Who needs a large sales force when your company website can do the hard work for you? Both B2B and B2C companies are realizing the need to make their websites more effective and optimize them to generate qualified leads.

So where can you start your optimization efforts? These seven universal optimization techniques will vault your online lead generation efforts into overdrive.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Content marketing” might be a new buzzword, but it isn’t a new concept.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, I received a direct message on Twitter from Richmond-based non-profit Virginia Blood Services. They were looking for “influential” social media participants to get the message out about their VBS Blood Lifeline campaign. Having participated in their campaign, I thought it would be interesting to study how this non-profit is using social media to get the word out. I reached out for an interview, and here was our conversation.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I talk to marketing prospects, the conversation eventually turns to landing pages. “Landing pages” are often confused with pages that anyone can see on your company web site, like the homepage.

This blog post focuses on what a landing page is and how it’s almost always better to use them in your online marketing efforts.

Using landing pages in your marketing campaigns is almost always more effective than sending people to your homepage from an ad, so it’s important to make the differentiation. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve written quite a bit about conversion rates on this blog, but the fact is that most people that visit an e-commerce web site have no intention of buying. They are window shopping. Optimizing your web site to increase your conversion rate is very important, but you can’t forget about optimizing for the 70-80% of people or more that are “window shoppers.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about marketing lead generation. For many companies, the economy has really caused slumping sales. Some are responding by stepping up their sales efforts, and the most intelligent companies are improving their web sites to generate more leads.

Read the rest of this entry »