The Weekly RAP for February 01, 2013

Once you have visitors coming to your website, you want to convert these visitors into leads. The beginning of the process of generating more leads is to promote new offers. An offer is like a bright shiny object you dangle in front of your site visitors to tempt them. If the offer is attractive enough to them, they will give you their contact information in exchange for it.

When it comes to inbound marketing, ‘buyer personas’ are certainly one of the buzz terms we’re hearing. Sure, most of us have a conceptual knowledge about their meaning, but, I’m thinking it’s a fair guess that the majority of us haven’t actually taken the deep dive to create one or more we can call our own.

The last time you searched Google for something, did you wonder why certain results have a thumbnail-sized picture of the content’s author? Here’s how you can boost your search engine rankings with the Google authorship program.

Like all goals we aspire to achieve, to be effective in your website marketing or inbound marketing efforts, you should begin with the end in mind. This means you’ve identified what your goals are, have ranked them by level of priority and, at each juncture, identified the supporting activities that will help you achieve the bigger picture. But what do you do if you’re “supporting activities” are undermining the foundation?

The rant is all about how the rush to content marketing in every industry will make it harder and harder for your content to rise above the noise — and how the only defense is to build a Great Content Brand. If you didn’t see the slideshow, take a quick look. It’s light on copy, you should be able to breeze through it quite quickly.

It’s no secret that companies are using Pinterest for marketing purposes and doing so successfully. Pinterest is a great tool for raising brand awareness, driving traffic back to your website and increasing sales.

The Six Signs of an Authoritative Blog

For many reasons, blogging remains one of the most important components in a search and social media marketing strategy. And to be successful, you not only have to strive to establish your own distinctive blogging voice, but also create guest posts for powerful blogs, especially as you’re starting out.