Yearly Archives 2012

Reducing Your Site’s Bounce Rate

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Articles, Featured, Inbound Marketing, Technology    Posted in November 6, 2012    |    No Comments

A high bounce rate is an indication that your site’s content does not match what is expected from the visitor.  Following are our recommendations from a strategic, design and backend/technical perspective for reducing your bounce rate.

Strategy

  • Make data-informed decisions
  • A/B test designs, CTAs, forms, headlines…everything
  • Compare better performing pages to underperformer using heat maps CrazyEgg is an excellent tool.
  • Profile and segment on geography, language, browser, operating system, traffic source
  • Compare keyword bounce performance and maintain keyword focus on each page
  • Ensure headlines accurately represent the actual content
  • Consider points of entry and perspective of landing as first page
  • Link to the most appropriate page rather than home page
  • Provide internal links to related content
  • Address the user’s REAL need
  • Incorporate video of people within the organization to allow visitors the opportunity to “get to know” us

Design

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  • Make sure the message is immediately obvious
  • Don’t overwhelm with content
  • Communicate who we are and what we do in 3 to 5 seconds
  • Ensure proper color contrast for readability
  • Design clean, accessible, intuitive navigation
  • Eliminate distractions such as animation, fly-outs, surveys,
  • Do not use auto-play video with audio
  • Incorporate a search function and analyze searches for insight
  • Avoid Flash
  • Do not use “welcome/splash screens”
  • Don’t get TOO hung up about staying above the fold.

Backend

  • Improve loading times
  • Lazy-load (AJAX) third-party content
  • Use responsive screen design for desktop, tablet, and mobile
  • Open all external links in a new window
  • Check various browser performance




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Incentive Solutions | Loyaltyworks Engages BrandON!

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in BrandON! Firm Information, Client Announcements    Posted in October 25, 2012    |    No Comments

Incentive Solutions joins BrandON!

Ritch Brandon, Chief Marketing Technologist for BrandON! marketing.technology, LLC, proudly announces the addition of two leaders in the incentive program management industry to our inbound marketing family.

Based in Atlanta, Ga., Incentive Solutions markets a range of incentive and motivation offerings to prominent corporations across the country.  Privately held ISI’s cutting edge technology manages online rewards programs, travel incentive events and debit card reward programs for some of the most highly recognized brands in the country, including Honda, Mohawk Industries, Pepsico Foodservice, Toro and GE.

Loyaltyworks joins BrandON!

Sister company, Loyaltyworks, provides incentive solutions for channel sales, customer loyalty, sales force and employee recognition for companies operating in the apparel manufacturing, electric utility, multi-product distribution, banking and construction industries.

Both companies use their proprietary and internally-developed RewardTrax platform that is recognized as the benchmark technology in incentive management.

Welcome to our digital inbound marketing family!

 

DNS Changer Check-Up

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Helpful Insight, Technology    Posted in July 6, 2012    |    No Comments

WARNING: There are 70,000 computers in the U.S. that are infected with a virus that will deny access to the Internet MONDAY July 9 if not corrected this weekend. The FBI has a site to check if your computer has been infected. Click the link. If the screen is green, you’re good. If it’s red, follow the instructions immediately!

Ernest Sports ES12 – Android Apps on Google Play

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Client Announcements, Mobile, Technology    Posted in July 3, 2012    |    No Comments

Ernest Sports ES12 ApplicationOur client, Ernest Sports, has launched their Android App in addition to the existing iOS app already available. Look for more great things to come!

6.5 Million Encrypted LinkedIn Passwords Leaked Online [REPORT]

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in LinkedIn    Posted in June 6, 2012    |    No Comments

LinkedIn iconLinkedIn USERS TAKE NOTE… There is a report that passwords to the service have been stolen. We recommend changing your password on LinkedIn AND any other site where you may use the same password.

 

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/06/06/6-5-million-linkedin-passwords/

TitleMasters joins the BrandON! family

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in BrandON! Firm Information, Client Announcements, HubSpot    Posted in May 24, 2012    |    No Comments

BrandON! is proud to announce the addition of Atlanta-based TitleMasters to our inbound marketing family. TitleMasters will be implementing HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing software to Turn Their Brand ON!

