5 Examples of Effective B2B Content Marketing in Times of Crisis

There has been no greater disruption to business in the modern era than the COVID-19 pandemic. For many, it seems as though the world has stopped turning. For marketers, it seems as though now is the worst time to try to promote anything. But as our CEO, Lee Odden, said, “While there will be a period of adjustment, these changes do not mean the work stops. It doesn’t mean companies don’t need information, solutions, support, products and services.” And he couldn’t be more right. Your audience may even have a greater need now for your solutions or expertise. They’re trying to navigate through this uncertain time, too. And they’re looking for help now more than ever before. To help you answer those calls for help and know what types of content are successful in times of crisis, I’ve gathered five examples of effective B2B content marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

#1 - HealthcareSource

Healthcare workers have always been essential. And with a pandemic afoot, they’ve become the most essential. As a result, hospitals and healthcare providers need to ensure they’re fully staffed, but that’s easier said than done. Declining revenues have led to job cuts. Doctors catching the virus has led to job growth. Hiring for healthcare is undergoing constant fluctuations. As a proven talent management software for healthcare providers, HealthcareSource saw that they were in a unique position to help. Through a long, thoughtful blog post, loaded with examples from healthcare systems around the world, HealthcareSource created a great resource to help healthcare organizations manage their hiring, onboarding, and talent acquisition strategies. They also created an on-demand webinar with in-depth tactics on how to manage these constant fluctuations in job demand and supply.

#2 - Zoom

Zoom, a favorite video conferencing tool for any organization, has seen their number of daily active users jump from only 10 million to over 200 million in just three months. They’ve grown from hosting business meetings to hosting virtual classes, happy hours among friends, family game nights, and more for hundreds of millions of people. COVID-19 and social distancing have invariably helped grow their user base. However, that comes with its own set of challenges. They now have to train hundreds of millions of people on how to use Zoom, how to adjust their mic settings, how to ensure their Zoom is secure and private. They’re users needed support, fast. So they created an in-depth COVID-19 resource with every relevant training users could need. But what makes this resource even more helpful is that they segmented it based on use-cases. Need help while working remotely? You have your own section. Need help teaching your class? You have your own section, too. It’s a great example of how tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience; help is easier to find and the experience feels more personalized.   [bctt tweet="“Tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience.” — Anne Leuman @annieleuman" username="toprank"]

#3 - monday.com*

Lockdown. Quarantine. Social distancing. Between those three mandates, it’s clear to see why the number of people working remotely is reaching unprecedented heights. For monday.com, a work operating system provider, this presented an interesting opportunity. They saw that teams needed help transitioning to a remote work environment with the least amount of friction. They needed help ensuring they had the right technology, process, and structures to make remote work successful. They needed help knowing how to best use monday.com remotely instead of in a physical office. To ease the remote work transition, monday.com created a new page on their website educating others on how to use their software for remote work. This new page helps existing clients and potential prospects on how monday.com can help ease the challenges of working remotely. They also made the smart decision of adding this page to their main site navigation, making it extremely easy for visitors to access. In addition to this new product page, the team at monday.com also created a custom video and content hub to ensure their users can get answers to all of their questions. *monday.com is a TopRank Marketing client.

#4 - Slack

Slack was already a popular piece of software for any business, helping streamline team communications and collaboration. With more workers at home, I’m sure businesses — including our own — have become even more reliant on Slack to carry the burden of all text communication between teams. And while they could have taken a page from Zoom or monday.com and created dedicated resources to help train new users or customers who may be relying on Slack a bit more during this time, they didn’t. They saw a different opportunity to help their audience. During a crisis, the value of information skyrockets. Business leaders want to know; what’s happening to the economy? Will their market be impacted? How is this affecting their workforce? Slack created a report to help answer those questions, especially as it relates to remote workers and the challenges they face. They recognized that key decision makers in their target audience desired more information to help them solve top challenges like transitioning to remote work, improving their employee experience, and more. With this report, they were able to provide those insights, helping their audience optimize how they work together during a pandemic.

#5 - Dropbox

Do you know what distributed work is? I didn’t know what it was, either. And this is where Dropbox’s latest content marketing really shines. Dropbox saw that while most of the world was focusing on transitioning to remote work, they really needed to focus on distributed work. Organizations sorely needed to be educated on the difference between the two and how they require different strategies. As Dropbox points out, “remote work is a discipline for the individual worker, but distributed work is a discipline for the entire organization.” That’s a very important distinction to make as organizations attempt to navigate social distancing and still get the work done. Their thought leadership content around distributed work is truly eye-opening. Positioned high up on their blog and given its own content hub, their distributed work content is a must-read for any organization operating remotely during this time. And it all happened because they recognized a key, relevant term that not many were focusing on.

