7 Online Marketing Tools That Are Totally Worth the Investment

Consider this your online marketing-tool cheat sheet -- one that can help you skyrocket your marketing.

1. Email marketing (and more): InfusionSoft

What it does: InfusionSoft is a bit on the pricey side, but it’s a powerful tool. Its best features are its automation features, which make it insanely effective for marketing campaigns. My delivery rates with InfusionSoft have been excellent!

How much it costs: InfusionSoft is a powerful yet costly email marketing tool. A one-time startup fee of around $2,000 will get you set up. Thereafter, fees range from $199 to $599 per month.

Why it’s worth it: InfusionSoft saves a lot of time. You’ll have to learn the system and get it set up. But once you’ve completed the setup, it’s pretty smooth sailing. Plus, with high deliverability rates and the ability to scale, you’re set for life.

2. Content Marketing: Buzzsumo

What it does: Buzzsumo allows you to find the most shared content on certain topics or websites. You also can filter the lists according to type of content (e.g., infographics, blogs). Buzzsumo’s advanced features, such as “influencers” and “monitoring,” are powerful ways to get ahead of the competition.

Pro: “Our starter plan is ideal for bloggers and small teams.” Costs $99 per month.

Agency: “For agency teams, with all Pro features, API access & more.” Costs $299 per month.

Enterprise: “Ideal for brands and publishers. Advanced functionality for large teams.” Costs $999 per month

Why it’s worth it - Buzzsumo is a content marketer’s dream come true. If you’re searching for trending subjects, analyzing effective headlines or trying to understand how to create the next viral topic, Buzzsumo is the answer.

3. Graphic Design and Visual Content: Canva

What it does: Not everyone can afford to hire a graphic designer. But nearly any of us can learn to do some basic design ourselves. Canva makes design easy and fast. Its tagline, “Amazingly simple graphic design software,” is spot-on. Canva’s templates are optimized for social media, and they are stunning. A few customizing clicks, and you’re set with eye-popping visual content.

How much it costs: Canva charges nothing for using the cloud-based software. If you use “premium elements” (certain images, etc.), you can pay as you go. Canva For Work is an advanced feature of the tool that charges a monthly subscription of $12.95.

Why it’s worth it: You don’t want to skimp on graphic design. Great visual design has a huge impact on how people perceive your brand and interact with your content. Canva will make you look good. And that’s priceless.

4. SEO and Site Speed: Pingdom Website Speed Test

What it does: Improving website speed is one of the fastest ways to improve your SEO and conversion rates. Pingdom’s website speed test helps you do that. Its free report provides instant analysis, plus tips on improving your site speed.

How much it costs: The speed test itself is free. Full website monitoring costs from $13.95 to $454 per month.

Why it’s worth it: For large websites that receive a lot of traffic, full-time monitoring is essential. Just minutes of downtime can cost you traffic and revenue. A monthly cost for Pingdom, to check your website’s status, speed and alerts, can save you money in the long run. 

5. SEO: Ahrefs

What it does: Every marketer needs to understand SEO. Ahrefs makes this job simple and straightforward. You can track keyword performance, measure your social metrics, perform backlink analysis, analyze your content, explore trending content, measure your keyword positions and do keyword research. It’s a robust all-in-one SEO tool that will put you on the path to outrank your competitors.

How much it costs: Plans range from $79 to $2,500 per month.

Why it’s worth it: There are plenty of free SEO tools, but few of them provide the full breadth of reliable information that Ahrefs does. Ahrefs’s quality data and reliable results are an essential part of dominating SEO.

6. Social Media: Buffer

What it does: Buffer is social media automation tool. You can schedule updates for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn. With a handy browser extension (click to schedule an update), mobile app, calendar, link shortening, optimal timing and social analytics, it’s hard to beat.

How much it costs: Buffer has a free plan with limited features. Its additional plans range from $10 to $250 per month.

