What on earth is a marketer to do with all the changes that are coming at us daily in the current crisis?
In short, we provide value where we can and pivot when we need to.
Here’s a video I made about this. Hope it’s helpful.
Ready to learn more?
You can sign up for my March 26 webinar here.
Wondering how to be more productive on your computer and at work in general?
Here’s the actual productivity program we at our digital marketing agency use as a company to win competitively.
I’ve been told by my team and some clients that I should share it, so here it is.
There may be some things in this guide that surprise you, from the broader strategies to the detailed computer productivity tactics.
I hope you get as much value out of these tricks and strategies as I have and continue to.
I strongly believe it’s very doable to double your productivity if you’re strategic and focused.
In some cases, tools can help get you there. In others, you’ll need to change how you structure and use your time.
One of your major advantages as a worker and as an organization needs to be how much better you organize and use your time than your peers and similar organizations.
We’re kicking off the third version of our annual digital marketing training course for local marketers.
You can sign up on Eventbrite for the free kickoff here.
(Not in town or can’t make Wednesday morning? Check out the webinar here instead.)
Here’s Facebook Ads case study from Splendid Beast Pet Paintings.
We ran a Q4 campaign where we spent $391.88 on Facebook Ads and made $5,942 in sales for a 15.16x Return on Ad Spend (or ROAS).
You can see the results below from our Facebook Ads Manager.
Ready to make more sales next year? Working on your marketing plan for 2020?
Great!
Because this Thursday I’m going to be teaching everything I know about how to get more business from online marketing (see the syllabus here).
All you have to do is email me by end of day this Wednesday if you’d like to join the all-day Boot Camp on Thursday.
I’m condensing down a full year’s curriculum from my Digital Marketing Mastery course into just two days: Thursday, Dec 5, 2019 and Thursday, Jan 9, 2020.
At a high level, here’s what you’ll learn if you join us at Lift Consulting’s office on Yellowstone Dr. in Madison, WI:
That’s the whole game. When you can acquire customers in a profitable way, you have everything you need to grow your business. Period.
Here’s what’s included with the Boot Camp:
When you hire a marketing team or agency to set your strategy and implement it for you, it can cost you $60,000-$100,000+ easily. But when you’re willing to learn and work hard to implement new skills and strategies, you can SAVE BIG.
Plus, these are some of the most valuable skills of the 21st century and they’re not going away.
Here’s the cost of this Boot Camp and how you get in:
Can’t make the in-person training but still want the online course, office hours and strategy planning workbook?
Here’s what previous students of mine have said about my Digital Marketing Mastery course on which this Boot Camp is based:
“Whether you are new to digital marketing, wanting to expand your knowledge or simply understand what your digital marketing team does and learn how to improve on it, Eagan’s class will allow you to learn and grow your digital marketing skills. Eagan is an awesome teacher and provides plenty of materials and tools to help you understand the material both inside and outside of the classroom.
Personally, my skills expanded further than I thought they would. Having taken marketing classes in college I knew the fundame
ntals of marketing but none of the current digital marketing strategies that are essential for companies to be competitive. I highly recommend this course to anyone wanting to learn or strengthen their digital marketing skills to help grow their co
mpany’s digital presence.”
-Robin Lawson, SullivanBUILD
“It was a very useful overview to all that digital marketing has to offer in bite-size chunks I could digest and understand. As Marketing Director, I’m not going to have to be expert in any of the areas, but I certainly feel I have enough knowledge to integrate FIT’s vision into a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.”
-Annalise Simsek, Functional Integrated Training
“The in-person format was the best part of the learning for me. I am more committed in that scene and I like to learn when it is interactive. One of my clients is now creating a new web site because of this course and I’ve also become the creative online director for another company.”
-Shawn Smith, Shawn Smith Marketing
Watch this video below of Elise Chan from Powderkeg Web Design
Email me now to claim your spot! We have limited seats available.
Hope to see you on Thursday at Lift Consulting!
-Eagan
One thing I’ve really been digging into in the last few months has been marketing fundamentals.
I often say digital marketing is the new and better game because it’s more targeted and can be measured. You can grow your business faster when you use smart online marketing.
That’s a simple fact.
