Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

What Are Facebook’s Intentions for Waze?

Monday, May 20th, 2013

waze logoRumors are circulating about a huge buyout of the popular navigation app, Waze. Which company supposedly has plans to acquire Waze to strengthen their mobile offerings? Facebook, of course.

The two companies are already in cahoots as partners, but Facebook may want more; and more is what they’d have to pay. Waze has been in acquisition talks for months and is said to be valued at a staggering $800 million to $1 billion.

Neither company would comment on the rumors, but we all know Facebook doesn’t back down when they set their sights on something. Do you recall back in 2012 when Facebook bought the photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion? Or the facial recognition specialist Face.com for an upward $50 million?

There’s no question about it: Facebook has been exasperating all their efforts in its mobile business. As of March 31, 2013 there are 751 million monthly active mobile users on Facebook, an increase of 54% year-over-year. Their desktop business only experienced an increase of 23% year-over-year.

To gain a better understanding of Facebook’s intentions with Waze, let’s review the features that set Waze apart from other navigating apps and devices:

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Google I/O 2013: What You Need to Know

Friday, May 17th, 2013

google i/o 2013

This week is one of those big ones for the tech world: the week of Google I/O, Google’s developer conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. In addition to the dozens of technical sessions, lab sessions, and demonstrations of Google technologies such as Android, Chrome, and APIs, Google had a lot of announcements about the future of their products.

Similar to Apple, Google announces product updates and news during the keynote at the beginning of the conference. The massive 3.5-hour keynote was full of important statistics about Google’s impact across different products and sneak previews of new updates and features to those same products.

It’s a lot of information to take in, to say the least, so we put together an outline of the important updates from the keynotes and a few other tidbits of information from I/O:

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Online Marketing Advice for Small Businesses [Slide Deck]

Wednesday, May 15th, 2013

online marketing advice for small businessesAs regular readers know by now, we’ve been interviewing marketers on their experiences with online marketing for small businesses. One of my favorite questions to hear the answer to was a question asking what advice they thought small businesses needed to know before going about improving their online presence.

This question probably received the most varied responses, partly due to how much advice each marketer interviewed provided. These marketers truly want to help others. They didn’t throw us a single sentence about optimizing for search, or how social media is important. These professionals often gave us multiple paragraphs full of detailed and helpful advice.

The advice ranged from what they thought should be at the center of an online marketing strategy, to what sort of content drives conversions, to the importance of qualities such as uniqueness and extreme dedication.

About Small Business Spotlight: Since we love small businesses and online marketing (so much so that we have a new product just for them), we decided that small businesses who rock at online marketing deserve more attention. So for the next few months, once a week we’re going to feature a Q&A with a small business that has a great online presence. It may be social media or PPC, but all of these small businesses are doing at least one thing right!

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10 Ways to Use Twitter Lists [Infographic]

Monday, May 13th, 2013

10 ways to use twitter listsWe’ve already explained how to create and edit Twitter lists, as well as suggested a few tools to make doing that easier. But we have yet to go into much detail on the most important part of Twitter lists: how you use them.

You could use the handiest tool out there to create a Twitter list of everyone you follow, but that isn’t the best use. The stream for that list would be exactly the same as your timeline on the homepage. The effectiveness of a list depends on how you use it.

Instead of just explaining how our company uses Twitter lists, we wanted to be able to suggest uses that go beyond our own needs, so that you can find ideas that will really help you.

So we turned to a few people that use social media professionally, day in and day out, since it’s their job to know how to use Twitter lists effectively.

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Explainer Videos: Convert Website Visitors Into Paying Customers [Guest Post]

Friday, May 10th, 2013

video marketingThese days, there’s a lot about video to get excited about if you’re a marketer. As a conversion tool, it has proven to be highly effective in generating huge returns and value as part of an online digital strategy. Companies of all shapes and sizes are finding ways to integrate video into their overall branding, marketing and sales programs because it works!

What’s even more exciting is that custom video does not have to break the bank in order to be a potent source of potential; animated video creators aren’t charging Disney-fees to take a totally custom explainer from script to screen.  So, whether you’ve got a multi-million dollar marketing budget to work with or you are building your web presence on a shoestring budget, custom video is a fit for any size company looking to boost their marketability online.

Animated video is not just child’s play. Custom explainer videos introduce a brand’s value proposition in a way that is engaging, simple, and interactive. Video marketing has the properties to drive traffic, generate sky-high conversion rates and enhance your search engine optimization.

