30+ Award-Winning Entrepreneurs Did WHAT?! 😮

Ever wanted to start building an online business, but felt like you didn't have enough time or money?

Or maybe you just felt stuck because you had no clue where to start?

If you said yes, I have some awesome news to share with you...

A bunch of my business mentors have gotten together to organize an exclusive live virtual summit this month [March 25-28, 2019 ] ...

They're planning to reveal their best-kept secrets to building a wildly profitable online business without even needing your own product...

...and even if you have no money, no time, or no clue where to start!

Here are just some of the things you'll learn:

• How To Find Your Ideal (and Highly Profitable) Niche and discover the products that will easily make you money.
• How To Start Getting Traffic Now even if you have no audience and aren't yet ready to build one.
• How To Rapidly Grow a Raving Fanbase That Can't Wait To Buy From You without having to spend a bunch of money you can't afford.
• How To Create Affiliate Bonuses That Stand Out From The Crowd and make people BEG for your affiliate links!
• How To Craft Captivating Stories That Easily Sell without coming across as corny, pushy, or spammy.
• How To Scale Your Income As Much As You Want without losing your sanity in the process.

The speakers include award-winning entrepreneurs like Spencer Mecham, Rachel S. Lee, Jeffery Banek, Liam James Kay, and more...

And the best part?

They're letting me give you a ticket to attend live for FREE!

By the way, it's all online so you don't have to worry about travel or expensive hotels...

I've read some of the reviews from the last time they had this event, and the feedback was amazing.

I don't know how long they'll keep this open for... but I wanted to make sure you can grab your ticket before it's too late!

>> Click here to GET YOUR FREE TICKET now!

I'm pretty excited for this. Looking forward to seeing you there! 🙂

7 Ways to Use Social Media Customer Feedback

There are a variety of different ways to collect customer feedback, and surveys are usually the first method that comes to mind.
But that's not the only way to figure out what your customers are saying about your product -- in fact, you could be missing out on valuable customer feedback coming in through a different channel: social media.

Social media is a meaningful channel through which to collect valuable customer feedback. With billions of people around the world already engaged in these social media communities, you should create profiles and provide customer support from your brand for those valuable customers who want an easier, faster way to get in touch with you than by hopping on a phone call.
What's more, it's important to know what customers are saying about your brand on social media -- because when millions of potential new customers can see tweets and Facebook posts blasting you for a bad phone call or a cumbersome subscription cancellation policy, word can spread fast -- and not in a good way.
So keep reading below to learn about the many ways you can use social media customer feedback to improve customer service and provide valuable insight to your entire organization -- and learn more about our new multi-channel Conversations tool that connects your social media accounts into an all-in-one shared inbox.

7 Ways to Use Social Media Customer Feedback

1. Social Media Listening
2. Collect Product Feedback
3. Host a Focus Group
4. Conduct Surveys and Polls
5. Ask Industry Experts
6. Source Blog Content
7. Develop Personas

7 Ways to Use Social Media Customer Feedback

1. Social Media Listening

Monitor mentions of your brand and your competitors. By seeing when your brand name is discussed on social media, you can give instant customer support and feedback to people having issues with your product or service, regardless of whether they contacted you for help.
And by monitoring competitive mentions, you can also capitalize on customers who are unhappy with other brands in your industry. Learn why they're dissatisfied, and see if you can provide a better solution for them. At the very least, you can learn how to differentiate yourself from competitors; in the best circumstances, you can nurture them as a lead and turn them into your new favorite customer!

2. Collect Product Feedback

When rolling out a new product or making changes to features of your existing product, it's common to experience backlash among your current customer base. Just look at, well, every new feature Facebook rolls out. While much of the hoopla dies down pretty quickly after customers adjust to the change, sometimes there are legitimate user experience and design issues that your team didn't identify during development.
Leverage your network before launching products to solicit the feedback of people you trust. The great thing about social media is that your network probably consists of not only current customers, but also prospects, target customers, and industry influencers. Getting a wide range of feedback on new products and features -- whether they are easy to use, whether they are worth developing in the first place, or what should be next in your development queue -- helps keep your ear to the ground and get the all-important community buy-in for greater adoption rates at launch time.

3. Host a Focus Group

Effective focus groups have segmented audiences, and many social networks have advanced in such a way that there is sufficient functionality to perform your own R&D. For example, you could use Google+ circles to segment people by industry or location to better target your questions. Or consider hosting a Facebook Live Q&A session to delve deeper into a user-generated suggestion.
Because focus groups require feedback from an audience that fits specific criteria, they make their participants feel inherently special. They're fantastic ways to get people actively involved in the success of your brand -- while simultaneously soliciting quick feedback that helps you advances your business objectives.

4. Conduct Surveys and Polls

Ask people in your social network to share their opinions on a critical issue through a survey or poll. Or, it doesn't need to be a critical issue -- it can be a lighter question that helps give you context about your customers' preferences and opinions. For example, here's a poll we recently shared on Twitter to get an idea of how customers and fans were using a new social media feature:

It's a unique and engaging way to ask for customer feedback that's different from an emailed or texted survey, and it's a good conversation to start with our audience. But what's more, the results are a good indicator for our product team that we might not need to create a tool with which to publish Facebook Stories anytime soon.
Reading audience and customer responses to polls and surveys on social media -- whether it's your survey or a competitor, the results will tell you about what your audience is doing, what they care about, and how you can meet their needs.

5. Ask Industry Experts

One of the reasons you're using social media is to expand and strengthen your network, so take advantage of your reach to get answers from the best of the best. Need to know how to set up a PPC campaign? Skip Google, and ask someone in your network to introduce you to the best PPC campaign manager in town.
Not only are you getting helpful advice, but you're also meeting someone new and influential and strengthening your relationship with your mutual contact.

6. Source Blog Content

Suffering from writer's block? Visit your social network to source blog content! I did this recently when I asked connections in my network to share their best blogging strategies. Their responses helped me frame the post around real-life challenges (some people even provided their solutions to those challenges, making my job even easier) and the result was content that more directly addresses the actual problems people are facing.
This method can also be used to develop topic ideas when you're struggling to come up with a meaningful post. Go to your networks, and ask what kind of content your fans and followers would like to see on your blog, and you'll have a topic (or several) that you know will resonate with your audience.

7. Develop Personas

Developing personas is a crucial part of a successful inbound marketing strategy, and it's important information for customer success managers to relay to the product team, too. Instead of starting from scratch, ask members of your social media communities questions that will help you narrow down your target audience, identify personas, and hone your customer success strategy. Ask about pain points, demographic information, what they find valuable in your products and services, and even what they like to do on the weekends to paint a better, more relatable picture for your sales, marketing, and product teams.
If you've already developed personas but would like to refine them as questions about your target audience's characteristics arise, ask for responses from fans and followers that meet specific criteria. For example, you might post to your Facebook wall "If you're a female office administrator out of college in the last five years, we're curious to know what you majored in as an undergraduate." As with the focus groups, your network will feel special if they fall into that very small niche and get excited about providing you information. After all, who doesn't like to talk about themselves?