Why it’s worth it: When it comes to social media, saving time is critically important. This is exactly what Buffer does. You can fully automate your social media posting, plus set up an ideal posting schedule in seconds. In business, time saved is money saved.

7. Marketing Schedule: CoSchedule

What it does: CoSchedule helps you plan your marketing, organize your campaigns, plan your content and get ahead. Marketing needs to be organized, and so does scheduling. It’s not enough to simply create content and make updates. CoSchedule helps to streamline the process. Its integration with Chrome, Wordpress, Google Docs and Evernote makes the process even easier.

How much it costs: Coschedule ranges from $15 per month for a solo user to $600 per month for larger agency users.

Why it’s worth it: Staying organized and saving time are the two main benefits of CoSchedule. If your marketing is a jumbled mess of time lines, interest, tweets and unfinished campaigns, CoSchedule can help you sort that all out.

Should You Use SEO or PPC Marketing?

There are two main ways a local business can reach prospects on Google, and it’s important to understand what they are and the difference between them. The two strategies are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.

Local SEO is concerned with getting your website ranked highly in the map and organic search listings on Google for keywords related to your business. You cannot pay for placement in the organic results. Google has an algorithm that determines where each page on your site ranks for various keywords and, with local SEO, you’re essentially trying to game the algorithm to get your site ranked higher than your competitors’ sites for the best keywords related to your busi­ness.
PPC is paid advertising on Google. PPC ads are displayed above the organic search results as well as down the right side of the search results.
The main thing to understand is how prominently PPC ads are displayed at the top of a Google search results page. Usually the top three results for a local search are ads. (This is one thing that will very likely not change about how the search engine results page looks because Google makes most of its money from these ads.) Under that are the maps listings, and then the organic search results follow. It's important to understand that most people will click on the results at the top of the page, which, no surprise, are exactly where the ads that make Google money are positioned.

If you were to look at the “above the fold” results (the “above the fold” results are those you see when you first land on the page before you scroll down) of any Google search, you'd notice that the majority of the pixels are taken up by paid ads. There is often no room for any organic results. People are lazy online and they won't scroll unless they have to. If they find what they’re looking for above the fold, they won’t go any further. Because of this, one of the main advantages PPC has over SEO is its prime positioning on the search results pages.


With PPC, you can launch a campaign and, almost immediately, your ads will start appearing on page one of Google. SEO, by comparison, is a long-term investment. You have to wait at least three to six months to typically start seeing any type of results, and in a competitive market, it could take over a year.

What this means is, you can hire an SEO firm for $1,000 or $2,000 a month, depending on how aggressive you want to be, retain them for six months or 12 months, yet still have no guarantee that you'll be on page one or get any leads from it. Even if you do get on page one, after a year or two of paying an SEO firm, Google may change its algorithm and you could lose it all overnight (we’ve seen that happen many times).

If you’re planning to be in business for the long term, are patient, and hire a good SEO firm, then SEO may be a very good long-term investment and generate a good ROI over time.

SEO is a constant cat-and-mouse game between Google and those who do SEO for a living. It’s getting harder and harder to get results, and we know a number of SEO firms that are starting to offer other services like web design or social media marketing, while others are deciding to fold up shop rather than continue to play games with Google.

You may be getting three to four solicitations a day from SEO firms telling you how poorly your website is ranking, how your horrible website isn't getting you as many leads as it could be, and how they have the magic solution to get you to the top of page one on Google (we get their emails, too!). The majority of these firms outsource their SEO to cheap overseas labor and mark up the costs 100 percent or more. Please don't respond to their offers. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

Another advantage of PPC is that it will give you clear, measurable results. You’ll know exactly how much you spent on clicks and how many leads and how much revenue you generated in return.

You can't get clear, measurable results like that with SEO. Google doesn’t share a lot of SEO data with website owners, which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to accurately measure how many leads you are getting from organic traffic. In fact, one thing to watch out for is that a lot of the organic/SEO traffic you get to your site may be from branded traffic (i.e., people searching specifically for your company name). So it may look like you’re getting lots of great quality leads from organic traffic, but these are people who already know who you are and would have contacted you anyway. Be sure to keep this in mind when you're trying to evaluate the results from any SEO work you do.

