Offers That Convert Website Visitors into Qualified Leads

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Getting qualified visitors to your website is only half the battle. The other half of the equation is converting those visitors into qualified leads. To earn a positive return on your website investment and to support your sales team, you need to have a strategy that gets those visitors to take an action on your website—to “raise their hand” and let you know where they stand in the sales cycle.

Generally speaking, there are five types of visitors who will visit your website…

via raintoday.com

…you’ll have follow the ‘via’ link to learn who they are!

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Do You Have the Skills to Be a B2B Social Media Marketer?

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Every job requires a variety of skills to be successful, and social media marketer or communicator or specialist at a B2B company is no different. But when you start to list out the skills and realize the level of competency required for this postion, it becomes daunting to find individuals with all of them. If you were looking to make a social media hire, which may be a quaint thought in a few years, you must determine what skills hold the highest priority for your organization. This may be difficult to determine if your B2B company is looking for the person to start the company’s social media programs.

And if you are looking for a social media postion, while you cannot excel at all of these, you must excel at several of them and possess a high level of proficiency at most of them. So let’s take a look at the major skills, which I have presented in the form of positions or job titles.

via socialmediab2b.com

Follow the ‘via’ link to go to the source where you can find all the skills you need…

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How to Get the Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 from Tamar Weinberg

Image by Tamar Weinberg via Flickr

Every year, I spend hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours reading articles on Internet Marketing for my annual Best Internet Marketing Posts blog post. The effort to find these posts, read them thoroughly, identify whether they meet certain criteria, and categorize them takes an incredibly huge toll on me, but at the end of the day, I’ve been proud to provide regular content to my readers. Over the last five years, hundreds of URLs have been carefully collected and selected for inclusion in this post.

The posts for the last five years are:

• Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2010
• Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009
• Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008
• Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007
• Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2006

Each year, this post has gotten bigger and better, and for my 30th birthday, I offered 300 great links that can most certainly act as the only internet marketing schooling you’ll ever need.

via techipedia.com

If Tamar says this is the best, I’m all in!

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95 Days of Cluetrain for 2011

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Back in 2000, I picked up a book at Barnes & Noble in Long Beach, CA.  The Cluetrain Manifesto (affiliate link) was on the end cap display and having been involved in “Internet stuff” for a while for a few years, I was keen to explore what the book had to offer.  Little did I know (same for most of us I’d imagine) that Cluetrain would be even more relevant over a decade later than when it was first written.  Frankly, I can’t think of too many business books that can make that claim, so that in and of itself is really something. Over the past several years I’ve read and re-read Cluetrain a few times and have kept the 95 theses document close at hand. As we all look forward to what 2011 brings, it seems an appropriate time to get reacquainted with the full Cluetrain set of 95 theses albeit with a bit more depth. (one liners such as “markets are conversations” don’t have the same immediate resonance with everyone and thusly some explanation may be required.). So, in in the spirit of getting fully engaged in the Cluetrain mindset that I’m embarking on the project of bringing all 95 of these to life over the next 95 work days.

via marketingsavant.com

Dana VanDen Heuvel of MarketingSavant Group is engaged in a rather ambitious project over at his blog, but as I have said so many times before — when Dana talks, I take notes. Follow the ‘via’ link over to his site and track his ’95 days of Cluetrain’ — I know I will…

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Want to be a successful blogger?

Image by toprankonlinemarketing via Flickr

Tamar Weinberg’s got you covered. Here are some characteristics she says you’ll need…

A few weeks ago, I posted about the seven characteristics of highly effective online video. Taking this theme a little further, I decided to branch out into the blogosphere, but using the number seven this time around was a tad too limiting. There are at least ten characteristics off the top of my head that make blogs and bloggers successful. These characteristics give the blogs mentioned below fame, fortune, and loyal followings.

Want to build your blog and following? Here are some key ideas and takeways — as well as inspirational bloggers you might want to follow — who can help you realize that dream. Source: 11 Characteristics of Highly Influential Blog(ger)s » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg

Go to the source to read the rest of the article…

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How Marketers Can Keep Brand Fans on Board

Go to the source to read the article: emarketer.com

The Future of Business is Social

You can read the original article here: Best of 2010: The Future of Business is Social.

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Opportunity of a lifetime!

“So, there’s plenty of bad economic news floating around. From the price of oil to Wall Street to bailouts to the death of traditional advertising.

Which is great news for anyone hoping to grow or to make an impact.

Change (and the fortunes that go with it) is almost always made during the down part of the cycle. It might not be fun, but it’s exciting. (Where do you think Google came from?) The opportunity is to find substantial opportunities (in any field) that deliver real value and have a future. Those jobs/investments/companies/ideas are undervalued right now, but not for long.” Click here to go to the source…

Reflecting on 2010 – The Year the Customer Became King

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“I came. I saw. I conquered.”

Were Julius Caesar a B2B online marketer in 2010, his words may have more appropriately been:

“I created. I shared. I conversed.”

Even five years ago, the concept of engaging the customer in dialogue, let alone allowing the customer to drive the conversation, would have been both foreign and frightening.

Today, marketers that are actively engaging their customers and their communities through social media and sharing relevant, meaningful content with them are leading the charge toward a new era of online marketing – an era in which the customer, not the brand, is King.

And, no longer is a solid brand message and well articulated value proposition enough for our King. When it comes to learning more about our brands and products, our customers don’t just want a message, they want a conversation.

via blogs.business.com

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9 SEO Insights You Must Follow

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The primary goal of your search engine optimization (SEO) is to drive relevant people that are interested in your industry or company to your website.  If you follow SEO than you know how fast things change.  You also know how hard it can be to keep all with these changes.

SEO is actually a relatively simple technique that requires small changes based on major changes the search engines announce. I bold major changes because the changes really need to be major to affect your overall website rankings and SEO strategy.

Here are nine SEO techniques that you should always follow regardless of the changes the search engines are continuously making.

via blog.hubspot.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…

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