Pubcon Roundup Austin 2013: 100 Top Tools, Tips, and Tricks
We’ve assembled a non-exclusive list of 100 great tips and tricks from the event from all the Pubcon sessions we were able to attend. We aren’t going for depth here–we are expressing what we feel are the best ideas in a super-concise format. Each of the ideas here are pretty powerful and can easily warrant hours of additional research. If we haven’t attributed a tip to you and you’d like a mention/link–please email emilyhurn[at]tastyplacement.com.
Social Media Marketing Tips
- Sponsored Facebook posts are rarely the best ad to employ on Facebook, you want to use the more advanced tool set. (Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics)
- If you make a claim in a Facebook ad, don’t say “We can help you save money on insurance.” Don’t even say “We can save you 15% on your insurance.” You need to be more specific — “Save 17.3% in just 3 minutes!”
- You Get 60 Minutes of News Feed Fame: 40 to 80% of your traffic is generated in the News Feed. Keep your tidbit trending with shares & comments. (Dennis Yu)
- Photo Fetish: 60% of consumption on Facebook is photo views. Start snappin’. (Dennis Yu)
- Photo posts are 7x more engaging than status posts; comments have 4x the weight of ‘likes’. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- Use Power Editor to run ads https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/. (Dennis Yu)
- Set ads to display in the News Feed, NOT in the right sidebar. (Dennis Yu)
- Ads must have social action. Use sponsored stories in combination with ads.
- Number one thing to do on Facebook = sponsored stories (the story gets placed higher in the newsfeed or where ads are usually placed)
- Amplify your message. Get your targeted audience to interact & push into conversions.
- Every object in FB has an ID. Use graph.facebook.com/anybody to view user IDs. Grab the IDs and target individual users for ad campaigns. (Dennis Yu)
- Where does the magic happen? In the News Feed! 65% of likes, 35% of comments, & 45% of likes on a mobile device are generated from the News Feed. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- Once a fan opts out of seeing your posts, your posts will never organically appear to them again unless either 1. the fan decides to opt in again or 2. you have a promoted ad. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- In edgerank, marking a post as ‘spam’ carries the highest negative weight. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- The newsfeed placement of relevant stories is customized specifically for the user – engagement is key. (engagement > relevancy)
- Make posts during weekends or outside business hours for higher response rates. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- Fan count numbers mean nothing if there is no reaction/interaction involved. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- “Make Insights your bitch!” Use Facebook Insights to check your organic results. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- Social Media is an audience response channel. Interact with your clients. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
- Sometimes it’s just more cost effective to automate some of your social messages.
- No one moves without influence – get your content into the stream of an influencer. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
- Fan exclusives boost your likes. (Annelise Kaylor, Intrapromote)
- Strategic viral posts can boost your affinity and increase the reach of your marketing messages. (Joe Youngblood, Senior Account Executive, WrightIMC)
- Unless you promote them, nobody will see your apps.
- You’re not competing against your brand’s rivals, you’re competing against your fans’ friends and grandmothers for space in their news feed. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
- You can check the emotional impact of your headlines: http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm (Susan Young, CEO, Get In Front Communications, Inc.)
- Listen to your audience – check out subreddit for idea generation. (Joe Youngblood, Senior Account Executive, WrightIMC)
- An individual’s Facebook account is capped at 5,000 friends. By that measure, Dennis Yu has reached the limit of human popularity.
- “Talking About You” is a bogus metric. (Dennis Yu)
- Instead of typing out all those tedious letters in Facebook.com, like some animal, use fb.com instead.
- Make your response time within 24hours. Half an hour is excellent. (Casey Markee)
- Content which stimulates conversation extends your reach and is a step closer to conversion. (Bryan Cheney)
- Fill out your content production by planning a social media calendar. (Bryan Cheney)
- Customer referral programs are the affiliate marketing of the social media age.