Be Helpful. Be Successful.

The true key to success in B2B content marketing is to always come from a place of empathy. The more you’re able to understand and empathize with your target audience, the more likely you are to surface content opportunities that help them overcome their pain points and challenges. And helping them = success. That doesn’t change even in times of crisis. In fact, it becomes all the more important. Use the B2B content marketing examples above as a guide when creating your own content and remember to be empathetic to their needs. If you want to help your audience during this time, learn how to build trust with your audience through authentic content.

The post 5 Examples of Effective B2B Content Marketing in Times of Crisis appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis

A crisis can turn things upside down for everyone. It can put many people and businesses into tough spots where they have to prioritize and concentrate on what’s really important and what will help them pull through a period of anxiety and uncertainty.

During such a time, marketers can keep marketing, but effective messaging tries to be human, helpful, and mindful. They need to watch their tone and their approach, which might not be easy, but they should be reaching out to customers and seeing how they can help. There are also other areas marketers can look at improving and refining, such as SEO, their strategy, content, and overall planning.

To provide insights into how marketers should operate during a difficult time, we put together these ten expert tips to show you how to be resilient, sensitive, and productive during a crisis.

1. Do not capitalize on the crisis.

The “unapologetic truth teller in marketing,” Katie Martell, says that this crisis is a chance for marketers to act with competence and ethics. You should try not to take advantage of the crisis in any way. Instead, look at it as an opportunity to help your customers, your team, and your community.

2. Do smart, responsible, and emphatic marketing.

When it comes to marketing, context matters! Asher Rumack, Director of Brand & Content Strategy at Column Five, stresses the importance of marketers addressing a crisis with empathy and tact. This means maybe altering your campaigns, deadlines, and tone, as you  should strive to be positive, helpful, and informative.

3. Understand, anticipate, and go above and beyond to fulfill customer needs.

During a crisis, the customer experience becomes more important than ever, according to Vandita Grover, a freelance contributor for MarTechAdvisor. With technology and a digital presence, marketers can still reach their customers and provide solutions and information that can help with at least some of their problems.

4. Double down on SEO efforts.

Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing believes that customer empathy should be at the forefront of marketing during any time and especially during a crisis. Part of this is providing solutions and answers that customers need, and SEO remains a frequently used channel for information discovery. Marketers can make their content as relevant and easy to find as possible for audiences, and SEO allows people to discover information on their own terms rather than as the result of unemphatic or even opportunistic marketing.

5. Act with a purpose on social media.

Put people first with your social media marketing and not brands or logos, says Jay Baer of Convince & Convert. Post with a purpose and listen harder to discover what opportunities out there exist where you can lend a hand.

6. Build a more solid foundation.

Digital marketing pioneer Ann Handley suggests slowing down now to speed up later. Now is the time to build momentum for what truly matters long term. You have a chance to deepen relationships, redefine often confusing marketing roles, and see how you can help your community, company, and industry in both the long and short term.

7. What you do now will define who you are later.

Matt Heinz, B2B marketing and sales expert, wants people to know that we will all get through this! However, some of the ways in which people are now reorganizing their lives and careers will become part of the new normal. Some of the pivots you make now will help you become more efficient, effective, and useful in the future.

8. Get creative.

A crisis requires marketers have to think up and propose new ways to engage with customers, Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD feels. To justify a new approach (and the budget to do so), build a solid business case, connect business objectives to marketing outcomes, align with sales, and create the right benchmarks. Above everything though, you have to be realistic and honest in how you go about achieving your goals. Without honesty or being realistic, you can't have trust, which is essential to innovation and convincing people to invest in you and your plans.

9.  Use this time to align with your sales team.

Your sales team will have the best insights into what is going with customers and how you can help them. Use this opportunity to better align with your sales team, suggests Tom Cunniff, of Cunniff Consulting, and Mike Cucka, of Brand Evident.

10. Reject the notion of business as usual.

Freelance B2B writer Sharon Hurley Hall wants marketers to acknowledge that things have changed that this is “business unusual.” This means you should continue marketing but not doing in a tone-deaf and insensitive manner. You should also be reaching out to clients if only to check in with them and see how you can help, to stay top of mind to them and build goodwill for when things get closer back to normal. It’s also a chance to identify new opportunities that you might not be able to pursue now but for later. 

                                                                                               

Want more advice on how to deal with crises? Check out these related posts:

• Systemic Shocks: Adjusting Your Email Messaging in Times of Disruption
• Disaster and Crisis Messaging Best Practices
• 5 Ways Marketing and Sales Should Align During a Crisis or Disaster
• Content Marketing During a Crisis or World Event
• 5 Ways Marketing and Sales Can Align During a Crisis or Disaster

 

 

 

 

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Here’s to Empathy in Business

Here’s to Empathy in Business written by Jenna Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Minter Dial

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Minter Dial a professional speaker, history fanatic, and president and founder of Digitalproof Consultancy, a strategic firm providing digital and brand consulting to clients. He is also an award-winning author, including his latest book Heartificial Empathy, Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence that won the Book Excellence Award 2019 and was shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2019.

