A blog about smart marketing and conversion optimization.

Clever Zebo officially succumbed to Blathy (what happens when your blog lays fallow for more than a month, and you don’t even spell out the words “blog” and “apathy”).

It’s a sad state of affairs I know many startups and even ongoing online marketing programs share. While Clever Zebo has been kicking butt in a bunch of other channels (partnerships, webinar, referrals, even GUEST BLOG POSTS ironically), we let our blog slip over the holidays.

Self-criticism aside, I want to talk about where we’re going with this blog and where you might consider going with yours.

There are blog evangelists out there who argue that regardless of the topic and your temperament you should blog multiple times a week and constantly share your ramblings on social media. The argument concludes with a general promise of a steady increase in traffic, leads, and new business. While certainly this dream scenario is true for some, there are mitigating factors, namely:

A) How much weekly writing and social sharing time is spent versus monetizable return.

B) What kind of long-term commitment is required to make this strategy pay off.

C) What kind of interest is there for the topic versus competition and noise.

While the ideal of an obsessively-maintained blog is attractive, what it takes to get there simply is not feasible for all companies — at least not in a short enough time frame to address fundamental business acquisition needs.

WHY WE ALL SHOULD KEEP BLOGGING

From the first part of this post, you might think I’m trying to talk you out of your commitment to blogging. But I’m actually attempting the exact opposite. I’ve noticed an interesting trend the past few months: the majority of our new clients and serious prospects cite connecting to our blog’s content as a big reason why they wanted to have further conversations with us and ultimately work together.

While it’s not yet at Seth Godin level, the blog nonetheless has an impact on our site visitors — they want to know how we think and are looking for practical, logical advice on how to improve their online marketing program.

This realization has been tremendously empowering. Maybe I don’t have to worry about a weekly regimen of vomit-blogging and social rampaging; maybe the key is to keep using this medium as a way to keep my thoughts sharp and Clever Zebo’s followers current on online marketing trends and thinking. If I’ve learned anything in nearly a decade of online marketing, it’s that best practices are best unless they’re not.

I invite you to revisit your blog and ask yourself a few tough questions:

Last time I rapped at you about creating effective lead forms, we covered the basics. Here, I want to spend some time on slightly more advanced tactics.

1. Sometimes, minimalism is a poor qualifier. Yes, I told you to ask only for the information that’s absolutely essential. But let’s say you’re capturing leads and everything’s fine and dandy, except that the leads aren’t taking your calls. They won’t call back, they barely remember submitting the form or they simply aren’t qualified to have a sales conversation.

Add a field or two that better qualify your prospect. What you ask for depends on your unique sales cycle.

One idea is to force your lead to specify a “best time to call” or “requested phone appointment.” Generally, the more specifically your leads answers this question, the better the lead. Some companies require the lead to name a project budget. You can also ask for specifics around the challenge that drove them to write in for help. In every case, entering more detail requires more commitment of your lead and better qualifies them.

2. Plug your forms into a marketing automation platform. The advantages of doing this are:

• Get richer data about each lead (geography, business IP, etc)
• See the keyword(s) the lead searched to get to your site
• See form conversion data over time in pretty charts & tables
• Automatically add your leads to specific mailing lists if you wish
• Automatically push lead data to the platform and to your CRM
• See exactly which pages the lead visited before & after converting

There are plenty of options, but I’d steer most small businesses away from the heavyweight, feature-rich marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Marketo unless:

• You’re ready to make an investment of at least $50k to $100k annually
• You know what you’re doing when it comes to marketing automation
• You have at least one dedicated person whose full-time job is making your marketing automation engine sing

On the other hand, if you just want to get your feet wet, some lower-end yet powerful marketing automation tools include Pardot and Loopfuse. The latter will even give you a free trial with functionality for up to 1,000 prospects.

3. Explain why you’re asking for the info. Assuage your visitors’ concerns by adding tooltips that explain why you’re requesting their phone number, email address or mom’s maiden name. Build trust with your prospect by over-communicating early. If you can’t put into customer-friendly words why you need the info, reconsider your decision to collect it.

