Your older blog posts aren’t just sitting there – they have powerful SEO juice and may also be attracting decent numbers of visitors. Don’t let them go to waste!

Consider adding targeted links and marketing messages to your highest page ranked older posts. All those old blog posts don’t just sit there gathering dust; Google and other search engines assign authority to the best content you wrote long ago. Why not make sure they are pushing and visitors and link juice to your best landing pages?

You can add a keyword optimized outbound link and sales paragraph to the end of your best posts in a way that does not reduce the readability of the post. This is a great way to get a deeper landing page on your main site ranked for a less competitive keyword and to spread important marketing messages. Just use the same paragraph at the end of a few of your best, older posts.

For example, one of my company’s older blog posts that gets good traffic is “Tips for Home Document Scanning.” It gets good traffic and has a good page rank. I added a paragraph at the end of the post:

New from OfficeDrop

ScanDrop scanning software is OfficeDrop’s newest product. ScanDrop makes it easy to scan paper directly into popular cloud services. Here is where you can self-scan with ScanDrop: Scan to Google Docs, scan to Evernote, Scan to Dropbox, scan to OfficeDrop, soon scan to gmail, scan to local disk. ScanDrop also offers powerful PDF tools like preview, page reorder, rotate, delete, and more. When scanning to the cloud, add metadata like tags, labels, notebooks, and folders/collections.

This is a great strategy because it lets you put great targeted sales content into pages that are getting good traffic and also transfers good search engine link power to deeper pages in your site.

A few tips: You don’t want to link to URLs that you’ve already linked to in that post, in the footer, the header, etc. because multiple outbound links to the same URL on one page only count once. Finally, don’t overdo it; too many outbound links on a single page reduce the power of each outbound link. Be reasonable with the number of outbound links you pack into any particular page.

Press releases can be a great way for a small business owner to get the word out about a new promotion, product, location and more. And press releases can also be powerful search engine optimizations tool that can pay dividends – in the form of targeted organic search traffic – for years to come.

But writing an effective press release can be a little intimidating if you have never done it before. Thankfully, there is a free tool that can analyze the content of your press release before you pay the big bucks to have it distributed.

Free Press Release Optimization Tool

Press Release Grader, by Hubspot, is a free tool that let’s you paste in the content of your release and get valuable feedback. The service looks at everything from the quality of the links to your site to checking to make sure your release has standard press release syntax (things like contact info and about sections, for example.)  Below is a video that explains how the service works:

Of course, you’ll also have to remember to write a great headline and solid opening paragraph to your release if you want to get covered by journalists. My company has had great luck with some of our recent press releases by writing headline that include things we know reporters are interested in. For example, when my company’s scanning software recently integrated with Dropbox, a popular online storage platform loved by the media, we made sure to mention it in the first paragraph of the release (you can see our release about scanning to Dropbox here as an example).

Don’t be intimidated by the press release process! Remember, journalists are more busy than ever – which means they need help creating content more than ever. Why can’t that content be about your company?

You’ve spent hours working with your designer to make your landing page look great; you’ve optimized the headers and paragraph text;  you’ve even got the right keywords in your press release.

But did you remember to write a compelling meta description for the people who find your site via a search engine?

Don’t forget the meta description!

The meta description is the text that a searcher will likely read if they type in the phrase you are optimizing for in a search engine. The following is an example of the description you’d see in the search results if you went to Google and searched for my company’s scanner software, ScanDrop.

Search Engine Description for ScanDrop

The meta description is the last thing a searcher will see before they decide to click (or not click.) This is how you tell the searcher that your site is what they are looking for. As such, you need to write compelling ad copy that makes your link the irresistible. The fun part about writing a meta description is that it really feels like one of the few places in online marketing that is a throw back to the old days of writing good print copy. You need to create compelling, call to action advertising copy that gets the reader interested and makes them take the action you want.

Of course, there is a catch. You only have about 160 characters that will display in most search engines results. That’s not a lot of space!

Secondly, you need to be using a CMS that allows you to write your own description. For example, in WordPress the All in One SEO Pack lets you write a description and even lets you know as you approach the 160 character limit.

Supposedly Google and other search engines do not look into the description for search results purposes, so you can write pretty much anything compelling that will win the click.

Good industry best practice is to include the keyword(s) in the description. Google will make them bold so that the searcher sees that they are getting good results. You will also want to match your message to the question being posed in the search box AND to the content on the landing page. In other words, the meta description has got to be relevant to the search result and the page where you are sending people.

If you are in the habit of routinely pitching and interacting with reporters, then it is a great idea to keep a “press library” where you store the content you’ve created for reporters. Recently there have been several times when different reporters have been working on similar stories, and having the ability to quickly hit them with the right content has been very important for getting OfficeDrop mentioned in their publications.

Press Library

A press library is simply an organized digital repository of things you have written in response to reporters or things you have written when trying to pitch your company to reporters. Keeping everything in one place is a great way to quickly recycle and reuse the best content that you’ve created. After all, if it was good enough for a major publication, with a few tweaks why wouldn’t it be good enough for another!

This strategy has helped me get OfficeDrop mentioned in the New York Times for the background checks we do on our document scanning associates, in Inc on our free trial strategy for our scanning software and more.

