VerticalResponse's Articles (46)

Can you believe it’s November already? I’m not really sure how that happened, but it happened nonetheless.

And while I’m always sad to see the Summer go, I love this time of year because it’s a great time to start preparing your 2010 marketing plan. But before you do that, you’ll need to evaluate which of your 2009 marketing strategies worked and which were not effective. Since email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for increasing your online presence, you should be co

The great thing about Twitter is that it helps create a conversation with your clients and prospects and joint venture partners and other interested parties in a quick and fast-paced manner. Thanks to the 140-character limit, you've got to get to the point and move on very quickly.

I know several marketers who have replaced their email marketing with their Twitter feed. Personally, I wouldn't suggest anything as drastic as that, but I d

If you’ve added social media to your marketing mix, you’re probably asking yourself, “Is it worth all the time and effort involved?” That might seem like a difficult question to answer at first, but there are definite steps you can take to measure the return on your social media investments.

What Are You Trying to Do?

First and foremost, you need to determine what your actual goal is. Are you trying to create brand awareness, generate sales, find joint venture partners, c

Wow, social media’s reputation with small business has really taken a roller coaster ride lately. First, the “2009 Tribalization of Business Survey” reported that that 94% of small businesses plan to increase or maintain their social media budgets. Then came the

In order to execute a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, it's very important to know who your competitors are. Understanding your competitors’ SEO strategy, website and their level of penetration in the internet is critical to the success of SEO campaigns. What I am referring to is not just direct competitors, but competitors that rank in search engines for the keywords that you utilize to optimize your website.

Executing an SEO competitive analysis

Com

We often get inquiries from prospective clients who would like us to build them a new website. They believe that their current website must be “bad” because it's not listed in the search engines. They're convinced that a new website will automatically ensure a top ten Google rank.

If you believe that line of thinking, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, you don't need an entirely new website (assuming your current site is built on W3C standards). The bad news is there is n

Whether you are hosting a small mixer, sponsoring a business workshop or exhibiting at an industry trade-show, a successful pre-event and post-event marketing plan will help you make the most of your event investment. If you’re looking for effective ways to promote an event, then look no further. In order to make the most of your events, it is important to use simple marketing tactics to get the word out and provide timely follow-up.

EMAIL:

Where to start: Telling your fr

Author and technologist Nicholas Carr says, “Twitter is the telegraph system of Web 2.0.” The New York Times has mentioned that Twitter is one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet. Only a few brands skimmed off profits from Twitter and others just tweeted about some direct marketing stuff. However, there are numerous ways you can leverage Twitter for your business and improve your bottom line. Here is the one-stop Twitter guide for

I am sure you know what bookmarks are - those strips of leather or crafted card used to mark a place in a book. Similarly, on the internet, users can use bookmarks to save their favorite pages to visit in future.

Personally, I have an enormous amount of important pictures, videos and documents and I save all of them in social bookmarking sites. Now, you might wonder what social bookmarking is. Wikipedia defines it as, “A method for internet users to store, organize, search, and manage

Many small businesses understand they need to get on the "social media bandwagon" but you might not know how to start, or better yet, why to even do it. You just hear about social media and think, "My business needs a Facebook presence and a Twitter account" but you don't really know why. If you're reading this article, chances are you've got a website and you're probably email marketing.

I’ve posted before that you should put an email opt-in form on each page of your website. In today’s world your social media profiles like your Facebook fan page are becoming extensions of your websites. Well, thanks to Return on Subscriber, I have found a way to add that opt-in form to your

Ten Quick Event Management Tips for salesforce.com Customers & Partners

Every event – from partner training sessions and user group meetings to seminars and luncheons – is an opportunity to enhance relationships with existing clients and tap into new lead sources. Salesforce and the AppExchange make it easy to strengthen client relationships with integrated tools for easy event management.

These Top Ten Event Management Tips will help you connect with more clients whi

Testing something new or changing something seemingly small in your email campaigns can definitely tell you something about how your recipients will respond. You'll either get more open & clicks or you won't. But you won't know until you try.

Testing something new can SEEM like a lot of work but it's really not. If you're going to create an email marketing campaign anyway, it's just three more tiny steps.

• One: Make a copy of the campaign you're creating

When you own an online business one of the most important things you can do is get high rankings in the search engines. There are many ways of doing this. One of the most effective ways of getting your site noticed by the search engines is by using relative keywords.

Keywords are words that people use to search for a site. For example: If you owned a site from which you sold pet care items and people typed in puppy food, you would want your site to come up. Now, some people might type

Optimize your audio files to increase their popularity, just as you would optimize a website. Audio search engines are becoming more advanced as audio files become more commonplace on the Internet. Here are some tips to optimize your audio offerings:

1. Optimize Landing Page

Create a landing page for the audio files. The landing page should explain the audio content and encourage subscriptions. Outline the steps the visitor should take in order to subscribe or listen to t

We all want our recipients to open our email campaigns, right? But it's what happens after the open we're truly concerned about. We want our recipients to read our articles and take action whether it's buying a product, service or donating to our cause. Here are ten easy actions you can take and put to work in your email marketing campaigns that might just get them clickin'.

1. More Links - Obviously you'll link your

You might have heard the term "link juice" before in the discussion of search engine optimization and traffic generation. Link juice is actually a loosely defined term, but it generally refers to the combination of link relevance, page importance and anchor text.

If we can assume that each web page is awarded points and these points were distributed to the links on that page according to the importance of those links, that points distribution would be the link juice.

And just to

Recently our CEO, Fred Yee did an interview with B2B marketing blogger, Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic), around helping SMBs convert more leads and market more effectively. Craig had some great questions about trends, challenges, metrics and hopes for B2B marketers that we were asked to share with the VerticalResponse community. The interview in its entirety is here:

1. What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009

Often times entrepreneurs get to the end of their financial ropes, and want a consultant to perform a search engine optimization miracle in the hopes of saving their drowning business. So, let's set the record straight on what SEO can and cannot do for you.

First, let me say I am a big fan of seo - I believe that today, your website is basically the marketing hub for your business. Even if you are not doing business online (i.e. selling something) your website serves as your ad center,

Companies of all sizes are looking for ways to leverage the flood of users in online social networking sites for their marketing efforts. So it’s no surprise that in a tough economy sales professionals, especially in a business-to-business sales process, want to leverage the power of their own networks to find as much information as they can about prospective customers in order to increase