Why PPC will be a top source of leads for a long time
PPC is never going away. Google is a publicly traded company with a responsibility to their shareholders to increase profits, and they're constantly rolling out new things that get more people to click on ads. Recently they rolled out new improvements, such as callout extensions, that make their ads take up more space on the page.

Google doesn’t make money on SEO. They make money on Google AdWords (the name of their PPC program). They're constantly rolling out new products for advertisers, and we found that they love local business advertisers. Why? Because your business is very relevant to searchers. If someone is searching for an injury lawyer in Dallas, Google wants people to find an injury lawyer in Dallas -- they want relevant search results.

From our experience, the fastest, most reliable, and most profitable way to generate an ROI on Google comes from running PPC ads. You just have to make sure you’re approaching PPC the right way for your local business.

Which Social Media Marketing Tactics Work Best?

(eM+C)—Now that marketers’ tenure on social networks is at least a few years old, they are zeroing in on what they are best able to accomplish on the sites, what their biggest challenges are and how to most effectively track their performance.

Ascend2, an agency consulting company, surveyed marketing professionals around the world in February 2013, and the greatest percentage of respondents from both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies considered customer engagement to be the primary purpose of their social media marketing. Website traffic also ranked high for both types of marketing professionals.

Leads were a more important end for B2Bs than B2Cs. Twenty-nine percent of B2Bs used social to generate better quality leads, and 27% sought to get more leads with the tactic.

Search engine rankings remain an important part of businesses’ digital strategy, and social media plays a role here too. Approximately one-quarter of both B2Bs and B2Cs used social media outreach to improve search rank.

The fundamental goal of increasing sales revenue was a social goal for over one-third of marketers from both B2Bs and B2Cs.

To best achieve social objectives, the greatest percentage of respondents cited creating articles and blog post content. These tactics fall directly in line with driving the goal of customer engagement. Other forms of content creation also ranked high, including research and whitepapers for B2Bs, and video and audio for both types of companies.

Big Social Media Plans + Small Budget = No Problem.

Step #1:   Develop ideas with endemic potential.

Marketers who view social media as efficient channels through which they steadily self-promote, where they do more talking than listening, or where they attempt to impose brand messaging and force brand loyalty instead of encouraging it are looking at it all wrong.

Social media is efficient because it’s viral. It isn’t designed for bragging about how great your business is.  It’s about enticing people to brag about your business for you. Essentially, social media offers smart marketers the opportunity to turn a handful of people into an enormous labyrinth of loyal brand ambassadors.

Step #2):  Be ‘resource wise.’

Probably one of the biggest myths about marketing on the social web is that it’s free.  It isn’t and it never was.
Marketers familiar with social media understand it takes a great deal of resources to be successful, including time spent strategizing, developing and implementing campaigns, and consistent man hours dedicated to routinely engaging with audiences. Costs for design and production, analytics, content creation and research can all put a significant dent in budgets too.

Following are a few suggestions to help marketers cut costs and improve ROI.

Focus on identifying trends surrounding posts and tweets that net the biggest reactions and interactions. Replicate those strategies.
Like the Ford Fiesta campaign, leverage User Generated Content (UGC) to reduce development and production expenses whenever possible.
Rely on turnkey social media management apps to automate posts and updates, gather data or monitor conversations to alleviate the burden of time consuming tasks.
Take a page out of Marketing 101 by integrating your efforts.  Messaging of traditional campaigns should align with social media messaging.  Post broadcast ads to your company’s branded social sites.
Enable your social media audience to share special offers or discounts with their friends.
Make your customers the star of your social media campaign.  Post photos of contest winners or reward your most influential followers with exclusive sneak peeks or special discounts.  Fan inclusion is a simple and cost-effective way to build brand awareness.





