The Ultimate Guide to Mastering on Pinterest for Marketing

nShar

Over the past few months, you may have heard some chatter about a brand new social network called Pinterest. Not surprising. According to Compete, unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429% from September to December 2011, and the social network already boasts
 a user base of 3.3 million. Pinterest is only growing in popularity as the hottest new social network, and in December 2011, it made
Hitwise's list of the top 10 social networks, currently sitting at #5 and beating out big names like LinkedIn and Google+. And as with any hot new social network that comes onto the scene, marketers are
chiming in with, "Can I use it for marketing?" "...and, how?"
The short answer? Absolutely. The longer answer? Read on to find out how. (And be sure to follow HubSpot's pins at http://pinterest.com/hubspot!)

What is Pinterest, and How Does it Work?

Pinterest is a social network that allows users to visually share, curate, and discover new interests by posting (AKA 'pinning') images or videos to their own or others' pinboards (i.e. a collection of 'pins,' usually with a common theme) and browsing what other users have pinned. Using a visual emphasis, the social network is very much focused on the concept of a person's lifestyle, allowing you to share your tastes and interests with others and discover those of likeminded people. The social network's goal is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting." Users can either upload images from their computer or pin things they find on the web using the Pinterest bookmarklet.
As with most other social networks, users can perform standard social networking functions such as following the boards of their friends, liking and commenting on other users' pins, re-pinning content to their own boards, sharing others' pins on Facebook and Twitter or via email, and even embedding individual pins on their website or blog.

Pinterest Etiquette

As with any site that is built around content curation, 'pinners' (Pinterest users) must be especially cognizant of citing the sources of their individual pins. And while Pinterest makes no direct statement that marketers cannot use the social network for promotional purposes, the site does discourage blatant self-promotion:

"Avoid Self Promotion | Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion."

Couple this with Pinterest's lifestyle vision, and what its means is that marketers need to find creative ways to promote their brand on the network and truly jive with its vision and user base. In other words, businesses should use the social network to showcase the lifestyle their brand promotes. If you're a shoe vendor, a pinboard of the shoes you sell won't cut it. A pinboard of a few of your shoes interspersed with images of places those shoes could take you, however, is the direction you should be thinking.
AARP's Pinterest account features a pinboard called 'Quotes to Live By,' which is a great example of a business using Pinterest to promote the lifestyle of its brand.

 

How to Create a Pinterest Account

Surprisingly enough, user access to Pinterest still operates under an invitation-only basis. That being said, you can request an invitation, and Pinterest doesn't exactly seem to be very stingy about granting requests. Visit www.pinterest.com, click 'Request an Invite,' and enter your email address to be notified when you have access to create your account. Or you can ask a friend who already has a Pinterest account to invite you -- this seems to be the speediest of the two methods.
(Important Tip: Be sure to register your account with the same email address you use for your business' Twitter account so you can easily share your new pins through your Twitter account, too. Once you receive an invitation to sign up for Pinterest, you'll want to sign up through the Twitter option, not the Facebook option. This will enable you to tie your Pinterest account to your business' Twitter account, not your personal Facebook profile. Currently, Pinterest doesn't offer a connection to Facebook business pages.)





Once your account is activated, optimize your Pinterest profile under 'Settings.' Choose your company name as your username and complete your profile information, including a company description, logo, and a link to your website. Be sure you keep 'Hide your Pinterest profile from search engines' checked to 'Off' so your profile can get indexed in search.

Build Your Following on Pinterest

Once you get started, you'll want to create a few pinboards before you start trying to build your Pinterest following (check out the list in the next section for some great ideas!). This way, new followers will have a reason to follow your pins; it's the same reason why you would populate a brand new blog with a few posts before you start promoting it. Unfortunately, because the 'Find Friends' feature on Pinterest leverages a personal Facebook profile (not business page), this tool won't be very useful for your business. Therefore, you'll want to promote your presence through other means to jumpstart your Pinterest following:

• Add the Pinterest follow button to your website.
• Promote your presence on Pinterest through your other social networks by encouraging your followers/fans on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter to follow your pins!
• Consider launching your presence with a Pinterest contest (see below), and write a blog post to promote it.
• Start following users you think would want to follow you back.

Think Outside the Box: 13 Creative Ways to Use Pinterest for Marketing

To get your creative juices flowing, we've brainstormed a list of creative ideas (and found some real-life examples) for using Pinterest as part of your social media marketing mix.
1. Feature Your Visual Content: Let's start with the basics. Pinterest is a visual social network, so if your business pumps out a lot of visual content like data visualizations or infographics, consider creating a pinboard that highlights some of your best visual content. Just as the shoe example above, be strategic about how you pin this content, and mix in other images to amplify the visual appeal of your pinboard.
2. Create a User-Generated Pinboard: Because you can allow other users to contribute their own pins to your hosted pinboards on a user by user basis, this opens up a great opportunity to involve fans and customers in your marketing. Pick out a few of your top fans or customers, and create a board dedicated to their pins. Ask the customer to pin images that showcase the lifestyle they enjoy because of your brand. Does your software save them time? Ask them to pin images of things that represent the time they save or the things they can do with that saved time. This is a great way to leverage customer testimonials in a unique and visual way. Clothing retailer ModCloth uses this tactic in its 'Guest Pinner Gallery.'
3. Host a Contest: First, consult Pinterest's terms of use to make sure the contest you're holding doesn't infringe upon its guidelines. And if you liked our previous example, you're going to get giddy about this one. Hold a contest that asks users to create a pinboard on their own account to demonstrate what they love about your brand, products, or services. If you're that shoe vendor we mentioned above, you might ask customers to create a pinboard that shows pins of them doing fun and awesome things while wearing your shoes. Ask them to send you a link to their pinboard so you can evaluate entrants, and the coolest board wins a prize! Even better -- you can also re-pin the top boards to your own Pinterest page and ask followers to vote on the boards to select the winner. This is exactly what High Point Market did in its October Pinterest campaign to promote High Point Market Week, during which it recruited fashion home trendsetters to showcase their favorite products and trends.





4. Add the Pin-It Button to Your Website: Make it super easy for website visitors to share your visual content or images on Pinterest by adding a Pin-It button to the visual content on your site. Just like other social media sharing buttons, this will help to expose your brand to a brand new audience. Where you showcase your other social media account presence, you can also add the Pinterest follow button, too! Click here to create your website buttons today.

