Whenever people ask me how to generate topic ideas for a blog, I always suggest a few different resources. These resources generally include question and answer sites like Quora, top blogs in your niche or industry, forums, and so forth. Having that many topic sources can be a great thing, until you have to actively visit each of them to see what is new. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can combine them all in your RSS reader and turn it into a topic generating machine…

Last week, Neil Patel wrote a huge article on The Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest which was a hit! It covers how to use Pinterest, how to find content to pin, 9 reasons marketers should use it, the brands using it, 14 marketing strategies, 9 ways to get followers, and optimizing your profile for local search. This week, I thought I would add a few additional statistics about Pinterest, how it compares to Tumblr, and tips for marketers looking to get more out of the Pinterest network…

Here at KISSmetrics, we’ve discussed how you can build authority in your industry through blogging. If you’re a fan of Social Media Examiner, you might have read about major brands that have benefited from guest blogging. So today, we are going to look at exactly how you can get guest blogging opportunities and make the most out of them.

Determine Your Guest Blogging Goals

Before we begin, your first task is to decide what your goal for guest blogging is…

If you are looking to build up your professional brand as an authority in your niche or industry, one great way to do so is to simply answer people’s questions. Even if you’re not the top expert on a particular topic, chances are you still know more than others. Quora is a great place to start. This question and answer network allows you to help others on any topic from Aardvark to Zumba…

If you thought that Google+ would eventually fail like other attempts by Google to enter the social media world, think again. Google has integrated Google+ into their environment in many ways, changing the way marketers must think about search and social media marketing.

The following resources will help you understand how Google+ is now integrated into search and other products, and how you can start adjusting your online marketing strategy for Search Plus Your World…

Have you ever been looking for something but didn’t know where to find it? If that something is online, then your search is over (or just about to begin). The following are 40 advanced and alternative search engines that you can use to find just about anything on the Internet. Use them to follow discussions about your industry, monitor your online reputation, and much more!

General Search

To start off our search adventure, let’s look at some general search engines beyond the top three…

You’ve read a lot about Google Analytics by now, especially here on KISSmetrics. But if you’re not applying what you’ve read, then you’re not going to get what you really want out of Google Analytics. If you are ready to get actionable metrics out of your analytics, then here are the things you need to set up NOW to get actionable data out of Google Analytics!

Track Goals & Conversions

If you have read any of my other posts on Google Analytics, you might notice how I continuously mention setting up Goals…

The meta description tag in HTML is the 160 character snippets used to summarize a web page’s content. Search engines sometimes use these snippets in search results to let visitors know what a page is about before they click on it. In this post, we will look at how search engines use meta descriptions, what the top SEO blogs say about meta descriptions & whether they still use them, and reasons why you should use them…

One of the things that many businesses fear about being online is that they will open the door to people publicly criticizing them, their products, or their services. But it doesn’t matter whether your business is online or not – if your customers are online, then people will still be talking about you!

I have seen businesses who didn’t have a Facebook page of their own discover that they had a Facebook presence in the form of either brand advocates who had created a group about how they loved the business, or brand haters who had created a group about how they hated the business…

If you have been blogging for a while, chances are you are familiar with content scrapers. Content scrapers are websites that steal your content for their own blogs without your permission. Some content scrapers will just copy the content off of your blog, but most use automated software that takes the content from your RSS feed and posts your content to their site like it is a new post.

In this post, we are going to look at some potential link building benefits to content scrapers, how to find out what sites are scraping your content, and what you can do if you want to either benefit from the linking standpoint or have them take it down…

Back in 2010, we wrote a thorough beginner’s guide to Google Webmaster Tools. Since then, there have been significant changes to Google Webmaster Tools. We have updated this guide to include new ways to set up your website with Webmaster Tools, the new data included in Webmaster Tools about your website, important data you might have forgotten about, and how to connect it to Google Analytics to learn more about search queries driving traffic to your site…

If you have a blog on your website, then you probably have an RSS feed which gives you lots of options when it comes to distributing your content with your audience and beyond. Let’s look at the various ways you should be using your RSS feed.

What is an RSS Feed

A RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a XML-based format for your content. Most blogging platforms, for example, will have an RSS feed built in…

It’s almost time to ring in the New Year, but before we do, we want to take a moment to shine light on the amazing content published here on the KISSmetrics blog in 2011. This way, you can catch up on the great information you might have missed throughout the year so you can start off 2012 with a knowledgeable bang! This sampling of our top content includes posts on analytics, conversions, social media, SEO, website design, and much more!

Analytics & Metrics

• You vs…

Are you looking to take the leap into starting your own business in 2012? If you’re just starting to think about it, or if you have been planning it for a while, you still may have lots of unanswered questions. The following 101 resources will help you learn more about entrepreneurship, startups, small business, and much more.

Entrepreneurs & Startups

• Entrepreneur.com – Business ideas and trends from Entrepreneur Magazine…

Link building is one of the most important things you can do in terms of off-site search engine optimization. As you probably know by now, search engines like Google tend to rank pages higher in search results based on the number and quality of links to those pages. Essentially, the more links you have, the more likely you will be to rank well when someone searches for keywords related to your website…

Here at KISSmetrics, we talk about all forms of online marketing for businesses, including email marketing. While beginner’s guides and email timing are important, there is also one other area that may not have a lot to do with marketing, but has everything to do with how effectively you can run your business (and personal life for that matter).