But the reality is, we can stand on the shoulders of marketing giants. We can learn from the greatest marketing minds of the 20th century to knock it out of the park in the 21st century.
Why?
Because we’re still communicating with our fellow humans. We’re still trying to get them to take that next step to buy from us.
The hardware is the same, and it’s just the tools that have gotten more sophisticated.
So I’m viewing our clients’ marketing (and my own marketing) using the lens of marketing fundamentals. I’m doing this because I see how:
MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS x DIGITAL MARKETING = 10X THE RESULTS
If you’re reading this, then you already know it’s important to compete and earn “impressions.” You need new prospects to see you on search engines, social media, websites they visit, and in their email inboxes because that’s where people’s attention is now.
But you can make your impressions even more effective when you speak directly to the needs of the person who is seeing a link to your website or visiting one of your pages.
So how do you do that?
Think about your very best customers or clients.
Draw each of them as a circle, then create a Venn diagram with the overlapping circles.
The part in the middle where all the circles are overlapping is what we’re going for.
It’s worth reading that last one again, because it’s literally worth millions of dollars.
I’m serious.
When you capture and leverage the voice of your customer (sometimes called VOC), they’ll bring you more just like them.
Here are some ways to find your customer’s language:
Here’s another amazing trick from conversion copy writing expert Joanna Wiebe from CopyHackers: don’t ask “Why did you buy from us?” or “Why did you reach out to us?” but instead ask “What was going on in your life that led you to reach out/buy today?”
There’s something about the construction of that sentence that puts people back in their original frame of mind, rather than just answering “Why?” which might elicit a new answer they make up since they already took the action and are justifying it for different reasons now.
(Human brains spend a lot of time rationalizing the decisions we already made out of emotion.)
For my digital marketing agency Get Found Madison, we have a few different types of clients we work well with (and get great results for!), so we are developing a persona for each:
Here’s what Katelyn from the marketing team at our B2B client Naviant recently said in my Digital Marketing Mastery course. Before working with Get Found Madison, they had another SEO company they weren’t happy with. Specifically, they:
Then she said, “Honestly, we’ll probably never switch from you guys. It’s been so great working with you.”
I’d trade my kingdom for a video of what Katelyn said that day at the DreamBank in Madison (luckily she’s agreed to go on camera and say something similar again!).
The headline writes itself:
“Are you tired of your expensive SEO agency leaving you in the dark about what they’re doing and not achieving results?”
That could go in SEO titles and descriptions, Google Ad headlines, email subject lines, and web page headlines.
It could be the first sentence I speak in my next video.
Because are there other companies out there like Naviant who are experiencing the same pain points right now?
You better believe it.
If at all possible, I always try to speak to pain rather than pleasure. It’s the far greater motivator. (If you don’t believe me, you can read more about Kahneman and Tversky’s work on Loss Aversion.)
While we sometimes run video testimonial contest for my ecommerce company Splendid Beast Pet Paintings, we’re not always able to talk directly to our customers (though I bet we could if we tried!).
As such, it’s important for us to survey our customers (at least) annually to ask them about their experience and how we improve.
This year I made sure to include a version of the magical Joanna Wiebe question:
Think back to when you ordered your pet painting. What was going on in your life that led you to buy one?
If I wrote that question again, I’d probably say “your Splendid Beast pet painting” so we’d get responses the might demonstrate how people see our paintings differently than the competitors.
In any case, the vast majority of people who answered said it was either a gift or a way to commemorate a pet they’d lost.
At first, I was primarily interested in the quantitative data when we manually coded the customers’ free-text responses into birthday, Christmas, wedding and other types of gift.
But perhaps even more important is the qualitative data: the phrasing the customers used.
Check this one out that highlights a pain point Splendid Beast solved that I never would have thought of:
My parents are extremely difficult to buy presents for, so my brother and I got one of your paintings with both our dogs in it (the American Gothic template). Needless to say it now hangs at the bottom of my parent’s stairs and they get to smile at it every morning.
Wow. You can’t buy copy that good.
I’m ready to run that as our Facebook Ad copy right now.
Are there plenty of pet owners out there who are difficult to buy gifts for?
You know it!
And now we know how Splendid Beast can solve that problem.
