I tend to collect a LOT of links, most of which I save in bitly, share on Twitter, and store in Evernote. But I rarely share them on this blog. There are some amazing people and companies publishing really useful content. It can be tough to find the golden nuggets through all the noise out there, so I wanted to share some hand-picked goodness that I’ve recently come across.
Conversion Optimization
How Wine Enthusiast increased organic traffic 154% with content marketing – As some of you know, I work in the wine industry, which is notoriously slow to adopt new technology and online marketing strategies. I came across this article when I was reading the MarketingSherpa blog, and found it highly relevant – not just for the wine industry, but for any ecommerce site.
How Unbounce uses landing pages for content marketing – Unbounce is a leading provider of landing page design and optimization solutions, and they have a repository of great articles about how to create effective landing pages. In this post, they explore the idea of “contextual design” and lay out a ten step process that includes creating a webinar, slide presentation, and extra resources to supplement the content/context for their main product.
Social Media Marketing
How a Winery Uses Social Media to Increase Sales and Brand Loyalty – Here’s another great case study about how Whitehall Lane implemented a social media strategy that brought big results. Again, while it might be in the context of the wine industry, the methods they use could easily be translated across almost any vertical.
26 Ways to engage your fans on Facebook – Social Media Examiner pulled together some really wonderful and useful examples of ways that you can use Facebook to drive fan engagement, get more likes, encourage clicks to your website, and generate brand awareness. I like how they include very specific examples and techniques that go deeper than the usual Facebook tips you might find elsewhere.
Content Marketing
32 Experts share their best blog promotion tips – This roundup of tips and tricks from 32 of the most influential and respected bloggers is loaded with insight into ways you can promote your blog and expand its reach to new audiences.
Ecommerce
Ecommerce made easy – how to build, manage, and market your website – This guest post by the young Charles Floate is a real gem, not to mention a beast, coming in at something like 10,000 words. He breaks down just about everything you would need to know to start an ecommerce site – from hosting, to using Woocommerce, and promoting the finished site, he’s done a really admirable job at laying it all out clearly and concisely.
The rise of Woocommerce – In case you aren’t aware of Woocommerce, you should be. WordPress has been in desperate need of an ecommerce solution that works, and this is it. These charts show the amazing growth of their company as compared to other ecommerce solutions, which is simply remarkable. I think what makes them the best is the modular integration strategy, where anyone can make an extension or plugin to address the many needs of an ecommerce store. I use Woocommerce on all of my ecommerce sites, and can’t say enough good things about them.
Website Optimization
Reduce site load time by 75% for better rankings – A fast loading site not only ranks better, but offers visitors a better experience. This is one area that I need to really pursue on a few of my sites, and Cloud Income did a great job explaining how they dramatically reduced load time, along with the steps involved.
