learn things like:
• Exactly how many people you’re helping
• If you’re growing that number of people
• The issues customers are experiencing with
your business
• What’s broken in your business

the second update by sharing the post and commenting on it.
Likes show support and comments indicate a deeper interest but shares are most valuable because
they move the update beyond your page.
At the beginning of the campaign, translate your
objective to a numeric goal. Then,use a tiered
point system to weight different types of engagement according to which is most valuable to you.
Here’s an example of a tiered point system for
Facebook:
• Likes: 1 point each
• Comments: 5 points each
• Shares: 10 points each
During the campaign, a quick sum of values will
help you determine if your efforts on Facebook
are moving you closer towards your goal or not.

At the end of the measurement period, prioritize
the problems you identify and use that intelligence
to implement fixes and improvements within your
business. You can measure the direct impact on
your business by looking at the additional revenue
or cost savings that these new fixes give you.
#2: Create a Rating System for Your Social Engagement
“Put a [tiered point system] in place rather than
looking at how many likes you have.” – Scott Monty,
Ford’s global head of social media (@scottmonty)
This is a simple yet effective strategy to use when
you’re trying to generate awareness and buzz. It’s
a smart way to measure the response to your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social
channel you’re using.
Here’s how it works.
Say you’re launching a product or service and want
to build buzz about it on Facebook. You post an update to your Page about your launch and you get a
bunch of likes on it. The next day, you post a different type of update. You get some likes on it, but
you also see that people are engaging more with

You can create similar point systems on any of
the social channels you use. For example, on Twitter, 5 points for a reply and 10 points for a retweet.

august 2013

29

#3: Add Tons of Value, Then Sell and Measure
“Jab, jab, jab, right hook.” – Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)
This strategy is the concept behind Gary V.’s upcoming book and it’s
based on providing great content that adds tons of value for your customers before asking for the sale.
For example, say your restaurant is rolling out a new healthy menu. Your
goal is to get 300 customers into your restaurant to try the new menu
over an upcoming weekend.
Since your food is visually appealing, you develop a Facebook or
Instagram strategy. You post pictures of your food, create content
around the importance of healthy
eating and curate information on
your Facebook Page about farmers’ markets in your area.
The Corcoran Group, a NYC real estate firm, adds
value via their social media outlets.

Offer this valuable content to build trust with people.
Then offer a coupon for your restaurant on your Facebook Page. The
number of people who claim and redeem your coupon is a result you
can quantify.
Here’s how to measure your efforts when using this strategy:
• Use the tiered point system described in strategy #2 to determine if your content is moving you closer to your goal.
• Use coupons that are specific to your social media campaign, thus
making the return on your investment easy to track and measure.
• Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns where
your customers can download or purchase what you are promoting.
Since the landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow you to clearly see how successful your campaign is.
I hope this article gives you some ideas for how you can simply measure
your social campaigns and shows you that you don’t need expensive
measurement tools.

Rick Mulready

Rick is a social media-marketing consultant who teaches smallto-medium sized companies big brand social media strategies
for small business budgets. He’s also the creator of the weekly
Inside Social Media Podcast.

30

august 2013

>

GOOGLE BRANDS

GOOGLE BRANDS:

4 REASONS YOUR BRAND SHOULD BE ON IT
By Sam Milbrath
dations (+1) to your followers and people you care
about and trust. From there, connect over shared
interests and discover content that you may have
overlooked otherwise.
4 Reasons your Brand Should Be on Google Plus

Google is everywhere. From Google Search to
Google Maps, Google Earth to Google Docs, Gmail,
GCal, GChat, all the way over to YouTube, Android,
Google Play and Chrome web browser. Chances are
that you’ve likely used a Google product. Interestingly enough, many people still believe thatGoogle
Plus (G+) is a ghost town.
Fact: over 500 million people are currently on
Google+ and approximately 343 million of them are
actively sharing, +1’ing, “recommending” and taking action every month. Earlier this year, Google+
was named the second largest active social network in the world, after Facebook (and beating out
Twitter and YouTube). As the network gains popularity, it’s important to understand the value it can
provide your business when approached correctly.
In this two part article, discover 4 reasons your
brand should be present on Google+ and (in part 2)
how best to showcase your brand, drive followers
and engage with your community.
Did you know that HootSuite’s integrated with
Google+?
Google+?
The purpose of Google+ is to make all of your
Google experiences better and more connected.
Think of it as a central profile that points all of
your Google activity back to you or your business.
Add your true identity, your relationships (social
graph of connect), share and provide recommen-

