Category Archives: Inside the Brain
Inside The Brain – Week in Review Oct. 14th
Here’s my weekly recap of what happened in digital marketing world this week. This is a collection of favourite tweets and must read articles for those looking to stay up to date in this wild and fast pace industry.
Social Media
5 Pieces of Damn Good Advice for Social Media Marketers - As digital creative and social leaders, we need to step away from the computer and realize that our business, at the end of the day, is really all about communication and relationships – things that exist away from a computer screen.
SEM
What to Do if AdWords Says Your Landing Page Experience Is Below Average - Having a poor performing landing page is bad news – not only will Google be less likely to show your ads, but you are probably missing out on valuable conversions. It also negatively affects your Quality Scores, which means you end up paying more for each click.
SEO
5 Link Building Tactics to Improve Your Local Rankings - If you can build a solid local link profile, you can rank organically for universal search terms with local intent in your vertical.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile Wallets or Fully Digital Wallets? - In a multichannel environment that’s expected to persist for the foreseeable future, is a purely mobile wallet the right move? Or is the right solution one that matches consumers’ existing behavior rather than tries to anticipate and mold their future behavior?
Display Advertising
Why publishers’ ad experiences need to be more flexible- Once a new content experience is rolled out, an ad experience needs to be tried out with it. Sometimes that new experience doesn’t fit in the guidelines you’ve created.
App of the Week
Luminosity Brain Trainer
Lumosity Brain Trainer includes 10 brain games designed to enhance your cognitive abilities, including memory, processing speed, attention, flexibility, and problem solving. Playing our brain games a few minutes every day will help you achieve the best results.
Brain Power
6 Tips for Staying Supercharged - Sustained energy and razor sharp focus come from within, not from a caffeinated beverage or other external stimulants. Here are six ways to help you develop a core base of energy.
Quote of the Week
Digital Marketing Workshop – October 25th
The 2012 Holiday Season is Upon Us. Is Your Business Ready? This workshop will provide your company with hands on knowledge to prepare and promote your company during the busiest shopping season of the year.
Learn more here - http://newfoundmarketing-es2.eventbrite.com
About the Author
A Certified Google Adwords Professsional, Sheldon has been providing Small, Medium and Fortune 100 companies forward thinking digital marketing campaigns for over 8 years.
Prior to starting Newfound Marketing, Sheldon was the Digital Marketing Director for M5 Communications and has spent time in Montreal and London where he planned and delivered sound Digital Marketing strategies to Fortune 100 clients Hewlett Packard and Chevrolet Europe as part of their overall search marketing strategy.
Inside The Brain – Week in Review Oct. 7th
Here’s my weekly recap of what happened in digital marketing world this week. This is a collection of favourite tweets and must read articles for those looking to stay up to date in this wild and fast pace industry.
Social Media
4 Ways to Stay Up to Date with Your Network on the New LinkedIn Homepage - Here are four simple ways you can use your new LinkedIn homepage to stay up to date with your professional network:
SEM
The Simple Approach to PPC Campaigns for SMBs - There are a lot of kinds of SMBs out there, but of those that will purchase SEM through an agency, you can generally split them into to two buckets: those that understand and use digital media, and those that understand that digital media is important to them, but don’t touch it themselves.
SEO
How Do You Know If Google Panda Or EMD Hurt Your Site? - How do you know if you have a keyword based domain and you see a decline in Google traffic, if it was EMD or Panda related? Maybe it is both? Maybe EMD is baked into Panda? Google said it only goes after low-quality exact match domains (EMDs) not high-quality ones. But I doubt they are baked in.
Mobile Marketing
App Store Optimization: 8 Tips for Higher Rankings - What follow is an outline of the most important factors that can impact app store ranking, along with a few tips to ensure long-term improvement.
Display Advertising
Display Ad Metrics - The basic understanding of a few of the metrics is a terrific way to improve your current and future marketing attempts.
Web Analytics
Introducing Google Tag Manager - Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface.
App of the Week
Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 26,000 cities and 192 countries.
Brain Power
Be Happier: 10 Things to Stop Doing Right Now- Happiness–in your business life and your personal life–is often a matter of subtraction, not addition. Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following 10 things…Read On
Quote of the Week
Source: fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net via Sheldon on Pinterest
Must Read Marketing Articles – Week of January 9th
So I’ve finally taken some time to update the blog. It’s been awhile since I’ve updated the Inside the Brain section of the blog so here’s my first update for 2012. Here’s what you may have missed this week in the digital marketing realm.
Social Media Articles
How to Create a Social Media Calendar - Originally designed for books, magazines, and newspapers, editorial calendars have been around for centuries and are the lifeline to successful publishing. Today’s editorial calendar takes into account web content, company press releases, blogs, social media news network postings in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube as well as email marketing plans and ppc, should also wrap into traditional marketing campaigns.
Why Social Media May Weaken the Moral Fiber of Your Workplace - Much is said about the benefits of social media for businesses, but what about the drawbacks? Though we’ve long heard about the productivity drain among employees who use social media at work, a new downside is getting some attention: ethical violations.
Real-Life Examples of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy: The new Google “Search Plus Your World” feature — which I’m now simply calling “Search Plus” — has just gone live for me. Huge debate erupted yesterday over whether it somehow favors Google+. I can see now that it clearly does, even more than I thought. Here’s a closer look at the changes, including how they turn Google+ into an essential social network for any search marketer.
SEM/SEO Articles
The End of Link Building as We’ve Known and Loved it - The past couple of years have made us all aware of the growing importance of social media, and Google’s Panda update made it common knowledge that other types of user behavior could be a factor in search engine rankings.