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The Right Way to Think About Google

 Oops, they did it again.

Our friend Google caused a panicked rumble through the tech world late Monday afternoon, when they announced they’d be restructuring under a new holding company called Alphabet.

Never mind that this is something companies do all the time. Never mind that there’s no reason to think it will change what’s happening with search in any way. Never mind the weird, April-Fools-looking new domain.

Google can’t really do “normal things,” because every time they make even a small visible change, most of us wonder,

What will this do to my rankings?

Why the collective jumping at shadows? Well, because if your business depends on your search rankings — and we’ll talk about that in a minute — you probably have a certain amount of Google-induced stress disorder.

Key elements change. Abruptly. And secretly. And you’re left scrambling to pick up the mess.

And to be honest, it can get right on your last nerve.

But if it causes you more than a few moments of irritation, you may benefit from shifting the way you think about the web’s favorite 800-pound gorilla.

Here’s how I’ve learned to think about Google (courtesy of advice from Copyblogger’s founder, Brian Clark). Which means when they pull stunts like this — and they do, with some regularity — my pain is limited to a few curse words and some moderate tweaking.

I have five rules for keeping my sanity when dealing with Google.

Rule 1: “What’s my plan if this goes away tomorrow?”

Any time you use a tool from Google (or from any third party you have no control over), this question will help you.

Sooner rather than later, ask yourself what your backup plan is — if and when the tool (or your search ranking, for that matter) dissolves overnight.

You’ll notice that Brian asked and answered this question publicly about the Authorship program way back in April, 2013 — making us all look like Big Damn Heroes when Authorship did, in fact, blow up.

Did we think that would happen? Actually, we didn’t.

Were we prepared when it did? You know it.

Ask yourself right now what you’ll do if Facebook disappears tomorrow, or Twitter, or your Google search results position, or your pay-per-click campaign.

When tools and programs disappear in the online world, they often do so literally overnight. You need a solid plan in place for when that happens.

Rule 2: Google owes you nothing

Ranking in the search engines is not a civil right.

You don’t “deserve” to have your content found by Google. (Or Bing, or Yahoo, or anywhere else.) That’s not a service that Google has promised you.

Weirdly enough, Google won’t even promise you that they’ll accept large amounts of your money to run advertising on their AdWords platform. They can take that away any time as well. Without necessarily giving you a reason.

Too often, we think that because we put a ton of work into being found on the search engines, that we are somehow entitled to that juicy position on the results page. It doesn’t work that way.

The greater your sense of entitlement about what companies like Google owe you, the more frustration and anger you’ll feel when you get smacked. Which you will, if you’re in the game long enough.

Rule 3: You owe Google nothing

You also don’t work for Google. They don’t send you a paycheck or have you under contract.

Whether or not you want to abide by their thoughts on best practices is completely up to you — and you should make that decision like an adult, weighing the pros and cons and keeping Google in its proper perspective.

Spending hours picking apart every syllable Matt Cutts may utter, trying to understand what he thinks the definition of is is, and making violent changes to your business model because Cutts mentioned he likes or doesn’t like something, is a sucker bet.

Refer back to Rule #2. It doesn’t matter how many hoops you jump through. Whether or not you do everything “the way Google wants,” (which you usually have to guess at, because they have no interest in telling you), they don’t owe you that search result.

As I’m fond of saying, Google is a lot like that really mean girl from high school. Your best shot at getting her to like you is to ignore her while you go about getting social sharing, links, and publicity because you’re trying to reach people. The less you care about what she thinks, the better light she tends to see you in — because real people already like you.

(And if she never gives you the time of day? Meh, you don’t need her anyway. Truly.)

Rule 4: Use the tool for what it’s good for

None of this is to say that having a good search result isn’t helpful. It can be, especially for some topics and business models.

We earlier recommended including the Authorship markup on content because it was quick and easy to do with Genesis, and the potential looked promising.

All of our SEO recommendations work that way. If you can tweak your content without messing it up for your human readers, and without putting every hour of your day into it, go ahead and do that. Use a few simple tools that will let you get your content optimized efficiently.

And if your company has the resources to hire a strong team that devotes all of its time to search, that’s fine as well. But don’t do it if you can’t genuinely afford it, and don’t do it if you can’t weather the inevitable storms.

Recognize that search is a long game. Put it in its proper place. Use other ways to connect with and engage your audience. And if a great search placement shows up over time, that’s terrific.

Rule 5: Serve the audience first

This is the granddaddy of them all.

Google robots don’t have credit cards. They can’t buy your product or service.

Instead of trying to serve Google, serve the people who will eventually become your customers. Create content that interests them and meets their needs. Make it useful. Make it entertaining. Give it some real time and attention.

The audience is where everything good comes from. Google is just one way for that audience to find you.

P.S. Same as it ever was

A slightly different version of this post was originally published in September 2014, when Google had just killed the Authorship program. And it might get republished later, when they do something else that causes a collective heart attack.

We created a new image, and I wrote a new introduction. After the words “you’re left scrambling to pick up the mess,” the only edits I made were changing the word this to it and adding a quick clarifying phrase in the first point.

Why do I point this out? Because nothing’s changed, and nothing is likely to change.

Google is going to shift. Sometimes abruptly. That doesn’t mean you need to go along for the ride. Develop a sustainable approach, and leave the panic attacks and the dysfunction behind.

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Pay-Per-Click: 8 Reasons to Try PPC Advertising

As an online marketer, your ultimate goal is to reach online users and promote your products or services, right?

Ideally, you want to achieve this in a quick and painless manner, all while remaining cost-effective.
Now, there are tons of traffic strategies out there and sometimes it can be hard to know which one fits the bill. That is where pay-per-click (PPC) advertising comes in.

PPC is basically when you (the advertiser) pay your host (the publisher) each time someone clicks the ad being displayed on your behalf.

Whether you are aiming to connect with users via social media, search engines or other content sites viewers, PPC is a great way to target a new audience and enhance your overall marketing efforts.

Check out these 8 reasons to try pay-per-click:

1. Get results quickly

It’s no surprise that everyone wants instant results when it comes to their marketing efforts.
PPC is a great strategy to expedite those results.

Quick turnaround is one of the most distinguishing differences between organic and paid searches.

The reason being is that organic positioning is extremely time consuming. You have to build up your pages, fill in your content, integrate keywords and phrases, share the content, develop high quality backlinks and then you might see your rankings increase.

Once a PPC campaign is set up and properly optimized, this advertising strategy can shoot your website to the top of the list, and fast!