Step #3): Simplify the sales path.

In Michael Stelzner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, it revealed that by spending as little as six hours per week in social media marketing, 61 percent of marketers surveyed saw lead generation benefits.

Social media isn’t all fun and games.  As marketers, our bottom line goal is to positively impact the bottom line of our business.  What this means is that any social media marketing campaign – any good marketing campaign for that matter – should include 1) clearly defined goals 2) performance analytics and 3) calls-to-action.

12 Valuable Tips for Video SEO Beginners

1. Content Quality Check

Ensure your videos are relevant, informative, and rich with content. Don’t waste time producing videos that have nothing to do with your brand or service.

Videos demonstrating step-by-step processes or videos expressing opinions about topics can be quite useful. Videos should be fun, memorable, short, and leave the viewer wanting more.

If using a video production company, trust one that understands the importance of these concepts. If you’re hesitant of their services, make sure to scan their existing video portfolio in detail for videos that match these qualities.





2. Title

Capture the potential viewer’s attention with a catchy title that contains related key phrases that are relevant to your brand or service. Do some keyword research and find the words that your audience will most likely be searching, but remember to keep the title interesting, not just filled with keywords.

Create a title that will catch the eye of a user. Brainstorm some titles that catch your eye when passing a magazine rack. What compels you to pick up a magazine?




3. Tags

Optimize your video with important key phrases or keywords. Don’t use complicated words or terminology that may not be common to the average person.

Refer back to your keyword research and think in terms of what your targeted audience might be searching for when looking to find your brand or service. Tag your video with these terms and consider naming the file of the video with these terms in mind.




4. Description

Optimize your video’s description with relevant keywords and include a keyword-rich description of your video to allow search engines to index it and rank it higher, and for users to better understand your video before viewing.




5. Links

Use video as a portal to other content on your site. Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and Vimeo, and consider providing links back to related content and other relevant videos on your site.




6. Transcripts

Provide transcripts of your videos. Good old HTML content is still a favorite with search engines.

If you want your video to rank well, you need to give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround your videos with on-page copy that can be indexed by search engines.




7. Length

Keep your video at five minutes or less. The average amount of time a user spends on a YouTube video is around 1 minute 30 seconds. People do not want to sit through a boring video, and most will not do it.

If you have video content that is of long duration, consider breaking it up into smaller pieces and tagging each accordingly, to be more appealing to the viewer. Not only does this make for better viewing pleasure, multiple videos are also better for optimization efforts.

YouTube is now paying close attention to viewership and engagement. It is critical that viewers watch your video for as long as possible.

8. Video Sitemaps

Submit a video sitemap to Google to make sure that the search engine spiders can find your video content and index it accordingly. This is the easiest way for search engines to find your video content.

Take advantage of Google Webmaster Tools for creating a video sitemap. Use important keywords in the anchor text that links to your videos featured on your sitemap.





9. Branding

As video is a great way to generate brand awareness with prospects, take advantage of this opportunity to incorporate your brand and logos into your videos.




10. Embedding Options

Help your video go viral. Allow other users access to the coding that will allow them to embed your video on their website or blog. This can help gain valuable back links and shares that will boost your rankings in search engines.





11. Syndication

Submit your video to RSS feeds and syndicate your videos to drive exposure across various online platforms and to optimize your videos even more.





12. Share, Share, Share!

Get on your social networks, look through your email contacts, write on your blogs, and get the hype going. Share your video with everyone, because if you have content worth sharing, it will continue to be shared to grow an expanding audience, and in turn develop more exposure for your brand or service.

Can The SEO Industry Embrace Long-Form Content?

1. Time is of the essence

For many SEO bloggers time spent on blogging is time not spent on paid work. Blogging is a side project for many of us, squeezed in between SEO audits and web analytics reports. Not many companies allow their staff to spend a lot of time on blogging, and those that do tend to judge an employee’s output by the number of posts they generate rather than the length of them.





