The Importance of Treating Sponsorship Like Partnerships

sponsorships-partnerships

Only a few months after launching Hack the Entrepreneur, Jon Nastor was receiving unsolicited sponsorship requests.

One turned out to be a perfect fit.

In this episode of The Showrunner, Jon takes us behind the scenes of how his deal with FreshBooks came about.

As we did last week, we offer up a significant snippet of a course lesson for the meat of this episode. In it, you’ll learn:

  • Why Jon made the decision to accept a sponsor for Hack the Entrepreneur
  • The details of how the original package Jon agreed to with FreshBooks came about
  • What “metrics” Jon stressed to show that his audience was worth tapping into for a sponsor
  • The big mistake many podcasters make when seeking sponsorships
  • Common sense negotiating advice that anyone can (and should) implement
  • The essential importance of viewing sponsorships as partnerships

Click Here to Listen to

The Showrunner on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Importance of Treating Sponsorship Like Partnerships appeared first on Copyblogger.

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Are Productivity Articles Making You Unproductive?

productivity-articles

This week on No Sidebar, host Brian Gardner responds to an article written by Paul Jarvis, entitled “On becoming digital hoarders.”

Our yearning to find information that will somehow magically fill some void in our life continually leaves us unsatisfied.

We are promised endlessly how to make our lives better, how to be more productive, and how to get what we want.

But the reality, and main takeaway from Paul’s article, is at some point, we need to take off the training wheels of acquiring knowledge and ride the bike of applying that knowledge …

In this 11-minute episode of No Sidebar, host Brian Gardner discusses:

  • The fascination with list articles
  • Our yearning to find the magical solution
  • Why inspirational words often fall flat
  • How productivity articles trap us
  • Why life hacks are often just a crutch

Click Here to Listen to

No Sidebar on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Are Productivity Articles Making You Unproductive? appeared first on Copyblogger.

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Deadly Conversion Busters: Turning Fear Into Trust

fear-and-trust

Is fear stopping your audience from engaging, subscribing, or purchasing?

How can you turn that negative into a positive, while helping you stand out in your market?

In this episode of The Mainframe, hosts Chris Garrett and Tony Clark reveal:

  • Why unanswered fears might be turning away your customers
  • What you need to create a safe place for people to visit
  • How your community can help you build trust
  • Why video can help build buyer confidence
  • Key elements that can mitigate risk for your audience
  • Creating trust-building case studies as content

Click Here to Listen to

The Mainframe on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Deadly Conversion Busters: Turning Fear Into Trust appeared first on Copyblogger.

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Revealed: The Perfect Blog Post Length

blog-post-length

Here’s a million-dollar question: Is there a magical blog post length? In other words, should you aim for a word-count sweet spot?

The answer is no; there is not an ideal word count for a blog post. But there’s an ideal number of questions you need to ask yourself before you write.

And that magic number is 13.

Ask yourself these 13 questions and you’ll discover how long your article should be, whether or not it will be interesting, and if you even have the time to write a good article.

In this 8-minute episode of Rough Draft with Demian Farnworth, you’ll discover:

  • The first thing you must understand before writing
  • Why thinking you have to write could be killing your readership (this is for anyone who hates writing)
  • The mistake most web writers make about mobile
  • What to say when people tell you your article has to be short
  • Google’s idea of the perfect blog post length
  • Question 13 amounts to a majestic, fool-proof way of seducing readers

Click Here to Listen to

Rough Draft on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Revealed: The Perfect Blog Post Length appeared first on Copyblogger.

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Authority Rainmaker 2015: Conference Peaks & Previews

Authority Rainmaker Conference in Denver Colorado

Did you know that there are 53 mountains in Colorado with an elevation over 14,000 feet? Known as the “Fourteeners”, ascending all of these peaks is a lifelong goal for many avid climbers.

What better setting to learn about Online Marketing from the authorities on the subject. This year, Copyblogger’s Authority Rainmaker 2015 will be held in Denver Colorado, with a full view of the rocky mountain peaks for visitors to take in. The TopRank Marketing team will be represented at the conference by Lee Odden, Alexis Hall and me, Evan Prokop.