4. No checkboxes. For heaven’s sake, don’t make them check any boxes. Unless you’re a giant corporation with a legal staff, don’t require a checkbox about your terms & conditions. Just insist that submitting the form signifies acceptance of your terms, and link to them. If you must add a checkbox — be sure to make the entire text and area around the box clickable.

5. Sell softly. Your visitors get it: you want their contact info so you can sell them stuff. But if you don’t couch your lead form in enough information — if you don’t give them enough to go on — they’ll just leave.

Every time a prospect encounters your lead form, they engage in a (sometimes subconscious) decision process: is this company worthy of my contact info?

Be informative, be brief and earn their trust by spelling out the benefits of what you do, featuring prominent logos of your partners and clients, making other options beyond your lead capture form available to them and being open about your company. Check out how helpful Gmail’s sign up page is. Aim for that level of hand-holding and transparency.

What companies are sporting the most effective, most powerful lead forms out there?

For most of us, we don’t do SEO so that someone typing in our company name finds us. CleverZebo.com was the first Google organic search result for “Clever Zebo” within days of launching the site. What I really want is for people typing online marketing strategy to find Clever Zebo.

So how do you make that happen? It’s all about anchor text, baby!

When people say that the key to SEO is getting back-links, they’re only half-right. Yes, the more back-links the more Google will view you as a player, but a player on what keywords? Take Unbounce. These guys are hardcore: awesome product, awesome free offer, awesome virality; their brand is doing … awesome. What they need is that when you search for landing page, they’re in the top 3 results.

Anchor Text = Context

Anchor text may tell Google a thing or two about where you’re linking, but its purpose is to assist the reader. Example: As we gear up for the first ever Clever Zebo webinar, I’ve been getting increasingly nervous about the fact that I’m going to have to PRESENT. Luckily, one of our clients is a master of presentation skills training, and I’ve been learning a lot from them, but it’s still scary.

But it’s not always so easy. Some key search phrases we want to target can’t always be grammatical. Let’s jump to the therapy world, where service is often hyper-localized. Take sex addiction Los Angeles — is there really any way to make that fit grammatically in a sentence? Same goes for sex therapy Los Angeles. Yes, a root term such as sex addiction or sex therapy will contribute to your geo-local results, but the exact phrase you’re targeting is best.

Anchor Text is to Title Tags as PB is to J

The sweet spot hook up is when you’re able to align anchor text with the target page’s title tag. As you’re doing your holiday shopping, get your unique invitations and announcements at LookLoveSend.com and notice that their home page title tag aligns with this anchor text.

In a case like Market Fish where they’re already dominating on the long-tail search phrase “list marketing platform,” the generic list marketing is probably more along the lines of where they want to move.

Back to the world of geo-localized optimization, los angeles catering is in perfect anchor text/title tag alignment for LA Spice.

Shameless Post or Vital Online Marketing Public Service Announcement?

You might be thinking, “Josh just wasted 5 minutes of my life plugging companies he likes,” and you’d be correct, but there’s a deeper point here. Google has become one of the most important companies in the history of humanity because it got at a profoundly deep level that ultimately what all humans want is to have our needs met as efficiently as possible. Google is constantly updating its algorithm to make sure that search results actually address a user’s desire, and the algorithm cares what we think.

If you love Alabama football, you want the best, freshest, most interesting Alabama football insights out there from a site like Alabama Intel. You don’t want some generic mega-conglomerate media company who’s throwing money at sub-domains.

Likewise, if you’re looking for free online games, you don’t want some decade-old tetris-clone-mill; you want to blow serious hours of your life at Mochi Games.

Finally, and to seal the point, if you want a kick-ass crew to help you with retargeting across all the networks, go with guys who know what they’re doing.

The point is that Google is asking us to tell it what’s relevant and what’s not relevant. When we lazily insert Google.com, we limit our voting power. Make your link juice voice heard — use relevant anchor text!