Persona creation and copywriting will be part of a Digital Marketing Boot Camp I’m offering soon. Email [email protected] if you’re interested.
Guest blogging is a great way to build backlinks to your website, build relationships with people in your industry, grow your referral traffic, and improve your website’s SEO. Check out this guest blog case study about how we successfully landed a guest post for our client Reynolds Transfer & Storage.
One of the best tools to find guest blog posting opportunities is free and easy to use – Google! To find blogs and websites that accept guest submissions in our client’s industry, we used Google Search Operators combined with keywords and common phrases related to guest posting.
To find guest blog opportunities in the residential moving industry for Reynolds Transfer & Storage, we searched multiple combinations of target keywords and guest post phrases. Through this process, we found a number of relevant blogs that accepted guest post submissions, including Apartminty. Apartminty, an apartment search resource with a blog about apartment living, has a page dedicated to Guest Post Guidelines that appeared in our Google searches.
Once we identified Apartminty as a potential guest blogging opportunity, the next step was research and preparation for outreach. The Apartminty Guest Blog Guidelines includes what they’re looking for in a guest post, an application to be considered for a guest blog post, and contact information for the blog. Working with the team at Reynolds Transfer & Storage, we brainstormed potential blog post ideas tailored to Apartminty’s audience and submitted the application to the contact information listed on the page.
Along with the application, we focused on keeping the email containing the attachment short and to the point, with a clear subject line:
Guest Blogger Inquiry for Apartminty
Hello,
I am reaching out on behalf of Reynolds Transfer & Storage, a Madison, Wisconsin-based moving company specializing in residential moves with a commitment to environmentally sustainable business practices. We are interested in contributing guest blog posts for the Apartminty blog. I have attached the completed questionnaire for your consideration.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Hannah Biggs
Once we submitted the application, we heard back from the Apartminty team with a preferred topic. We wrote the blog post, submitted it for review, and received a publication date. Finally, our guest blog post for Reynolds Transfer & Storage was live on the Apartminty blog.
The post includes a bio with a link back to the Reynolds Transfer & Storage website. Below is the estimated domain authority for the backlink from Apartminty.
For more about improving your website’s SEO through guest blog posts, check out our post How to Write High-Quality Guest Posts.
Researching the competition is one of the most important elements of business success in the modern business world. In fact, keeping tabs on the most successful actors in your field has always been an excellent way to bring prospects to your doorstep and surpass the competition in the long run.
Needless to say, backlink analysis falls right into this category and remains a crucial part of the discovery process. How else are you going to find out who’s linking back to their websites and how many outlets are there that are supporting their growth, brand reach, and boosting their rankings?
You need to research your competitors’ backlink portfolio and strategy in order to gain a competitive advantage and increase your own websites’ traffic and conversions. Here’s what you need to do to achieve this goal.
In order to improve your online authority in the eyes of the public and reach the top spot on Google’s result pages, you need to rank high for keywords relevant to your brand, services, and niche. With that in mind, your first order of business should be to conduct in-depth keyword research that will tell you what people are searching for. With these keywords in your hands, you can find out how your competitors are ranking for the same phrases.
What you might be surprised to find out is that there are smaller actors in your niche you never heard about that are ranking higher than you for specific phrases, so that you can broaden your search and discover even more opportunities for your own content. Once you have the list of keywords, you can go ahead and Google them.
The sheer number of keywords related to your business and niche makes it very difficult for your competitors to achieve monopoly over them. This means that not all keywords relevant to your business are dominated by the biggest competitors in the field.
This creates an opportunity to rank your website higher for select keywords, but it also hints at the possibility that smaller, yet equally important, competitors might be lurking in the shadows.
By Googling the keywords you’re most interested in, you can zero in on the competition in its entirety.
More importantly, this type of research will let you find out if their content is actually delivering and solving their audience’s problems. If not, they might get penalized for going after irrelevant keywords, which is something you should watch out for as well.
Now that you have them in your sights, it’s time to check out their backlink portfolios.
Here comes the good part. Find the list of all the links on the web that lead back to your website. Building this network of backlinks efficiently and effectively means positioning organic KWs on these target pages by finding and reaching out to authoritative influencers in your specific industry and niche. Keep in mind, though, you’re not the only one doing this, which is why discovering your competitors’ backlink profiles becomes imperative.