5. Gather Insight Into Your Buyer Personas: Use Pinterest as a tool for understanding the interests and needs of your ideal customers. View pinboards of your customers to aid in your understanding of who your customers are and what they're interested in.

6. Re-Pin What Your Followers Are Interested In: Showcase the cool things your followers are pinning in a separate pinboard but re-pinning followers' pins. This will add a non-promotional, interesting dynamic to your collection of pinboards while promoting engagement with your followers. Whole Foods is a great example of a brand on Pinterest who re-pins other users' pins often.

7. Become an Curation Expert: Become the go-to Pinterest account for pins about a certain subject or topic relating to your industry. For example, because HubSpot is a marketing software company, we could create a pinboard that features awesome visual examples of great online marketing. Or if you're a paper company, you could create a pinboard that features really awesome origami paper creations from around the web. Minted is a great, real-life example of a paper company that leverages this tactic by creating themed pinboards that show unique ways to use paper, mixed in with other related lifestyle photos, such as in its 'Trick or Treat' Halloween board:





8. Create a Video Gallery: Pinners aren't only limited to pinning images; they can pin videos, too! Create a pinboard of some of the interesting videos your business produces interspersed with relevant images. How about a blooper gallery while you're at it? Do executives in your business do a lot of speaking at industry conferences and events? Create a pinboard that features videos of your speakers and images of them speaking or networking at events to promote your speaking program.

9. Feature Offline Events: Create a pinboard that features the best photos and video footage of the annual event you host to help you generate buzz and promote the next one.

10. Use Hashtags: Just like social networks like Twitter and Google+, Pinterest users can leverage hashtags to tag their pins and make their content more search-friendly. Promoting a new campaign of some sort? Create a pinboard around it, and tag it with a hashtag you're also using on Twitter and Google+ to leverage an integrated, cross-channel campaign. Club Monaco leverages its Pinterest account for this very purpose, using the #cultureclub hashtag and pinboard to promote a section of its website called Culture Club.





11. Showcase Your Business' Personality: As we've mentioned, Pinterest has a heavy lifestyle focus, so what better opportunity is there to give people a peek into the personality of your brand? Create a pinboard that showcases your employees and life around the office -- show them working together, show them making your products/services, and show some of the fun activities your business participates in, such as company outings, parties, award ceremonies, volunteer days, etc. Letting people in behind-the-scenes will make your brand relatable, interesting, and humanized. The Today Show, for example, uses one of its pinboards called 'Anchor Antics' to let you into the personalities of the show's stars.





12. Drive Pinterest Users Back to Your Website (and Track Results!): Incorporating Pinterest into your social media marketing mix might seem like a great opportunity for your business, but you need to make sure it's generating results to make it worth your time and effort. Whenever possible, include links back to your website and landing pages in your pins to drive traffic back to your website. Keep track of referral traffic and leads generated from Pinterest.

13. Follow Social Media Best Practices: Pinterest is a social network, so it's a great idea to follow the best practices you operate under for most other social networks. Spend time to increase your following, be engaging with your followers, keep your Pinterest account regularly updated, and drive traffic back to your website when possible to increase conversions.

Source: HubSpot

Why You Need Social Media Followers Who Won't Ever Buy

Shar

Which is better? 50 qualified social media followers, or 1,000 followers, many of whom will never buy from you? The answer may surprise you.

In social media, reach is of critical importance. It directly impacts how much your content and messages get shared, it increases your business' ability to get found and generate leads, it can help extend your online footprint as a thought leader, and the list goes on. In other words, in an online world, social reach shouldn't be a trivial factor for businesses leveraging inbound marketing. So, have you figured out what the right answer to our first question is yet? If the title of this article wasn't enough of a hint, yes, more followers is always better.
It may seem obvious (more is always better....right?), but a lot of businesses fall into the trap of thinking fewer and more qualified is better. In this case, here's why it's not...

1. More followers means access to more followers' followers.

This concept, albeit simple, is pivotal to understanding the overall importance of reach, so here goes. Think about it: Every one of your fans/followers also has his/her own followers, be it 5, 500, or 5,000. Let's say that a follower who has 5,000 Twitter followers of his own shares one of your blog posts or retweets one of your tweets. Now, that content is getting exposed to 5,000 additional people who weren't directly following you. If you can understand that every one of your fans/followers might share your content with their friends and followers, now you can start understanding the awesome impact of reach. So even if that original follower of yours never becomes a customer himself, that doesn't mean one of his followers who saw your content because of him won't. Now that's some powerful stuff.

2. Influencers have, well, influence.

If you can build up a large following for your business in social media, you probably have a few influencers among the bunch. While these influencers may follow but never buy from you, remember that these people are called influencers for a reason. They can introduce you to co-marketing partnerships, put in a good word with investors, and provide introductions to other influencers, bloggers, and experts in your industry. For example, if you can solicit an introduction from an influencer to another industry blogger that you can contribute a guest blog post to, you'll probably benefit from a couple of inbound links. That follower may not have contributed any direct revenue to your business, but those inbound links are very valuable.   

3. Followers who won't ever buy can still refer your business.

Indirect exposure to your followers' personal networks can be an invaluable source of business. Okay, so Frank the Facebook fan may never actually purchase your industrial vacuum cleaner for his teeny tiny small business office. But when his buddy, landlord Lenny, is searching for a new one for the apartment building he owns, Facebook fan Frank might just refer you some highly qualified business. Even if landlord Lenny isn't the type to participate in social media himself, his good buddy Frank is. Need I say more?

4. Social shares impact SEO.

The impact social media is having on SEO is only increasing. Search engines are taking social cues like social media shares into account when they're ranking your content, which means the more people you can get to share your content in social media, the better.
Let's say you own a dog grooming business, and you and one of your competitors each wrote a blog article about how to take care of your dog's coat in between visits to the groomer. But let's also say your competitor has 10 times as many social media followers than you and his article got tweeted 50 times, generated 20 likes on Facebook, and got quite a few shares on LinkedIn and Google+, too. All of a sudden, your competitor has quite a leg up when it comes to getting his article ranked in search ahead of yours. In other words, because social shares are now one of the factors search engines take into consideration when ranking your content, it behooves you to build up your following and encourage those social shares. If you tweeted your article and you have 1,000 followers compared to your competitors' 50 followers, you have a much better chance of generating social shares and a much better chance of ranking in search. Those people who shared your content may never become customers of your dog grooming business themselves, but someone who finds your article in search because of them might.