2. We don’t get paid for this

Relating to the first issue, blogging is usually a voluntary activity. With few exceptions, on the whole SEO bloggers don’t get paid for their writing. It’s something we do because we like it and/or because it adds value to our reputations in the long term. It doesn’t generate direct revenue, which makes it hard to justify spending a lot of time on.





3. Short-term thinking is beneficial

A mindset that embraces quick change instead of long, in-depth analysis can actually be an advantage in this fast-paced industry of ours. SEOs that quickly adapt to changing circumstances, that can rapidly churn out large amounts of content, and that are able to send out massive amounts of link request emails, tend to be seen as more productive and valuable than those who spend hours agonising over that one anomalous keyword referral. That short-term thinking often results in short-form content of variable quality.




4. We chase hypes

Relating to the previous point, as an industry we’re infected with a hype-chasing mentality. The algorithms we attempt to profit from change from day to day, which means we’re always adapting and looking for the next ‘silver bullet’ that will help us gain a competitive advantage. Our blogging reflects this – every time Google spits out a substantial update, it dominates the SEO blogosphere for weeks. New features of Google’s products need to be rapidly communicated and analysed on various blogs if they’re to be seen as cutting edge and on top of things. Few bloggers have the freedom – or will – to take a few days or weeks to gather data and analyse new trends carefully.





5. We’re not investigative journalists

Investigative journalism is a powerful medium, but it needs skilled practitioners to pull it off. Most SEOs are not journalists. We don’t usually have the skills that are required for proper in-depth research and authorship.





6. The internet favours short content

As Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows, the internet as a medium encourages short attention spans. That means long-form content is at a high risk of not being read properly. Short articles and short videos tend to work better online than lengthy tomes and in-depth analysis.

7 SEO Tips for not provided in Google Analytics

Ever since Google announced they would no longer report referring keyword data from logged-in users, webmasters and SEOs have become increasingly frustrated dealing with the dreaded (not provided) keywords.

Google assured us this would impact less than 10% of queries. Although that has proved to be the average, some webmasters have observed 50% of their keyword information wiped clean away from their data.

1. How Big is Your (not provided) Impact?

If Google reports less than 5% of your organic keyword traffic as (not provided) then you probably don’t have much to worry about. On the other hand, if you are one of the unlucky few who experienced 25-50% in lost keyword data, then you want to hustle to get that data back.

The simplest way to measure impact, of course, is to look at your referring keyword information. Here you can easily track the percentage of “not provided” keywords





2. Take an Accurate Look

Once you understand how much referring keyword traffic is hidden by Google’s privacy veil, now is the time to fill in the missing holes in your analytics..





3. Get Smarter Data Analysis

Using clear, step-by-step instructions he shows how to:

Establish Macro Content

Understand the Performance Profile of not provided traffic.

Match up Performance Profile to Brand & Non-brand Visits

Establish Conclusions

Landing Page Keyword Referral Analysis





4. Mine Your SEO Report in Google Analytics


Google’s own answer to this predicament is the new SEO reports in Google Analytics. The reports are found under the “Traffic Sources” section.


Although it’s true that these SEO query reports list most of the keywords searchers used to find your website, they are limited in value by several major drawbacks.

The data is limited to the top 1000 daily search queries and top 1000 daily landing pages for the past 30 days.

The reports are often criticized for their inaccuracy and confusion they produce.

The query reports aren’t tied to landing page reports, or vice-versa, severely limiting their usefulness.




5. Got Ca$h? Buy the Data


The same privacy loophole which angered so many webmasters also allows web marketers to buy the keyword data. This is because although Google hides referring keyword query data from everyone else, it does make this data available to customers who purchase advertising through Google.




6. Send Google Your Love

…or not. Personally, I love Google and what they have done for our world, but it’s best to let our voices be heard. If you have strong feelings about Google’s “not provided” actions, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz suggests you voice your concern.