- Pay attention to personal behavior, you are being lead around by things curated by your friends. (Bill Rice, CEO, Kaleidico Digital Marketing)
- Pinterest. Get on board! Why? Pinterest increased over 1,000% in 2012 & it drives referral traffic. (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)
- With Pinterest, “visual content is KING.” Make your Pinterest content relevant – even slightly. Find an idea that can go into multiple boards, push your content at specific times/days (6am/pm eastern time) & get on Community Boards to increase your reach into the millions. (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)
- Use http://tineye.com/ to check for attribution of images and posts on Pinterest.
- Facebook is an image sharing network. 250 million photos are uploaded per day on Facebook & 70% of all activity is related to an image, photo, graphic, or video. (Kate Buck)
- How to Repurpose Content Across Social Media (by Kate Buck): Create image, embed in blog post, pin from blog, tweet from pin, share on instagram with link to blog post, share to FB page (or upload directly), later…pin from instagram web, upload to Twitter directly (this works with YouTube videos as well)
- Want to see how your site is doing across all social media platforms? Use http://socialsiteexplorer.com/ (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)
- Perfect Pinterest “Instructographic”: You need a large title, step by step instructions, and use up to 5,000 pixels. (Vince Blackham, 97th Floor)
WordPress Tips
- Don’t use the default username “Admin” when setting up a WordPress site–that lets hackers get one step closer to getting into your WordPress installation (Michael David and Matthew Bey of TastyPlacement).
- Never store a database backup on your server. Your WordPress database contains an encrypted version of your password that can easily be hacked
- You can easily block bad bots with your .htaccess file (all WordPress installations have this file already), full tutorial here.
- Use the Yoast SEO plugin to control your Open Graph and Twitter Card markup.
- Keep your WordPress index clean by no-following your category and tag pages.
- Yoast SEO’s title tag features are unreliable on some themes. Always double check the source code of the header to make sure it’s correct.
- Don’t bang on the post publish button, since that repeats the ping.
- You know what’s pimpin’? Blog post thumbnails. Do ‘em up right!
- Link Building
- When the link is epic, like from a college professor, don’t worry about whether the link is perfectly within your niche (Jim Boykin).
- Internet Marketing Ninjas have a soon to be publicized tool which will automatically categorize your backlinks.
- When using the link disavowal tool, start off by disavowing the nofollowed and dead links. (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
- Repetitive anchor text might not be a problem if it’s for a non-valuable keyword. (Jim Boykin)
Local Maps and Marketing Tips
- If you are having trouble verifying a merger between Google+ and your Google local page, initiate the postcard for the 2nd time after 15 days elapses and it’ll be verified automatically…(Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)
Greg Gifford really took this to the next level
- To rank better locally, try having more local content. Blog about local events and your community. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
- To distinguish between a local campaign and your national rankings, try listing a 1-800 number sitewide, and your local phone numbers on individual location pages.
- The merging of Google+ for Local and Google Places is inevitable, but it’s not yet helpful to merge those two accounts manually. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
- Local keyword optimization for your website is vital for the rankings of your local listings.
- It’s still a matter for debate whether it’s better to have your multiple location addresses on separate pages. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
- Geo-tagging can help improve your PlaceRank. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
- A Google My Map may help your local ranking.
- Make your site a genuinely useful local resource directory.
- Is your location too remote? Try a virtual office closer to downtown. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
- You want an awesome local strategy? Emulate Obama’s. (Kevin Adams, smbSEO LLC)
- Manage multiple listings in Google Places. Manage brands through G+ for local.
- Your places description is seen by a lot of customers, so it needs to be copy that sells, not just keywords and location. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
- Info not updating on Google? Poke your listing. Show that you are active. Don’t make any new changes, and click submit. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
- At least one listing category needs to be a default, the rest can be keywords. (Brian Combs, CEO, ionadas local LLC)
Miscellaneous Tips
- With an enhanced Adwords campaign you can put phone numbers in an ad, as well as a Google supplied tracking phone number. (Kevin Adams, smbSEO LLC)
- Rel = Publisher ties your Google Business+ page to your whole site, while Rel = Author ties your personal Google+ page to individual articles (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
- Through rel=’author’, author headshots are connected with articles in SERPS. When searching for a brand, rel=’publisher’ pulls up your G+ summary page for that particular brand (in the knowledge graph area). (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
- If you are an author churning out content that doesn’t get links, you are not an influencer. Consistent & valuable information is key. (Bonnie Stefanick, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
- Power is moving away from pagerank/individual pages to the author. (Bill Rice, Kaleidico)
- As of 2012, only 9% of tech blogs have implemented rel=’author’. Which means that Google has very little data for this right now but their plans have not been abandoned (in fact, it has been an ongoing project since 2007).