5. Your followers might surprise you.

If you've been doing your research and spending time developing buyer personas, you likely have a pretty solid grasp on who your ideal customers are. That's all well and good, but if you have a very narrow-minded idea of who exactly will buy your products and services, you could actually miss out on a completely different set of people who might also buy from you.
To use a classic example, the makers of baking soda had a very specific use case in mind for their product: baking. But we all know that the uses for baking soda extend way beyond baking --  it can also be used to extinguish small electrical fires, for personal hygiene, and as a cleaning agent, to name a few. And you can bet that some people who buy baking soda never even use it for baking.
The lesson here is that building up a large following in social media could expose your brand and products to a group -- or groups -- of people you might never have thought would be interested in what you sell. Your product or service may not have completely different, original uses like baking soda does, but your followers could still surprise you. Just because a social media follower doesn't fall neatly into one of your cookie cutter buyer personas, doesn't necessarily mean he won't buy from you.

Always Be Working to Build Social Reach

The ultimate takeaway here is this: just because followers may not directly turn into customers doesn't mean they're not valuable. Social media reach can be a powerful thing for any business, and the ones who understand this know that continuing to build reach is a smart social media tactic.
If building reach isn't something you're consciously doing, you may want to start working to attract more fans and followers for your social media accounts. In this article, we've got some great tips for building reach that can help get you going. Doing so can greatly increase the impact and ROI of your social media efforts. And if you're having a tough time convincing your boss that building reach is important, share this article with them :)

Source: HubSpot

9 Ways B2Bs Can Excel With Location-Based Social Media

 

Facebook Places, or Google Places, can benefit them or their customers. However, there are a number of opportunities for these type of companies to market themselves using location-based apps; its just harder to identify the strategies that'll help draw the same results a B2C company would see using these social channels. Here are the 9 best B2B uses of checkin-based social platforms and some companies that are using them right.

1.) Claim Your Business

It may seem like a no-brainer, but many companies don't have their business listings claimed in Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Places, or other widely used services. This is a missed opportunity for your business, regardless of industry. It's not required that you claim your location before someone is able to check-in, but your listing may be missing vital information like a phone number, web address, Twitter handle, or a physical address that users might be looking for. Claim your listings to ensure they're both branded and optimized at every location for the best experience every time someone decides to check-in, no matter the service they're using. All verification requires is a phone number or a bill to claim a location as your own. Unfortunately, this can be quite a tedious process if you have multiple locations.

2.) Add Foursquare Tips

Companies are now able to leave tips at various venues (physical locations) from their very own Foursquare page as their brand and not as an individual user. These tips will pop up on a user's mobile phone if a user checks in nearby or at the venue where your B2B left a tip. The tips generated by your B2B will appear on your Foursquare page for viewing on the Foursquare application on users' phones or desktops/laptops. Tips offer insights about a location that are helpful and will drive further recognition of your business. The key to applying Foursquare tips to a B2B is understanding where physical location factors into your sales funnel. Think long and hard: where will your customers (other businesses) see these tips and also find them relevant to the location and the products and services you offer?
For example, Barracuda Networks is a security, networking, and storage solutions company that provides most, if not all, of its services to other businesses. This B2B has started a promotional tour of the nation called the 2012 Velocity Tour to promote its product offerings. Barracuda is stopping at relevant conferences, hotels, restaurants, and other locations to spread the word about its business. This marketing tour is the perfect opportunity for Barracuda Networks to leave tips about its upcoming showing at the particular locations they are planning to stop and promote at. Leaving tips at the conference locations throughout the tour is the most beneficial because conferences often attract other businesses and tech-savvy individuals, giving them more opportunity for exposure on Foursquare. This could work for Barracuda Networks, because it is an easy addition to an existing marketing campaign. An important question for you is, how can you adapt to using Foursquare tips at physical locations so it makes sense for your B2B?

3.) Create Lists of Tips on Foursquare

Creating lists of your Foursquare tips allows you to group your tips based on a subject of your choice like a list of airports with Wi-Fi or restaurants with vegan options. B2B's can group their existing tips based on the nature of those tips. Lists of tips are beneficial because it helps users quickly see which tips are most applicable to them, while also allowing users to follow these grouping of tips for future additions to the list. Based on the example above, Barracuda Networks could group all the tips for its 2012 Velocity Tour into one list, separating it from other tips on its page. The creation of lists is up to you, as long as they're relevant to your B2B and truly benefit your audience based on how you’ve organized them. You can create a new list at https://foursquare.com/lists.

4.) Network at Conferences

Like we just discussed above, conferences are often an amazing networking opportunity for businesses to connect with other businesses and industry professionals. Many B2B's thrive when it comes to attending industry conferences for sales leads and more. Take your networking to the next level at these conferences, not just with tweets and posts on Facebook, but by also checking in and promoting yourself on Foursquare, Facebook Places, and SCVNGR. These services allow you to check in, alerting others on these networks that you're there and allowing you to post a message as well. It's one way to stand out from other conference attendees. Reach out to your audience, and let them know where your B2B can be found at the conference as well as what you're looking to accomplish while you're there. Do research on your own as well, by seeing who else has checked in and what they're messaging about. Comment on check-ins of relevance, and make lasting connections with other B2B's, potential customers, and other influencers.

5.) Check In With Clients

Whether you've got an existing network or you're starting from scratch on SCVNGR, Facebook Places, or Foursquare, showing your current and future friends/followers you're active is a vital way to increase buzz about your business. Check in at meetings with your clients, showing you’re involved in your industry and most importantly, thriving. Be sure not to share before the time is right with particular clients; simply practice common sense. To ensure the most exposure from these checkins, follow your employees, existing clients, potential clients, industry partners, competitors, and other B2Bs of interest to your business. They'll be more likely to follow you in return if you're active on the particular network, thus seeing where you've recently checked in.

6.) Explore Partnerships

Explore partnerships with other B2B's, B2C's, and nonprofits to promote a particular campaign that has a location-based component. This is an effective way to incorporate your branding into a service like Foursquare, even if your products or services wouldn't regularly fit the platform.
For example, American Express started partnerships with Sports Authority, H&M, and a handful of restaurants in New York City, offering a loyalty coupon. Through this campaign American Express uses Foursquare to draw customers to the physical stores of a few B2Cs, while increasing impressions of its brand and giving incentives to Foursquare users to use its services. In terms of your B2B, stop and think about what organizations would make sense to partner with on a local, state, or national level, and decide what benefit they would receive from a partnership of this nature.

