The Weekly RAP for January 18, 2013

Creating Buyer Personas for B2B and B2C Companies

An effective buyer persona is an archetype. It’s a fictional character that represents your ideal prospect. It is not a customer profile, although it usually contains some demographic information. When complete, it will help you understand the motivating beliefs, fears and secret desires that influence your customer’s buying decisions.

Recipe for Effective Lead Generation

Inbound marketing is based on getting found on the internet, converting website traffic into leads and sales, and analyzing the effectiveness of your lead generation process. We’ve boiled this down to a recipe for success that has many moving parts, but all of them are within your reach.

2 Kinds of Search Engine Optiization (SEO)

On-Page SEO refers to how well your website’s content is presented to search engines. This type of SEO gets your site on the list of search results for a given keyword search and can usually be improved quickly.

Off-Page SEO refers to your site’s “authority” on the Internet, which is determined by what other websites “say” about your site.

Getting Found Online: Trouble Attracting Highly Targeted Leads?

If your website doesn’t have the additional magnetic qualities for conversion, you’re missing a crucial element to any lead nurturing opportunities. If you’re not enticing them to leave their contact information with a variety of CTAs (call/s-to-action) before they leave, they might never be back, and you’ve missed a critical opportunity, and potentially just lost a sale.

7 Ways To Spice Up Your Online Marketing Using Photography with C.C. Chapman

When someone looks at the images that you use to help tell the story of your content, it should illicit a response or reaction. If a follower takes a look at your photo and then stifles a yawn it’s time to go back to the camera lens and find another image that is more suited.

Why It’s Time for the Content Marketing Haters to Move On in 2013

Instead of complaining about the phrase(s) used by the various groups, let’s focus on helping businesses learn how to use digital content to teach, inform, communicate, and garner consumer trust. If someone wants to call it “content,” then great. If they choose “inbound,” then good for them. Again, it’s not the actual word that matters, it’s whether or not the masses understand it.

Ladies Only! How To Get What You Want This ♥ Day

Yesterday’s email was about how crap most men are about buying Valentine gifts. Oddly, it seemed to upset the woman folk. Sorry ladies, we didn’t mean to horrify you by highlighting the fact that most of us guys are so feeble in the Love department, please forgive us.

6 Ways to Uncover Highly Targeted Referral Prospects

One of the most important elements of getting more highly targeted referrals is to make it EASY for others to open the right doors by being crystal clear about what you want. Stop saying “if you can think of anyone else who might benefit from my services, please have them give me a call”  because it hardly ever works and, if it does, the referrals will likely be unfocused at best.