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http://www.titlemasters.com/

Why Your Company NEEDS Inbound Marketing

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Articles, Helpful Insight, HubSpot, Inbound Marketing, Marketing    Posted in May 15, 2012    |    No Comments

Finding new customers is the single biggest problem that almost every company has to face.  Ask any salesperson or marketing manager and they will agree.  And we see only two general ways to find those elusive customers:

  • You do all of the work and seek them out
  • Let new customers find you – the inbound strategy

In today’s highly competitive and technology-driven world, the inbound marketing approach is the key to growth for many companies, and it is the approach that we at BrandON marketing.technology utilize as we help small to medium size companies make their sales grow.

Customers are out There Looking for What You Sell

Every day hundreds of people are searching online for exactly what you are selling.  Using Google to find a specific product or service, searches are invoked that you can satisfy.  Making your site attractive to those searches is at the heart of an inbound marketing strategy.

Designing your site to be a sales oriented, effective website is a requirement.  But perhaps even more important is a strategy to attract those customers looking for the products or service that you sell.  Keywords, inbound links, compelling titles are all a part of the SEO strategy that we design for you and your company.

In addition to a search engine optimization mindset, a robust email nurturing campaign and effective landing pages with calls to action convert “visits” into SALES.

We are all about driving traffic to your website, attracting those predisposed buyers that are looking for you and converting them into clients.

Find Profitable Inbound Leads

The inbound marketing approach we use includes the following steps:

  • Determine what keywords both describe your products and services and are frequently used by the internet audience
  • Establish traffic measurements
  • Optimize your site so it can be found
  • Monitor progress and make tweaks where necessary
  • Build a robust social media presence
  • Establish and publish a blog to create fresh new content, driving traffic to your site and establishing your firm as a thought leader in the industry
  • Capture visitor contact information with compelling content
  • Nurture visitors with email follow-up
  • Drive prospects down the sales funnel

Attracting inbound sales leads is today’s way to make your business more successful.  Learn more about inbound marketing on our Resources page.  If you would like to speak with an inbound specialist, click the link below to schedule an online audit.





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How to Generate Leads With LinkedIn

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Helpful Insight, Inbound Marketing, LinkedIn, Marketing, Social Media    Posted in May 11, 2012    |    No Comments

LinkedIn is an astoundingly revolutionary platform for professionals. This social networking site allows people to stay in touch and strengthen relationships with all of their business contacts, both past and present. Read on to learn how you can harness this amazing tool to start generating real leads and driving revenue for your business today.

Transition Personal Into Professional

One of the ways that LinkedIn can work for your business is to help you seamlessly translate personal contacts into professional ones. When you connect with someone on this site, you will instantly have access to their contacts to see who you know in common and whom you could potentially be introduced to.

The search function on LinkedIn is sophisticated and allows you to find contacts at any business. You can even search more generally for people in a given field. This meshing of professional and personal may seem out of place at first, but it is truly just an extension of one of the most time-tested ways of conducting business.

Level The Playing Field

The key is to be proactive and take advantage of this tool while it is still a true competitive advantage. It is quite likely that this strategy will not remain on the cutting edge for very long, so jumping in and getting what benefits you can from it is the true key to overall success.Perhaps the most exciting part of using LinkedIn as a lead generating tool is the potential it has to really level the playing field between the Davids and Goliaths in the business world. Extensive lists of clients and potential clients were previously the domain of big corporations, but this one digital platform can serve as your client list with little effort on your end.

Cash In Without Shelling Out

It goes without saying that one of the biggest benefits to using LinkedIn in this manner is the fact that it is entirely free of charge. Even better, using this method of lead generating is actually less of a strain on your time than traditional lead generating. The site is built out in such a seamless and intuitive way that using it for this function is will end up saving you both time and money.

Stay ahead of the curve by tapping into the power of LinkedIn as a lead generating tool. Your business, along with your new clients, will certainly thank you.

~ Colin




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How to Reach Customers on LinkedIn

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Helpful Insight, Inbound Marketing, LinkedIn, Marketing, Social Media    Posted in May 9, 2012    |    No Comments

Social media can be a very effective way to find new customers. However, simply adding names or liking or friend requesting is not enough. You must have a strategy before you begin your search.

Who do you want? Putting together a rough demographic for what your contact looks like is important before you begin your LinkedIn adventure, with considerations including what industry they’re in, where the company is located, and what possible tangential industries work with the original one. Once this process has started, begin connecting with friends and acquaintances you already know in LinkedIn. They have friends and acquaintances that may fit the ideal contact you’re looking for.