7.) Conduct Market Research

When it comes to truly making long-lasting relationships with industry partners as well as existing and prospective clients, understanding their activity on every channel is key. Any information your sales team can gather about your market can aid in strengthening existing and future relationships. Monitoring where others check-in as well as the activities they complete on these location-based networks is more information to work with in the future. This research can help tell you which locations to leave Foursquare tips at, give you ideas for campaigns that will help engage your customers, understand which location-based networks your audience participates in, and keep yourself active on these networks to increase interest in your B2B.

8.) Do Competitive Analysis

Just as you can look to see how customers and industry partners are interacting on location-based channels, you should also look to follow the activity of your direct competitors. See what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong, changing your strategy accordingly. Identify which locations seem popular in your industry to optimize and create your own spin on an existing technique by creating your own unique list of tips on Foursquare or one of a kind challenge on SCVNGR.

9.) Lighten Up

One of the most important things you can do is have fun with whatever location-based social network you choose to utilize for your B2B. Social media should be a fun and engaging experience for your users, providing them with a true value from their engagement with your company, whether it's on Facebook Places or any other network. If you force participation from one of these communities, it'll come off as such. Work with what you know best: your company. Take what you do well and relate it to a common experience you share with your existing audience. Your strategy will resonate best if it's relevant, engaging, and most of all, rewarding to your audience.

Source: HubSpot

11 LinkedIn Marketing Gems You're Missing Out On

nShar

We already know that LinkedIn is more effective at generating leads than Facebook or Twitter. 277% more effective, in fact. It also has over 100 million users, is a B2B marketing goldmine, and allows brands and individuals to build valuable industry connections that can lead to opportunities for new business, co-marketing and affiliate agreements, and even land you your next rock-star hire.
The companies that turn these possibilities into realities are those who leverage all the little hidden marketing gems LinkedIn has to offer -- and there are a lot of them. Here, we examine 11 features of LinkedIn functionality that many marketers either overlook, or just plain didn't know about, and explain how they can bolster your inbound marketing.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers is a forum for people to ask and answer questions. Aside from the obvious thought leadership credibility you can gain from providing clear answers to questions here, it is also a great opportunity to identify industry influencers with whom to network. LinkedIn Answers actually provides you with the ability to search through experts in the Top Experts section.




Search the top experts across all of LinkedIn Answers, or target by industry -- Business Development, Customer Service, Healthcare, etc. Not only are the experts answering these questions industry influencers (they've captured the attention of the LinkedIn Answers crowd, at least), but they are also clearly very adept at writing about your industry, or a complementary one.
Know what that means? Guest blogging, that's what it means. If you're having trouble keeping your blog fed, the top experts on LinkedIn Answers are the people to reach out to. Ask them to take some of the most common questions they answer, and write a post for your blog on that topic. Then whenever the question comes up again, they can refer people to the blog post they wrote for you on the subject. They save time and build their reputation, and you get the SEO and content creation benefits.
You can find more creative uses of LinkedIn Answers in Kipp Bodnar's blog post on the subject.

Group Statistics

Found under 'More' in the navigation of your LinkedIn group, Group Statistics gives you insights about group members, whether you own the group or not. Use the data available in Group Statistics to help refine the targeting of your advertising and marketing campaigns.
For example, if you're running ads on LinkedIn, take a look at the activity levels of groups you're considering targeting in Group Statistics to ensure you're only targeting ads at the most active LinkedIn users.





If they're not spending time on LinkedIn, you're not going to see many impressions and clicks, and thus won't garner much return on your campaign. You can use Group Statistics to further refine your ads based on data like company, industry, and professional status. You can also use group statistics to target people based on city, professional status in the company, and industry.
You can also stalk other groups (remember, you don't have to own the group to look at their Group Statistics!) that represent good microcosms for your own marketing efforts. Think of it as an inside look on a focus group that can help you inform your marketing personas and campaigns. For example, if you're looking to sell to small business owners in the healthcare industry, find groups that are active and collect information like geographic location, topics of discussion, other industries they discuss, and seniority level.
You may also find, after looking at the statistics of certain groups, that they have an audience with whom you should be connected. Join that group! Remember, if you're both in the same group, you have the ability to message a member even if you're not a first degree connection -- just one more benefit to using data to scout out the right groups for you!

Subgroups

So there's LinkedIn groups, but did you know there were also subgroups of those groups? It's true; click 'More' on the tab of your LinkedIn group, and you'll see it there!





A subgroup is a space within your group where members can collaborate based on a function, project, topic, location, or anything else. As your group grows, you'll find that maintaining relevancy for everyone becomes more difficult, because there are naturally some topics, industries, or side projects that develop that don't pertain to everyone. Just like Google+ has Circles to combat this relevancy problem, you can use LinkedIn subgroups to filter out any content that isn't relevant for the entire group and keep your members engaged. These subgroups can have their own discussions, news, jobs, and digest emails as regular groups, too!

Targeted Product Tabs

You probably know about the product tab on your LinkedIn company page, but did you know you can do more than just blanket product information out there for the entire LinkedIn universe? You can actually create different variations of your product tab for each segment of your target audience.




Create a default version of your page, then iterate on it so the most appropriately messaged page appears based on the characteristics of your target audience -- like company size, job function, industry, seniority, and geographic location.

LinkedIn Apps

Did you know there's a LinkedIn Application Directory? You can enhance your profile and better collaborate with your network with many of these apps. Here are some of the most useful ones:

• SlideShare Presentations: Sometimes marketers forget that the slideshows they develop also make for remarkable B2B content. This app lets you import presentations from your current SlideShare account, and continue to share that content with LinkedIn members as you add to it.
• WordPress: If your blog runs on WordPress, this app will let you sync the posts you publish to also appear on your LinkedIn profile to help you get more traffic to your site and more social shares.
• Box.net Files: You know that whitepaper you just published under the Resources section of your website? You know where else you should share it? The Box.net Files app lets you easily share that content.
• Company Buzz: Manage your reputation with this app, which lets you track what people are saying about your company, tailored to the trends and keywords you input.

There are a couple more great apps in there, but we'll cover their epic uses a little later in the post.

Skills & Expertise

This tool is currently in beta, and already we love it. Skills & Expertise lets you search for LinkedIn members, companies, and groups based on the skills and expertise they list.