Minter Dial is the producer of the award-winning book and film The Last Ring Home and co-author of Futureproof that won the Business Book Award 2018.

Minter Dial is a self-proclaimed itinerant bohemian in search of experiences and interesting people. As a metier, he relishes being an energetic speaker on leadership, brand and digital strategy with a specialization in digital transformation.

Questions I ask Minter Dial:

• What are the overarching ideas of empathy and artificial intelligence being blended?
• How does empathy relate to business?
• How do we ultimately connect this idea to AI?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• Where empathy needs to start in a business
• How empathy affects employees and customers.
• The two items that will gage our ability to connect AI to empathy

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Minter Dial:

• Learn more about Minter Dial.
• Connect with Minter on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr.

Zephyr is a modern, cloud-based CMS that’s licensed only to agencies. The system is lightweight, easy to use, and incredibly fast. And with an array of beautiful themes to choose from, you can get your clients’ websites up-and-running quickly and with less effort. Or, if you’d rather build a custom site, Zephyr includes agency services to be your plug-and-play dev shop.

Zephyr is passionate about helping agencies create great websites for their clients. To learn more, go to Zephyrcms.com.

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Why B2B Marketers Should Give a DAM: Top Tips on Digital Asset Management

Why should B2B marketers give a DAM? When that DAM is digital asset management, you’re looking at a system that will improve all forms of online marketing, whether it's B2B influencers, social, search, content, video or always-on marketing. It's also one of the top investments an organization can make for successfully leveraging a digital environment that will only expand with more data in the coming years. It’s no wonder the global DAM market was valued at $3.4 billion in 2019, and is expected to reach $8.5 billion by 2025, according to report data from IMARC.

Just What Are Digital Assets?

As we explored in our introduction to DAM technology, “Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing,” digital assets are simply any computer files, stored anywhere — whether on your phone, tablet, desktop, network, or in the cloud. DAM software runs either on a local computer network or in the cloud, and is built to pull in and make it easy to organize an unlimited number of files — all those digital assets that organizations create and use daily. The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of DAM will be, especially when accumulated over time. The pandemic has also brought to light weaknesses for some organizations, as remote workers place additional strains on systems not necessarily designed for unified online access to digital asset libraries. Let’s look at how adding a DAM system to your mix can help improve six major forms of digital marketing. [bctt tweet="“The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of digital asset management (DAM) will be, especially over time.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

1 — Use DAM to Augment Your Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing campaigns, especially in the B2B realm, can involve many people and projects, often with a variety of images, document files, videos, and other digital assets. Tracking multiple versions of files — with varieties specifically created for each social media platform involved in a campaign — can get complicated, and many firms either use a cobbled together make-shift approach that may be known only to one or a few people in the organization, or end up bouncing around from one software solution to another. A good DAM database, however, can be used company-wide and is expandable enough to accommodate any change in file types, for as long as the DAM is supported by its developers. The best DAM solutions also offer transparent and robust import and especially export routines, so that organizations aren’t locked-in to one DAM environment with their digital assets held hostage, unable to easily migrate to other solutions if needed. Influencer marketing benefits from DAM through increased efficiency and time savings, which ultimately make influencers happy and better able to share co-created content.

2 — Expand Your Content Marketing With DAM

The type of savvy content management offered by DAM systems could save marketing teams 13 days annually per staff member, according to report data from Canto. The same research found that 41 percent of marketers said that digital filing inefficiencies had caused delayed project releases, and 54 percent noted that they experienced frustration with inefficient filing systems. By its very nature content marketing involves vast quantities of content in all its various digital forms, and a powerful DAM system enhances content marketing by making it easy to find all the digital assets a business has ever created, both for current campaigns and when gathering past performance and return on investment (ROI) data. Brands such as Under Armour use DAM systems to manage over 12 terabytes of content including more than half a millions digital assets for some 7,000 products that change seasonally, a task that while possible without using a DAM, really shows off the benefits of a solid organizational and archival solution.

3 — Make a Move to DAM to Improve Your Video Marketing

As with static digital assets, a good DAM system easily ingests and organizes video content, putting it at the fingertips of each person in an organization who needs it, from video editor to social media manager to corporate executives. Digital video has remained a leading performer for marketers, with 92 percent saying it's an important part of their marketing strategy (HubSpot), and with the arrival of the global health crisis initial reports have shown that more video than ever is being viewed, including 5.5 percent higher video view rates on Twitter. One of the many benefits a top-notch DAM solution offers is the ability to find otherwise hidden static content in your organization's archives that can work well in creating video marketing, oftentimes also avoiding time-consuming efforts to re-do work that has already been completed but can't easily be found.