As the process manifests itself, the next step is to dive deep into the profiles. Very much like finding ‘interests’ on dating sites, finding the associations of the contact is an important step. This starts to round out and detail what this possible contact is like by seeing what groups they are connected to, any conventions or seminars they have attended, even going as deep as any extra skills they may have picked up over their lifetime.

These are the opening steps for building contacts that may turn into customers. You will need to make this something you dedicate time to if you truly want to build a solid network.

Connect with Ritch Brandon, Chief Marketing Technologist for BrandON! here –> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ritchbrandon

~ David

 




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How to Measure your Blog’s Performance

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Content Marketing, Featured, Helpful Insight, HubSpot, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Social Media    Posted in April 18, 2012    |    No Comments

Business blogging without measuring results is a waste of time.

Business blogging without measuring results is a waste of time. That said, there are so many metrics that you COULD track, you could end up overwhelming yourself with data and leaving yourself time to actually blog.  So… we recommend focusing on the major metrics that can help save you time and hone your blogging to generate more leads.

 Measuring Visitors

Start by measuring the most fundamental (and important) of metrics…visitor count.  Google Analytics will quickly supply the information you need for any timeframe.

While tracking your blog visitor count like the stock market is fun, it takes a little digging in to the data to get some actionable insight.  Look at your five most successful blog posts. What do they have in common?  Is there a common topic?  Were your images better?  Did a Twitter follower tweet a link to the posts?  How many Facebook friends “liked” the post on your wall?  Now use this insight to refine and improve your future posts.

 Measuring Leads

We’re sure (most of) you are not investing the time to blog for your health.  The success of a business blog should be measured by its results.  And the results you want are leads.  “Sometimes a post may not get a ton of visits but still generate lots of leads. Without looking at the leads metric, a marketer might easily dismiss the less viewed post as a failure when that shouldn’t necessarily be the case.  Look at the leads you generate from blog posts. Also examine at what rate those leads convert into customers compared to other marketing channels.” (Business Blogging, Hubspot)

 Subscriber Counts

It takes more than reading one blog article for a person to develop an understanding of your expertise and credibility within your industry. Giving readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog either via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or via email is a common characteristic of a well-planned blog.  Tracking the number of people subscribing to your blog provides a solid indicator of the quality and consistency of your content.  Your subscribers act as the base readership of your content and can help spread it to others.

Inbound Links

An “inbound link” is a  link that originates from another website or blog and links to a page or post on your site.  Search engines use inbound links as an indication of authority and content quality which in turn influences how pages appear and rank in search engine results.  As blog posts are normally educational rather than product-centric, they are great at generating inbound links and, subsequently, search traffic.

Track how many inbound links each of your blog posts attracts. Different types of blog posts and topics will be more successful than others.  That is… some will drive more inbound links than others.  Looking at these metrics for each post will guide you as you determine which topics and types of posts should be included in your content strategy for your blog.

Social Media Shares

Tweet, pin, like.  Social media can drive traffic to your site and bring new eyes to your blog.  Remember to keep titles within Tweet size limits (less than 140 characters) and be sure to include photos and images that will help attract interest on Facebook and be pinned on Pinterest.  Then track the activity around each post to decide which topics and types of posts seem to be most interesting to your followers.  Use Facebook Insights and third-party twitter analysis tools to make life easier.

This article is an excerpt from our eBook: An Introduction to Blogging for Businesses.  The entire eBook is available as free PDF download.




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How to Promote your Blog

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Content Marketing, Featured, Helpful Insight, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Social Media    Posted in April 16, 2012    |    No Comments

Social Media Sharing

Social media works, y’all.  We’re talking Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube… all of those and the thousand of others.  We recommend blogging using the WordPress blog platform (www.WordPress.org or www.WordPress.com).  If you do, there are plug-ins that can automatically post a link to all of those social media sites that will direct traffic to your blog post.  You can do it manually too… but that can get tedious.  Regardless, you need to do it.  If social media is totally new to you, you probably should call us for some help.  We also have tons of resources on our site that may help: http://turnyourbrandon.com/resources/

Other Bloggers

Believe it or not, other bloggers are often happy to help spread the word about your blog… assuming you are writing intelligent, value-added posts. Start by following their blog’s RSS feed, commenting on their posts, and linking to their blog in articles and/or a blogroll that has links to your favorite sites.  The other blogger may very well return the favor.