What is this good for? When you search for a skill -- whether for business development deals, recruiting, personal networking, or to build LinkedIn group and page membership -- you can find the best people on LinkedIn to speak with related to that query, their locations, groups that are discussing the topic, and see the growth of that industry over time. If you're starting a new business or just starting to grow your social presence, it means you're choosing only the best people with whom to network and learn from on LinkedIn.

News Module

This is an easy one, which is why everyone with a LinkedIn Company Page should be using it. The News Module not only feeds mentions of your business to your LinkedIn company page, but it also shows news to those who have your name listed in their profile. That means news about you has a greater likelihood of showing up in someone else's news feed -- in other words, the News Module is marketing your company for you. Plus, it can help that third party content about your company get more social visibility when members see it and share it with their networks. To enable it, simply go to your page's 'Overview' tab while in edit mode, and check 'Share news about my company' under 'News Module.'

LinkedIn Events

Another great LinkedIn app, LinkedIn Events is so useful for both event marketers and event attendees that it deserves a section of its own.





This app is so useful because it doesn't put the onus on you to search for events to attend in your industry. The app automatically delivers personalized recommendations for events you should attend based on your industry, location, and what events your connections are attending. That means you can be where your customers, vendors, and industry influencers are going. The app makes that even easier by including a feature called 'Attendees You May Want to Meet.' With this feature, LinkedIn surfaces important people attending the event with whom you may want to connect (or at least prepare for your run-in at the actual event), or you can take the reins and filter by company and industry to find other opportunities.

LinkedIn Polls

Groups now have the ability to poll people, and it's really, really easy to do. Just go to the group in which you want to publish a poll (it's up to group managers to decide whether everyone can publish polls regardless of group membership), hit 'Poll', enter your question, and schedule for how long you'd like your poll to run.





Polling a group not only lets you perform your own market research and collect interesting data for content creation, but doing it on LinkedIn also means it can be extremely targeted based on group demographics. And remember Group Statistics? Now you can use that information to get seriously targeted with the groups you poll. Or if you're trying to drum up membership for your own LinkedIn Group, make use of the Tweet feature that allows you to share your poll on Twitter and get your group more traffic, activity, and membership.

Company Status Updates

"Wait, this isn't an unknown LinkedIn feature!" It's not? Well then why aren't more companies using it?
Company pages now have the functionality (and have for several months) to post status updates, just like you can on personal profiles or your company Facebook page. If you haven't enabled it, check out this blog post to learn how to easily turn on the functionality.




Post content you've created, post questions to your page followers, and share other peoples' content to get more followers, drive more traffic to your website, and generate leads from LinkedIn. It's one of the easiest things you can do, and you can integrate with the day-to-day social media posting you already do on Twitter and Facebook.

Export Contacts

Since you've been taking advantage of all these underused LinkedIn features, you've been building up quite the virtual rolodex. As such, it'd be helpful to import them into your CRM, no? Good thing LinkedIn makes it easy to export your LinkedIn contacts for just that purpose.




Under Contacts in the main navigation, click on 'My Connections,' then 'Export Connections' to download your .CSV or .VCF file. You can also filter out certain people in the left navigation -- like friends and family -- that aren't relevant to your business.
Just be sure not to opt them into any email communications or lead nurturing campaigns when you bring them into your CRM -- they haven't given you permission yet!

Source: HubSpot

How to Master Pinterest for B2B Marketing

hare

Let's face it. Pinterest is a slam dunk for companies who sell jewelry, fabrics, bags, and other cool "visual" items -- but it's pretty tricky for B2B. However, with the rapid growth of the Pinterest user base, many companies are seeing that referral traffic from Pinterest is lapping the traffic they're generating from Google+ and YouTube. It may be time for B2B to step into the game, take advantage of Pinterest's popularity, and use it as a new traffic and lead generator. But how can you come up with a Pinterest strategy that fits B2B? Let's take a look ...

Identify Your Most Visual Content

The biggest challenge for many B2B companies that want to use Pinterest as a marketing channel is a lack of visual content. By nature, many B2B companies are selling a product or service in an industry that most likely isn't visual. The first step is to think outside the box to find images that align with your company's image, fit nicely on Pinterest, and are fun to share.
Here are some ideas of content you can post:

1. Visual Content You Already Have: For example, someone at your last company mixer must have grabbed a few photos, right? If so, create a board to showcase your company's culture, and pin those photos. Only have executive headshots? Create an "executive management" board, and include a bio for each person.

 



2. Strong Visuals From Your Blog Articles: Pin visuals that best highlight your written content. Don't have any yet? Start using clear, beautiful images in your blog articles with the point of pinning them to your pinboards moving forward. You should be using images in your blog articles anyway!

3. Infographics: Infographics are all the rage right now, and they are doing very well on Pinterest. Have any company or industry data that you can visualize? It'd be a hit!
 



4. Data Charts. Similar to the above suggestion, you can also pin simple yet compelling data charts that you can build in Excel. Whether you're highlighting industry data in a visual way or own original research, just make sure you have a clear headline in the image so people know what they're looking at!

5. Ebook and Book Covers: Have you created a whitepaper or ebook recently? Take a screenshot of the cover and add it to a board that's a collection of ebooks for people to read. If the covers of your ebooks aren't normally very visual, make a point of giving them a better design from now on to make them pin-friendly.






6. Photos of Your Customers. Promoting your happy customers and clients is a great way to get more happy customers. Encourage your customers to send you photos (or take photos of them at your next event). Create a board of their smiling faces – perhaps while using your product or service!

Send Traffic With Specific Links in Each Pin

In the B2B world, using Pinterest as a tool solely to "enhance your brand" isn't going to cut it. When leads and customers are your bottom line, it's really important that you're driving quality traffic to your website with the goal of conversion.
To increase the likelihood of driving more traffic to your website, be sure to add a link back to the page on your website where that image lives for every pin. If you are uploading a photo instead of pinning something live on your website, choose a link that makes sense, and include that in the pin's description.
With this strategy, each link becomes a micro traffic source. Once in a while, one of your pins might be wildly successful. More often, your pins may only receive a modest number of re-pins each. However, the combined impact from each pin's clicks and re-pins will give you the biggest advantage.
For example, when reviewing two weeks of HubSpot's traffic data, we found a single pin only sent a handful of visitors to HubSpot.com. However, all pins combined sent a substantial number of visitors to HubSpot.com in that same time period. This phenomenon gives you good reason to have boards with many pins. Also consider adding more and more pins to your boards over time as you promote new visual content from your company.