4 — DAM Shines in Always-On Marketing Environments

Always-on marketing replaces on-again off-again campaigns with a fluid ongoing effort, continually cultivating and carefully building efforts that allow businesses to seamlessly adapt their marketing efforts, rather than playing catch-up, stopping a campaign, and waiting to build a new one. For B2B marketers, the shift to always-on is swiftly advancing, and in always-on marketing DAM shines brightly, as it removes many of the bottlenecks slowing down traditional marketing by offering easy and swift access to a firm’s digital asset archive. We recently launched a new ongoing series for B2B brands looking to explore the many benefits of always-on influence, as our CEO Lee Odden took a close at in "Always On Influence: Definition and Why B2B Brands Need it to Succeed." Marketing technology also thrives when DAM is involved, and MarTech Advisor recently took a look at 10 of the major players in the DAM market. [bctt tweet="“Always On Influencer Marketing is a strategic approach to creating communities of trusted experts that is relationship and content focused.” @LeeOdden" username="toprank"]

5 — Search Marketers Find Success with DAM

Search marketers also benefit from a powerful DAM system, being able to systematically find search campaign assets, analytics data contained in spreadsheets or other formats, in ways that help make more data-informed search marketing efforts a snap. In a way the so-called findability of search marketing goes hand-in-hand with a smart DAM solution, as both are centered around finding things — whether in the form of search engine query answers or finding a file you know you have but haven't been able to successfully locate until the arrival of a DAM system.

6 — B2B Marketers Get Social with DAM

Social media marketers too can gain advantages by using a DAM workflow, easily accessing digital assets destined for a variety of social platforms, whether they involve static or video content, advertising copy in text documents, or social analytics data in any number of file formats. Social media marketing is also enhanced by DAM through time savings, but also by the extra insight it can bring helping to open up an organization's digital asset library. Re-purposing content on social platforms can take on an entirely new and all-encompassing level when every digital asset can easily come in to play and be combined in relevant new ways, thanks to a powerful DAM system.

Invest in Your Firm’s Long-Term Success Using DAM

Whether you specialize in B2B influencer marketing, social, search, content, video or always-on efforts — or a combination of these primary digital marketing practices — finding and implementing the right digital asset management system is an investment in the long-term success of your organization. Finally, to help you learn more about DAM solutions for marketers, including a list of many of the top providers, have a look at our article exploring the subject.

The post Why B2B Marketers Should Give a DAM: Top Tips on Digital Asset Management appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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3 Simple Steps to Get Your First 10,000 Visitors from Google

Today’s going to be fun.

I’m going to make a bet with you that if you follow the 3 steps below, and you really follow them, you can get 10,000 visitors from Google.

I promise it won’t be hard, but it will take time.

And if you follow my steps and don’t get the results, hit me up and I will personally help you with your marketing.

All I ask is you do it for 3 months straight. You may not get to 10,000 visitors from Google in 3 months as some niches are really tiny, but most of you should get there or be well on your way.

Again, if you prove to me that you followed everything below and you don’t achieve the results, you can get in touch and I will personally help you with your marketing for free.

Ready?

Step #1: Finding the right keywords

If you pick the wrong keywords, you’ll find yourself with little to no traffic and, even worse, you’ll find yourself with little to no sales.

So, before we get you on your way to more search traffic, let’s find you the right keywords.

I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in your competitor’s domain name.

Now, I want you to click on the “Keywords” navigational option in the sidebar.

This report will show you all of the keywords that your competition is ranking for.

If you don’t see a list of thousands of keywords, that means you didn’t type in a big enough competitor. And if you don’t know who a big competitor is, just do a Google search for any major term related to your industry. The sites at the top are your major competitors.

I want you to go through the list of keywords and look for all of the keywords that are related to your business and have an SEO Difficulty (SD) score of 40 or less. The higher the number, the harder the keyword is to rank for. The lower the number, the easier it is to rank for.

In addition to an SD score of 40 or lower, I want you to look for keywords that have a volume of 500 or more.

Volume means the number of people that search for the keyword on a monthly basis. The higher the number, the more potential visitors that term will drive once you rank for it.

Next up, I want you to click on “Top Pages” in the navigation.

This will bring you to a report that looks like this:

This report shows you the most popular pages on your competitor’s site.

Now, under the Est. Visits (Estimated Visits) column, I want you to click on “view all” for the first few results.

Every time you do that it shows you all of the keywords that drive traffic to that page.

Just like you did with the keywords report, I want you to look at the keywords that have an SD of 40 or lower and a volume of 500 or more.

