The Maine SEO Blog

FeedBurner is a great platform for seamlessly keeping your blog subscribers up-to-date on your latest posts. The added bonus? As the blog owner, you get some pretty sweet stats out of the deal.

A lot of people (myself included) probably don’t check their FeedBurner stats often enough – but why would we? The FeedBurner dashboard is not the most intuitive under the sun. So let’s start with something simple: I want to see how many email subscribers I have and who they are.

From the main Analyze page, click “See more about your subscribers”. (By the way, subscribers on this page shows the total number of subscribers; reach denotes how many people made an action – viewed/clicked.)

You’ll be taken to a page with a graph – showing where your subscribers are actually subscribing from. If this is all the information you were looking for, then you’re done!

Here comes the tricky part. If you’re more interested in email subscribers, then scroll almost to the bottom of the Subscribers page until you see “Email Subscription Services”. Click “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions” to expand the box, then click “Manage Your Email Subscriber List”:

Now you’ll have a list of all of the email subscribers to your blog!

As a side note, I don’t know how accurate the numbers on FeedBurner truly are; but what they will do is give you a relative number of subscribers and stats for measuring purposes.

Nicki Hicks
Seeking out hard-to-find statistics

What happens when your site connects peers?

• Increases website success
• Improve SEO
• Enable real-time research

Example: Drive SEO Strategy (Bank of America’s small business online community)

• Top organic search result driven by community discussion (for the keyword “online contact database”)
• Per click cost for those advertising with PPC: $5-$15

How can social increase the ROI on Our Events? (vmworld.com)

• Reduce event costs
• Extend events to all year
• Offer more value to vendors

What is a holistic engagement strategy?

• Identify and engage the new world influencers
• Real-time & broad visibility of hot topics and trends
• Eliminate missteps

3 ways to engage, ignite passion, and grow relationships

• Become a conversation hub
• Extend the event experience to 365 days
• Focus on a holistic engagement strategy

Speaker: Adam Mertz, Product Marketing Manager at jive
@adammertz

We can improve how our websites maximize our Ad spend

• Improve ad conversion
• Improve spending decision processes
• Increase residual value of advertising
• Re-engage with customers on a long-term basis

Habit #1: Deliver what the customer expects with the continuity of messaging

Landing pages need to be delivered on the ad’s promise

• Copy and calls to action must be on line
• Offer expertise based on the ad’s subject
• Engage the user and build trust quickly
• Start looking for the problem

Keep telling the story as they move deeper into your site

• Consistently message to the user throughout their experience
• Uncover the customer needs and deliver solutions

Benefits

• Reduce bounce rates
• Increase conversion rates
• Build credibility with prospects and customers

Fun example: Waste-O-Meter

Habit #2: Segment and balance user experiences with site goals

Not as obvious as you think

• Align your promises with your calls to action
• Identify latent needs
• Allow visitors to self segment
• Guide users where you want them to go
• Remember: landing pages is just the start

Ask yourself…

• How will each segment react
• What different types of goals do they have?

Benefits

• Build credibility with visitors and prospects
• Higher conversion rates (leads, transactions, self service, etc.)

Habit #3: Deliver value back to your Web visitors by waiting for the right moment

Pick your pitch

• User experience must win out
• Visitors aren’t always ready to engage
• Understand intimacy levels
• Lead scoring helps find buying signals
• Customers filter advertising because it’s always on
• Make it personal, make it matter
• Deliver value

Benefits

• Improve conversions on site
• Differentiating experiences
• Word Of Mouth (WOM) marketing

Habit #4: Learn to listen, listening to your segments and optimizing messaging

Learning to listen

• Scoring your content and actions
• Testing and validating with polls and surveys
• What profiling can tell you
• Measure performance by segment and persona
• Test, test, test: Test messaging with MVT

Benefits

• Better understand of each and every customer
• Incrementally improve campaign performance by segment

Habit #5: Overcome objections and barriers using community content and engagement