Optimize Pinterest for Lead Generation

Now that you're starting to send traffic to your website, it's important to make sure you are converting a percentage of that traffic into leads. There are two ways you can make sure your Pinterest traffic is converting for your business to support your lead generation efforts.
1. Include landing pages in your pins' descriptions. Brainstorm images you could pin that represent something that is normally gated behind a form, like an ebook cover perhaps. In the description of the ebook, include a link to the landing page to download it. You could also do this with slides from webinar decks or other presentations that have landing pages.
2. Add more calls-to-action (CTAs) around the visual content on your website. Sometimes it might not make sense to include a landing page link in a pin's description (for example, if you're pinning an image from a blog post). In cases like that, add more calls-to-action to your blog to increase the likelihood of conversion from there. And remember, it's always a best practice to give visitors a next step to further engage with your business on all pages of your website -- visual or not!

Build Your Pinterest Follower Base to Grow Company Reach

Just like any social network, building reach via a follower base is key to long-term sustainability for that network as a traffic and lead source. However, Pinterest functions a little differently than the typical "follow process" we know from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
For example, on Pinterest, there are two "follower options" users can take when they like a piece of content they find. A person can follow either an individual board from a Pinterest user or the user's account as a whole. What's the difference? When following a specific board, you only will be notified (via the Pinterest homepage/stream) when a user pins a new piece of content to that board. When following a user, you will be notified every time that user pins content to any of his or her boards.
Because of these differences in follow methods, it's possible for a Pinterest user's board to have more followers than the user himself! So how can you create a strategy to increase followers at both the account and board levels?

1. Commit to creating the BEST boards on a specific topic. With this vision in mind, you will add the best content to your board, as well as start imagining new content you can create that fits that board's need.
2. Be ready to promote other people's content to enhance your collection. Committing to having the best board also means being ready to promote other users' pins too. Who cares if you didn't make the piece of content that convinced a new user to follow you? The next time you post something that is yours, that new follower may see it and click it!
3. Like and comment on other people's pins. Sharing is caring. When someone sees you interacting with his or her content, that person might check out yours and choose to follow you, too!
4. Promote your account in your other channels. Maybe a handful of your Twitter followers are using Pinterest. Give them a chance to follow you by sharing your account via Twitter, too! One great way to do that is to connect your company Twitter account with your Pinterest account so you automatically tweet all your new pins (you can turn on this integration in your Pinterest settings). To connect with the right Twitter account, the email address you used to sign up for Pinterest will need to match the email address associated with your corporate Twitter account.

Measure Your Traffic and Leads

Show me the money! At the end of the day, what's going to matter most is how much traffic, leads, and customers you generate via a specific source.
As you start pinning images to Pinterest and adding more images over time, how is your traffic changing? Is there a specific image type or topic that sends more traffic than others? Use your analytics tools to understand what images work and what don't.
From there, monitor your lead conversion. As you tweak your strategy to meet your B2B needs, you may learn you need to send people to more internal pages of your website.
Through these steps, you will begin generating Pinterest reach, traffic, leads, and customers. Monitor your growth, and tweak your strategy over time! As you pin more and more content to Pinterest, your metrics should improve.

Source: HubSpot

< kashmir tour packages
cheap holiday packages
amarnath yatra tour packages
kashmir honeymoon packages
srinagar package
kashmir tour package from delhi
ladakh tour package
leh packages
summer holiday packages

How to Use Internal Linking to Improve Your Website's SEO

nShare

Great content and attracting inbound links are major elements of your SEO strategy. If you’ve created an exciting blog post or ebook, you’ll naturally want to work on making sure that you are driving as much traffic to it as possible. Part of that strategy should always include internal linking, and understanding how the other pages of your website can contribute value toward your new page.
If you are working on any important campaign, it’s absolutely critical to figure out which of your already great, high-authority pages should be linking to your new page, or what ongoing efforts can continue to build link authority for your site over time. And with great internal linking, ranking for very difficult keyword phrases is made much easier as you share the authority of your other best content with your new efforts.

Why Internal Linking Is Important

Remember that a search engine’s ultimate goal is to surface the very best few pages about a topic on the web. With the focus that most linkbuilders and SEO specialists have on inbound links and developing links from other sites, it is easy to overlook how internal linking is important. If you’ve heard that inbound links are like other sites voting for your content and telling search engines what your content is about, internal links are like voting for yourself and also letting the search engine know about your vote.
While it’s obviously better to have more people than just yourself voting for your content, if you don’t start by voting for yourself, the search engines will have a difficult time considering your page as one of the best on the web. Internal links are valuable not just because they are a direct signal that your content is important, but also because those links themselves pass on their own link authority.

When you consider that the link authority of each page is being shared into your website from these internal links, the value of your blog and other linked pages is more obvious to search engines. While these pages are ranking well and bringing traffic into your website on their own, there is a second layer of SEO benefit that they can bring to your website if you properly apply them to your internal linking strategy.

How to Leverage Internal Linking

If there’s a page on your website that you care about a lot and that has a lot of value to you, you should be thinking about how you can explain that value to a search engine. Start by considering how a search engine understands the value of an internal link; it’s looking at how many pages on your website link to that page, and how they link to it. If every page of your website links to something, it must be important to you -- like your homepage, or your blog’s homepage. If the only links in to your blog are from your 'About Us' section and nothing from your homepage or your website’s main navigation, you have already sent a strong signal to search engines that your blog is not very strong. On the other hand, if your blog is in the main navigation on your website, Google and Bing will treat it like one of your top pages.

3 Ways to Improve the Internal Linking on Your Website

Here are three exercises you should go through to ensure you are effectively using the authority of your internal pages.

1) Sketch out a map of your website. Make a list of each page in your main navigation and what links are on each of those major pages. This will help you understand the links that you already have between each section of your site, and how you’ve linked it together in the past. Sometimes, laying out your whole website visually is the only way to understand what you’ve overlooked and what’s working. You might just uncover that the reason some of your best pages are ranking well is because you subconsciously did a great job building your own links into them from your other content.