Plus, publishers like Google reward the highest quality ads (not just whoever paid the most), making this especially worthwhile for businesses that are just starting out and need a quick boost. Of course you still need to design and implement your campaign effectively, but with PPC, you’re basically paying to get bumped to the front of the line.

2. Reach more people

Regardless if you’re just starting out in the digital world, or you already have a great online
reputation, PPC advertising is something that can help you expand your audience by reaching even more people.

Internet users today don’t want to be bothered with intensive searches, or be forced to dig through pages and pages to find you. That’s why implementing a PPC campaign can help you increase your traffic tremendously!

Efficiency is key in the world of digital marketing and most people don’t have the time or patience to get past the first page of search results. However, when utilizing PPC your ad gets bumped to the front of the line, allowing it to be showcased in an easy-to-see spot.

When your ad is visible above all of the others, potential customers are that much more likely to choose you over the competition:

This is crucial for anyone looking to expand their influence and gain more customers. If either of those sound appealing to you, PPC advertising may be a perfect fit for you!

3. Target the right people

Paid advertising doesn’t just allow you to reach more people. With proper deployment of this strategy you can actually tailor your audience to a specific group of people you’d like to connect with.

In order to maximize the results, you should use targeting options wisely, especially when it comes to custom audiences within Google AdWords and Facebook.

Narrowing down the audience criteria will allow you to showcase your ads only to the people that matter, i.e. the people who may actually be interested in your products or services!

Options such as demographic, location, interests, behaviors and even an exclusion of any or all of those things will help refine the group of users you’re targeting online and as a result, you’ll increase the efficiency of your ads which ultimately leads to better conversion rates!

4. Only pay for actual clicks

Another reason PPC advertising is so appealing has to do with the financial investment itself. You know exactly how you’re spending your money, as opposed to different advertising models where the destination of funds may be a bit more vague.

With PPC, you simply pay when the person interested in your products or services clicks on your ad. It’s that easy.

This click model (vs an impression model) means that you aren’t just paying for the view, but instead getting another level of marketing entirely. Any investment you make is based on real people who not only saw your ad, but were so enticed by it that they actually clicked.

Most importantly, you are only paying to specifically target the users with the most buying potential and therefore it makes calculating your return on investment a breeze!

By implementing a tool like ClickPerfect,  you can track your results while comparing your advertising budget to your conversion value. This is extremely helpful, as it will give you an insight as to which ads are giving you the best return on your investment.

As you start seeing tangible results, you can then in turn continue increasing the advertising budget to broaden your reach even more!

5. Full control over your costs

Budget settings makes most PPC platforms quite flexible and allow you to adjust spending to your own specific needs.

One thing you should know when setting up a budget is that many publishers work like an auction. This means that the cost of the campaign varies depending on campaign bidding for the same keywords.

Most platforms let you to set up payment limitations, that way you always pay the lowest amount when bidding. You also have the ability to set up a spending limit so you won’t be charged over that set amount.

Having a very specific business niche combined with a little luck might allow you to get some campaigns for a very cheap price!

6. Leverage different ad types

Another reason why PPC advertising is a strategy worth trying out is the diversity when it comes to different types of ads that are available. From social media, to search engines, to content sites – you can hone in on a ton of different ad campaigns.

Do you want to raise awareness of your brand? Increase sales for a specific product? Share details for a specific event? Re-market to previous customers?

Whatever the end goal may be, PPC allows you to select the ad specific to your business, allowing you to achieve results quickly!

7. DIY

Online marketing is no longer reserved for big companies and industry experts. A do-it-yourself approach is now being utilized by newbies, small business owners and seasoned veterans alike.

Platforms like AdWords and Facebook include plenty of instructions and online tutorials to help you set up your ads. Anyone with a little bit of drive and internet access can easily start a PPC campaign to promote their business!

One important thing to remember is that PPC advertising does require some skin in the game and you need to come prepared to do some trial-and-error marketing if you are just starting out. Get familiar with the rules and learn how to successfully manage a campaign in order to get the best results.

Remember that using a click tracking tool will come in handy here as you’ll need to run tests, monitor, compare data and alter the settings accordingly to stay on top of your game.

8. Grow your business

All of the aforementioned best practices we’ve discussed here are oriented towards growing your business and enhancing results as quickly as possible!

If your budget is tight, and you need to see quick results? Try PPC.

If branding and recognition is something you want to improve, a PPC advertising strategy is recommended.

If you’re looking for targeting options and fully manageable costs? Yup: PPC.

Make sure to set goals, optimize your campaign before implementing, and be prepared with tools in place to track your progress, and pay-per-click may just work for you.

Armed with this information and a tool like ClickPerfect, you’ll be able to see results faster than ever before!

Over to you! Have you used PPC advertising before? What is your experience with this strategy?
Share your thoughts in the comments!

And, don’t forget to like and share this article to help spread the Word.



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3 Simple Tips to Get More Website Traffic

Your website is great, but you’re having trouble getting people to actually stop by. Without online visitors, it’s going to be nearly impossible for a web-based business to do well.

Millions of people use search engines each day to find the products, services, and information they need. The only way to make sure your website comes up when they do a search is to be ranked higher in the search engine results.

The higher your website ranks, the more traffic it will see. Since traffic generation and search engine rankings go hand-in-hand, it’s easy to see why the most critical part of any successful marketing plan is going to be traffic generation.

So, how do you increase website traffic?

By following the basics.

Keep reading for some must-follow tips on the basics of traffic generation, designed to help boost your search engine rankings.

SEO

What it is

Generally referred to as SEO, search engine optimization involves affecting how a website is seen within unpaid search engine results. This is called “organic” or “natural” traffic, and is the type your website has earned on its own, as opposed to gaining it from ads or other paid methods.

How it works

Search engines turn to complex algorithms to collect, filter, and analyze the vast amounts of data they constantly receive regarding the millions upon millions of websites they find.

The data is analyzed to find the websites that should be on the first results page when someone does a search for a relevant keyword phrase. The more the website ranks for a particular keyword or phrase, or phrases, the higher in the results the website will appear.

When you’re working on giving your website traffic a boost, it’s important to take a close look at both your target audience and your competition. Take the information you find, and then “reverse engineer” what the search engines are looking for.

From there, you can be sure your website has everything the search engine is looking for, including both Onsite and Offsite SEO. These are the two main building blocks of ranking for the first page on a search engine.

Onsite SEO consists of your content and the infrastructure of the website itself. To really make the most of this type of optimization, you want to focus on targeting the best keyword clusters for your niche and audience. You want to match the content you already have with target keywords you want to rank for. Add these target keywords into your new content, and within the tags, tabs, and headers of your website.

Offsite is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. This is how other websites refer to yours. To really optimize in this way, you need to develop a profile of quality links coming in from other sources relevant to your niche and target audience. Links can also come from your social media profiles, so having an active presence is essential for ensuring your content circulates and links back to you. If your content is shared, including in terms of guest posts, you want a citation or byline that links back to your website. You should focus on roughly half of your optimization coming from outside sources.