You can use a number of tools to monitor your competitors’ backlinks and discover the blogs that are linking back to their websites. One of these tools is Ahrefs. You can start by finding your domain-level competitors by using Ahrefs Competing Domains option. Results can be sorted by common keywords, keywords unique to competitor or keywords unique to target.
Once you do this, seek for page-level competitors. These don’t necessarily need to be your direct competitors but websites that rank well for a topic/keyword of your interest, thus competing with you. This can be done by using Keywords Explorer option – just add a keyword you’re trying to rank for (in this example I’ve used keyword Onsite SEO)
Then, scroll down for results in the SERP Overview section.
Finally, once you determined your main competitors, use the Backlink Profile option to directly find their backlinks. You can simply do this by adding their website in the Ahrefs search. These backlinks can be sorted by anchor text, date, domain rating, traffic, referring page… (In the example below you can see how Moz backlink portfolio looks like, since it is one of Ahrefs’ main competitors).
With all this Ahrefs data in your hands, you can analyze the top-performing content, the blog they’re featured on, and use it to discover new bloggers and opportunities for your own content and backlink strategy.
It’s not just about discovering your competitors or checking out their backlink portfolios one time – it’s about continuous research and diligent backlink monitoring that will allow you to find new backlink opportunities for your website. After all, if a blogger was willing to publish a link to your competitors’ websites, then there is a distinct possibility they will be willing to do the same for you.
This is all provided that you have mastered the fine art of guest blogging, that is. Keeping tabs on their backlinks will also allow you to discover broken links and lost backlinks, which presents the ideal opportunity for you to step in with your own content and fill the gap, effectively replacing your competitor’s link with your own.
If the competition is fierce, you need to be fiercer. There is no way around it, your content needs to have higher quality content, better storytelling, offer a simpler solution, and of course, take a more in-depth approach to every topic. Using the time-tested skyscraper method, you can offer higher quality content to bloggers and thus boost your brand authority while enhancing the authority of the blogger at the same time.
Complementing stellar content with careful social listening will further allow you to keep tabs on your competition and react effectively to their every move in the future.
Building backlinks is an essential part of a winning SEO strategy, as every link that leads back to your website has the potential to improve your traffic, conversions, and ranking in the online world. Use these techniques to analyze your competition’s backlink strategies and capitalize on their success.
Short story: I’m speaking next Tuesday at Tingalls about how to improve your website and you can sign up here.
Longer story: You’ve likely heard me talk about optimizing your website for search so it shows up in the top spots on page 1 of Google where most people click, but what about optimizing for conversions?
Wait, what’s a conversion again?
That’s the action you want your visitors to take on your web page.
It could be:
If more of your website visitors took these actions, then you wouldn’t necessarily need to bring a lot more people to your site. You’d be getting more leads and sales with the traffic you already have.
Make sense?
That improvement process is called Conversion Optimization.
(It’s also sometimes called CRO, as in “Conversion Rate Optimization,” usually when a lot of website traffic is involved.)
The very best and largest companies in the world constantly test tweaks to their web pages to improve their results.
You don’t need to make hourly changes like they might, but you shouldn’t just “set it and forget it” when it comes to your website either.
If you’d like to learn more about this, I’m speaking next Tuesday during lunch at Tingalls Graphic Design on Fish Hatchery Road in Fitchburg as part of their Munch-n-Learn series.
I’ll be covering how to:
You can sign up by clicking this link. Hope to see you there!
Marketing and advertising tend to follow where people’s attention is going, and as you’ve probably noticed, most people now spend a lot of their time online using various devices, from computers to tablets to smartphones.
And that trend is increasing.
That’s why it’s only going to become more important to reach your prospects by marketing your business on those devices.
Hiring an agency like ours that specializes in digital marketing can admittedly be expensive for small and medium businesses.
At the same time, learning all that you need to know about Google Analytics, SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and making your website effective can seem overwhelming.
That’s why I’ve created an intensive 12-month digital marketing training program called Digital Marketing Mastery 2.0.
You can check out the schedule and syllabus here.
