As an example, let’s say that you have a site that sells obscure comic books. The site panders to items like parallel spin offs or fan favorites like Lobo. You’ve got tons of these, all in mint condition. People who are fringe comic book collectors really enjoy your site for shining some light on less than popular characters and series. Some traffic enjoys it so much that they actually talk about your site on their blogs. These people may be fan boys, but are their blogs?

Well, they may enjoy comic books, but they have other passions in life so they talk about all sorts of content, such as basket weaving, entertainment watches, photos of cats and dogs, or just about anything else you can think about. The thing is the majority of your backlinks aren’t from people who also sell comic books. Those people don’t want the competition that could occur from linking to you.
So you have all these backlinks from sites that have nothing to do with comic books. Along with the fact that you have some great content on your site, this set up allows you to rank rather well for some nice key phrases in Google. Are these backlinks not relevant? Now it would be beneficial to acquire more relevant backlinks from authoritive sites, but you shouldn’t dismiss some links that at first glance seem irrelevant.

I’m not suggesting spammy links. What I’m stating is that you need to delve in a little more when researching where your links are originating. A lot of people out on the Web keep too much of a laser like focus on research when they should  widen their gaze. They may be able to find an untapped resource in what initially looked to be worthless.

With that out of the way, have you ever found an untapped resource that on first glance you thought was worthless? Let me know in the comments below.

Retweet That Link Up

This one should be pretty self-explanatory. You need to start focusing on when the best time to send out a tweet with a relevant link is for your demographic. I’m following the understanding that you’ve already created a decent amount of relevant followers. Now you need to know when they are most active on Twitter. This may take some time to figure out but then make sure your content is Tweeted out during those times. Asking for a retweet usually nets more retweets than not asking for one as well. Also concise wording allowing for ease of retweeting is another factor you have to think about.

Don’t Write Fluff

You can probably name some big name in your field. I’ll bet you they have created some great content. It is one thing to hash out some fluff, but an entirely different proposition to take the time and research to make excellent informative pieces. Additionally, if the person is able to keep a solid rhythm of up-to-date content you’ll be a step ahead. If you’ve already got that part down the next step is really integrating the same kind of content from your blog onto social media sites. Take the time to respond to followers on Twitter, release informative links and content on Facebook, take the time to post and answer questions on Quora. These should be natural extensions of your site and should reflect the same kind of standard you have on your site.

Flesh Out Your Profiles

The more you actively create a fleshed out profile the more human you’ll seem out on Social Media networks. That personalization is the thing that separates you from all the other individuals out there. You, usually, have very little space to tell people about yourself, or your company, so pick your wording carefully. I also see a decent number of people that forget to put links in their profiles. Before hand I mentioned that these Social Networks are an extension of you and your site, why wouldn’t you want that SM traffic the ability to go to your site where you have more freedom and space to truly tell people about yourself and your services? Lastly, I recommend sticking with the same photo across all SM platforms. As your reputation rises in your field that photo will become synonymous with who you are and what you represent.

Don’t Worry What The Cool Kids Think (Reputation across SM outlets)

Not too long ago people would judge certain people across SM outlets by the number of followers, or likes, a person had. Trust me it might be great to have 100,000 people following you, but if the majority of those people are spam bots or irrelevant to your business that number is pretty worthless. Focusing on providing great insight, being conversational with individuals that are leaders in your industry, and following/interacting with a core group of people is the key to success. Instead of worrying about your Klout score when starting out, worry about putting hard work into providing information to your demographic and distributing properly. The more work you put into that aspect the easier it will be to generate a great reputation on SM networks.

Have any other tips, suggestions, or disagreements about this article? Leave a comment.

I’m glad we have that covered so we can jump into the outline, at least my outline, of how to set up a Site Analysis. I like to convert all my work over to PDF due to ease of reading for clients and the ability to create internal linking structures for jargon or acronyms throughout the analysis report. I also go with a nice header to continually have the NuRelm name and contact info handy for the potential client.

Explanation of SEO

I know this might be a given, but you take for granted how much you know about technology. I include this no matter how tech savvy a client. You spend all day talking about SEO, thus why you have clients asking for your help. If they knew all about it you wouldn’t be writing up an analysis. By allowing a client to understand the basics of what is going on, it will help you down the line. I don’t go into a crazy amount of detail but several paragraphs help me get my point across.

Use visuals to strengthen the point

Instead of inundating a client with jargon that deals with on-site optimization I’ve found it is much easier to actively show them with a screen shot. This continues my trend of placing everyone at a non-technical standpoint and if they know more can simply scan this part. I usually make this part pretty simplistic only bringing out several examples that can be expanded upon when having a sit down or phone conference with them.

Keyword Analysis of Website

I use the ever popular Term Extractor from SEOmoz to grab a cursory analysis of several pages to see what I’m working with, then I compile the data for what the client is currently targeting. Depending on how well the site is optimized you’ll either get keywords all over the place or a great list that is appropriate for the site and clients wishes. I than compare the keywords to the current sites SERP rankings. Both ways are a good starting point, with one obviously needing more work, but by showing the client where they can improve is the goal here.

Industry Analysis

I like to do a little search of how competitive the industry the client is and then explain a couple different thoughts on how we could go about combating the difficulty of the keywords/phrases. Whether that’s focusing on the long tail, which going forward in 2011 looks better and better, localization, or working specifically in vertical searches. This helps me, and the client, get a better grasp on working towards a goal. Sometimes you get lucky and the client already has a definitive plan but often times they have too loose of a plan which you need to tighten up.