The one difference though, is that I want you to check out some of the URLs on the Top Pages report.

Click on over to the site so you can see the type of content they are writing. This is important because it will give you an idea of the types of content that Google likes to rank.

When you create similar pages (I will teach you how to do this shortly), it will allow you to get similar results to your competition over time.

Now that you have a handful of keywords, I want you to expand the list and find other related keywords.

In the navigation menu, click on “Keyword Ideas.”

When you type in one of the keywords you are thinking of going after in this report, it will give you a big list of other similar keywords.

This is important because it will show you all of the closely related terms.

For example, let’s say you came up with a list of keywords of a handful of keywords, such as:

1. Dog food
2. Cat food
3. Dog bed
4. How to clean your cat
5. What do birds eat

You can’t just take all of those keywords and write one article and shove all the keywords in because they aren’t similar to each other. Someone looking for “dog beds” is probably not interested in reading about what birds eat.

So by typing in a keyword into the Keyword Ideas report, it will show you all of the other similar keywords that you can include in a single article.

When you are on the Keyword Ideas report you’ll notice some tabs: Suggestions, Related, Questions, Prepositions, and Comparisons.

I want you to go through each of those tabs. They will show you a different group of similar keywords that you may be able to include in your article (we will go over how to write the article in step 2).

Just take a look at the Questions tab:

You can see the keywords are drastically different than the Related tab:

Again, you’ll want to look for all keywords that have an SD score of 40 or lower. But this report looks for keywords that have a volume above 200.

I know 200 may seem like a small number, but if you find 100 good keywords that all have a volume of 200 or more, that adds up to 20,000 potential visitors per month. Or better yet, 240,000 per year.

Now it’s rare that you are going to get all of those people to come to your site, but you can get a portion of them. Even 10% would add up… especially if you did this with a handful of articles.

Your goal should be to have a list of at least 100 keywords that are very similar. You’ll want to do this at least five times. For example, remember that list of five keywords I mentioned above wasn’t too similar to each other…

1. Dog food
2. Cat food
3. Dog bed
4. How to clean your cat
5. What do birds eat

You’ll want to make sure that for each main keyword you use the Keyword Ideas report to find another 100 that can accompany each keyword.

Step #2: Write content

At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If your list of keywords isn’t at least 100 keywords per group, go back to step 1 and keep at it.

It’s not that hard to get to 100 similar keywords that you can include in one article. It just takes some time to continually search and find them.

In general, as a rule of thumb, I can find 100 keywords in less than 8 minutes. It may take you a bit longer than me at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’ll be easy.

With your newly found keywords, I want you to write an article.

All you have to do is follow this tutorial step-by-step to write your first article.

Or, if you prefer a video tutorial, watch this:

As for your keywords, naturally place them into the article when it makes sense.

What you’ll quickly learn is that you probably won’t be able to “naturally” include all 100 keywords within your article. And that’s fine.

The last thing you want to do is stuff in keywords because you aren’t writing this article for just search engines, you are writing it for people… and the secondary benefit is that search engines will rank it because it contains the right keywords.

Before you make your article live on your site, I want you to keep a few things in mind:

1. Keep your URLs short – Google prefers shorter URLs.
2. Include your main keyword in your headline – by having your main keyword in your headline, you’ll be more likely to rank higher.
3. Include your three main keywords in your meta tags – whether it is your title tag or meta description, include at least three main keywords in them. You won’t fit as many in your title tag, and that’s fine, but you should be able to within your meta description tag.

There are a lot of other things you can do to optimize your articles for SEO, but my goal is to keep this simple. Again, if you just follow these three steps, you’ll hit the 10,000-visitor mark.

So, for now, let’s just keep things simple and once you hit your goal, then you can get into the advanced stuff.

Step #3: Promoting your content

Writing content is only half the battle. Even if you include the right keywords in your article, if you don’t promote, it’s unlikely that it would be read or rank on Google.

So how do you make sure your content is read and ranks well?

Well, first you need to get social shares, and second, you need to get backlinks.

Yes, search engines don’t necessarily rank pages higher when they get more Facebook shares or tweets, but the more eyeballs that see your page the more likely you are to get backlinks.

And the more backlinks you get, generally, the higher you will rank.

So here’s how you get social shares…

First, I want you to go to Twitter and search for keywords related to your article.

As you scroll down, you’ll see thousands of people tweeting about stuff related to your keywords. Some of them will just be general updates but look for the members sharing articles.

And…

Now what I want you to do is click on their profile and see if they mention their contact information or their website. If they mention their email you are good to go. If they mention their website, head to it, and try to find their contact information.