2) Next, look at the topics that you frequently write about. If you’re writing regularly about something, you should have another dedicated page on your website about that topic -- like a landing page with an offer, for example. Each of those posts should be linking to that authoritative page on the subject, and it should be optimized for conversions. If your landing page has a prominent call-to-action, your effective use of internal linking will help drive more new leads through the offer.
Also consider where that page lies in your navigation, and if it’s worth linking to from your homepage or products page. Depending on your business, you might even find that linking to a specific blog post or page from your website’s main navigation might suit you well. For example, if your company often needs to explain your business to people who discover you, that would make a good blog post that deserves major promotion across your site.

3) Think about every other page that could link to your ranking page. If it is a page related to a topic you frequently blog about, make sure each of your new blog posts about that topic reference that page and link into it. You can see this in how HubSpot ranks for the term 'how to use facebook for business.'




One of the major factors behind its rank is that we regularly write about how to use Facebook for business, we have a lot of very powerful links from our blog posts about using Facebook for business, and we have at least one link in each of those entries to our Facebook for Business landing page. Those blog posts we wrote over the last five years about this topic all have great authority of their own because people have linked to them, and each of them links to our landing page to further build that value.

Source: HubSpot

12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like An Expert

inSh

If you’re like me, you probably use Google many times a day.  But, chances are, unless you are a technology geek, you probably still use Google in its simplest form.  If your current use of Google is limited to typing a few words in, and changing your query until you find what you’re looking for, then I’m here to tell you that there’s a better way – and it’s not hard to learn.  On the other hand, if you are a technology geek, and can use Google like the best of them already, then I suggest you bookmark this article of Google search tips.  You’ll then have the tips on hand when you are ready to pull your hair out in frustration when watching a neophyte repeatedly type in basic queries in a desperate attempt to find something.
The following Google search tips are based on my own experience and things that I actually find useful.  The list is by no means comprehensive.  But, I assure you that by learning and using the 12 tips below, you’ll rank up there with the best of the Google experts out there.  I’ve kept the descriptions of the search tips intentionally terse as you’re likely to grasp most of these simply by looking at the example from Google anyways.

12 Expert Google Search Tips

1. Explicit Phrase:
   Lets say you are looking for content about internet marketing.  Instead of just typing internet marketing into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase.  To do this, simply enclose the search phrase within double quotes.

   Example: "internet marketing"

2. Exclude Words:
   Lets say you want to search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising.  To do this, simply use the "-" sign in front of the word you want to exclude.

   Example Search: internet marketing -advertising

3. Site Specific Search:
   Often, you want to search a specific website for content that matches a certain phrase.  Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the "site:somesite.com" modifier.

   Example: "internet marketing" site:www.smallbusinesshub.com

4. Similar Words and Synonyms:
   Let’s say you want to include a word in your search, but want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms.  To do this, use the "~" in front of the word.

   Example: "internet marketing" ~professional

5. Specific Document Types:
   If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier "filetype:".  For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to internet marketing.

   Example: "internet marketing" filetype:ppt

6. This OR That:
   By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search.  If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator.  (Note: The OR has to be capitalized).

   Example: internet marketing OR advertising

7. Phone Listing:
   Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know who it is.  If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature.

   Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note: the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).

8. Area Code Lookup:
   If all you need to do is to look-up the area code for a phone number, just enter the 3-digit area code and Google will tell you where it’s from.

   Example: 617

9. Numeric Ranges:
   This is a rarely used, but highly useful tip.  Let’s say you want to find results that contain any of a range of numbers.  You can do this by using the X..Y modifier (in case this is hard to read, what’s between the X and Y are two periods.)  This type of search is useful for years (as shown below), prices, or anywhere where you want to provide a series of numbers.

   Example: president 1940..1950

10. Stock (Ticker Symbol):
    Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock.

    Example: GOOG

11. Calculator:
    The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google.

    Example: 48512 * 1.02

12. Word Definitions:
    If you need to quickly look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply use the "define:" command.

    Example: define:plethora

Source: HubSpot

Free Advertising on Google

hare

Many small businesses do not know that you can get some free advertising on Google, using Google Local or Google Maps.  Google is looking to increase the value of their local search and their mapping application, so they have a simple way for you to tell them some information about your business, and now they are infusing those results into their main search engine.  It is basically a way to advertise your business on Google for free, and everyone loves a free advertisement.  This will help your advertisement show up in searches and can help you get more traffic, leads and customers.  For example, a Boston volunteer organization I work with called the Boston Scholars Program is currently listed at the TOP of the Google search results for searches like "volunteer in boston", "volunteer boston ma", and "volunteer boston, ma".  See the image below.

How to Get Free Advertising on Google

Things You Need Before Starting Your Free Advertisement

• A description of your business
• Your phone number, address, and any other contact info you want to advertise
• A logo or image that represents your business (some people use a picture of their office, store, or restaurant)
• A coupon or special offer you want to advertise (Google also lets you add a coupon for FREE if you want)

Step-by-Step Guide to Free Google Advertisement 

1. Go to www.google.com/local and search for your business to verify it is not yet listed with an advertisement.
2. Go back to www.google.com/local and click on Add/Edit Your Business at the bottom left part of the page.  (See image below.)
   
     
3. Follow the steps provided by Google.  They are pretty simple and straightforward.  As part of the process you will need to verify your business either by phone or mail.
4. Check back in a few weeks with Google and verify your listing.  If you want to update it, you can use the same process outlined here to update your listing.  See image below of the advertisement for the Boston Scholars Program including details and logo.

Source: HubSpot

7 Keyword Research Mistakes That Stifle Your SEO Strategy

are

Getting found in organic search is one of the most cost-effective means of lead generation, so it's no wonder marketers and SEOs spend plenty of time optimizing their online presence to get ranked in the SERPs for important keywords. And whether you're just starting out with SEO or it's been a part of your internet marketing strategy for a while, you're probably familiar with the need to conduct keyword research to inform the content and SEO strategies that help achieve that rocking organic presence.
The thing is ... there are kind of a lot of keywords out there. So which ones do you choose? How do you even approach researching and selecting keywords to target in your content creation and link building efforts when you could realistically have hundreds of thousands in your arsenal?
While it's not a bad idea to keep an eye on a lot of search terms -- you know, to see if some become more or less important to your strategy over time -- you won't get far spreading your efforts so thin. So here are some common mistakes to avoid when conducting your keyword research so you don't end up with too many keywords, the wrong keywords, or an unhealthy mix of keywords to target in your SEO strategy.

