Linkbait Generator

Sometimes it can be difficult to decide how often to stay in touch with a customer, obviously you want more business from them and you want them to remember that you exist but also you want to be sure you don’t bother them.

Email marketing is an area of the digital marketing sphere that is particularly difficult to gauge, how many emails are too many? With such a quick, cheap and simple way to contact large numbers of people it’s all too easy to go overboard and have your contacts reaching for the unsubscribe button.

Some of the biggest culprits of this are fashion retailers, the market is so hotly contested at the moment that email marketing has increase massively over the last 12 months.

I made a purchase from a popular London based retailer recently and since then I have been flooded with emails, so much so that I actually counted them because I could not believe what I was seeing. I received 20 emails in just under 5 weeks which equates to 4 emails a week, practically one every other day.

Most of the emails were very repetitive and used the old “time is running out” strategy that went out of fashion a long time ago. Pressurised sales don’t work in an environment where customers can easily access online vouchers, discount codes or, worse, competitors.

In this particular case, the products are quite expensive and something that you wouldn’t want too many of so this level of email marketing is fairly pointless, repeat custom will be limited and seeking out new customers should be what the retailer is looking to achieve.

Investigating how the sale came to be rather than drowning the purchaser in emails would be a much better use of their time.

This is a guest post by Amanda from Clever Cat Marketing

In its drive to make the platform easier to use and less time-consuming the good people at LinkedIn have introduced endorsements, a simple one-click way to endorse certain skills for an individual in your network.

While this initially looked like a good idea it hasn’t taken long for the system to be manipulated and, to some, become worthless.

12 months ago if you wanted to tell the world that you thought John Smith was good at international taxation you would have to compose a detailed personal recommendation and send it to John, waiting to see if John had the time or the inclination to send you a recommendation back commending you for your account management skills.

Now it’s simple, perhaps a little too simple. Not only does it only take one click but LinkedIn actively recommends skills and people whenever you make certain changes to your profile, a scrolling, never-ending list of people and skills will appear and all you need do is click a single button and you have endorsed them. Or look at someone’s profile, the first thing you will see if a box asking if you that person has certain skills or expertise.

So this has of course led to people “gaming” the system, clicking on every single connection they have and endorsing them for everything and even for skills that person hasn’t listed in the hope that person will reciprocate. The problem is, these people have often never met and certainly never worked together.

Someone I met on a LinkedIn forum once asked me to connect to them and since then they endorse me every week for lists of things. However I have no idea about their credentials so I don’t reciprocate. I’m also highly doubtful of the skills they have been endorsed for as I know the method in which they were gained. As a digital marketing consultant I would like nothing more than 100s of endorsements to prove my skills but I want to earn them the right way.

But does this make all endorsements worthless? The answer is no. Not everyone is so jaded as to game the system and a lot of people are more precious in where they give praise. A well established profile with good content and a blend between endorsements and recommendations will still look better than one with no endorsements. Like with on-page SEO it’s about the whole package, once everything comes together you have a winning formula.

During social media training recently a couple of attendees proclaimed that endorsements were a waste of time and not worth the virtual paper they were printed on but this was immediately rebuked by other people in the training session saying that they personally wouldn’t endorsement people for skills unless they meant it.

So don’t ignore endorsements, use them wisely and sparingly and ignore the gamers but also keep a focus on the rest of your profile and, even though it may be time consuming, give credit where credit is due and write a recommendation or two.

This is a guest post by Amanda from Clever Cat Marketing

There’s so many tools out there to help with SEO it can sometimes be difficult to sort out which ones are good and which ones aren’t.

One very useful tool for SEOs, and webmasters in general, is Xenu’s link sleuth. Most people will know it as a website crawler that can be used to help you diagnose crawl issues with your site, but it actually has many other benefits in terms of SEO.

Checking for Broken links

When you set Xenu to crawl your website, one useful feature is that it picks up and reports on any broken links, both internal and external. As you know, lots of links on your site to error pages, or non-existent pages can potentially harm your sites rankings.

By using Xenu you can locate any issues and resolve these to improve your site for both users and the search engines.

Check for redirects

As well as checking for broken links, Xenu can also help highlight any redirects that are in place on your site, specifically 302 redirects.

302 redirects are not good for SEO as they do not pass on any weight from the old URL to the new one.

Unless the redirection is a temporary measure you are best off replacing these with 301 redirects as they will pass on the weight to the new pages on the site.

Report on external links

By running a crawl on your site you can locate any external links on your to other websites. Who you link to is important for SEO, and by running a link check you can get a detailed view of what sort of external links are on the site.

Ensuring you are not linking to “bad neighbourhoods” is vital if you are trying to build trust in your site with the search engines.

Check competitors external links

Just as it’s important to not link out the wrong sites, it’s useful to link to relevant sites. If you are aiming to improve your rankings it can be useful to have an understanding of your competitors’ external link profiles.

Running a crawl on their site can reveal who they are linking out to and highlight any particular sites that may be useful to link to from your site.

As you can see, Xenu can be used for so much more than just checking for crawl errors. It’s a very useful tool for anyone practicing SEO, and it’s free so there’s no excuse not to give it a go.

This is a guest post by Ben from Navaro, a SEO company based in Leamington.

Google loves linkjuice – so we all have to love linkbuilding right? Well its time for you to do link building the smart way. So put the music on your iPod, grab your mug with coffee and get on the train. Ready? Take control of your link building.

I wanna show you 10 great websites where you can build backlinks to your juice loving website.

When someone decides to take the plunge and a create a blog invariably a market will need to be served and nourished. Think about the sites you visit for various topics, perhaps you visit Mashable for your social media fix and when you want to read up on and or see what’s new in tech - you pay a visit to Tech Crunch. Why do you think you go to these specific sites for these specific topics? Because they know and serve their market. Decide early on what your blog will be about (its niche or topic) and then aim to serve this up on a silver platter.

Don’t be shy about it, give it your all and give “them” what they want. Them being your readers. Let’s take a look below at the various ways you can do this whether on a daily, weekly or whatever schedule you decide to have for your blogs content.

HEY THANKS FOR THE LINKBAIT HEADLINES, BUT WHAT NEXT???

One of the more common pieces of feedback I've received about LinkbaitGenerator.com is that, whilst it's a really handy tool to brainstorm ideas for blog posts (and also adds to the 'clicks appeal' of a headline) it's really hard to formulate content to match the eye-catching title.

Today I would like to run you through an excellent case study that, I hope, provides some tips as well as inspiration for that perfect viral blog post.

Are you ready for some practical link building? Grab your cup of coffee – put some music on (Earth Wind and Fire is always great by the way) and lets do some practical link builiding. We all know we have to do link building – but where do we start? Well here are 4 easy steps you can take.