Interesting Things – SEO, Facebook, and saving a company with content marketing

Interesting Things – SEO, Facebook, and saving a company with content marketing

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m not a marketer. I’ve never had any formal training, I’ve never worked in a marketing department formally, and I’ve never been a classic “marketing person”.

However, everything I have ever done has had marketing involved in it. From the online comic shop that I ran, and that I still consult for, to the online invoicing program I ran, to the SAAS for comic shops that I run today.  I’ve always been involved in marketing.

Because of that, I read a LOT of marketing related content. I also listen to a fair number of marketing focused podcasts.

This post will be part of a semi-regular feature that I’ll be hosting, where I post some interesting things I’ve learned.

Before I get started, if you’re not already using Flipboard on your mobile device, make sure you’re using it and that you’ve subscribed to the NorthIQ Megazine on Flipboard!

SEO Quick Wins You Can Try – SEO is a big, dark, scary prospect, but if you just make your website better, you’ll find that you also end up doing a bunch of things that search engines appreciate!

Why You Need Keyword Benchmarking in Your SEO Strategy – Search engine optimization is really just optimizing your site and its content to cater to the intent of someone searching for your businesses offerings. Optimizing your website for Grommets when you really sell Widgets will just bring a bunch of people looking for grommets to your site. This is why you need to monitor the keywords you are trying to rank for, and making sure that you’re adjusting to it.

Automated Marketing and CRM for an Effective Business – Running a business is hard, but some parts of your business can be built once and re-used many times.  Creating simple rules in a CRM like we do with our Sharpspring clients, will help you run an entire segment of your business automatically.

Generating Leads with Facebook Ads – This is a great step-by-step podcast on running your first Facebook ad campaign, what to do, how to do it, and why you should do each step.

The Most Persuasive Sales Emails Always Follow These Strategic Copywriting Tips – Five great tips on writing better sales emails. This is a really simple list that will improve your emails tenfold instantly.

13 Practical Tips to Increase Your Email Response Rate by 320 Percent – This is such a great post on improving emails, and it focuses on the most important things first all the way to the least important. So many people start out trying to get their email design right thinking it is the reason they’re not getting opens…but if nobody is opening your email, they’re certainly not seeing your design!

3 Ways Content Brought My Company Back From Bankruptcy – This article has some great tactics on how to produce better content. Content is one of the most powerful marketing tactics that there is, but you need to make sure that you’re delivering content that people have a meaningful reason to use.

How Your Company Can Use Both Outsourced and In-House Marketing – Why not hire everyone internally?  There are some skills that you don’t need to have all of the time, and there are some people you simply won’t be able to hire full time. Both Craig and I are pretty specialized at this point in our careers, and we can add a ton of value to a company without you needing to bear the burden of our salaries full time.

After these messages…we’ll be right back

After these messages…we’ll be right back

There’s something about the summer that is kind of ingrained in our DNA. It’s a time for rest, reflection, and to get re-energized. That’s why we’ve decided to take the rest of the summer off from blogging and promotion. We’ve got some cool projects that we want to work on, and we’d like to really focus on a big push for the first week of September. You’ll still see us on social media, and we’re still around for client work (both new and old), but we’re not going to put a huge push on putting out a new piece of content every week.

It’s important when you run your own business to look back at what you’ve done recently, we take regular stock of what we’re doing, and we posted some annual goals.

Way back in January, we posted our “Start, Stop, and Continue” post, where we figured out what we would focus on for 2018. We’ve been doing a ton of work on this stuff recently, and we will be making some major announcements in September with some new focuses. We’re also working with our friends at Code Elves on a major product launch that will be ready for some beta testing later this fall.

In the meantime, we’re going to take some vacation time, spend some quiet time reflecting things, and come back on September 5th with a brand new blog post, and a very cool download that we can’t wait to show you.

See you back here September 5th!

In the meantime, we want to hear how you refresh and refocus your own efforts? What do you do to make things better?

Hot Buzz Fermented Pepper Sauce V1

Hot Buzz Fermented Pepper Sauce V1

This is the recipe for the NorthIQ Hot Buzz Fermented Pepper Sauce, which we are calling Hot Buzz Fermented Pepper Sauce V1.

When I started thinking about what I wanted in a hot pepper sauce, I knew that it was more than just heat. I wanted well rounded, flavourful sauce that would go well on a variety of dishes, but it would be the main event of the Hot Buzz final round.

Here’s what we did to make this version. (more…)