7. Don’t Worry

Although we find the development of “not provided” keywords troubling, one thing that will always be true is that SEOs are resourceful – incredibly so. Through 1000s of algorithm changes and a rapidly shifting web landscape, savvy web marketers have found ways to keep up with evolving search engines. In fact, the reverse is often true – search engines find themselves keeping up with web marketers.

The “not provided” story is long from over. That said, we’ve been through worse storms than this. By working together for a better understanding of the web, as SEOs do, we will arrive on the other side stronger than ever.

Fixing 5 common SEO problems with HTML5... today!

Problem 1: Pagination

You have a tonne of pages, e.g listing products in a particular category, which are completely identical asides from which subset of your products are listed on them. Now you want to ensure that you rank, but you also do not want to run into duplicate content issues, or waste your crawl budget letting Google crawl hundreds of pages which add no value. However, maybe you do want them to be crawled to ensure the content is indexed? Maybe you want them crawled but are aware these same products are listed in different groups and sequences in varying categories and you are worried about the implications of this. If only you could just tell Google: “Hey! These pages are paginated listings, so please treat them accordingly!”.

This is a common scenario for many sites, especially eCommerce sites; however, whilst a common problem, it is still something we see many clients struggling with. Furthermore, often clients will have some specific site quirk or preference which makes this less straightforward than it should be.

Problem 2: Page structure


For years now we have been reminded over and over to focus on semantic HTML. Originally the focus on this was that it makes rendering content across devices and formats far easier when it is neatly categorised: HTML for content and meaning, CSS for presentation and style, and Javascript for additional behaviour. Removing anything in your HTML that was just there for presentation was not too difficult, but managing to fully define the meaning of the content with HTML was pretty much impossible - HTML simply wasn’t a rich enough language. Microformats started flooding in trying to fill some of the gaps, but the fact is that HTML remained ill equipped for the task.







Problem 3: Internal search pages


What happens if you Google Bing’s results page for Googling Bing? Well, nothing actually because they block it with robots.txt, but my point is when a search engine starts crawling another search engine’s results pages the universe gets uneasy.

Now if you have an internal search feature on your site, the standard answer would be to block it with robots.txt and stop the hellish nightmare that can otherwise ensue. However, some sites actually blend the search feature with weird navigation systems or even use the search results as a way to list certain product categories that they then link to. The best solution is to fix the site IA and make this a non-issue but it isn’t always as easy as it should be.





Problem 4: Microformats != schema.org

Microformats and RDFa are two forms of embedding machine readable meta data into our web page that are both quite well known in the SEO community.

Microdata is another such format, and is part of the HTML5 spec, but has remained somewhat in the shadows and hasn’t seen the widespread adoption of the others.

Schema.org is not a format or a language in itself, but it actually a vocabulary which the search engines have all agreed to understand and respect. It lays out what types of entities and attributes you can insert into the metadata on your web pages and guarantees that all the engines will understand these.





Problem 5: AJAX and URLs



This one is well known and disliked by pretty much every SEO that there ever was. AJAX sites are really nice for users and improve the user experience greatly.... right up to the moment the user tries to bookmark the page they are on, or email it someone, or share it via social media, or use the back button, or find the page in their history the next day.

AJAX and SEO simply were never designed to mix, and now we are in a world where people want both. If you have somehow managed to avoid this problem and aren’t aware of is then I’ll briefly outline it... AJAX allows a webpage to, via the use of javascript, update the contents of a page without actually reloading the page; a new HTTP request will be sent and the new content will probably replace some old content on the page but because the page does not reload the URL does not change.

The traditional method to address this to ensure the Googlebot can spider the content is simply to ensure the AJAX calls are hooked to traditional <a> tags so you can include an href to a version of that same content which Google will pick up (and far too often even this hasn’t been done - meaning the content is stranded and will never get indexed). This is fine for the crawling aspect of SEO, but nowadays we need to consider the fact that social shares are an important aspect of SEO too and if the user can’t copy and paste the correct URL then you are already handicapped.