In addition to majestic scenery, great food and entertainment of downtown Denver, we can’t wait to learn from some of the leading authorities on online marketing on how they recommend marketers take their craft to new heights.

Here is a “mountainous” preview of just a few things we’re looking forward to at the conference:

Mount Elbert - Authority Rainmaker Conference

Mount Elbert – The Tallest of the Fourteeners

Session: Good Content vs. Good Enough Content: A Fight for Sore Eyes

Speaker: Ann Handley – @MarketingProfs

Mount Elbert may be the tallest peak in Colorado, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s the best. As many brands continue to ramp up their content marketing efforts, it’s increasingly important to distinguish between content that is “tall” and content that is “great”.

Tall content may attract a lot of eyeballs, but what does that truly mean to your business? Popularity doesn’t guarantee effectiveness and the “best” content is that which delivers real ROI.

Ann Handley, Chief Marketing Officer at Marketing Profs, promises to deliver when it comes to differentiating between popular and truly effective content. Effective content does more than create conversation, it generates traffic which impacts business objectives. Content that inspires your target audience can engage core customers, attract a new prospect or drive visitors to the toward the bottom of the funnel. That’s the kind of content every business should aspire to.

We’re really looking forward to Ann’s insights on creating content which engages and drives your target audience to actions. We’re also looking forward to tips on how to measure the effectiveness of content marketing (i.e. how do we know if the right audience is reading and engaging with our content, and which content is it?).

Pikes Peak - Authority Rainmaker Conference

Pikes Peak – Inspiration for America the Beautiful

Session: How to Perform Witchcraft: The Art and Science of Fascination in Your Marketing

Speaker: Sally Hogshead – @SallyHogshead

When it comes to taking people’s breath away, Pikes Peak has it nailed. Have you seen the view?

But how does the average brand fascinate their audience? Well, we’re going to find out in Sally Hogsheads highly anticipated session that promises to teach us how to make our marketing and brand more captivating.

Consumers today have more information in front of them than ever before. With a few key strokes they can find millions of results related to a topic or product category. More options means a greater need to differentiate your brand from the competition. And that is where fascination comes into play.

If you can fascinate your customers, they will be more interested in what you have to say, more engaged with your brand and more likely to be inspired to perform desired actions.

Sound like unbelievable? Maybe, but we looking forward to learning more from Sally about the art of being fascinating.

Longs Peak - Authority Rainmaker Conference

Longs Peak – The Most Routes to the Summit

Session: The State of Search Marketing in 2015

Speaker: Danny Sullivan – @DannySullivan

Longs Peak is one of the most popular mountains in Colorado, and for good reason. Coming in less than 100 ft shy of the elevation of Mount Elbert, Longs is said to have more climbing routes than any of the other Fourteeners.

Like Longs Peak, businesses have been attempting to climb to the top of the search results for as long as search engines have existed and have traversed a diverse range of routes to get there. Some businesses took a practical and sustainable approach with customer focused keyword research, quality content and technical site optimization and are continuing to be rewarded for it. Others unfortunately took dangerous shortcuts by employing tactics like link spamming or keyword stuffing and are in major trouble today.

To say there have been major changes in search marketing in recent times would be a big understatement. From the increased importance of semantic search brought about by Google’s Hummingbird algorithm update, to the rush to achieve mobile optimization before the Mobile Friendly update (also referred to as ‘Mobilegeddon’ by the more alarmist), Google has definitely kept the SEO industry on its toes.

Founding editor of Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan has been an authoritative voice in the search marketing industry for nearly two decades, so he’s certainly seen and weathered plenty of big changes since the inception of search.

We’re looking forward to hearing his take on the current state of search marketing and how he recommends search marketers and brands prepare for the future.

Maroon Peak - Authority Rainmaker Conference

Maroon Peak – The Most Photographed, But Also One of the Most Difficult to Summit

Session: The 6 Steps to Building a Massive Audience with Content

Speaker: Joe Pulizzi – @JoePulizzi

Content marketing has already achieved a well-earned position near the top of most digital marketers list of priorities and accordingly to research from Curata, 71% of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budgets in 2015.