How to use it

Target keywords should be used throughout the website content, headers, alt tags, and footers. The main keyword should be present in the title of your website, the sub-headings, and throughout the entire content of the site.

It’s recommended that you publish at least fifteen articles on your website’s blog, all of which should be related to the main topic. These articles should incorporate the target keywords used within your website, as this will help you rank for them in search engines.

Share these articles across various social media platforms, in addition to article and website directories. Include a link back to your website within all of these article submissions, as this will increase both your website traffic and SEO.

While there are thousands of article directories available out there, not all of them are worth it in terms of getting backlinks. Some are ranked higher than others, and have more authority and a larger audience reach.

When you find a quality directory to submit to, you will be able to include a link to your site in the bio box of your article. This gives you a backlink, which is great.

Just remember – not all backlinks were created equal. The more authority a site has, the more that backlink is going to be worth. That’s why it’s best to submit to the bigger directories first, and then go for smaller directories.

Pay-Per-Click

What it is

Pay-per-click, generally referred to as PPC, is a marketing method that involves advertising on search engine results pages. It’s all about using search engines to generate clicks to your website, as opposed to organically “earning” those clicks. You’ve undoubtedly seen those sponsored ads at the top of a Google search results page. Those are examples of pay-per-click advertising.

How it works

Basically, you bid to have your ad appear as part of the sponsored results when someone searches using your keywords. Each time your ad is clicked, and a visitor is sent to your website, you owe the search engine a small fee – thus the name “pay per click.”

If your advertising campaign is designed effectively, and runs smoothly, the fee you are expected to pay will seem trivial in the long-run. The visit you get to your website will outweigh the small amount of money required to pay for the ad. For example, if you pay $20 for a click, but that one click leads to a $450 sale, then using pay-per-click advertising definitely paid off.

Expert tip: Grab Click Perfect and start tracking your own clicks. You can keep close tabs on all of your link stats including traffic and conversions. You should be tracking and analyzing your marketing efforts as much as possible especially when it comes to paid traffic.

Ultimately, PPC is one of the best ways to generate more website traffic. In fact, several studies show internet users click on paid search ads more often they do any other form of online advertising. This means people aren’t opposed to being sold to, as long as the products or services being offered are relevant to their needs and interests. Because the search engines use keywords and only show relevant ads, this isn’t a problem. The ads are highly relevant to what the user is looking for, which increases the chances of your ad being clicked on.

Why use it

The reason pay-per-click advertising stands above other methods is Google doesn’t just simply give the ad space to the highest bidder. Instead, they reward the ads that are of the highest quality (most popular). This is because Google rewards performance, rather than just being all about money.

The better your ads are put together, the better they will perform. The better they perform, the higher your click-through rates will be and the lower your advertising costs will be.

Video Marketing

What it is

Video marketing involves adding videos to your marketing campaign, whether it’s in promotion of your company as a whole or just your products and services. Video marketing is growing in popularity, especially live streams, and the video content is shared across various social media platforms.

How to use it

Creating compelling video content means truly understanding your target audience. Take a bit of time to get to know the people in your audience, including their interests and type of content they would be most interested in.

Consider different types of video content like full production promos, live videos, whiteboard explainer videos or even GIFs!

If you aren’t sure what to try first, take some time and learn more about ways to enhance your content with videos. Plus, we offer an easy-to-use video tool like Doodly which really simplifies the process if you are just starting out.

Whatever way you decide on, be sure to let your brand personality shine through. Showing your customers you’re relatable and authentic will make it easier for customers to trust you. The more they trust you, the more likely they are to trust your brand and buy your products or services.

Finally, don’t forget to use the SEO strategies we talked about above. One of the biggest reasons for adding video content to your marketing plan is to boost your search engine ranking. Add target keywords to your video title, tags, and description. Upload a transcript (if it’s relevant to your video type) that includes those same keywords. This will make it easier for consumers to find your video content and your website.

Why it works

Digital marketers can stand to gain a lot more website traffic with just a single video, all by adding that video to their various marketing channels – from email marketing to blog posts to landing pages. Video content also increases Google ranking, conversions, open rates, and click-through rates.

Additionally, research shows it helps increases sales by a significant amount. In a recent survey of 2,000 consumers, 44% of them watched an online video while they were doing a search for local products and services they needed. Out of that percentage, 53% of the viewers contacted the company after watching the video, 51% visited the company’s website, and 33% even visited the store.
Overall, 71% of the viewers ended up buying something.

Get More Website Traffic

The key to generating more website traffic is to have the basics down. Whether you’re an experienced digital marketer, new business owner, or just getting into this whole marketing thing, following these tips is a great step in the right direction.

By taking the time to implement foundational components like SEO optimization, PPC tracking and grabbing a tool like Doodly for video content, you’ll see an increase in website traffic before you know it.

How do YOU generate traffic for your own website? Do you use these strategies, or do you have traffic tips of your own?

Share with us in the comments below!


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Inbound Lead Generation Checklist (Infographic)

In the age of automation and Artificial Intelligence, it is up to marketers to ensure that all the fundamental aspects of inbound lead generation are still strictly followed. While marketing automation software undoubtedly doubles the chance of marketers to generate more and better leads, and twice as more effective at communicating with their prospects, there are important factors that marketers should not overlook to ensure that their strategy and efforts will come to fruition. If you are planning to jumpstart your own inbound lead generation campaign this year, then it is high time to familiarize yourself with these factors. In this infographic, we will discuss the things that you should consider – or better yet, start utilizing in order to bring your inbound lead generation to success.
 

Embedded from Digital Marketing Philippines

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4 ways to leverage email marketing with PPC

When it comes to the fast-moving world of internet marketing, everyone is looking for that competitive edge. If SEO and email marketing are already a developed part of your marketing campaign, PPC (pay-per-click) can be another useful tool to help grow both your conversions and your leads.

Use PPC to test email marketing elements

While we can use email marketing to increase leads in a variety of ways, PPC advertising offers a great way to test out the elements of your marketing emails, like landing pages or possible subject lines, before using them in a mass email. PPC gives you ample space to safely test out that edited copy, those new keywords or a new landing page and get an early peek at conversion rates. Using these tools can help optimize your message and increase its rate of success before sending it out to your entire list. That said, PPC ads are not only a great environment to test out elements of email marketing, but are versatile enough to try out nearly any element of your marketing campaign.

Build email lists with PPC

A great way for anyone to start introducing PPC into their campaign is by using it to grow your email list. While email can be used to increase both conversions and leads, PPC is a terrific way to boost both of those numbers even further. In this case, you can measure every email gained from a PPC ad as a conversion and a success toward this goal. Someone clicking on a PPC ad should arrive at a page that shows off the service or product one is offering, but with two possible ways of gathering potential customer information:

First, the primary focus of this page should always be the conversion itself. Part of this process will gather the customer’s email along with other information for things like receipts and contact or shipping information. Simple enough.