Another avenue is to join blog networks like BlogGlue or NetworkedBlogs.  BlogGlue also has an excellent SEO tool that will automagically check blog post drafts for SEO best practices and offer suggestions to improve your post in the eyes of search engines.

Email Signatures

As soon as you have a blog, everyone in your organization should add a link in their automated email signature to it (and to your Twitter feed and Facebook page).

Events and Presentations

If, like us, you occasionally give presentations to Chamber events, networking groups, business associations, or what have you, be sure to promote your blog by saying that all of the material you covered today along with the slides you presented are available on your blog at…. Several of the attendees will look up your site right there from their smartphone.  Which brings up an entirely separate point…be sure your website and blog are mobile-friendly.  Call us if you don’t what that means.

This article is an excerpt from our eBook: An Introduction to Blogging for Businesses.  The entire eBook is available as free PDF download.




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How to Optimize Your Blog Posts

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Content Marketing, Featured, Helpful Insight, Inbound Marketing, Marketing    Posted in April 13, 2012    |    No Comments

So how do do I get the biggest bang for all of my work when I start blogging?

Attention-Grabbing Headlines

blog rss iconTake a lesson from the newspaper… grab readers’ attention with a great headline.  Headlines can be controversial, funny, shocking, or clever…but a good one is something that prompts the reader to investigate further.  Here are some tips:

  • Start with “How to….”
  • Start with “Top 10….”
  • Be a little irreverent with something like “5 Ways to Not Suck at…”
  • Start with “11 Essential…”
  • Make a statement, then follow up with “Here’s how to” deal with it.
  • Provide your “Top 10 Tips for…”

We’ve found that headlines like “How to Use Business Blogs to Market Your Business” work well.  ;-)

Compelling Images

People are visual.  If you’ve ever doubted it, look at the recent meteoric rise of Pinterest.  If that’s the first time you’ve heard of Pinterest, download our eBook “How to Use Pinterest for Business” to learn more: http://info.turnyourbrandon.com/how-to-use-pinterest-for-business.  But we digress.   Using a compelling image that catches attention in much the same way a great headline can will make your article much more popular.  There are free image sites like http://www.iconfinder.com/ that can help.  Keep in mind that images that are not specifically offered under common creative license are, almost certainly, copyrighted images.  Don’t use those without permission.  Bad karma.

Formatting

Break the article into sections so it’s not a sea of endless text that makes a reader’s eyes glaze over.  Use bullets for lists when appropriate.  Insert relevant graphics that help tell the story.  Don’t use funky colors, animations, or fonts that MIGHT “look pretty” but more than likely make the article difficult to read.  Remember the power of white space.  Designers call it “negative space”.  If you’re not sure what we mean, check out any Apple package or their website.  They’re masters in simplicity and formatting.

 Calls-to-Action

In sales, a good salesman knows they have to ask for the business.  Calls-to-action are where you ask for the business.  For every page on your blog, your website, and every article, there should be a clear call-to-action that invites the reader to download something, attend a webinar, schedule a consultation or SOMETHING that is relevant to the post.  Your objective is to engage the reader with as much content as possible…and then turn them into leads and then customers.   Calls-to-action are the bridge to Moneyland.  Build them!

If you’re not a graphic whiz, try using PowerPoint or Keynote to layout a nice “download now” button and then save it as an image that you can use on your blog.  Or hire someone to help by sending an email to HelpME@TurnYourBrandON.com or calling us at 404-955-9447 or contact us by completing the short form at this URL: http://info.turnyourbrandon.com/request-a-marketing-consultation.  That was a call-to-action, by the way.  ;-)

This article is an excerpt from our eBook: An Introduction to Blogging for Businesses.  The entire eBook is available as free PDF download.




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You’re invited to join Dropbox! Bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere!

Posted by Ritch Brandon    Posted in Uncategorized    Posted in April 11, 2012    |    No Comments

Dropbox is an excellent service for anyone (like us!) who uses multiple devices to work. Dropbox allows you to share files with your clients or team mates and provides a way to access those files from any of your devices.
[green_message]Source: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTI2NTcyODAzOQ?src=referrals_fb_post9 [/green_message] Follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/p/147417775294220

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