If you’re ready to
then join us for the Digital Marketing Mastery 2.0 training series at DreamBank in Madison.
Click here to apply for the full course! The final deadline to sign up and pay is March 27 because the first class is on the morning of March 28.
We made the first class free, and you can watch the recording of it below. It gives an overview of the principles of digital marketing, how you select channels, and how you measure the results to improve over time.
Then you’re ready to learn how to get visibility for your company when it matters most: when people are searching for what you do, when they recently searched for what you do, and when they’ve left your website without buying from you or contacting you.
Are you:
“The in-person format was the best part of the learning for me. I am more committed in that scene and I like to learn when it is interactive.
One of my clients is now creating a new web site because of this course and I’ve also become the creative online director for another company.”
-Shawn Smith (Shawn Smith Marketing)
“Whether you are new to digital marketing, wanting to expand your knowledge or simply understand what your digital marketing team does and learn how to improve on it, Eagan’s class will allow you to learn and grow your digital marketing skills. Eagan is an awesome teacher and provides plenty of materials and tools to help you understand the material both inside and outside of the classroom.
Personally, my skills expanded further than I thought they would. Having taken marketing classes in college I knew the fundamentals of marketing but none of the current digital marketing strategies that are essential for companies to be competitive. I highly recommend this course to anyone wanting to learn or strengthen their digital marketing skills to help grow their company’s digital presence.”
-Robin Lawson (Sullivan DesignBUILD)
“You have real-time examples from him [Eagan], his clients, plus feedback from classmates and they always have examples.
There’s always awesome questions that you yourself wouldn’t think to ask. It’s just a great brainstorming environment.”
-Elise Jensen (Powderkeg Web Design)
Depending on the scope, $18,000-$60,000 and up per year. Monthly retainers are regularly in the $1,500-$5,000 per month range!
You can enroll in the course and get everything that’s included, plus one hour of 1:1 consulting over video meetings per month for
Sign up by clicking this link right now and paying the first invoice by March 27, 2019.
If you want to be put on the list for when we offer the class again or if you want the online version, email [email protected].
Note: Looking for an actionable Local SEO Checklist for 2020? At the end of this post, you can download a PDF that distills all the important points into checklist items. You can also watch our in-depth video below.
“I know I need to work on SEO for my business’s website, but there’s so much to do and learn and I don’t know where to start.”
If that’s something you’ve said (or found yourself thinking), then this blog post is for you!
We want to de-mystify this arcane art of search engine optimization. We’re doing that by giving you a checklist-style guide to the main things you should be concerned about when it comes to SEO for your local business.
First off, here’s the big picture as a series of straightforward bullet points:
Now we’ll take a look at each of these items, and explain how you can take practical steps to improve your business’s SEO.
There are now some truly amazing free SEO tools that can get you very close to all the way toward ranking higher for targeted online searches.
Wait.
Is it really possible to fully optimize for Google’s algorithm without paying for expensive SEO tools?
I would say yes. Now it is. And that’s awesome.
Once you’ve done your initial pass at optimizing your website for your target keyword phrases, you should monitor and work to improve your rankings over time.
As I often tell our team and our clients, the work of SEO never really ends.
We all need to remain vigilant to continue to reap the rewards of targeted search traffic from customers and clients who are looking online for exactly what we offer.
Here’s the process I follow when I’m optimizing my own pet portrait company’s website for Google search. While I love using fancy paid SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz Pro, I can get pretty dang far using just the following free SEO tools:
We’re returning to speak at the DreamBank in Madison on Nov 27 on the topic of Multi-Channel Marketing. Can’t wait to see you there!
Click here to register for free.
Social advertising has taken off in a big way. Companies of all sizes are using social ads to get their brand in front of their target customers, generate traffic, and boost sales. Retailers especially can take advantage of the benefits provided by social ads.
But how can you get more from your ads? Here are some strategies to get you started.
First of all, you want to make sure you get all the basics right. What does that mean?
Use compelling images. Visuals will get more attention and will bring your ads to life. Remember, social media is a crowded place. People are looking for content that catches their eye, and there is a lot of it out there. You have to stand out to get noticed.
Also, make sure you take a mobile-first approach. Obviously, it is important how your ads look on the desktop version, but mobile should be the priority. And use enticing language to make sure you attract people to your ads with your copy.
