Best Free Online Marketing Guide For Online Entrepreneur

Wondering how to run brand contests and giveaways like a pro? Contests and giveaways can be an amazingly easy and quick way to generate positive engagement, get more traffic to your website and most importantly, generate more leads for your business. That said, holding an online contest is not as easy as buying an iPad, posting a contest on Facebook and then waiting for the results to come in. You might get lots of people interested and participating – and more likes than you ever expected on a post – but at the end of the day, if you’re not getting the right people signing up for your contest or giveaway (i.e. your target audience), you’re not going to get a return on your investment. In this post, I’m going to show you how to run contests and giveaways like a pro – so that you’re not just doing a contest for the sake of it, but actually reaching your goals for your marketing strategies. Why run online contests and giveaways? As I mentioned in the introduction, contests and g...

Building consistent organic search traffic is every digital publisher’s dream. But what does it really take to make your content SEO friendly? The good news is it is not a rocket science. On top of that, despite what many people think, it has nothing to do with “tricking” Google into thinking your content is high-quality or SEO friendly. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, which basically means making sure a search algorithm can easily access and understand your content. There’s no dark art involved. Here are the steps you should take to make your content SEO friendly: 1. Match Your Content Idea to a Searchable Phrase (Search Query) So you have an idea in mind which you feel like writing about. This is where any content creation starts: “I have something to say on this topic, and I feel like it will be interesting and/or useful”. Is anyone searching for this topic? Chances are, if you have come up with the topic, there should be other people who may feel intrigued en...

Jay Baer started the Convince & Convert blog back in 2008, and every year, we post a top 10 list of our most popular posts of the year. But for 2020, we’re bringing you our favorite posts of the decade . Some are visitor favorites. Others are team member favorites. Dive in now as we celebrate 10+ years of marketing content: My Biggest Mistakes in 10 Years as an Entrepreneur To celebrate Convince & Convert’s 10 year anniversary in 2018, founder Jay Baer reveled the 10 biggest lessons he learned while leading the company. While this post doesn’t receive many organic visits these days, it did get a ton of feedback, shares and engagement when we originally posted it. It’s worth a read — for sure! Originally Published: June 1, 2018 How to Build a Content Calendar (Plus a Free Template) A fan favorite, we recently refreshed this popular post in early 2019 with a video, new downloadable template and updated advice—and it jumped in the rankings and receives thousands of visit...

Videos have always played an important role in organic visibility. Video rich snippets were one of the first rich elements in Google search results pages. For years , Google would show video thumbnails inside organic search results. Having your video thumbnail in Google search always meant higher brand visibility and more clicks. So does video help SEO these days? How Videos Help Organic Visibility Now that we talk more about organic visibility than rankings , building a consistent video strategy has become even more important. With on-the-go and video search on the rise, video content has become even more important, as consumers are able to watch videos without interrupting their current activity. Videos Are All Over the Search Result Pages Google has been adding interactive rich video elements all over search engine result pages. As such, you can find video carousels for every other Google search these days. On a mobile device, video carousels look like this: Apart fro...

Do you become a different marketer during the holiday season? Until holiday season begins, you spend countless hours researching your audiences, building buyer personas , and executing strategies that put the customer’s experience first. All of your work is rooted in best practice and conducted with an innovative spirit. I mean, let’s be honest, you’re really good at this. Then, out of nowhere, the holiday marketing season takes hold. Grab your copy of “Delete Santa: Holiday Marketing Nightmares Revealed” now. All of those best practices and innovative, creative ideas take a backseat to what needs to be done for the final push before year’s end. We don’t act like ourselves. We send multiple emails daily. We execute a variety of promotional ideas we would never consider in Q2. We try to tailor our messages in ways we aren’t quite ready to do. The result is a marketing tsunami that results in a lot of noise and a bunch of tired marketing professionals. Here’s the thing: we know...

Are you in the midst of planning your 2020 digital marketing? Here are the biggest digital marketing trends for 2020, according to Convince & Convert’s consulting team. Messaging Goes Mainstream Brands Need to Meet Consumers’ Continued Need for Immediate Information Standards Are Being Raised in Privacy and Digital Wellbeing Content Inclusivity Across Digital Touchpoints Is Gaining Momentum Teams Need to Become Fluent in Interpreting and Collecting Useful Data Gathering 1st Party Customer Data Is Becoming Increasingly Important Voice-Activated Content Will Increase in Popularity The Already Trendy Chatbot Will Get Trendier and Provide Even More Interactive Options Messaging Goes Mainstream While email will continue to be an important way for brands to communicate with customers, other modalities will see sharp increases in 2020, especially SMS and Messenger/WhatsApp. While these communication methods are already massively popular in other parts of the world, the...

In addition to running Convince & Convert, I am a professional speaker and give many presentations each year on marketing and customer experience. I’m even in the professional speaking Hall of Fame (alas, no bronze bust included). As a speaker, I have discovered that one of the elements that differentiate a good on-stage performance from a great one is the stories: how relevant are they to that audience, and how richly are they told. Why are some stories better than others, and why are some storytellers better as well? This week, I launched STANDING OVATION to find out. Where Professional Speakers Tell the Stories of Their Stories Each episode of my new podcast, Standing Ovation , works like this: I introduce the episode, and then the audience listens to an actual signature story, told on-stage by a professional speaker. When the story concludes, I interview that speaker about how the story was found, developed, polished, and perfected. The tagline of the show is “where pr...