Each week, we scour the web to uncover valuable articles and blog posts for our readers on the topics of inbound marketing, local optimization, search optimization, social media, and much more.
Welcome to our weekly roundup of inbound articles! We’ve picked some of the best articles and stories that will take your business to the next level. There were quite a few stories of note this past week, such as Facebook buying the Oculus Rift, Bing releasing product ads, and Quora releasing its first form of verified profiles for select users.
Let’s get this show on the road. Here are our top 25 inbound marketing articles:
Search Optimization
Build enough links, and you might just be able to get the right amount of traffic. Finding success in link building requires a know-how and expertise to get the best links. Paweł Grabowski interviews Paddy of Distilled on link building as a business.
Search engine marketing can be either entirely free or leveraged using paid options. If you prefer to pay for your search prominence, take note of some important tools. Flying Man Productions writes a rundown of what you can use to excel in search marketing.
If you’re like every other marketer, you want to discover more ways to drive traffic to your site through search. There are multiple ways to leverage SEO, but some aspects make more of an impact than others. Eric Enge interviews Duane Forrester for five keys to improving your rank in search.
Listen folks, the majority of search marketing is about links. However, which links matter more than others, and which ones are natural as opposed to illegitimate? Sally Ormond writes about when a link is low value in a post.
Social Optimization
Marketers working with Facebook these days have a lot on their plates. It’s clear that paying for Facebook ads boosts visibility for their posts, but could post type have an effect on reach? Maximilian H. Nierhoff shares another deep resource on Facebook post analysis.
As social marketers, we often neglect some of the lesser utilized platforms for sharing our content. Tumblr has a massive user base, but there are business owners who just don’t know how to push their content onto the platform. Seb Atkinson broadcasts a sound step-by-step guide to driving Tumblr traffic.
You can use social media for much more than connecting. Meld your sales process with your social engagement for improved results. AddShoppers posts part one of 75 tips to sell socially.
What’s the ROI of social media? Not everyone likes that question, but it’s an important one to ask if your current social strategy is showing signs of stagnation. Debra Eckerling presents her guide to measuring social media ROI for your business.
Local Optimization
There are several bonuses you get as a local business that you can be taking advantage of. Simply put, it’s much easier to verify your legitimacy because your site has a physical location attached to it. Learn the other benefits of local businesses in the rest of this post from IncreaseYourRank.
The line between free and paid marketing services is quickly dissolving. Even with free services available to them, local businesses are increasingly paying more to stand out. Damian Rollison presents his view on this shift in a thoughtful article.
Make sure your business is properly optimized for local. If you succeed in doing this, you’re way ahead of the game with your local presence. Travis Biffen teaches us 21 local SEO mistakes we shouldn’t make.
Email Optimization
Once a user subscribes to a free trial, the work doesn’t stop there. You have to awaken that subscriber to the process of purchasing by reminding them of your intentions. Steven Macdonald demonstrates eight ways to convert free trial users through email marketing.
Do you want to grow your email list, but don’t have the time to do it? Don’t fret, as there are simple, low-effort techniques you can utilize to continue increasing your list. In a detailed post, Kate Stull shows us how she keeps list in her two-person startup growing.
Producing an email course is a top way to engage subscribers. Do you want to know how to make your course one of the best? David Tuite shares everything he learned from completing his email course in a day.
Mobile Optimization
Okay, so you’ve decided to take the first step into marketing on the mobile platform. Are you ready to release your first campaign? Victor Green points out what to focus on in your first endeavor with mobile.
Although we encourage marketing on mobile, don’t just jump in without a plan. This is essentially the situation many business owners find themselves in. After surveying 161 businesses, Jamie Turner lists four key takeaways for us to learn from.
How much do you know about mobile marketing? As the mobile landscape evolves, staying on top of the facts proves difficult. Appsdb writes up with 19 mobile statistics to blow your mind.
Content Marketing
It comes as no surprise that we love infographics. They’re both visually engaging and educating at the same time. Jon Norris lays out the anatomy of an infographic in this post.
While content marketing is an effective practice, content alone rarely nets you enough traffic to get your business noticed. The missing step after content creation is content promotion. Larry Kim explains its distinctness from content marketing in an article.
The more content marketing strategies you know, the better! You’ll need to test out as many as you can to identify the perfect fit for your content. Reginald Chan posts five content marketing tips to double your traffic.
What do content marketing and first dates have in common? They both need to engage the participants to move forward. Jose Antonio Sanchez enlightens us in this curious Slideshare post.
Conversion Optimization
Most marketers can pick up Twitter fairly quickly and use it for social engagement. Using the platform for CRO is another story. Dave Schneider guides us through a tutorial on advanced Twitter tactics for business.
Are you new to conversion rate optimization? This agreeable post by FuzeInc. gives you both insight and understanding into CRO and how to begin testing.
It’s so easy to get caught up in traffic and signup pages that we sometimes forget there are more insightful metrics to learn from. Are you ready to use more advanced conversion reports? Peep Laja collects the opinions of conversion experts on the most under-utilized reports from Google Analytics.
Reputation Management
Are you skilled at managing your reputation online? You’re going to have to learn some new skills if you want to maintain a pristine reputation. Chik Quintas has five solutions for more powerful reputation monitoring.
Thanks to the Internet, it’s easier than ever to call out a business if it doesn’t provide a service that’s up to par. Sometimes though, there are some innocent companies that get caught in the crossfire. Chris Anderson teaches these enterprises how to protect themselves online.
The list above includes some of the most interesting articles we caught in our streams this week. If you want to share other great inbound marketing news, please let us know below in the comments.