Understand your customers hurdles

• Ask your sales team
• Understand the sales lifecycle
• Use community to overcome fear and build trust
• Use content marketing to overcome objectives
• The 12th man (if you’re a football fan) of your sales team

Benefits

• Drive leads deeper into the funnel for your sales team
• Reduce cost of sales
• Improved conversion rates and win ratios

Habit #6: Get the conversation started: Long-term customer value through ongoing dialog

Create an ongoing conversation with your customer

• Engage users in community content
• Put your customer community to work for you
• Offer community content interchangeably with your contnet
• Build trust and confidence in your community

Benefits

• Creates value for the customer
• Greater customer intimacy/Loyalty
• Expands the customer relationship
• Deeper understanding of customer needs

Habit #7: Provide the ongoing content and experience for which visitors hunger and return

The show isn’t over after the first dance

• Content marketing mixed with episodic delivery to keep them coming back
• Build content assets worth subscribing to
• Pull visitors back with community engagement
• Tap Wisdom of the Crowd content: help customers filter
• Nurture campaigns

Benefits

• Engagement leads to buying
• Drive residual value of ad spend

Putting the Habits to Work

Improve the effectiveness of your ad spend using your website with these 7 habits

• Improve ad conversion
• Improve our spending decision processes
• Increase residual value of advertising
• Re-engage with customers on long-term basis

Speaker: Darren Guarnaccia, VP of Product Marketing at Sitecore

Yesterday I talked a little bit about how to set up Google Alerts, and hinted at why they’re important. Today, I’d like to focus on how you can use the Alerts you receive.

Do some damage control. Even the best business will have unhappy customers. Here’s your opportunity to make it right. Don’t pretend like the post didn’t happen, don’t even ask the blogger to remove it. Face it – head on – and comment; apologize for their bad experience and vow to make it better (however you can manage to). Not only will the unhappy blogger feel better (maybe even remove or update their scathing review), but anyone who reads the post and your subsequent comment will want to do business with you.

Catch the copy cats. Unfortunately, there are a lot of blogs out there whose soul purpose is to copy content from other blogs/articles and repost it. They sometimes give credit, but never their own .02. More often than not, these copy cat blogs are harmless (since Google already sees them as spam), but some are truly a more serious copyright violation.

Catch what fell through the cracks. You might already be tracking your business name on Twitter, and regularly Googling yourself. Google Alerts are a sure-fire way to catch even more mentions of your business.

Get inspired. Tracking your highly sought after keywords will result in a variety of blogposts, websites, and more that also target those keywords. You’ll find plenty of new ideas by reading through these alerts; just make sure your keywords are specific enough so you don’t end up sorting through pages and pages.

Thank people. We’ve talked about the negative, but there’s also the positive! There might be some positive blogposts out there talking about your company, product, or service. Maybe they don’t offer a link, so your backlink checker wouldn’t pick them up. Make sure you leave a comment thanking them and you could even offer them an incentive to do business with you again (% off, free bonus, etc.).

How about you? How have you used your Google Alerts?

Nicki Hicks
Tracking, tracking, tracking

I find that Google Alerts is, by far, one of the most under appreciated Google products. Leveraging it correctly can result in good PR, better blogposts, and a quick and easy way to get a leg up on the competition. Here’s how to make the most of it.

1. Start by assigning a keyword/phrase – the more specific, the better (unless you want to sort through lists of results that don’t apply). You might want to assign multiple alerts, and they could include:

• Your most sought after keywords and phrases
• Your business name
• Your competitor’s name(s)
• Product/service names

2. Then, choose what you want to have sent to you. Choose from:

• News
• Blogs
• Web
• Comprehensive (everything)
• Video
• Groups

3. Receive notifications once a day, a week, or as they happen. (I find that notifications as they happen are simply annoying, but figure out what works for you.)

4. Decide on how many results you want (as to not be overwhelming).

5. Get alerts sent to your Gmail account or your feed….and you’re done!

Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to use the information you get after setting up your Alerts.

Nicki Hicks
Alert the Media