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.

How Your Local Search Engine Optimization is Preventing You From Generating New Business Leads

Local search engine optimization is important to success, because four out of five searchers using Google are looking for a local business to contact. (Search Engine Watch)Therefore lead generation directly depends on your audience knowing you’re a local option.

Unfortunately, many local businesses either don’t know how or don’t care to take local optimization seriously. But not caring or not knowing how to fix the problem are equally indefensible positions to take in a digital marketplace where more and more buyers are shopping more and more locally.

Take a look at two of the biggest problems found when local search engine optimization isn’t made a priority.

1.  Confusion For Your Buyers

Search engines, like Google, and search directories, like Yelp, MerchantCircle and Yellowpages, take a business's local information and display it to users among local business search results. So, inconsistent business listings can turn into hundreds of directories with variations of your local business information. And with directories continually sharing different information with one another, this is a problem that will continue to spread.





2.  Poor (If Any) Local Placement

When Google knows your business name, address and phone number, it is able to place you among the local business options in search results. But Google pulls this information from directories to provide buyers with the local business information it believes to be most accurate. So if your business has inconsistent local listings, Google may list you as a business in an incorrect location and ultimately, in front of the wrong buyer.

What’s worse, if the buyer is left to figure out the correct local listing, they’re simply going to shop somewhere else.

Generating new business leads is the solution to any problem your business may face. But you cannot generate new business leads if you’re not placing your business in front of your local buyer. In order to be placed in front of your local buyers, you need to prioritize local search engine optimization.

Why Google Is Going To Be Changing Your Position In Search Results

Google aims to please searchers by providing them with a simple and quick searching experience. When searchers are happy with their experience, they will continue to use Google each time they need information. You may not know it, but business owners and Google share the same goal: make customers happy so they continue to use your services.

As searchers continue to depend upon their mobile devices to search, Google has adjusted accordingly by valuing websites that adapt to mobile devices over those that do not. In fact, 50% of all queries on Google are now conducted on mobile devices. That’s why on April 21st, Google will use a website’s “mobile-friendliness” as a website ranking factor. A website that is inconvenient for a searcher to use will be penalized.

3 Lessons Social Media Marketers Can Learn From Big Bird

1.Choose Your Platform: In the wake of Mitt Romney’s comments, the majority of real time discussion and comments occurred on Twitter. PBS was able to recognize this as the best channel to use, and took advantage very quickly.




2.Invest in Social Media: Once PBS had an opportunity to be part of a larger dialogue in a national news story, they made a decision to invest in Twitter advertising, a fairly new development on the social network. This kind of forward thinking, and real time reaction is exactly what many brands and businesses need to embrace as they move their social media campaigns forward. PBS made sure to take control of the dialogue that was already occurring, and gave users a place to channel their discussions.

3.Produce Quality Content: A case could be made that the content PBS chose to promote in light of these comments was the most important part of the equation. The tweet that was promoted read, “PBS is trusted, valued and essential. See why at valuepbs.org. (please retweet!).” This tweet appeared whenever users searched “big bird” and directed them to an educational website about why PBS is such a valuable organization. It was also retweeted over 9,000 times as of October 11th. Full of statistics, graphics, and readable information, PBS was able to inform users in an enjoyable and shareable way. As of October 11th, the site had already been shared over 10,000 times on Twitter.

How much is too much promotion? Facebook wants to know

Some users have recently reported that Facebook asked them to rate posts from advertisers to see if it’s “overly promotional”. This is part of their new update (rolled out in January 2015) which reduces the visibility of posts advertising your products and services.


Here are some of the traits that will be considered “too promotional”

Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads


To us, this sounds like any post that is about your product may be considered “overly promotional” and may be penalized. But isn’t the goal of your Facebook page to get your message out to your fans and interact with the users of your products?

How to Estimate How Many Links You Need

Doing some work for a client with a fairly new site recently, I noticed their home page has a toolbar PageRank of 7, and they achieved that almost entirely by having a site-wide link on a PageRank 9 website.  Finally, now that have I seen enough cases like this, I think it’s possible to estimate the answer to the question “How many links do I need?” for many situations.  This posting will detail the anecdotal data I’ve seen, and then give tables that can be used to estimate what a page’s toolbar PageRank will become if you obtain a link from a high-PageRank site, and also how many links of which type you need to move up one level of PageRank.

Why Getting a PR8 Site-wide Link is Like Getting a Single PR9 Link

You’ve probably noticed that if you have a PageRank 6 website, the next level of pages down on the site are probably PageRank 5, and the next level down from that are PageRank 4, and so on.  This is not always the case (for instance, one popular post on this blog titled “Google’s Secret Ranking Algorithm Exposed” is a PageRank 4 as of this writing, while the blog’s home page is a PageRank 3) but it’s generally the case.   So when you obtain a site-wide link from a PR6 website, you’re essentially obtaining one PR6 link, maybe 10 or 11 PR5 links, and 50 PR4 links (perhaps).

If each level is worth roughly 1/5 of the previous, then a site-wide PR6 link is equivalent to:

1 PR6 link (the home page) + 10 2nd-level PR5 links (=2 PR6) + 50 third-level PR4 links (= 10PR5 = 2 PR6) = 5 PR6 Links = 1 PR7 link.

Looking at the anecdotal cases, it does seem to me that obtaining a site-wide link is akin to obtaining a home page link from a site that is one PageRank level higher.

The Value, in PageRank, of Obtaining a Single Link

Clearly, that depends on your existing PageRank, and how much PageRank you will get from the target of a linking request.  Using the anecdotal evidence above, I created the following table and calibrated it against those individual situations; you can look up what your pages existing toolbar PageRank is, and then look over and see what the pages PageRank should be after obtaining a link from various other pages.

How Many Links You Need to Move Up One PageRank Level

Remember, in the article referenced above, the conclusion was that each toolbar PageRank level is roughly 5.14 times harder to reach.

Based on that assumption, and the table above, I generated Table 2, which does not show how many links it will take to go from zero links, but instead, how many links will it take you to *move up* one PageRank level.  

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.