Online Marketing - Page 3
A collection of posts on Online Marketing
I sometimes find myself getting lost in a sea of marketing advice. There’s just so much out there. We produce four to five marketing posts on the Buffer blog every week, and we are just one of many sources of social media marketing advice. Multiply our handful of weekly posts with the countless blogs, tweets, updates, and emails, and the social media tips grow exponentially. How can a marketing idea or bit of advice stand out from the crowd? We’ve certainly been eager to experiment with answe
No matter what you do in life, chances are good you’re reliant on some kind of a community. People to read your writing. Social sharers to spread your message and curate your content. Customers to review your products or services and tell their friends about you. Communities work because they’re built on relationships, and during the early stages of any new project, you need all the strong relationships you can get. The community you grow will be the source of your very first (and potentially
I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of some amazing companies such as Facebook, Mint and now AppSumo.com (including our latest products: Monthly1k.com and SumoMe.com). Collectively, these companies have reached nearly 1.5 billion people, and each has taught me many marketing methods that are extremely effective. Here are the 10 most important marketing lessons I’ve learned along the way. Lesson 1: Incentivize your audience (with something they want) It’s not just any incentive that get
Infographics can contain a wealth of useful, interesting, and captivating information—but only if readers take the time to survey the entire graphic . It’s no secret that the typical Internet user quickly bounces from site to site while shuffling among multiple tabs and windows. With the added distraction [http
A lot of things go into a person’s decision to purchase a product , and social proof is certainly one of those important factors. Studies show that 70% of consumers say they look at product reviews before making a purchase, and product reviews are 12x more trusted than product descriptions from manufacturers. Product reviews [ht
What are we really talking about when we’re talking about conversions? Persuasion, right? Influence. When we talk about conversions, we are—most of the time—discussing ways we can be more persuasive, more influential. We’re interested in meeting the needs of customers, fans, and followers and doing so in a way that truly speaks to them. So how can you persuade—i.e., convert—better? Perhaps not surprisingly, the hacks for conversion and persuasion begin with psychology. Understanding why some
Do you ever wonder how often you’re being A/B tested? The practice is so commonplace among websites and marketers these days that at any given point at any given website you could be part of a grand experiment in optimization. I often hope this is the case. I love the science and analysis behind improvements—both on the web and in the real world—so I find myself clicking a blue button and hoping my participation is making a website better. I love participating in A/B tests, and I love performi
Every day it seems like we feel hundreds of different emotions – each nuanced and specific to the physical and social situations we find ourselves in. According to science, it’s not that complicated by a long shot. A new study says we’re really only capable of four “basic” emotions: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted. But much like the “mother sauces” of cooking allow you to make pretty much any kind of food under the sun, these four “mother emotions” meld together in myriad way
You don’t have to know everything about SEO to start reaping the benefits of it. There are some small but important search engine optimization changes you can make right away. Here are 5 simple things you can do today to improve your SEO. 1. Sign up with Webmaster Tools On-site optimization (making sure all the technical details of your site are how they should be for both search engines and searchers) can be complicated. Luckily, both Google a
Aren’t shortcuts just the best? While everyone else takes the long way, you and your shortcut get to breeze right through, skipping a few steps and feeling pretty smart doing it. Finding a good marketing shortcut feels especially great, considering all that we marketers have to do in a day. That’s why I went hunting for the top free marketing tools in a variety of marketing categories. These tools – all quick hits you can get started with easily – focus on everything from research and writing
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to design a totally new landing page for Buffer . I had the green light to get creative and to try something new, even if that meant throwing everything away and starting from scratch. So that’s exactly what I did. The Experiment This experiment, for me, was all about learning. Learning what people care about, learning what imagery tells a story, learning about how visitors examine a landing page, and learning how they decide whethe
This is the sixth article in our new series with advice on building a business, company culture and life-hacking from Joel , CEO here at Buffer . You can grab all posts here . Choosing a name is one of the parts of a startup I find the most difficult. It’s also something you can easily get hung up on. We all know that the key thing is to move on to actually building [http://joel.is/post/28