You won’t be able to find everyone’s contact information, but for the people you do, I want you to send them this email:

Subject: [insert the keyword you searched for on Twitter]

Hey [insert their first name],

I saw that you tweeted out [insert the title of the article they tweeted]. I actually have an article that I recently released on that subject.

But mine covers [talk about what your article covers and how it is unique].

[insert link to your article]

If you like it, feel free to share it.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

PS: Let me know if you want me to share anything for you on Twitter or any other social network.

What you’ll find is a large percentage of the people will be willing to share your content because they already are sharing related content and, of course, you offered to share their content, which helps out too.

If you send out 30 to 40 emails like this, you’ll start getting traction on the social web.

Now that you have social shares, it’s time to build backlinks. Instead of giving you tons of link building methods as there are many that work, I am just going to start you off with one that works very well.

I want you to head back to the Keyword Ideas report on Ubersuggest.

Once you get there, type in some of the keywords that you are trying to go after.

On the right side of the report, you’ll see a list of sites that rank and the number of backlinks that each of the ranking URLs has.

Click on the “Links” number. For each result, it will take you to the Backlinks report, which looks something like this:

This will give you a list of all the sites linking to your competitor’s article.

I want you to go to each of those URLs, find the site owner’s contact information, and shoot them an email that looks like this:

Subject: [name of their website]

Hey [insert their name],

I noticed something off with your website.

You linked to [insert your competitor that they linked to] on this page [insert the page on their site that they are linking to them from].

Now you may not see anything wrong with that, but the article you linked to isn’t helping out your website readers that much because it doesn’t cover:

[insert a few bullet points on how your article is better and different]

You should check out [insert your article] because it will provide a better experience for your readers.

If you enjoyed it, feel free to link to it.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

PS: If I can ever do anything to help you out, please let me know.

I want you to send out 100 of those emails for each article you write.

Conclusion

Yes, it takes work to get 10,000 visitors but once you do it you’ll continually generate traffic and, more importantly, sales.

To achieve 10,000 visitors, I want you to do the steps above five times. In other words, you will be writing five pieces of new content following the steps above.

It’s actually not that bad because you can just do 1 a week. So, within 5 weeks you would have done your job.

So, are you going to accept the challenge? If you do everything and don’t see the results over time, you can hit me up and I’ll help.

The post 3 Simple Steps to Get Your First 10,000 Visitors from Google appeared first on Neil Patel.

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How to Get High-Quality Backlinks

How to Get High-Quality Backlinks written by Jenna Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Getting backlinks can seem like a daunting task. How do you get other businesses to link to your site online?

If you don’t have any backlinks yet you can get up and running pretty quickly by tapping your existing partners and resources within your community. Things like the local chamber of commerce online listings, alumni directories for the founders’ schools, and church and community directories are great places to start. This is the low-hanging fruit, and getting these backlinks set up is a great way to ease into the next steps in a backlink strategy.

Once you’ve established those links, it’s time to move onto more advanced tactics. Gathering more backlinks should be an ongoing effort, and if you’re looking for legitimate ways to get backlinks, these are the best way to do it.

Research Competitors Backlinks

Start by investigating your competitors. Where are they getting backlinks? Are they in industry databases or local publications that list providers in their city? Once you’ve discovered these additional places where you can be listed, it’s sometimes as easy as filling out a simple form to get your business listed.

A comprehensive SEO tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs can help you research your existing backlinks as well as the links your competitors have acquired.

Update Existing Content

Hopefully, you already have some content on your site. Sometimes, there’s an opportunity to restructure or refresh the content you already have in order to generate backlinks.

Do you have any blog posts that list providers or tools that are helpful for your readers? Take a look through the list and add some new businesses onto these lists. Then, reach out to these businesses to let them know their service or tool has been featured; they’ll want to let their customers know that they got a shout-out on an outside site, and so you’ll likely get a backlink from them.

Submit Guest Posts

Guest blogging has long been a popular, more advanced way to get backlinks. Reaching out to relevant sites and writing a guest post on their blog is a great way to get links. However, over the years the trend of guest posting has waned a bit, so it’s now more difficult to get a guest blogging gig.

It’s worth the try, though! Put together a targeted list of blogs and publications that would be a solid fit for a strategic partner for your business. Write a compelling, error-free pitch email, outlining the topics you could write about and why it would bring real value to their audience. Tailor your pitch to each blog’s specific audience, and take the time to research who you’re emailing so that you can send a personalized message. Finally, feel free to follow up with your contact in a respectful way if you don’t hear back initially.

Join a Podcast

While guest blogging seems to be falling out of favor, guest podcasting is my new favorite way to get backlinks. Just like with guest blogging, guest podcasting is great because it allows you to tap into the existing audience of the brand of the podcast you’re appearing on.