Then, you should always include a secondary call to action (CTA) that can still obtain an email conversion even if the person decides not to purchase. This shouldn’t distract from your main objective and should encourage potential customers to give you their email address and offer them something in return. An example of this might be “Sign up to be notified of future discounts” or “Sign up for news and tips” — anything that could appeal to someone interested in the ad but not quite ready to commit to what you’re offering.

Use your email marketing data to optimize your PPC ads 

The information you have gathered via sending conversion emails and looking at click-through rates isn’t just useful for your email marketing. While emails commit to a higher percentage of overall conversions for many businesses, PPC ads can be a powerful tool in gaining conversions themselves. The keywords, subjects, headlines and offers that have been successful in the past can likely be integrated into your PPC ads as well. At the least they are powerful starting benchmarks to help augment your marketing strategy. This can be great information in reaching out to a brand-new audience or wider market, and increasing your numbers across the board.

Plan PPC campaigns to boost email click-through rates 

A large part of successful advertising at its core isn’t just about the message itself and how strong it is, but about the amount of exposure to your message that your potential customers receive. Time and time again research shows us the power of the Exposure Effect, and how customers who are exposed to a product or service multiple times are simply more likely to commit to a purchase. PPC ads can provide more exposure to your message outside of your emails. You can do this by starting a PPC ad campaign that begins a day or a two before your email campaign goes out, and ends a few days afterward. The awareness and exposure of these PPC, ads coupled with your hard-hitting emails, can work well together to increase conversions.


Source

25 Best Online Internet Marketing Courses

In this video, you will learn about the 25 best online internet marketing courses for furthering your knowledge and building credibility in your niche. These courses range from free to thousands of dollars and all offer something a little different. You can get certifications that are more broad or more specific to things like coding, content marketing, PPC advertising, social media, etc. You can use these certifications, not only to learn more about internet marketing, but to show on your social profiles, author bios and websites. When people see these, they will instantly trust you more and see you as a credible expert in your industry. Enjoy the video!

101 (Neatly Organized) Marketing Tools For Nearly Any Marketing Task

Looking for a definitive list of “marketing tools”? Then look no further.

We’ve painstakingly researched, refined and distilled hundreds of them.

The result: this fully-categorised list of what we believe to be 100 of the best tools out there.

But, before we get to the tools, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:
It would be impossible to create a list of every tool, so this wasn’t our focus. We instead focussed on collating the most popular and widely-used tools (and categorizing them).
We’ve put a lot of focus on SEO tools. Why? Because we’re talking about online marketing here, and SEO is a HUGE part of it.

OK, let’s get to the tools!

Analytics Tools

Without analytics, there’s no way of knowing how your visitors are reaching or interacting with your website.

And, if you don’t know this, you’ll be in the dark about what’s working and what isn’t.

This is a dangerous place to be, as it can lead to all kinds of errors.

For example, you may continue spending money on that PPC campaign that isn’t generating a return on investment. Or keep creating content that nobody is actually reading.

Analytics tools allow you to gain insight into these areas, so you can base your marketing strategy on cold, hard data (rather than guessing).

They can tell you where your visitors came from, who they are, and the traffic sources that convert best.



And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

These days, there’s an analytics tool for virtually everything.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Google Analytics — comprehensive analytics platform from Google (we recommend all websites use this!)

KISSMetrics — digs deeper into your visitors/customers behavior.

MixPanel — helps you learn more about your users. Great for product development and/or increasing conversions.

HotJar — shows how visitors are using your website with heatmaps.

Competitive Research Tools

Sometimes, you’ll be working on a site and realize one thing: your competition is absolutely crushing it.



It can be depressing, but remember this:

If you can just reverse engineer what they’re doing (i.e. everything responsible for their success), you can then implement similar tactics on your site.

But, here’s the problem: it’s almost impossible to do manually.

This is where tools come in handy.

Competitive research tools can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about your competitors, including:
Which content has the most backlinks?
Which content has the most social shares?
What terms are they bidding on in AdWords?
What keywords are they ranking for?

It’s also possible to identify “content gaps” (i.e. content your competitor has, yet you don’t) for your own site.

Here are our favorites:

SimilarWeb — estimates traffic and engagement statistics for any website.

SEMRush — shows the keywords your competitors are ranking for, the terms they’re targeting with ads and much more.

Ahrefs — lets you see who’s linking to your competitors, their most popular content, and more.

SpyFu — spy on your competitors and find their most profitable keywords (in both organic and paid search).

Link Prospecting Tools

Building backlinks is never an easy task.

It takes time, effort and a meticulously personalized approach to outreach.

Even then, you’re still only going to convert a handful of your prospects.

Therefore, successful link building requires two things:
A large list of prospects.
A way to meticulously vet these prospects.



Here are a few of the best tools for any serious link prospector:

Google Results Extractor (by Chris Ainsworth) — scrapes Google search results into a neat, copyable list.

LinkClump — lets you open a bunch of links in one fell swoop (perfect for vetting large lists of prospects).

Check My Links (for Chrome) — checks for broken links on any web page from within your browser.

NoFollow (for Chrome) — check for nofollowed links on any web page (i.e. links that pass no SEO value).

SEERS SEO Toolbox — adds insanely useful SEO-focussed formulas to Google Sheets.

URL Profiler — crawls and scrapes content from websites. It can also pull in data from Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, and a ton of other data sources.

Backlink Research Tools

Links remain one of the most important ranking factors.

Many studies (including our own) have confirmed this.

But, building links (without buying them!) can be extremely difficult.

And, if you don’t have access to a backlink research tool, it will be even harder.

Why? Because nearly all link building strategies that work (e.g. broken link building, etc.) rely heavily on data from such tools.

For example, you might want to reverse engineer the top 10 Google results (in order to figure out why they’re ranking) then copy their strategy.

But, with links (still) being a crucial ranking factor, you can bet that any site ranking in the top 10 has a ton of links.

So, you’ll probably need to reverse engineer (and copy) their backlinks to stand any chance of outranking them.

And the only way to find out who links to a particular piece of content is by using a backlink research tool.



Without relying on metrics (e.g. DR, UR, etc.) from such tools, it’s also pretty difficult to figure out the potential value of a link.

So, here are our 3 favorite backlink research tools:

Ahrefs Site Explorer — finds backlinks pointing to any domain or URL. It also has great filtering, shows anchor text, and even surrounding link text. Yeah, we’re biased, but this guy isn’t.

Majestic — the closest competitor to Ahrefs when it comes to “backlink research”. It has a few useful metrics such as TrustFlow and CitationFlow.