1) Selecting Keywords That Don't Reflect How People Actually Search

Sometimes the search terms companies target reflect how they think about their industry, not how their target audience does. Are your search terms full of industry jargon that aren't even part of your leads' vocabulary yet? Are you targeting branded terms that describe your specific solution that many searchers aren't familiar with yet?
For example, not all of the traffic that lands on HubSpot's site actually knows that we sell inbound marketing software. In fact, some don't even know what "inbound marketing" is. But they do know they want to learn more about a component of inbound marketing -- like how to use social media to generate leads. So while it's important to target a search term like "inbound marketing," it's crucial to also target a long-tail term like "how to get leads with social media." That lets us capture traffic for the long-tail term and educate those readers about how generating leads through social media relates to inbound marketing.
If you're having trouble getting inside the minds of your target audience, it's time to get social -- in every sense of the word. Talk to your leads on the phone, ask employees on the front lines with your leads and customers how they talk about the concepts in your industry, and watch how leads and customers on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks talk about your industry. This will give you a good indication of the language and terms they use to describe their questions. That being said, it's important to confirm that the keywords you brainstorm are on point -- you know, that people actually use them as search terms. Simply check the search volume using HubSpot's Keyword Tool or the Google Keyword Tool. If your search term yields little or no monthly search volume, you haven't hit the mark. If the search term turns up hundreds or even thousands of monthly searches, congratulations! You've got a great new search term to target.
This isn't to say you shouldn't target jargon and branded terms in your search strategy -- you should! But it should also be balanced with the typically longer tail variations of keywords that people use when they don't know exactly what they're looking for (but you know what they're looking for is you!).

2) Failing to Perform Competitive Keyword Analysis

One of the reasons you're optimizing your organic search presence is so you appear higher up in the SERPs than your competitors. Research from Optify shows that websites that appear in listing position 1 in Google had an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4%. It drops to a CTR of 12% in position 2, and a 9.5% CTR for position 3. Do you want your competitors getting those clicks, or you?
If you don't perform competitive keyword research, two things may happen: you could end up targeting keywords that don't actually help you capture any competitive market share, or you miss important search terms your competitors are targeting but that you forgot to include in your keyword arsenal. Let's take a look at the "Competitors" function in HubSpot's Keywords Tool, for example.

This indicates the company in question is 17 listing positions away from beating its competitor for the term "using facebook for business." Is this an important keyword with an appropriate level of competitiveness for your business? That is to say, could you realistically move from position 18 to the top 3 for this search term, or is the search volume so high with so many other sites trying to rank for the term, that you would need far more content creation and link build resources than you have to be successful? For this term, there are 1,600 searches, so moving 17 positions is likely well within your grasp.

3) Not Focusing on Profitable Terms

No matter what your competitors are doing, you should always focus on whether the search terms you're targeting affect your bottom line. If your biggest competitor is in position 1 for a term that doesn't actually yield you any leads or customers, who cares, right? Use closed-loop analytics to determine which search terms generate that great traffic that converts into leads and customers so you can prioritize your optimization efforts.
First, take a look at which keywords are driving conversions. In the example below, the keyword "free advertising" yielded a lead, but the keyword "don corleone" didn't give bunk (wonder why?).

Prioritize the keywords that have the best conversion rate from lead-to-customer, and then take it one step further: look at which keywords drove the most customers. Traffic and leads are good, but customers are better. Based on the closed-loop analytics below, it wouldn't be wise to spend time creating content and building links around the term "lil wayne," despite the fact that it led to some website visitors. Though for what, I can't be sure.

4) Having an Uneven Distribution of Keyword Difficulty

Not all keywords are created equal; some are extremely difficult to rank for, and others will be a quick win for your business. The key to seeing constant gains from your organic strategy is constantly targeting keywords of all difficulty levels. If you target only competitive terms -- head terms with search volume in the hundreds of thousands -- maybe you'll see significant gains in several months. Or you could target keywords with low search volume that are easy to rank for -- typically long-tail keywords, which do drive highly qualified traffic -- but never see that big win that comes from ranking for a hugely important head term with tons of traffic.
So the best inbound marketers target both, and they let the long-tail keywords they target feed their campaign to rank for important head terms. So if you're trying to rank for the (possibly) highly competitive head term "unicorn farms," you can spend time improving your rank for it while also generating traffic from long-tail terms like "unicorn farms in boston," "unicorn farms with good reviews," and "best unicorn farms for kids."

5) Not Knowing Your Geography

This first little detail is easy to overlook -- before targeting a search term, ensure the traffic originates in your area of business. If you only sell to customers within a certain geographical location, what good is it to rank for a search term that is searched largely in a place you don't do business? You can filter your searches by location in Google's Keyword Tool.
And if you're a local or regional business, get proactive with geographic search terms. If you're one of just a few unicorn breeders in Michigan, for example, you may be fine to just target terms like "Unicorn breeders in southwest Michigan," "Unicorn breeders near Detroit," and "Unicorn breeders in Michigan." If you're in a much more competitive market, though, like unicorn insurance providers, your geographic terms should be more granular. Consider terms like "Unicorn insurance providers in Royal Oak," "Unicorn insurance providers on Woodward Avenue," and "Unicorn insurance providers 48201."

6) Not Monitoring Search Trends

When considering keywords to target, consider how their popularity trends over time so you can get ahead of a potential search boom before your competitors. This is also a crucial research tactic for seasonal businesses so you have enough content written in advance to rise in the search rankings during the off-season, and keep you in the top when your season is in full swing. You can use tools like Google Insights for Search to see how a certain search phrase performs over time -- you can see when the search starts to increase for "halloween costumes," for example, in the graph below.

This is also crucial to consider because of the way Google presents search traffic -- as a 12-month average. If your business' search traffic has major seasonality swings, the search volume estimates you're receiving could overstate or understate the current importance of targeting any given search term.

7) Failing to Maintain and Adjust Over Time

Just as you should monitor the search trends of keywords over time, you should also monitor your performance for keywords over time. First, see if your content creation and link-building efforts are helping you improve your listing position in the SERPs for the search terms you're targeting, and whether that improved listing position is actually driving traffic, leads, and customers.

But, just as important, is watching how your performance tracks for search terms that you've already gained top positions for. Often, marketers stop optimizing for search terms that they are always in the top of the SERPs for, because come on, they already made it to number 1! But you can easily slip from that position if competitors ramp up their efforts to rank for that term. Continue to create content and build links around these terms, or you could find yourself struggling to regain lost positions -- and all the traffic, leads, and customers you lost with it.

Source: HubSpot