And there’s an additional benefit that guest blogging doesn’t have: It’s very little additional work. While writing a blog post requires research, writing, editing, and selecting photos and relevant emails, when you are a guest on a podcast, you simply show up and talk about what you do every day. You’re an expert in your field, and you can speak comfortably on your topic with little preparation. And with most podcasts, you can call in from wherever you are to speak with the host, so within the 30 minutes or so that it takes to do the interview, you have generated great backlinks.

A service such as Podcast Bookers can get you set up a pitched to podcasts very quickly.

Write up a Report

While it’s sometimes challenging to convince others to let you guest blog, if you have exclusive research to share, you can capture everyone’s attention. Offering up research is a great way to get media links and to even open guest blogging doors.

Yes, exclusive research takes time. However, if you are able to partner with one of your existing business relationships, you can both reap the benefits and halve the work. You and your strategic partner can tap into your networks to find people to interview for the research. Then divide and conquer when it comes to assembly the data and creating visually-appealing ways to share it.

Connect in New Content

How can you get attention and backlinks for new content you create? Mentioning relevant influencers, community members, or others in your posts is a great way to get re-shares on new content.

Of course, you shouldn’t just stuff names into posts for the sake of name dropping. Make sure that the people you’re mentioning are relevant to what you’re writing about. For example, let’s say you are a home remodeling business. Consider pulling together a series of posts featuring families you’ve done work for. If there’s anyone that’s a pillar of the community who they’ve worked with, ask if they’d be willing to be featured. Let’s say you helped the former mayor remodel her kitchen—ask her if she’d be willing to talk about the process and share how her new and improved kitchen has bettered her life.

Once the post goes live, let the person know and ask them to re-share with their network and followers.

Publish a Press Releases

With all of these new digital marketing tactics, it’s possible to forget about those tried-and-true methods. But press releases are still a great way to get attention and backlinks! Are you launching a new product or opening a new location? Did you make a big, announcement-worthy hire? Are you participating in a local community event? There are plenty of reasons you might write a press release.

If you need a refresher on how to write an effective press release, check out this guest post on our Duct Tape Marketing blog.

Link Out

This is a long-game approach to getting backlinks, but it’s worth the effort. When you’re creating content, link out to tools and resources you genuinely like and think are helpful. If you’re featuring a specific tool or mentioning an individual person, you can email the business or person to let them know. But it’s good practice to include external links in every post, and many of those external links don’t warrant an email to the source.

However, it’s likely that the source is doing exactly what you’re doing: monitoring your online presence. They’ll see an alert that they’ve been linked out to, and that simple thing such as a link can get your brand on their radar screen. While they might not shout out that piece of content or link back to them right away, there may come a time in the future where they’re looking for a link to share that’s relevant to your client’s business, and it’s your site that they’ll turn to.

It’s important for you to build up a repository of backlinks. It matters for SEO ranking and your online reputation, and the more mentions you can get across the web, the more likely you are to win the attention of a new audience. But just as important as quantity is quality. A great marketing strategy can help you gather backlinks that are relevant to your business.

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Break Free B2B Series: Kelvin Gee on Winning with Enterprise ABM

Everyone in B2B is talking about account-based marketing. And almost everyone is practicing it in some form — around 93% of organizations, according to SiriusDecisions. “Not many are killing it though,” says Kelvin Gee. “That's the problem. They start pilots ... then they re-launch and learn from the mistakes. That's just a natural maturation.” This is a fundamental process in digital marketing, of course: test, assess, optimize. But in the Break Free B2B series, our goal is to help you fast-forward it by learning from the mistakes, successes, and revelations of your innovating peers in the field. And as the Senior Director of Modern Marketing Business Transformation at Oracle*, Kelvin draws from a deep well of experience at one of the powerhouse brands in enterprise technology. Walking the walk is different from talking to talk, but it’s easy to see why companies across the spectrum are seeking to do both. “Companies do need to be more customer-centric, deliver a better customer experience, personalize the content, align with sales, and measure themselves differently,” he observes. “I call account-based a strategic glue that pulls all that stuff together.” In his conversation with TopRank Marketing’s Josh Nite, filmed in Arizona during B2B Marketing Exchange in February, Kelvin shares his perspectives on what it takes to actually make ABM work, and how Oracle empowers its people to thrive within this framework. It comes down to a fairly simple and repeatable model: standardize, evangelize, train, enable. [bctt tweet="“Standardize, Evangelize, Train, Enable,” @kgee’s model for implementing #ABM at scale in large organizations like @oracle. #BreakFreeB2B. — Kelvin Gee" username="toprank"] During an expansive 25-minute interview, Kelvin unpacks the inner workings of enterprise ABM, from getting buy-in to rethinking attribution to developing meaningful metrics and beyond.

Break Free B2B Interview with Kelvin Gee

If you’re interested in checking out a particular portion of the discussion, you can find a quick general outline below, as well as a few excerpts that stood out to us.