Here’s how custom explainer video converts window shoppers into paying customers…just like magic!

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Online Marketing Misconceptions from Small Businesses [Slide Deck]

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

online marketing misconceptions from small businessesAs regular readers know by now, we’ve been interviewing marketers on their experiences with online marketing for small businesses. When asked if they had any misconceptions starting out, this is what they said.

Notice a common theme is search engine optimization, an online marketing tactic of growing importance with each year. Learn from the rookie mistakes of these smart marketers and follow in their successful footsteps.

It’s not enough to have a website, or even to have a beautiful, well designed website. It takes time and effort to be seen by search engine users. Additionally, you need to use a combination of several online marketing methods to truly spread the word about your product or service.

“If you build it, they will come,” does not apply to websites anymore. (Tweet this!)

About Small Business Spotlight: Since we love small businesses and online marketing (so much so that we have a new product just for them), we decided that small businesses who rock at online marketing deserve more attention. So for the next few months, once a week we’re going to feature a Q&A with a small business that has a great online presence. It may be social media or PPC, but all of these small businesses are doing at least one thing right!

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3 Tools for Better Twitter List Management

Monday, May 6th, 2013

3 tools for twitter list managementLast week, we brought you a little Twitter Lists 101: what they are, how they can be used, and how to create them.

But we have a confession: we may not have told you the easiest way to manage Twitter lists. In our defense, we told you the most basic way, and the way that Twitter intends for you to make lists.

However, Twitter’s methods for creating and managing lists can be time-consuming and tedious. Thankfully, a lot of services have been created to make using lists easier for you. From creation to completion, there are tools that make Twitter lists and their management much more quick and efficient.

To understand how Twitter lists work, it is a good idea to use them on Twitter.com. But once you have a few lists to your name and it’s become time consuming to manage them, these three tools should come in handy.

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Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page [Infographic]

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

perfect landing pageOur friends at Formstack know a thing or two about landing pages. Their product is an online form builder, and what good is a landing page without some sort of form to capture leads? None.

So when we came across their infographic about landing pages, we knew we needed to eat up every morsel of information found in it. We also knew that you all would probably benefit from it, as well.

We’ve already talked about the most essential components of a landing page, but what we need to talk more about is optimizing those components. We also didn’t give you much advice about design: where those components should go and what they should look like. Please forgive us.

So to make up for only covering the basics of landing pages, we found this for you.

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The 12 Best Small Business Spotlight Quotes [Slide Deck]

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

small business marketing spotlightsWhy should you care about content marketing? Lexion Capital Management, Console & Hollawell, and CBG Benefits have seen results.

How can email marketing increase sales without even offering a coupon? StorkGifts explains how it works for them.

Why is it so important to have a robust presence on search engines through PPC and SEO? Go Get Funding and MyBinding.com explain it perfectly.

For the past few months, eZanga.com has been interviewing small business marketers about their experiences with online marketing. Twelve quotes in particular stood out to us, and we wanted to collect them all in one place to make it easy to learn from these excellent marketers.

About Small Business Spotlight: Since we love small businesses and online marketing (so much so that we have a new product just for them), we decided that small businesses who rock at online marketing deserve more attention. So for the next few months, once a week we’re going to feature a Q&A with a small business that has a great online presence. It may be social media or PPC, but all of these small businesses are doing at least one thing right!

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Introduction to Twitter Lists

Monday, April 29th, 2013

introduction to twitter listsMy personal Twitter account doesn’t necessarily have a large network, I follow a mere 314 users. Yet I’m still overwhelmed with content as I scroll through my stream throughout the day.

Log in to your Twitter account. What kind of tweets pop up on your timeline? After pulling up my account, I encountered tweets about food, daily complaints, promotions and gossip.

If only there was a way to separate the small businesses tweets from large corporations blasts, or connections I’ve made at conventions from college classmates. Oh wait, there is! If you’re not familiar with the Twitter lists feature, you have been missing out on connecting more efficiently.

We have a few posts coming up soon about how to make Twitter lists work for you. But first, you need to know how to use them. Here’s a little introduction on what a Twitter list is and how it functions.

So what are Twitter lists?

Twitter lists allow you to curate groups of users, so when viewing that list you’ll only be able to view their tweets. The list’s stream will appear just like any other stream on Twitter. In addition to creating your own lists, you can subscribe to public lists created by other users.

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