I highly recommend keeping careful track of the content you create when trying to generate press for your company. You’ll be surprised at how much time it can save you – and if the reporter never ends up using it, maybe you’ll make a great blog post out of it!

Ivana has been publishing some great tips on using LinkedIn as a customer communication tool. A strong LinkedIn profile offers some other benefits, and one of the most overlooked is the ability to use your profile as a search engine optimization tool for your business.

LinkedIn give you the opportunity to have up to three outbound links. You can not only have these links pointed anywhere you want, but can also pick the anchor text as well! This means that you can let Google and other search engines know about your site via LinkedIn AND can give Google the right keywords.

Here is an example from my LinkedIn profile:

The two links I’ve pointed to are my company, OfficeDrop’s home page – where I am optimizing for Digital Filing System – and our document scanning page, where I am optimizing for document scanning.

Here is how you do it: Go to “edit profile” then scroll down to the website section, where you will see edit buttons. Add your company’s site – but don’t select “my company” in the drop down, instead choose “other” and then and enter the text as your target keywords. That’s it!

If you get the other people at your company to update their LinkedIn profiles then you’ll have several new, optimized links directing Google love to your site!

If you are like me then you are constantly using email to market to and communicate with your customers/leads. I send hundreds (if not more) emails a week. I love getting replies to my emails (I always use my email address as the reply to, since email is a low cost way to begin a conversation.)

I’ve recently come across a new tool that really has been helping me when customers actually reply to my emails – Rapportive. This tool works only if you are using Gmail, which my firm does. Basically, it looks at the email address in the email you are reading and searches across LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks for that individual. It has really helped me know who the person emailing me is – fast! Here is a screen shot of an email from Ivana Taylor, the editor of DIYMarketers.com:

Look at all that great info – her job positions, location and recent Twitter updates! It’s very handy if you are using email as a primary vehicle for communicating with customers. And it is free! It has been very helpful to me as I’ve begun email marketing to accountants who have signed up for my company’s new product (a bookkeeping software product – and of course it is helpful if people are asking me questions about our scanner software too!)Since I’ve been collecting email addresses from bookkeepers interested in signing up for the software, but have never really interacted with them before, knowing who is replying to me quickly is very, very powerful.

This cash saving tip may not be totally kosher, but it did work for my startup…

We wanted to attend a very expensive conference to market our new service to potential partners – but the registration fee was just not in the budget. So, we called the hotel where the conference was taking place and rented out the room next to the ballroom where the conference was being held for a fraction of the cost of attending the event.

The hotel kindly (and very enthusiastically) put out a huge sign that said “free demo” in the hallway and a large number of the conference attendees came in and saw us demonstrate our digital filing system.

The conference promoter actually liked our scrappiness – and has invited us to attend each conference since then!

Do you use email marketing and email blasts to keep in touch with your current customers and prospects? (You should be!) Did you know that you can gain valuable marketing insights into your customers’ behaviors from them at the same time as you are marketing to them?

If you are sending more than 300 emails (using an email service like Constant Contact) then you have the opportunity to use your emails as simple A/B tests – tests that can really help you refine your marketing message. Here is the easiest way to run a marketing test within your email campaign:

1. Randomly split the email list into two homogenous groups – same number of recipients, with no difference between the groups (i.e. one group can’t be paying customers and the other leads; they all have to be at a similar point in your marketing funnel).
2. Craft exactly the same email, with the same content and links/call to actions.
3. Vary the subject between the emails. I’ve had luck swapping a benefit with a promise of a discount – it really increased the open rate on the email!
4. Send the emails at the same time
5. Track the open rates and click through rates!

Any significant difference in rates could be a valuable marketing data point. But do not make the mistake of drawing conclusions between small differences – they are likely to not be statistically significant.

About the Author: Healy Jones is the head of marketing for OfficeDrop, an online digital filing system and document scanning service that helps small businesses go paperless and manage their digital files.

If your company makes a lot of sales through your website, or if a large number of your sales are initiated by customers visiting your website, you should consider adding live online chat to your site.

Online chat

Live online chat allows visitors to your site to click on a button to have an online discussion with you or one of your sales/customer support people. Basically, by clicking a professional looking “chat with me” button, customers are brought to a familiar instant messaging system.

This live chat technology is not only scalable and cost effective, but it has greatly increased our sales and lead generation since many people are more comfortable having a few questions answered via chat than taking the time to call in. Some of our customers have told us that, while they have never actually clicked the live chat button, they like knowing that it is there if they ever have a quick question on our service.

This type of customer sales support can be a bit distracting. So, while I highly recommend installing a live chat on your business website as well I do have a few caveats. First, this tool works very well for our big ticket items, like our document scanning service. It can be a bit of a waste of time if you offer free or very low price items (for example, responding to potential users of our free scanning software product via live chat can sometimes be time consuming and not generate real revenue.) Secondly, since you never know when a customer will be pinging you online you should make sure you can turn on and off the live support feature as needed – you don’t want to be interrupted when you are in a meeting! Finally, you do need to be disciplined in how long you spend on any given live support discussion. If a chat is appears that it will not generate a sale and will not help an existing customer with an issue then you need to gently transition the conversation to email, where you can control the amount of time you spend responding to the customer.