• 1:00 - Kelvin's definition of modern marketing
• 1:45 - Scaling account-based marketing
• 2:15 - Strategic adaptations in the evolution of ABM
• 3:30 - How does an organization adopt a new marketing philosophy?
• 5:00 - Who should lead the charge for transformation?
• 7:15 - Metrics Oracle looks at to measure ABM success
• 8:45 - Overcoming traditional friction between sales and marketing
• 10:30 - Is there a need to redefine success and "credit" in order to achieve alignment?
• 12:15 - Operational structure: should sales and marketing converge?
• 13:30 - Challenges and opportunities in the industry
• 15:45 - Oracle's tech stack
• 17:45 - How to filter out data that matters and makes a difference
• 18:45 - What will marketing look like in five years?
• 21:15 - Humans versus robots, and their roles in marketing going forward
• 23:00 - What can marketers do to break free?

Josh: What kind of metrics does Oracle look at when measuring ABM? Kelvin: We actually look at account engagement as an early indicator on whether your program is performing or not, because if you're not seeing an increase in engagement from a snapshot that you might have taken before the campaign started, that probably means it's not working. Either the personalization isn't there, the tactics aren't working, you're not at the right watering holes, or the orchestration might not be right. [bctt tweet="“If you're not seeing an increase in engagement from a snapshot of before the campaign started, that probably means it's not working.” — @kgee of @oracle on measuring #ABM success. #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"] So that's the early indicator whether it's working or not. Once you're past engagement, what truly matters to sales, of course, is conversations. They want conversations with these target accounts, so that's what we really looked at and that's really measured by a target account pipeline, or "TAP," as we call it. But when you look at growth in that pipeline, regardless of crediting who sources that pipeline, whether it's marketing or sales, we don't care because it's a team sport. And you can see that growth. Again, you compare this with a snapshot you've taken of those target accounts before the campaign begins, you will see success, and that's how you measure some of those programs. Josh: I know that Oracle is a data corporation, and you live and die by data. Can you give me a little peek into what your tech stack looks like? Kelvin: Yeah, I'll give you some broad strokes but obviously we drink our own champagne, right? So Eloqua is our marketing automation platform and our analytics engine is all on Oracle analytics, but the important thing to understand is: We believe that data is the future of B2B marketing. Because we're not gonna have less data, we'll probably have more data in the future, so if you believe that and you also believe that most organizations — especially enterprise organizations — have data silos, and if the goal is to deliver a better customer experience, you’ve got to break down those data silos. [bctt tweet="“We believe that data is the future of B2B marketing. If the goal is to deliver a better customer experience, you’ve got to break down those data silos.” — @kgee of @oracle on #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"] So I always used the Marie Kondo analogy, right? Where she goes into your house and then she tells you to, you know, pile all your clothes from all your different closets onto your bed. And she tells you that for a reason, because only when you see all the piles of clothes on your bed does the light bulb go off and you say, "Oh my God I’ve got a lot of clothes." It's the same thing with your data. Once you consolidate all your data silos onto one bed, so to speak, in this case a customer intelligence platform or customer data platform or whatever you want to use, once you combine all that data, that's when you start to see all the insights of your customers. And for us, we think the future of B2B resides in a data lake of some sort. And that data lake is your single source of truth and when an account surges or rises, it'll rise simultaneously in your marketing automation platform and/or your CRM, and so that's really the important construct that we think is going to be more representative of a better customer experience in the future. Josh: What can marketers do to break free? Kelvin: I’ve always believed that all marketers should have empathy. I think empathy is a super important value that we all need to possess, because we all talk about customer-centricity, how we need to be more customer-centric blah, blah, blah. But what drives customer-centricity is empathy so, I always try to train all of my marketers, especially the young ones who are just coming out of college and learning that they have to develop the empathy muscle. And actually, I do this little "E" test in my workshops, and that is, I ask them to draw a capital-E on their forehead and then I watch them, and they struggle for a few seconds, because they realize there are two ways to control that "E" — they could draw it where it's facing the right way for them, but backward to the person facing them, or it's the other way, where it's backward for them but rightward-facing for the partner. And I asked how many people in the room draw one way or the other and it's usually a 50/50 mix, sometimes I'm surprised by 80/20 drawing it the right way, the right way being that it's rightward-facing for your partner. So I call this "E" test for a reason, because the E stands for 'empathy' because you've taken the time to think about the other person and make sure they see it the right way. So that's just a quick little parlor trick to show the importance of empathy in the world of marketing. Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus
• Break Free B2B Series: Jon Miller on How ABM Can Help Marketers Keep Their ‘Ship’ Together
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

* Disclosure: Oracle is a TopRank Marketing client.

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