When you work online, you will find that the things that you need the most to maintain important business connections are also the things that will derail you from the path of productivity…

When it comes to social media, there is not that much hidden about how it all works. The issue is that sometimes the information is hard to find in one place. So in this post, we are going to unearth some commonly unanswered questions in standard Twitter how to posts when it comes to getting the most out of your Twitter experience.

What is the New Twitter Activity Stream?

You may not have noticed it yet because you spend a lot of time in a Twitter management tool instead of on Twitter itself…

Case studies are a great way to tell the world how valuable your products or services are. They go beyond simple testimonials by showing real-life examples of how you were able to satisfy your customer’s needs and help them accomplish their goals. With great case studies, you will be able to highlight your successes in a way that will make your ideal potential customer become your customer. The following are some tips on how to make your case studies a powerful asset in soliciting business…

In our recent post about finding out what online marketing strategy drives the best traffic to your website, you learned how to use Advanced Segments to see your traffic from social media, local search, and other methods of marketing. While this is a great guide to seeing your overall results, it may not answer all of your questions.

You might, instead, want to dig deeper into your Analytics to see more details…

While some companies jump right in to the world of online marketing successfully, others have a much harder time getting into the swing of things. It’s hard to learn all of the various strategies, platforms, tips, and tricks, then apply them to your business. If you find things are not working well for your company in any area of online marketing, then you will want to make sure you are not committing the following marketing sins…

When it comes to driving traffic to your website, there are a variety of ways to get visitors. The primary two that individuals and businesses almost always have a struggle with investing their time and money into are search and social. Sometimes the issue is convincing people why these are a necessity for a thriving business. Other times, the conflict is whether to invest in one marketing strategy more than the other, or to only pursue one marketing strategy but not the other…

While Google Analytics is one of the best free analytics applications out there for getting basic traffic and visitor data, it also has some pretty significant holes. You’ve probably noticed some discrepancies when comparing your Google Analytics data to other analytics sources which can include anything from your hosting company’s own built in analytics to social analytics programs that track hits from shortened URLs sent through Twitter, Facebook, or other networks…

Do you participate in so many different types of online marketing strategies that when your boss asks you which one is the most effective, you don’t know what to say? Sure it’s easy to spot the top referring traffic source in Google Analytics, but you won’t be able to say what overall online marketing method is really working as a whole unless you want to start adding up different referral sources with a calculator and then cross reference them with goals, demographics, and other data…

Social media can be an invaluable part of your business’ online marketing strategy. But one of the biggest issues that comes along with social media are the distractions – those things that take your focus off of your social media goals. These distractions can lead to losing minutes, even hours out of your productivity time. The following are common distractions you may come across on the top social networks and ways to combat them…

In the first installment of the keyword research series here at KISSmetrics, we took a look at keyword discovery and how to use a combination of several tools to discover new keywords and phrases for your website and content. In the second installment, we took those same keywords and analyzed keyword difficulty and competitors to determine which keywords would be best to target.

Since keyword research can be done in a variety of different ways and everyone has to find the way that is easiest for them, the final installment of this series is dedicated to the 40 top posts on keyword research in 2011…

In Part I of the keyword research series on keyword discovery, you got a base spreadsheet to use to start entering data about estimated search volume and approximate CPC next to keywords and phrases. Now we will look at getting even more data about each keyword to further narrow down the results.

Please note that this data will take a bit of time to compile, so you might want to run through the keyword list and remove any obvious ones that you don’t want…

Keyword research should be the basis of any online marketing campaign. The simple goal of keyword research is to find out what your target audience is searching and what it will take to actually rank for those keywords and phrases. Without knowing what keywords you should be targeting, how will you effectively optimize your website, target phrases for link building, or know what content to develop for your audience?

The following is the first of a three part series to help you set up a spreadsheet for your keyword research and discover the best keywords / phrases for both your main website’s search engine optimization and topics for content development…

Before we can fix our bounce rate, we have to fully understand what bounce rate is. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave without viewing any other pages on your website. If you look into your Google Analytics, you will see a percentage. If you’re average bounce rate, for example, is 75%, this means that 75% of the people who come to your website leave after only viewing the page they entered on, whether it was your homepage or an internal page…

Previously we have discussed the importance of branding and building authority through social media through using a hands on approach. But some businesses are not ready or able to commit the kind of time and personnel to managing a full-force social media campaign for their brand. This is where outsourcing comes into play. Businesses can instead find outside experts to help them run their social media…

Now that Google+ is available to the public, there is no excuse for anyone not to be using it! Sure you may feel that you just don’t need it, but keep in mind that Google+ is not just another social network. It is the social network endorsed by the leading search engine, and one that is only growing in popularity.

Google+ is currently only allowing profiles for people. This means you cannot set up a profile for your business or use keywords instead of a name…