Open Site Explorer (from Moz) — backlink checker created by Moz.com. It has the smallest index of the three.

Keyword Research/Discovery Tools

Many people begin creating content without first conducting keyword research.

This is a big mistake.

Without comprehensive keyword research, your content typically won’t stand a chance of ranking for anything worthwhile.

And, if it doesn’t rank for the right terms (i.e. the keywords/phrases your target audience are searching for), you won’t get the traffic you deserve.

This means that the time, money, and effort you put into creating your content will be wasted.

Keyword research is actually a two-step process, consisting of:
Discovery
Research

Sidenote.Here’s a great 19-step process if you’re seriously about learning more, but we’ll keep things simple for the purpose this post.

Discovery involves finding as many keywords (related to your niche) as possible.

Finding related keywords from a “seed” keyword is one way of doing this.



Research involves looking at things like search volume (i.e. how many people search for a keyword each month) and keyword difficulty (i.e. the effort required to rank for a keyword).



And using this information to decide which keywords to target.

Both of these processes are equally important, so here are our favorite keyword discovery/research tools:

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer — grabs search volume and keyword difficult for any keyword. It also suggests related keywords and has great filtering options.

SEMRush — show a ton of information for any keyword (including search volume).

Long Tail Pro — grabs keyword volume, determines keyword competitiveness, and pulls in metrics from Majestic.

KeywordTool.io — amends your seed keyword with hundreds of variations, then scrapes Google’s related searches to find thousands of similar keywords.

AnswerThePublic.com — finds questions people are actually searching for (from your seed keyword).

On-Page SEO / Crawl Tools

Most “on-page SEO” tasks fall into one of these two buckets:
Finding errors (or optimization opportunities)
Fixing them

When you’re working with a small website (<5 pages), manually searching for and fixing problems is pretty easily done.

You load up a page, inspect the HTML, and note down any areas for improvement.

Simple.

But, with a large site (say 10k+ pages), doing this manually could easily take weeks or even months. It would also be pretty boring.

This is where web crawlers and various other on-page tools are needed.

Web crawlers make finding errors en masse as simple as hitting a “crawl” button — the program does all the work for you.



But, there’s another problem: big sites typically have big (i.e. many) problems.

Diving into the HTML to fix hundreds of problems would be pretty time-consuming. Fortunately there are a tons of other on-page tools/plugins that make life a lot easier.

Here are a few must-have tools:

Screaming Frog — powerful website crawling application that’s perfect for discovering on-site issues (e.g. broken links, etc.)

DeepCrawl — powerful industry-leading website crawler (also cloud-based, unlike Screaming Frog)

Yoast SEO (WordPress Plugin) — gives you the ability to easily edit on-page meta information (e.g. title, description, etc.) without sifting through the code.

OnPage.org — crawls your website, finds on-site/technical errors, and kicks back a detailed report.

Beam Us Up — powerful crawling application (somewhat similar to Screaming Frog, but 100% free),

Xenu Link Sleuth — lightweight website crawler with a focus on finding broken links (only for Windows).

Rank Tracking Tools

Knowing where you rank for your target keywords is super-important.

Without tracking this information, you’ll never know where to prioritize your efforts.

For example, if you rank #1 for a particular keyword, you probably don’t need to launch a massive link building campaign for that page/keyword (as it can’t get any higher).

But, if you’re ranking at the bottom of page 2, that page may benefit from such a campaign.



What’s more, if you have clients, they’re going to expect a “ranking” report every month.

And, with most websites ranking for hundreds — sometimes even thousands — of keywords, it would be crazily time-consuming to do this manually.

So, here are a few of the best rank tracking tools on the market:

Pro Rank Tracker — track up to 50,000 keywords with daily automatic updates. They also support both local and mobile rank tracking.

STAT — track an unlimited number of keywords, all with daily tracking. Mobile and local SERPs included.

SERPWoo — track up to 4,000 keywords (includes mobile + local). It also lets you track the top 100 positions for any query.

AWR Cloud — daily rankings for desktop, mobile and local searches. You can also generate white label ranking reports.

Accuranker — fast rank checker (updates in seconds). It also tracks social metrics and integrates with Google Analytics.

Content Research Tools

Millions of blog posts are published every single day.

And here’s the truth: most of them go completely unnoticed.

Why? Because most people never research the type of content that is likely to work well in their industry.

They simply start writing and hope for the best.

So unless you want to waste time creating content that your target audience won’t care about, you need to do your research.

This is where content research tools come in.

These tools allow you to gain insight into your industry before you write a single word.

Just type in a keyword or phrase and you’ll be able to see things like:
Number of social shares
Number of backlinks/referring domains
The exact wording your target audience uses when searching for a topic



And from this, you can make informed, data-driven decisions about the best way to attack your chosen keywords/topics.

Here are a few of our favorite tools:

Buzzsumo — easily find content with the most social shares and backlinks (you can also filter by content type and time period).

Ahrefs (Content Explorer) — find niche-specific content with the most social shares, backlinks, and traffic. Also lets you get super-granular with the filtering (e.g. filter by publish date, languages, etc.)

Reddit — popular community site where you can find tried and tested ideas for your content.

Email Discovery/Verification Tools

Many marketers still search for email addresses manually.

They spend countless hours sifting through hundreds of websites, social profiles, and other web properties, searching for that elusive email address.

This takes a ton of time.

Simply finding the contact information for, say, 100 people can easily set you back a full working day.

This is where “email discovery/verification tools” come in handy.

Using super-smart algorithms, they visit, parse, and scrape sites to gather contact information.

Many of them will find a person’s email address in seconds — all you need is their name and website.



But, here’s the bad news:

None of these tools are 100% accurate (most claim 80–90% accuracy), so occasionally they won’t find anything.

This is where email guessing and validation tools come in handy.

Here are our 5 favorites:

Hunter.io (formerly EmailHunter.co) — tackles both email discovery and verification. It has a clean UI, API access (which works in Google Sheets), and a Chrome extension.

Voila Norbert — discovers and verifies email addresses (very similar to Hunter.io). It has an API, but no Chrome extension.

FindThat.Email — claims an 85% delivery rate on all email addresses it finds. No API access, but there’s a Chrome extension. It also works within Ahrefs Dashboard.

MailTester.com — will verify the existence of an email address by pinging the server. It’s ugly, but it works.

Guesser.email — does what it says on the tin: it’s guesses someone’s email address (from their name and website).

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing tools have come a long way over the last few years.

No longer are they restricted to bland broadcast emails (i.e. an “email blast” to your entire list).



You can now:
Segment easily
Get extremely granular with campaign monitoring
Create smart action-based autoresponder sequences

This is why email is reported to have a 3800% ROI.

So, if you’re serious about email marketing, you need to invest in email marketing tools.

Here are a few of our favorites:

MailChimp — email marketing made simple. Offers easy integration with a ton of third-party apps/services (e.g. UnBounce, WordPress, etc.)