Like the majestic Maroon Peak, it’s easy to stand back and admire the heights that many brands have managed to reach with their content, but getting to the summit yourself can be an arduous journey.

Widely considered to be an authority in all things content, Joe Pulizzi has been educating marketers and businesses for years on how to do content marketing right through books, speaking engagements, podcasts and much more.

Joe is planning to show how businesses can build a massive audience in six steps. We can’t wait to hear what they are.

TopRank Team at Authority Rainmaker 2015

TopRank Marketing Will Be Covering Authority Rainmaker 2015

These are just a few highlights of what we’re looking forward to at Authority Rainmaker, but it wasn’t an easy choice as nearly every session looks interesting.

You can get a great preview of the conference from the interviews, group post and the conference eBook we produced for Copyblogger leading up to the event:

At TopRank Marketing, we don’t like to keep the digital marketing awesome to ourselves, so we’ll be blogging and Tweeting our favorite tips, tricks and takeaways throughout the conference.

Keep your eye here on Online Marketing Blog for coverage of the presentations as well as Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest and Twitter @TopRank.

Photos via Shutterstock: FirstSecond, Third, Fourth


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The post Authority Rainmaker 2015: Conference Peaks & Previews appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

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Google Testing New Keyword Planner Interface?

As a Customer Success Representative and Consultant at WordStream, you find yourself in AdWords a lot – which is why we are often among the first to notice more subtle changes in the platform. We’ve seen from experience that not every change that Google makes in its products is actively promoted or announced.

This leads me to another small change to the Keyword Planner that you may not have known about.

If you work in AdWords then you know what the Keyword Planner tool looks like and how it functions – it has been largely unchanged for some time.

New AdWords Keyword Planner interface

However, I was able to find a much more modern version of the Keyword Planner interface recently. In fact, this interface isn’t reflected uniformly across our accounts, and when I tried to open up the Keyword Planner tool from different accounts, only one had the new updated UI.

At first I thought it could be a special feature for MCC accounts, or in other words larger more involved accounts as a beta feature for those users. I also tried to look at account spend to see if higher spenders got the first peek at the new dashboard. Neither had any effect, and most accounts still had the old interface.

Here’s what the new interface looks like:

New Keyword Planner Interface

You can see how much better this interface looks, and that Google decided to break up its 4 main sub-tools into two key categories, “Find New Keywords” & “Plan Your Budget And Get Insights For Keywords.” The language on the tabs is also different, signaling perhaps a new approach to how Google wants to leverage its tool in the future. The two key differences are on the bottom half of the new interface, where the focus is put on “data & trends” and “click and cost performance,” which are not mentioned in the original version.

Changes to the Keyword Planner tool also could signal potential changes to the Display Planner tool. These smaller gradual changes put together can help us understand the future of AdWords as a search marketing advertising tool and how Google may be reacting to the market and competition from its main rival, Bing Ads, which has rolled out a number of new and unique tools for search marketers to use.

Google Changing to Keep Up with Bing?

One of those tools Bing has introduced is the Market Sizing Dashboard that you can download to your computer as an Excel file to dig up a lot of data on Bing search historically in DMA’s (Designated Marketing Areas).

Bing Ads marketing dashboard

Although it is still important to test how effective this tool is, Bing is aggressively pushing forward as it tries to become a key player in search marketing.

Not too long ago Bing really pushed its new Campaign Planner forward by introducing “verticals” that break down searches into categories and sub categories.

Bing Ads vertical insights

These changes and innovations could become the testing ground for who will attain more attention in the future. As the markets change and trends fluctuate, having a vision of the future is absolutely important for a search and marketing professional.

It will be interesting to see how Google and Bing will continue to impact each other when it comes to new product improvements. Last month Google introduced new benchmarks in Keyword Planner. Could we see a much different Keyword Planner tool in a year? And what would that change mean to search marketers and advertisers? We’ll be sure to monitor the changes and report them as we see them. 

grade your adwords account

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