- You might not know this, but you may be implementing rel=’publisher’. Google is actively implementing it through the G+ button, by default. (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
- Host content on your website to grow your domain & presence, then link to your Google+ page. (Bonnie Stefanick, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
- It takes time to build your authorship, but you can lose it very fast. When you are claiming your article Google associates it with you, therefore building your profile. Only claim what you are comfortable with to be safe. (Ann Smarty, Internet Marketing Ninjas)
- Panda vs. Penguin: Panda focuses on sites providing bad user experience & low quality content while Penguin looks for unusual linking patterns, keyword stuffing & over optimization. (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
- Got an unnatural link warning in Webmaster Tools? The process for recovering is to: clean up links, disavow (Google Disavow Tool), & request reinclusion. (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
- You can fit 110+ characters in Title Tags. Measure Title Tag length in pixels, not characters. http://bit.ly/titletaglength (Bill Hartzer, Standing Dog Interactive)
- Use all available Analytics & Insight tools. They are free!
- Keep your agency engaged in the industry: hold a couple of lunches, several webinars and events a month, and attend a conference a quarter. (James Loomstein)
- Google Pagespeed Insights: if your results are less than 70, you are not going to rank very well. (Aaron Shear, CEO, Boost Search Marketing)
- Gain more real estate with your listing by adding Rich Snippets. It’s simple – you only add one line of code to your site. (Aaron Shear, CEO, Boost Search Marketing)
- For phone support for local verification with Google places or Google+ Local), go to: bit.ly/localphonehelp Go through the steps, click on “Call Us” and a Google employee will call you directly. (Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)
- Author rank is a leg up opportunity for a small business. (Nathaniel Broughton)
- Having problems with Google + or Local listings updates, and are an AdWords user? Call the AdWords Rep, say you are pulling your Ads…the problem will be fixed fast. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
- The authority/reputation of reviewers is important. Having an active Google account is something Google is paying attention to when looking at reviews. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
- Keep up with the industry by spending time every day on Google Reader, catching up with the literature. (James Loomstein)
- Keep tabs on your clients by setting up Google Alerts for their brand name, industry keywords, competitors, and their employee names. (James Loomstein)
- No one to call at Google? Visit this forum: productforums.google.com/d/forum/business (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
- If your Google+ business email doesn’t match your Google+ Local email, you can’t respond to reviews. (Greg GIfford, AutoRevo)
- Never REPOST a good review off your google+ page, exact duplicates will be removed. (Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)
- Location-based keywords in good reviews can bump you up in local searches for that particular location. Same goes for product/service keywords (ie. the ‘best widget’). This should all happen organically.
- Make sure landing pages are mobile-optimized. Create Mobile Ads with Call To Action buttons. (Kevin Adams, smbSEO LLC)
- Get your site, business ready for Google’s Knowledge Graph, list your website/business in Freebase.com, some data is believed to feed into Knowledge Graph. (Bill Hartzman of Tandem Interactive).
- Think of social ranking factors as the Three Amigos: 1. The number of plus ones (velocity of and authority of +1 user) 2. The number of shares on Google+ 3. The CTR from search results (Greg Gifford, AutoRevo)
Conversion Science Tips
- Your goal in ecommerce is to increase your conversion rate without decreasing average order size/value (AOV). Solution? Optimize for revenue per click (RPC), not conversion rate (Brian Massey, the conversion scientist).
- When representing small businesses, it’s important for a marketing agency to communicate that the campaign never ends. (Nathaniel Broughton)
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