ConvertKit — conversion focussed email marketing for bloggers.

InfusionSoft — email marketing platform focussed on smart automation (also incorporates a CRM).

GetResponse — claims to be the “world’s easiest email marketing” platform. It also offers some automation features (although not as advanced as InfusionSoft).

Outreach Tools

Manual outreach is one of the most effective ways to promote new content.

It’s also a great way to build links.

But, if you take the fully manual approach, it can take hours to compose and send just a few outreach emails.

This is because generic email tools (e.g. Gmail) aren’t built for mass outreach. So, you’ll end up writing each and every email from scratch (this is crazily time-consuming).

Outreach tools make everything much simpler and quicker.

Many have features such as auto follow-ups, email open tracking, pre-built templates, and even mail-merge capabilities.



They can also drastically simplify the process of discovering relevant prospects.

Some even allow you to discover hundreds (or even thousands) of targeted prospects in seconds.

Here are our favorites:

Buzzstream — find prospects and send outreach emails with ease. Includes a basic CRM and lets you track all emails sent.

Pitchbox — outreach platform focussed on automation and scaling.

ContentMarketer.io — lets you send and track outreach emails using Gmail. Includes a ton of templates.

JustReachOut.io — allows you to discover and pitch to journalists easily. Integrates with HARO.

NinjaOutreach — all-in-one influencer discovery and outreach management tool.

Local SEO Tools

If you’re involved in “local” SEO, things like citation building, reviews, and reputation management will be a big part of your life.

But, here’s the problem: these tasks can be extremely time-consuming, boring, and repetitive.

For example, It can take hours to find local citation opportunities. And when you do find them, you’ll then have to spend even more time submitting to each of them. One. By. One.

It’s the same story with local blogger outreach, attracting reviews, and virtually any other “local SEO” task, too.

But, what if all this could be simplified, or perhaps even automated?

With “local SEO” tools, you can automate tasks such as, local rank tracking, and even finding local citations.



Here are a few useful “local SEO” tools:

BrightLocal — pulls your local SEO data into one dashboard. Offers a ton of tools including citation auditing and online review monitoring.

WhiteSpark — offers three main tools: local citation builder; reputation builder; and local rank tracker. There’s also a link prospector.

Moz Local — helps you ensure that your local business listings are accurate and correct.

FreeReviewMonitoring.com — monitors your businesses reviews on all the major review sites, daily.

Mobile Analytics Tools

If you don’t know exactly how people are using your mobile app, something needs to change.

Sure, looking at the number of downloads gives you a basic insight.

But, if you’re looking to optimize your app for UX (as you should be) or analyze where mobile users are falling out of your funnel, you need to dig deeper.

This is exactly what mobile analytics tools allow you to do.

They’ll help you figure out who your users really are; what they’re clicking; and even the exact features they’re using.

You can then use this data to improve UX, guide your feature implementation strategy, and even increase your bottom-line.

Here are a few great tools:

Apsalar — app analytics platform focussed on ROI. Assesses return on ad spend (ROAS) and helps with remarketing.

LeanPlum — comprehensive mobile analytics platform that helps to drive app engagement and ROI.

App Annie — app analytics and marketing data intelligence platform.

Online Mention Tracking Tools

Most businesses are constantly being mentioned online.

Some people will be talking about their experience(s) with you, others will be asking questions about your product in forums, and so forth.

Now, it’s easy to see how monitoring these mentions could be beneficial; for example:
You could follow-up and answer questions from potential customers in forums
You could reclaim links from those mentioning you, but not linking to your site (thus helping with SEO)
You could promote future content to those who’ve mentioned you in the past

But monitoring these mentions manually is literally impossible.

The solution: mention tracking tools.

These tools constantly monitor the web for mentions of, well, whatever you ask them to monitor the web for.

You can enter brand keywords (e.g. “Ahrefs”), competitor keywords (e.g. “SEMRush”), or even topics (e.g. “marketing tools”).



Whenever they spot a new mention, they’ll let you know.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Google Alerts — lets you monitor the web for any keyword/phrase (completely free!).

Ahrefs (Alerts) — monitor alerts for any query and get updates in real-time (or daily/weekly).

Mention — monitors mentions of your brand on the web. It also helps uncover influencers and allows you to react instantly.

TalkWalker — listens for brand mentions on social platforms. It also tells you whether those mentions are positive or negative.

Social Mention — real-time keyword monitoring and analysis.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Facebook has 1.7+ billion monthly active users.

Twitter has 313 million.

Even Pinterest has 100+ million.

So it’s clear that social media marketing is a must for all businesses, regardless of size.

But, managing a Facebook page, Twitter account, Pinterest board, and LinkedIn group is a time-consuming process.

And here’s the truth: most small business owners simply don’t have the time or budget to do this.

I mean, if you’re doing everything manually, it can easily take an hour just to post one link across all your social media channels.

Luckily, social media marketing tools can help streamline the process.

Not only can they help with management, but many use smart algorithms to determine the best time for posting.

They even automate the entire process.



Here are a few of the best:

Buffer — allows you to queue your social media posts and publish to multiple platforms in one place.

CoSchedule — lets you build a smart content marketing editorial calendar.

HootSuite — helps you to manage all your social platforms from one place.

FollowerWonk — helps you to analyze your twitter followers (e.g. who they are, and where they’re from). Also useful for discovering “influencers”.

Landing Page Tools

Landing pages have one job: to convert visitors into leads.

In fact, a good landing page should convert at 20%-40%.

But, here’s the problem: each time you promote something new (e.g. ebook, webinar, “cheat sheet”, etc.), you’ll need a completely redesigned landing page.

But, most businesses can’t afford to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for a custom landing page design every few weeks.

Landing page tools solve this problem by offering sets of pre-designed, easily editable landing page templates.



Most also keep track of conversion rates, allowing you to gain some insight into how well your pages are converting.

Some even allow you to create and optimize entire funnels, which ultimately leads to a nice increase in revenue (when used wisely).

Here are a few we love:

LeadPages — a landing page builder (with a ton of templates!). Integrates with most email marketing platforms.

ClickFunnels — map out your entire funnel and build all the landing pages (and more) you need.

UnBounce — a simple landing page builder with over 200 templates.

Instapage — build, publish and continually test (with A/B testing) landing pages.

A/B Testing Tools

Most people are quite “trigger happy” with their ideas.

For example, when they have an idea for increasing conversions on their sales page, they’ll waste no time implementing that idea.

This is a huge mistake.

Why?

Because that change could just as easily decrease conversions. And if that happens, it will have a negative effect on your bottom-line.

A/B testing solves this problem by offering a data-driven approach to any changes.

Here’s how it works:

Instead of simply implementing a change and hoping for the best, A/B testing tools will create two versions of a page.