What The Merging of Google+ and Google Search means to SEO - G+ also solves Google’s very big problem of trust and authority for content that’s served in their SERPs. Before Google Profiles and their push for connecting authors with the content they’ve written, they had to rely solely on “low confidence” data to determine trust and authority and hope for the best.
In case you missed it, the CES (Consumer Electronic Show) took place this week in Las Vegas. Here are several reviews on what we’ll be seeing in our home in the not so distant Future.
From Entrepreneur – What I learned at CES 2012
From Techradar – CES 2012 Highlights: What you need to know
Here are a couple of the products coming soon to a living room near you.
Samsung’s Transparent Smart Window
Stayed tuned in the coming weeks as I’ll be adding new blog post on Paid Search, Mobile Marketing and Social Media.
Inside The Brain – Week in Review June 5th
It’s raining here in St. John’s so it’s a great day to catch up on digital marketing. Here are several articles worth reading during a break from the work week:
Social Media
5 tips for building a super-sticky Facebook page – Remember when “how to build sticky websites” articles were everywhere? Well, the goals for Facebook are different, and you risk being disappointed with your social marketing investment if you don’t understand this new paradigm. Luckily for all of the social marketers, a Facebook “like” is inherently sticky.
The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Optimization – Website Magazine provides 10 tips for Twitter optimization to make sure that your business is at the forefront of the Web’s next search boom.
Social Media Distractions are Costing Businesses Major Money – In a survey of more than 500 employees in U.S. businesses of all sizes, harmon.ie found that at companies with more than 1,000 employees, these kinds of digital distractions can waste more than $10 million each year.
Sidenote – I want to here from you on this subject so I’ve posted the question on Facebook - Is Social Media Costing Your Business Money?
SEM/SEO
Unified Tracking: Making Sense of Display and Search Data - Unified tracking lets you see all the given touchpoints before the user converts and gives a better overall picture of the effectiveness of the display/search mix.
Search marketing stats round up – Here’s a selection of recent search stats, taken from a range of sources, including ourUK Search Engine Benchmarking report, the Internet Statistics Compendium, and others.
Wellness Articles
Will Nike’s SportsWatch GPS Keep You Running? – Chris Taylor of Mashable Reviews the new SportsWatch GPS by Nike. Here’s a quick video or the product.
In case you missed it, here’s a review of my First NikePlus GPS run.
Wanna connect with me, here’s how you can reach me:
Inside The Brain – Week in Review May 22
While it’s hard to catch up on every news tidbit and how to in the world of Digital Marketing, below are several articles worth reading during a break from the work week:
Social Media
5 Successful Twitter Marketing Campaigns You should know about – While Facebook gets a lot of the attention when it comes to ‘sexy’ marketing campaigns by brands, there are some great examples from Twitter, that show how brands are using the platform to their advantage, to engage with followers in new ways.
5 Top Qualities Your Social Media Manager Should Have! – You don’t have to have a masters degree to run an effective social media campaign but it is not something that just anyone can do. Below are 5 qualities some of the top businesses, who understand the power of social media, are looking for when hiring a social media community manager.
Likes Are Not Loves – How To Waste Time “Marketing” In Facebook – I heard the other day that if someone “Likes” your Facebook business page, they’re over 90% likely to never look at it again.
SEM/SEO
How to Avoid PPC Campaign Strikeouts - Good decision-making is the key to avoding and preventing some common PPC pitfalls. Here are three curve balls to watch out for from Search Engine Watch.
Mobile SEO Tips For Everyone – Filmed on an iPad 2 – How are you ever going to be able to optimize your mobile web presence when you don’t have one?! Fret not! On this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus from SEOmoz’s very own SEO team gives some pointers on how to keep sites optimized for cell phones and tablets without breaking the bank or the brain.
Wellness Article of The Week
Can A Real Man Be A Vegetarian? - Can you be a real man if your steak and potatoes consists of tofu substitute?
Inside The Brain – Week in Review May 14
While it’s hard to catch up on every news tidbit and how to in the world of Digital Marketing, below are several articles worth reading during a break from the work week:
Social Media
10 Simple Tips for Facebook and Twitter Success – In a world defined largely by social media — from business reviews to cultural revolutions — you cannot simply be where your customers are for the sake of being there. You must be there for a reason, and that reason must not be entirely, if at all, self-serving.
7 Reasons Replacing a Website With Social Media Is Stupid – While social media is a powerful tool for marketing and building online reach for a business, it does not fill the shoes of a corporate website.
SEM/SEO
The Real Cost of Cheap SEO - With SEO, you typically get what you pay for. If you are paying £500 per month for SEO in a competitive field where your competitors are paying £5000, then you will not be getting the same amount of time spent on activity.
Why Small Businesses Should Link Out - A lot of advice has been written over the years telling you to never link out, and horde all the link juice for yourself. I disagree. You should link out as much and as often as you can, within reason. Here’s why.
Wellness Article of The Week
Multitasking Makes You Fat – Juggling multiple tasks at the office may impress your boss, but it could have unintended consequences for your waistline.
Inside The Brain – March 29th
Recap of the day in the brain:
Google Touts Conversion Boost With Call Tracking Solution - Google Call Metrics uses the same technology that’s behind Google Voice. It generates a unique phone number for each ad/search campaign and can be used for both PC search ads and those that appear on smartphones or tablets.
How to use Paid Search as a Branding Tool – Ann Summers takes interesting approach to generate brand awareness via Paid Search.
How to Target Affluent Facebook Users – One group of people marketers would love to get their ads in front of are the affluent. There is no way to target strictly job titles, incomes, or property values on Facebook unless you think outside the box.
Please check back throughout the day for new articles and comments.