Videos are a great way to help your social ads get more attention, and they can be even more engaging than images.
People love watching videos online, and they are a great way to show off your products and build trust by showing the actual faces behind your company. You could create video testimonials for social proof, interview people in your business, or show your products being used. Definitely experiment with video ads to see if they can get you more clicks and engagement.
Any time you can encourage engagement in the form of likes, shares and comments, you should! Prompt viewers to leave a comment or tag a friend. When Facebook sees strong engagement on an ad, that can drive your cost per click (CPC) down.
There are many options for targeting audiences on social websites. Facebook especially provides you with lots of options where you can target by age, interests, behaviors, and more.
Targeting based on interests can be especially effective. If you sell a certain type of product, you can target people with similar interests who will be more likely to be interested in your product.
For example, Splendid Beast is a pet painting business that targets their Facebook ads based on people who love dogs, specific dog breeds, and cats. They also create lookalike audiences based on previous purchasers and website visitors, then remarket to people who have already visited the website or interacted with their Facebook page.
You could also target people at certain moments in their lives, such as when they are getting married.
Experiment with these options. Start by targeting your main target market, but try different audiences as well by making tweaks. Once you have run a few ads, you will see what is working for you.
Using promotions is a time-tested strategy to make more sales. But you need people to discover your promotions. When you post an update on your social account that you have a 24-hour discount, you’re just hoping that your customers see it.
That’s why you should use advertising. Create a standard ad just like you normally would, but make the promotion the main focus. Let your targets know that they can get a special discount if they act fast. A great offer will get noticed, so use this technique to break through the noise.
If you have multiple locations, you might be able to use the Store Visits feature in Facebook. This is where you can create different ads with maps and copy that is specific to the store that is located nearest to the target, and it’s a great way to send people to your physical stores.
Always try to do new things with your ads, and don’t be tempted to run the same ad all the time. If something works, that’s great. But experiment further. Change the images and the copy, otherwise people will quickly get bored if they see the same ad all the time.
Consider having five or 10 types of ads, some showing products, others showing reviews, and others with special roundups and collections. Then change your copy to use different messages so you are not saying the same thing all the time.
Find out what works, then optimize it further and keep on changing what you are doing to keep your targets interested.
One simple technique is to focus your efforts on your existing customers. It’s cheaper and easier to sell to existing customers because they have already shown an interest in your products. Getting new customers, on the other hand, is hard work—and more expensive.
On Facebook, you can do this by using custom audiences. This is where you define the exact audience you want to display your ads to, which could include customers on your email list.
You should also create a lookalike audience based on your customer or email list, so Facebook can use its algorithm to help you find more customers and subscribers. Sometimes you can supercharge this technique by “layering in” interests. For example, Splendid Beast sometimes targets dog lovers who are also lookalikes of previous purchasers.
Facebook Collection Ads are a great option for retailers. Using these, you can show a main image or video then display product recommendations. They are a great way to advertise a collection of products, especially around a certain time of year like the holidays.
Dynamic ads are one of Facebook’s killer advertising techniques, and these are perfect for retailers.
And its efficacy is well-known, even for brands on the lower end of the financial scale. One need only take a look at the ad overheads of high-performing businesses of less than $10k to see that, for many of them, their highest expense is on Facebook social ads. Shop Trucksy alone spends $500 a month on its Facebook ads, but reports $8000 average monthly profits!
You will need to use the Facebook pixel on your website to use dynamic ads. Install it on every page, and this will then analyze the actions of visitors. You can then decide who to show your ads to based on their behavior.
It’s a very powerful tool because you can use it to advertise to people who have looked at specific products on your website or who have visited certain pages. You could then provide the visitor with a special discount on that product and give them a push using your ad.
When you find something that works for you, don’t stop there. If you find that Facebook ads work well, experiment on Twitter or Pinterest. You may find that other platforms are even more effective.
Always experiment with new platforms and types of ads, and constantly improve your results.
Social ads are a fantastic way to find new customers and get repeat sales from existing customers. If you have been using social advertising with unexceptional results, try some of the above techniques. Keep on experimenting and optimizing, and you may find that social ads can be one of your most effective ways to drive sales.