The first version is the original page (no changes), and the second is identical to the first, but with one change.

These two pages are then tested against each other — you can then choose whichever performed best as the winner.



Here are a few great A/B testing tools:

VWO — easily run A/B tests (and multivariate tests) on your website. It also helps you target and personalize content to different types of visitor.

Optimizely — run A/B tests and personalize web content with ease.

Convert.com — enterprise-level A/B testing with “seamless” Google Analytics integration.

Marketing Automation Tools

Most businesses use a ton of different marketing tools.

But, there’s a problem: most of these tools aren’t very good at talking to each other.

For example, if a customer purchases something via PayPal, getting that information into your CRM can often be a manual, time-consuming process.

Wouldn’t it be easier if these services could talk to each other?

Marketing automation tools make use of APIs and other smart technology to connect seemingly unrelated tools to one-another.

So, automatically importing form-fill data (e.g. from TypeForm) into a spreadsheet (e.g. Google Sheets), for example, is now possible.



And that’s just one example — you can create your own triggers and actions to do almost anything you can imagine.

Here are a few of the best tools:

IFTTT — connect hundreds of different services with a simple “If [THIS] then [THAT]” formula.

Zapier — automate tasks between seemingly unrelated apps with “zaps”.

Marketo — create, automate and measure marketing campaigns (across a number of different channels).

Center.io — automate tasks based on the actions your leads take (created by LeadPages).

Hubspot Marketing — all-in-one marketing automation platform (it literally does everything).

Webinar Tools

Webinars are powerful lead generation tools.

According to these stats, 20%-40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads.

So, if you can get 100 people to attend your webinar, that’s potentially 20–40 qualified leads for your business.

Convert those leads at, say, 50%, and that’ll be 10–20 new clients.

For an SEO company charging a monthly retainer of $500 (which is apparently the most common figure), that could be an additional $5k-$10k in MRR from hosting just one webinar.

But, here’s the issue: many businesses struggle with the technicalities of hosting a webinar.

Luckily, webinar software has come a long way over the years. There are now many webinar tools that are both feature-packed and easy-to-use.

Some of them even help you to monetize your webinars with certain features.



Here are a few of the best:

WebinarJam — an enhanced version of Google Hangouts, heavily focussed on increasing webinar revenue.

GoToWebinar — lets you host and record webinars with live Q&A’s (and much more!).

ClickWebinar — lets you educate your prospects with branded webinars.

WebinarNinja — create a webinar in as little as 10 seconds.

Lead Capture Tools

Traffic is great, but it doesn’t always directly correlate with revenue.

Some sites get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month and only make a few hundred dollars. Others receive a fraction of that and make tens of thousands.

So what gives?

Well, the sites making real money are typically the ones that understand the importance of lead generation.

Remember, you can have all the traffic in the world but if it doesn’t convert, you’re fighting a losing battle.

Lead generation tools essentially help you to convert visitors into business leads.

They make implementing common lead acquisition strategies (e.g. content upgrades; overlays; pop-ups, etc.) easier by handling the technicalities.

Most have a user-friendly UI, which allows you to implement advanced lead generation tactics in seconds (without needing to know how to code).



Here are a few of the best:

SumoMe — a suite of lead generation tools (including various opt-ins).

OptinMonster — build, test and analyze lead generation forms.

Thrive Leads — add “content upgrades” and other opt-ins to your WordPress website with ease.

PPC Management Tools

Facebook alone earned $1.51 billion in revenue (from advertising) in the first 3 months of 2016.

And Google’s ad revenue recently hit $19 billion.

With PPC networks like this (and yes, Facebook and Google are effectively PPC networks) making such astronomical amounts, it’s clear that PPC advertising can be hugely profitable for businesses.

If it wasn’t, businesses wouldn’t be willingly handing over such crazy sums to these companies.

But, here’s the problem: when you start to scale your PPC spend, things become increasingly difficult to manage.

It gets to a stage where your messy spreadsheet just won’t cut it.

This is where PPC management tools come in super-useful, as they drastically simplify the management process.

But, that’s just one feature.

Many of these tools also have sophisticated algorithms built-in. These constantly analyze campaign performance and give you recommendations for improvements (e.g. cutting that unprofitable ad before it costs you dearly).



Here are a couple of must-have tools for those involved in PPC:

WordStream — helps you create, manage and optimize your PPC campaigns.

AdEspresso — optimization tools for Facebook ads (includes A/B testing and detailed analytics).

Optmyzr — manage and optimize PPC campaigns (including keyword, bid, and ad optimization).

CRM Tools

Sales management can be a messy process.

It’s usually fine in the early days (when you’re dealing with very few customers).

But, when you start getting more leads, things can turn to chaos pretty quickly.

I mean, when you’ve got a few thousand people in your sales funnel (all at different stages), you need a robust management system.

Without one, customers are going to fall through the cracks, and you’ll be leaving money on the table.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools solve this problem by pulling all your data into one robust management application.

You can then keep track of every touchpoint, every interaction, and every sale in one place.

Many also automatically pull in data from other platforms (e.g. MailChimp).



Here are a few of the best:

Salesforce — possibly the most powerful CRM application on the planet.

Hubspot CRM — 100% free CRM for up to a million contacts.

Close.io — a CRM for salespeople (focussed on helping you make more sales).

Pipedrive — a sales management application for small businesses.

Customer Communication Tools

Many marketers spend the bulk of their time chasing new leads but remember: existing customers are the lifeblood of your business.

Here’s a quote from Market Metrics:

The probability of converting an existing customer is 60 percent to 70 percent. The probability of converting a new prospect, on the other hand, is only 5 percent to 20 percent


Market Metrics

Clearly then, it’s important to keep in contact with your existing customers.

But how do you do this, at scale?

Customer communication tools solve this by automating the customer communication process.

So, we’re talking things like website live chats (that ping you on demand).

And even fully-automated marketing solutions that send personalized messages to customers based on their activities.



Here are a few great tools to consider:

Intercom — communicate, engage with and solve the problems of your visitors (in real-time).

LiveChat — clutter-free live messaging application for your website.

Customer.io — automate your customer communication based on visitor engagement.

Miscellaneous (but still useful) Tools

And, finally…

Here are the tools that didn’t fit neatly into the categories above, but are still super-useful:

Google Tag Assistant — a Chrome extension for troubleshooting the installation of various tags in Google Tag Manager (e.g. Google Analytics).

DownNotifier.com — alerts you when your website is down. Simple.

BuiltWith — find out what any website is built with (e.g. WordPress, Magento, etc.).

Microdata Generator (by Schema.org) — a structured data generator for (almost) anything you could ever need!

JetPack (for WordPress) — speeds up image loading, adds extra security, and gives visitor stats for self-hosted WordPress websites.

WebCodeTools.com — generate web code for just about anything you can imagine!

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