There is the famous story about Steve Jobs when he invented the iPod and everyone in the news and the rest of the tech industry scratched their head a little. MP3 players had been around for quite a while, what was so different about the iPod? Of course, people argued many things were different, but one of the key aspects was how Jobs marketed and presented it: “1,000 songs in your pocket” When ever
This is the third article in our new series with advice on building a business, company culture and life-hacking from Joel , CEO here at Buffer . You can grab all posts here . It’s a long time ago now, however I still remember it very well. When I first went about creating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Buffer, there was some
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how marketing is evolving, and marketers need to keep up. I’m still not sure of the exact definition of “growth hacker,” since everyone seems to be putting their own spin on the term still, so I’ll use the term “ technical marketer” in this post to mean someone who works in marketing and uses technical skills (e.g. programming) to enhance their work. To start with, let’s see what people are saying about this idea of marketers getting technical and why
When I joined Buffer, one of the things I was most excited about was seeing how we can get a lot done with a distributed team. I knew that Buffer was specifically set up to work this way and I was curious about seeing that play out. It turns out, this is possible mostly because of the great tools we use. We’re continually testing and adding new ones to our arsenal to make sure we’re all on the same page and are looking after our customers as best we can. Here are some of the products and servi
Seeing your name in the phone book used to be the ultimate, I remember it clearly. As a boy, I dreamed of the day when I would have the independence, stability, maturity, and home phone to be listed on page “L” alongside my fellow human adults. I’d crack open the new Yellow Pages, thumb through the Lees, and lo and behold, there I’d be. A celebrity. My Yellow Pages dream has vanished. Now it’s all about Google. I want my face on a Google search results page. The ticket to my desired Internet
The internet went nuts a couple of days ago (or at least, the SEO world of it did) when Google confirmed that it would be encrypting almost all keyword searches in the near future. The Not provided Google Analytics section has easily become the most talked about thing in the past. Various industry professionals weighed in on the change, what it means for marketers and what other options we have to inform our marketing choices. Let’s take a look at what happened exactly, and then we’ll explore
Running a blog is so much more rewarding when you know people are reading, enjoying and sharing your work. If you’re managing a blog as part of your business, you probably want people to find and buy your products through your blog, as well. So increasing subscribers is an important task for bloggers. These are some fairly simple hacks that you can implement without too much fuss, which should boost your subscriber numbers. 1. Lower your bounce rate – here is how Cameron Chapman explained in
So here is a simple question, what do you need to do, to get more customers? The intuitive response that most would give to this topic (me included), are a good product, good marketing, good customer support and so forth. But what if we could actually look into our customers heads to truly understand how we they are thinking? That’s exactly what our great friends, Gregory Ciotti over at HelpScout have done, to produce this fascinating in
Have you yet heard your startup should be Lean? I bet you did. So with internet memes finally going completely viral and mainstream, thanks to 9gag, Reddit and co, we thought of doing a set of memes just for the Lean Startup. Here are just a few of the most important concepts of lean startups, explained with the latest internet memes! Enjoy: 1.) “How minimal should your MVP be?” “Probably much more minimal than you think” Related post: Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it [http
Yes, there is an incredible amount of tools out there that help you understand more about how well your website performs, where your users come from and more. One thing I realised though is that they are also very complicated to use. The Google Analytics of the web are powerful, but it might not be always what is right for the job. In the past few weeks, I found myself using a few tools that are taking a rather different approach. They aim to educate you about your blog or website without dumpi
This is one of the those posts I have been looking forward to sharing with you for a long time. Mashable, amongst all top tech news site, sets itself miles apart. And the reason for this is their amazing understanding of growing and nurturing a community I believe. If you look at how Pete Cashmore has handled things, it is just amazing how every step he took is to first and foremost benefit the community. The most exciting part is that despite its skyrocketing growth, this community driven focu
This is the first of an ongoing series of posts called Building Buffer where we share our methods and learnings with the aim to help people and learn from others who have had similar experiences. We’d love your comments. Rewind… I’ve learned more in the two and a half month period since I launched Buffer than ever before. I am very excited to let you know we now have over 500 users, many of whom are active, and we are generating revenue through our paid monthly plans at a conversion rate of aro