How to Optimize Your Business Blog [Checklist] + MORE

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In today’s Web clinic at 4:00 p.m. EDT – “How You Can Use Email to Discover the Essence of Your Value Proposition (in 5 Simple Steps)” – Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, will use our research to help you discover an effective value proposition, and answer questions like:

What do your customers find most appealing about your offer?
… Is it the price?
… Is it a specific feature?
… Is it the broader brand association?

But first, we wanted to learn some value proposition insights from the MarketingExperiments community …
 
Value props consist of needs, wants and desires
The best value propositions consist of:

The benefits my customer most NEEDS from the product/service (ex: the ability to make 500 copies per minute if we are talking about a printer machine)
+ the most parallel benefit my customer WANTS (ex: saving $400 on ink cartridges/per year)
+ the most DESIRE my customer has with products like mine (ex: colorful/professional reports)

– Ahmed Seddiq, Senior Operation Officer, Corporate Visa Services, Dnata, The Emirates Group
 
Value proposition testing
Really, the only way to answer this question is to test various configurations of value communication using multivariate testing and scientifically determine what resonates in terms of conversion…

#1 Is the Best Ad Position! … Or Is It?A common assumption about paid search is that position #1 is the ultimate goal. Advertisers clamber over each other to ensure their ads make it into the top position, because they think that’s what’s necessary to be successful for their campaigns.However, I’d like to go on the record and make a bold statement: Position #1 isn’t always going to be the best ad position for your business…

Your business blog is one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox. But how do you know that your lean, mean lead generation machine (aka your business blog) is running as efficiently as possible? We’ve created a master checklist of everything your blog should be optimizing for and how to do it.

Click for full-size image

Seem overwhelming? Don’t worry! This post will act as a step-by-step guide for everything you need to know…

  

In many ways, responsive Web design (RWD) deserves a big share of the honor for making the Web more usable on non-desktop devices. This trend of letting the browser determine more about how a Web page should be displayed makes sense, especially now that mobile browsers are slightly more trustworthy than in the old days of mobile…

Editor’s Note: Today’s offering is a guest post from my friend and author Eric Schwartzman. He is a long-time, well-respected public relations pro, entrepreneur and thinker and is the co-author of Social Marketing To The Business Customer with Paul Gillin.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through a social media strategy concept known as the homeland-embassy approach…

Most companies understand the benefits of a well-executed online PR strategy: improved brand visibility and industry reputation, increased traffic to the company website and even sales. It’s no wonder that companies trip over themselves to come up with a regular stream of PR related content.
Unfortunately, lower barriers to entry for publishing and distributing information have resulted in a plethora of non-news littering the web…

Developers may be getting their hands on Google Glass within a matter of weeks. Speaking at today’s announcement of the Glass Collective, Google’s Steve Lee — Product Director for Glass — announced: We will hopefully this month start shipping to developers. That’s a…

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article…

What an amazing week this has been at Social Media Marketing World! I moderated a session on corporate blogging with Justin Levy and Waynette Tubbs. Justin leads the charge at Citrix for their social and content strategies, and Waynette leads the help of SAS content strategy efforts. Two amazing people that are running enormous strategies efficiently and practically…

Remember all of the rules and restrictions that came along with the new Facebook Timeline covers?
You couldn’t include anything in your Timeline cover photo related to pricing, contact information, calls to action, or even encourage people to like your page.
Scrap that.
Now, the guidelines for your cover photos state that it must be at least 399 pixels wide and not include more than 20% text…

Did you buy cereal at the grocery store this week? If you used a store loyalty card at check-out, then you might start seeing cereal ads when you log in to Facebook.
Facebook is now using both online and offline shopping data from “select third parties including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon” to group Facebook users into very specific buckets…

The wisdom of launching an identical but incompatible RT OS is debatable. It seems that all Microsoft managed to do is confuse customers and stymie their own Surface Pro sales.Related Articles
Bing Bleeds & Siri Leads: The Future of the Search Engine WarsSiri Outages & iPhone 4S Battery Woes Sour Apple Fans5 Ways to Add Qualified Techies to Your Business Team

Keyword research has long been heralded as a pillar of a proper SEO strategy. In fact, without proper keyword research, inbound marketing efforts can be misguided, budgets misspent, and strategies designed on a poor foundation. While any SEO professional worth their title knows how to conduct keyword research, many marketers tackling SEO still fail to consider a core component of keyword research: user intent…

Look around these days and you’ll find it’s hard to miss the growth of sites and services that rely on the more visual aspect of our senses growing rapidly.
Sites like Pinterest and The Fancy rely on lots of pretty picture to tell stories and attract visitors.
Infographics and visualized data still attract lots of interest…

Simplicity always wins.
If there is one lesson the modern business world teaches us, it is that complexity kills and simplicity wins. Apple, Flip Camera, Twitter, Uber, Walmart — all are examples of companies that owe their success at least in part to their ability to simplify a service or product to an extreme level…