That’s nice that Google Analytics has all this info about our website traffic, but how do we see whether our campaigns are truly effective?
Well, good news, assuming you’ve set up Google Analytics goals to track, you can see if visitors are taking those actions after clicking particular links, whether from emails, Facebook ads, Google Display Ads, or even referral links from other websites.
Check it out in the video below. We also discuss our recommendation around how to handle Paid Social Ads, given the fact that Google Analytics came out before there were social media ads.
Here’s the UTM tracking templates spreadsheet mentioned in the video. Please select File > Download to save your own copy for your use. Use these recommendations in conjunction with a campaign URL builder.
This lesson is an excerpt from our Digital Marketing Mastery course. You can learn more about the course and watch the first class for free here.
Check out this SEO Case Study in which we discuss how we ranked Splendid Beast #1 for dog paintings in under a year and with fewer backlinks than the competitors.
One thing we didn’t dwell on in the video was “dwell time,” which is the amount of time users spend on the page or site after they click your link. From looking at the analytics, the dwell time for this page and for the site from this organic landing page has been really good. Google is likely interpreting that as a sign that we’re showing the searcher what they want to see: dog paintings.
Digital marketing is changing so fast that it’s next to impossible for any marketer or business owner to keep up.
Luckily it all boils down to some basics.
You want:
To go more in-depth on how to do each of these things, we’re launching a course called Digital Marketing Mastery to show you the latest techniques and tricks to earn more leads and sales online.
We love keeping up with this stuff and teaching others what we learn and what we see working for our business and our clients.
We made the first class in our 6-month course free, and you can catch the re-recording of it below. It’s called, “What’s Possible Now With Digital Marketing.”
Check it out!
Note we’ll have an in-person class (at 555 D’Onofrio, Madison WI) as well as an online-only option if you’re outside town or can’t make our class dates.
As you can see from the syllabus and schedule, we’ll be covering the best strategies and tactics to increase business using
Most of the in-person classes will be on Wednesdays at 3:30 pm, but we have a few Mondays in there, too.
At least twice as many website leads in the next 12 months.
This assumes you’re ready to invest in the paid online advertising channels we’ll teach you to use. Appropriate budgets will vary based on business and industry, but you should be ready to spend $500-1,000 per month in ads at the very minimum to test the strategies we’ll teach.
You should be eager to learn and implement the best strategies and tactics in online marketing.
To get the most benefit, you need to be able to make changes to your website or have someone who can.
We strongly favor WordPress as a website platform and Content Management System, but most of what we discuss can be done on other platforms like Wix, Squarespace, HubSpot, etc.
We have three options:
Great!
Select your option below and we’ll send you an invoice. Once that’s paid, you’ll receive login access to the Digital Marketing Mastery website.
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We get pitched on guest posts all the time on our site. The pitches are often terrible and so are the submissions. As a result, we’ve drastically reduced the number of guest posts we accept. They often create extra work for us, instead of providing us free value in exchange for great SEO links.
But that’s not how guest posts have to be. They can be a great opportunity that’s mutually beneficial to both the writer and the site owner. If you’re interested in writing a guest post for someone and you want it be awesome, here’s how to do it.
We recently spoke about digital marketing for an Ask the Expert put on the by Middleton Chamber of Commerce, specifically on how to target audiences using Facebook ads and how to measure the results using the Facebook pixel.
Here’s the re-recording we made for YouTube in case you missed it or need a review.
This is the perfect starting point for businesses who are struggling to get traction from their organic and boosted Facebook posts, which either don’t reach people anymore or don’t reach the right people.
Don’t neglect search engine optimization in the flurry of excitement around the launch of a redesigned website. Everything on the new site is fresh and up-to-date, and it looks slick as hell – but is that good or bad for your SEO?
It doesn’t have to be bad at all! We’ll explain how to maintain strong SEO and stay in Google’s good favor when you migrate to a newly updated website. It starts with knowing your old site and making sure nothing is lost or forgotten. Then we’ll tell you how to create redirects to avoid errors and confusion. Lastly, we’ll explain how you can make sure Google knows what you’re doing, so that the search engine will be friendly to your new site.
