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…

In the first part of the Ultimate Guide to Online Branding, we focused on using blogging to build your online presence. Now, we will focus on the best avenues and tips for online branding and authority building with social media.

Create a Consistent Brand Image for Each Profile

Have you ever visited a company’s social profile, and you were not sure that it belonged to the company? One of the most important parts of branding is keeping a consistent image across all of your online properties so that no matter what path a person takes from one property to the next, they will always know it is your brand…

While Digg, formerly one of the top social voting sites on the Internet, lost a lot of its luster since their major update last year to version four, they still receive at least 2.5 million visitors per month in the US alone and have an Alexa rating of 167, PageRank of 8, and Domain Authority of 100.

Digg is also a little bit more marketing friendly than their main competition Reddit. The following guide will help you learn to use Digg for sharing your awesome content with a larger audience…

One of the top things that helps increase a visitor’s confidence in your website, particularly if it is a blog, is evidence of social proof. This evidence comes in the form of displaying social engagement numbers including your subscribers, followers, fans, tweets, likes, and other social shares. While perusing the AdAge Power 150, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the top marketing blogs were proving their social clout…

Google Analytics is one of the most valuable resources for webmasters, marketers, business owners, bloggers, and anyone who does practically anything online. The best part is that Google Analytics is free! The following are 50 resources to help you get to know Google Analytics inside and out, from the new version, latest updates, social engagement tracking, advanced hacks, and much more!

Google Analytics 5 and the Newest Features

Want to get started with the latest and greatest version of Google Analytics? Then check out these resources highlighting the new features of Google Analytics 5 plus other minor and major changes to the Google Analytics system this year…

One of the most powerful pages on your website is your testimonials page. Great testimonials tell people that your product or service is not only legit, but awesome enough that other people are seeing great results from it.

The question is, how do you get believable testimonials? Let’s look at some of the sites you can collect reviews upon, as well as how to encourage reviews from your customers and how to gather them from all around the web…

What is the difference between online branding and building authority? Some would consider it the same thing, but in reality it can be two completely different processes. Online branding is a way to get more exposure for your brand on all levels of online marketing, especially search and social.

Building authority takes online branding to the next level by making each online presence for a brand authoritative…

With so many Twitter tools out there, it’s hard to know which ones to trust with your Twitter account management. So why not take a look at what the social media and industry experts are using! Here are ten Twitter applications and tools used by some of the top Twitterers.

The following list is presented in alphabetical order:

Bit.ly

Bit.ly is just a URL shortening service right? Wrong! Used by @marismith, @techcrunch, and @problogger, a free Bit…

Sites that were almost solely dependent on search engine traffic were given quite the shock this past February when Google released the Panda / Farmer update. This major algorithm update was intended to hit the content farms hardest, but it also had a devastating effect on other types of sites as well, including ecommerce (you can see a list of over 300 sites here). Sites that were affected lost a substantial amount of traffic due to a loss of rankings for a huge percentage of their keywords…

Google Analytics 5 took the best features of their analytics program and made it even easier to use with new organization and visualization features. Here are nine awesome things you can do with Google Analytics 5 that will help you get the most out of your analytics information and use it to improve your website’s content, conversions, and user experience.

1. See your most important analytics data first…

Previously on KISSmetrics, I covered the art of 7 sneaky ways to use Twitter to spy on your competition. I don’t really consider it spying so much as simply competitor research, but spying makes it more James Bond-like. And who doesn’t want to pretend to be a secret agent every now and again?

If your competitor doesn’t have Twitter, or you’ve exhausted what you can learn in 140 character bites, let’s continue by learning how to use Facebook for competitor research…

StumbleUpon is one of the best traffic generators among the top seven social media sites, referring more than other social bookmarking and voting sites such as Digg and Reddit according to Statcounter.

Why?

Because when a user likes, or stumbles, a particular page, it is put into the StumbleUpon lineup. As other StumbleUpon users are randomly searching for new content on a specific
topic using the Stumble button on their toolbar, any pages in the lineup for that topic will be displayed to them…

Facebook Likes are a powerful way to get website visitors to socially engage with your brand. There are two types of likes you can solicit with Facebook’s developer code – likes for website pages and likes for your fan page. The best part is users can like both of these directly on your website without having to go anywhere else!

Using the Facebook Javascript SDK

Some features for the Facebook Like options are only available if you use the XFBML code for the buttons…

When it comes to SEO, advice changes as fast as Google and search engines themselves. Therefore, you will want the latest, most up to date resources when it comes to information, tools, and where to look for links. The following are 79 link building resources that are current, or currently updating for 2011. Because the stuff from 2010 just won’t do!

Blogs

Probably one of the most important things you can do for your link building strategy is to keep up to date on the latest news about what works, and what no longer does…

One of the main points to any search or social media campaign is to get exposure for your brand. I want you to think of your brand like a house that you have for sale. By itself, it’s a beautiful house that could easily be sold for twice its actual value. But when you sell a house, you can’t just take into consideration the house itself when figuring out what you want your asking price to be…

When it comes to creating link bait, there is no one more naturally successful at it than bloggers. Because one thing that bloggers believe in most is good content – if their content isn’t interesting, then no one wants to see it, share it, or link to it.

Popular Types of Link Bait

Here are some types of link bait used by bloggers and marketers to draw traffic and links to their sites…

Unless you’ve been under a rock like the guy in the Geico commercial, then you have probably noticed that a lot of changes have been happening on Facebook, particularly to the fan pages. Here is a look at how you can take advantage of these changes and use them to market to your targeted audience.

1. Using Facebook as a Fan Page

This is by far one of the most powerful changes, in my opinion, to fan page functionality…

While Twitter may not be as big as Facebook in terms of traffic, it has several advantages over Facebook. Not only is it easier to gain followers on Twitter, but you can engage with people before they become your friend on a personal profile or your fan on a business page.

The following is a guide to help you setup your Twitter profile and implement a successful Twitter marketing strategy…

Facebook offers webmasters and bloggers a lot of options for integrating their platform onto websites. Considering the number of users that are logging into Facebook on a daily basis and staying logged in throughout the day while perusing the Internet, it makes sense that website owners would want to take advantage of the power of Facebook on their own sites, especially since Facebook is the most used identity when it comes to people signing into sites…

When it comes to online personal or business branding, the creation of social media profiles is absolutely essential. Whether you are just trying to get more exposure online, connect with your fans or customers, or working to purify your online reputation, social networking profiles are the way to go as they will rank highly in search engine results when people search for your name.

I want you to think of each social media profile you create as a landing page for your brand…

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You decide you’re going to concentrate on SEO for your primary traffic strategy, optimizing everything so that Google and Bing and Yahoo send you thousands of visitors per day, free of charge. So, you rush off to do your keyword research, and you find a few phrases that are bringing in massive amounts of traffic. Giddy with the opportunity, you optimize your website and get lots of links, expecting to see your website start climbing the search results…

These days, spying on your competition is easier than ever.

Twitter is one of the most popular social networks for businesses, and it gives you an advantage that you may never have had before. Because so much Twitter data is public, you can easily use that data to learn so much about your competitor’s followers and strategies.

In this post, we will look at seven ways you can use this data to look behind the scenes of what your competitors are doing…