#1: Better Brand Discovery
Google Search’s results page has completely transformed brands’ presence and visibility online. On
top of the usual business information, maps, brand
images and website and social media details, people can follow and view your brand on Google+ right
from a google search results. The Google Search
page is prime real estate to introduce your brand.
In this search field, potential followers can see:
• Recent Google+ post activity
• Number of followers, profile image
• Brand information
• Whether your business is verified
• If someone they trust has +1’d you (recommended).
If the “searcher” is already following your brand in
G+, your brand’s content will appear higher in the
Google search results page. #Bonus

Screenshot of Google Search results for “HootSuite.” Notice besides the regular search results,
HootSuite’s G+ account is displayed in the top right

august 2013

31

along with an image, follower count and a verified
check. Because I personally follow HootSuite in G+,
their latest content is shown right in this page.
#2: Deeper Brand Engagement
Google+ Hangouts and Communities help your brand
engage on a more personal level.
G+ Hangouts
In Hangouts, brands can video chat with people anywhere in the world, host virtual meetings (screenshare is useful here) or broadcast live concerts,
shows, talks, conferences etc. Many brands have
gotten creative with their interactive Hangouts by
hosting interviews, sharing inside scoops, launching
exclusive products and hosting live Q&A’s or AMAs.

their paid search ads there is a 5-10% uplift in click
thru traffic rate (CTR) back to their site.
For
example,
during a search
for
“Chevy
Truck,” Chevrolet’s paid ad appears along with
one line that
says “1.5 million
people +1’d or
follow Chevrolet” in G+. Those trusted recommendations are driving increased ad performance. Image from Google+

#4: Measurable Impact
Use Hangouts to develop your reputation as an in- How many conversions were as a result of social?
dustry leader by sharing your opinion, connecting Between Google Analytics, G+ Ripples, Insights andwith other specialists in the field, staying on top of HootSuite Analytics, the impact that each social ininews, teaching what you know and offering help. tiative has on your business’ bottom line is easily
Why not host a weekly Hangout where you share tracked and measured.
some of the above (or do the same in a Community)?
For example, Topshop transformed one of their
fashion shows using Google Hangouts by giving the
everyday girl an inside scoop on what it was like
to be at (and in) the fashion show, interviews and
backstage events. Topshop had 7500 live views of
red carpet hangout and over 300k new Google+ followers in two weeks.
G+ Communities
In Communities, people come together to have rich
conversations and discuss content over shared interests like food, shopping, art, music, etc. Brands
can either drive, participate or moderate these
communities. This is a great chance for brands to
listen.
For example, National Geographic created “Exploration,” an international community of people who
share a “sense of adventure, a passion for exploration and discovery, a love of learning, and a desire
to make a difference” – National Geographic G+
#3: Increased Marketing Performance
Ads are getting more relevant and performing better than ever before. If you use Google AdWords to
promote your business, turning on social extensions
is essential. When brands add social annotations to

32

august 2013

G+ Ripples shows how a post was shared across
Google+; who had the most reach and whose opinion was the most influential that shared the original
post (size of circle matters). Tap into brand or key
advocates that spreads the word for your business
across the platform.
With Google and HootSuite’s Analytic reports, your
business can tie real dollar amounts to your social
marketing and follow the full path to conversion
with multi-channel funnels.
This article is originally published on Hootsuite.
com
Sam Milbrath

is Hootsuite’s Content Producer. Keeping
her finger on the pulse, she writes Trends
of the Week, HootSource content and killer
interviews.

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Tạp trí Internet Marketing Số 25 - AUG 2013

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Tạp trí Internet Marketing Số 25 - AUG 2013