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Friday Link Wrapup – Email, LinkedIn, Membership Sites and Typography

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

Need some help coming up with engaging subject lines that’ll get people to open your marketing emails? Here’s a cheat sheet for 12 super subject lines.

Want to use LinkedIn to grow your online business but not sure where to begin? Start here.

If you have a membership website, you’ve probably found member retention is one of the big issues. Here’s a guide to keeping them happy (and on your site!). One of the most important points: survey your members regularly to find out how you’re doing, and what they want more (or less) of as users of your site.

And finally, here’s an interesting comparison of typography used for political party marketing content. Can typography be liberal or conservative? Maybe… but it looks more like a split between old-school and contemporary mindsets.

Friday Link Wrapup – Conversions, Social Media, SEO

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

Something I tell my clients all the time: don’t ask for too much information. When it comes to filling in online forms, less is better. Here’s an infographic that shows how reducing the number of things you ask people for can actually increase conversions.

Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? I loved those. Here’s a new one – all about learning SEO!

How much time do you spend each week on marketing through social media? More than you’d like? Here’s a post that might help you do a better job allocating your time using social media.

Finally, a post from Yoast about the five things they see wrong with websites most often when doing paid reviews. Stop guessing and see what you can do better with your site.

Friday Link Wrapup – Google Analytics, Mind Mapping, Getting More Clients

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

Here is a very, very basic overview of Google Analytics reports for beginners. This doesn’t go into detail – just provides a nice intro on three key default reports. And here’s a chart for learning your way around the features and controls in a report.

Learn how including some kind of penalty (limited time or supply) can increase clicks of your call-to-action buttons.

A few weeks ago I found this great, very simple to use mind-mapping app from Google. It’s called Coggle, and it’s a great way to diagram complex information for yourself or for a team.

Finally, a short article about turning prospects into paying clients by offering possible solutions of varying cost and effectiveness. It’s all about understanding their problems, not pitching your services willy-nilly.

Friday Link Wrapup – SEO Tactics, Landing Pages and Readability

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

Here’s a question clients ask me frequently and I was glad to see that the answer I always give is the right one. What’s the most effective SEO tactic today? The top answer is: relevant content creation. This is no surprise. Next comes keyword research and then frequent website updating. The only bad part is, content creation is rated as the second-most difficult tactic to do (and do well), right after link-building. But you’ve just got to do it if you want to do well in organic search results.

Here’s an infographic on the landing page screwups that are likely to cost you customers. The top ones I see in client sites are:

  • Too many choices and no clear call-to-action
  • Lack of credibility – old website, not mobile-friendly, doesn’t look professional or trustworthy
  • Slow-loading pages – a cause of frustration

Finally, are you having trouble ensuring that all that content you’re writing is reader-friendly? Here are some readability tools that will help.

Friday Link Wrapup – Copyright, Instagram, Content

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

One of my clients recently found that some of the images on their site were actually copyrighted on another website (we promptly replaced them!). How can you be sure your photos are legal? Here are some guidelines.

How to do creative content research to find out what other websites are publishing (and what readers are sharing).

Want to boost engagement on your company’s Instagram account? Try running a photo contest.

How do you convert potential customers that come to your website into buyers? Here are 10 user onboarding tools to consider.

Friday Link Wrapup – Email Marketing, Ecommerce, Content for Boring Industries

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

Do you use email for promoting your business? Here are 29 Reasons to Use Email Marketing (As Told by Small Business Owners). A high-quality and useful regular email delivery helps keep your company at the top of your customers’ minds.

If you manage an ecommerce website, this is especially for you. Learn about 12 easy ways to lose ecommerce customers. The ones I see the most with new clients are:

  • Site is not mobile-friendly. This really is becoming a critical issue now – if you still have a website that doesn’t work well on phones and tablets, make it a priority to get that fixed.
  • Your site is slow. If you’re serious about your business, don’t depend on $3/mo shared hosting, it’s not good enough.
  •  Your site is too busy or hard to navigate. Too much clutter or bad navigation impacts users’ ability to find what they want.
  • Your photos are tiny/poor quality. Spend some time and money to get fantastic product photos, they really do make a huge difference.

Think your industry is boring? You likely have a hard time writing tantalizing content, right? Here’s a post about writing content for boring industries that might help inspire you.

And finally, if you’re thinking about creating video to help market your business, here are three things to consider before pushing ‘record.’