Competitive Analysis

I think a lot of people, who do traditional marketing, assume that their competitors in other areas would be the same for organic rankings. Oddly enough, if the client is small to medium, their competitors could also be in the dark about SEO. Often times I’ll show this competitive analysis and clients weren’t even aware of the competitors or wrote them off because their offline presence wasn’t as strong. This helps me, usually, show the importance of quality/quantity backlinks and strengthen that a client needs to focus on all aspects of marketing.

SEO Packages

This is pretty self explanatory; I give them a break down of my stock packages, unless they want a custom package.

Explanation of SEO Packages

I think we’ve gotten the point that I like to describe exactly what I’m doing. This is just a run down of everything on my SEO package with an explanation of what it is and why it’s beneficial to the clients SEO Campaign.

SEO Vocabulary

I like to link all of the vocabulary throughout the document so it’s easier for a client when viewing to get familiar with any terms I may have used throughout the analysis. I tend to stay pretty light on acronyms and jargon, but everything is included here so a client can understand everything.

So that’s pretty much it, just give them a full breakdown and explanation. That way you dissolve any mysticism and get down the nitty gritty everyone likes – results. If you set up your analysis differently or have any questions let me know in the comments below.

I think a lot of people have focused on writing SEO Audits lately. While, they are amazingly insightful and by studying them you can learn a lot about SEO, I think a lot of SEO individuals forget that sometimes they’re in stronger demand than people in between the level of beginner and being a respected representative of the SEO community. They’ve established a decent amount of clout, while the new guys/gals need a little grease on the wheels when finding interested clients.

Thus, it can prove to be beneficial to do an analysis of a website for a potential client. It’s a teaser and a strengthener of what you know as an SEO while simultaneously explaining the basics of SEO, which will help in a multitude of ways. First you’re more likely to get a call back, and secondly you’ve helped to negate any mysticism or negative aspects your potential client thought about SEO. Below are several key points I think should be included in every cursory analysis of a website.

Call the client to learn of Pain Points:

Doing an analysis is wonderful, but make sure you have a quick phone conversation to hear a client’s goals, if they have any defined, before going off to grab data, competitive analysis, or cursory keyword research. If the client wants something that isn’t really related to SEO you’ll have a really awkward meeting showing them a service they don’t want. Alternatively, sometimes clients are looking for the results of an SEO campaign without even understanding any concepts of SEO. By offering up them a plethora of beginner knowledge it will help them grasp the benefits of SEO

Make the Analysis Free:

Now I realize some individuals don’t want to give all their tactics away. I’m not saying that, but if you’re throwing out nothing but acronyms and jargon without actually telling them what you’re going to do, please just send them my way, that client deserves better.
The analysis isn’t about money, it’s a good will testament that your, potential, client needs help and you’re the person to guide them along while explaining to them SEO. If your SEO revolves around doing audits or you’re rolling up your sleeves and getting nitty gritty with on-site optimization and link building either way you are one step ahead of the game if the client goes with you.

Give your Client a Vocabulary Section:

If you get a person who is not technology savvy, or even SEO savvy, you will spend a decent amount of time explaining certain, simple, concepts to them. Make sure they have a reference guide when reading through your analysis so they really grasp what they are reading. Often times I’ve learned that even in a client meeting it’s better to have more written down on an analysis. After you leave a client will still have all of the vocabulary, descriptions, etc.

Tell them AND Show them the Results (My love for graphs continues)

A lot of text can be daunting, and most clients will glaze over large paragraphs of topics they really don’t care to understand. Graphs on the other hand are great ways to show a potential client gaps and opportunities he currently is missing out on. It also confirms the data you’ve taken the time to write about in simple concise matter. I’m not suggesting you do heavy handed analysis but delving a little under the surface can reveal a lot.

A little bit of hard work goes a long way in helping to secure clients while creating a name for yourself. In the SEO world, where some people operate with a sense of mysticism, showing how you operate upfront is the best possible option. Next week we’re going to delve into the actual set up of an analysis and the week after that we’ll assume you’ve nabbed your first client and start to cover site audits.

You Said Something About a Filter?

Filters help you to manage what kind of data flows through to your Google Analytics report. Filters are similar to the gold rush days of panning. They eliminate dirt and debris until all you’re left with is gold, or in this case more accurate results. Why is filtering your data important? With unfiltered, or raw, data you won’t get an accurate view of how your site is performing. By setting up these simple filters below you’ll start to see a more accurate picture of how well your site is functioning.

To set up these filters log into your Google Analytics and click the account in which you want to set a filter. Don’t actually go in and view the report.
In the lower right corner will be a link titled “Filter Manager”. Clicking on that will lead you to where you can set up your filters.

Simply click on “Add Filter” and you’ll be ready to set up the below described filters.

1. Excluding Internal Traffic:

If you have any reason to go to your site and you don’t have this filter applied you are actively skewing your results. Now imagine if you have a large amount of employees all going to your site every day. You can see how this can affect results drastically. Luckily there is a filter that you can apply to exclude by IP (Internet Protocol) address:

Enter your filter name: Exclude Internal Traffic
Filter Type: Exclude and in the drop down choose “Traffic from the IP addresses that are equal to”
IP address: In older versions of Google Analytics you had to use regular expression but they have since made it easier as you just have to input your IP address in the brackets.

2. Forcing URL Reports to lowercase only:

The problem with Google Analytics is that it will display two different reports for both lower case and upper case URL’s.

For instance:

www.example.com/awesome-example.php

www.example.com/Awesome-example.php

These would be perceived and reported as two different unique views when in reality they are not. We can eliminate sifting through maddening amounts of data by applying the filter below.

Enter your filter name: Force lowercase URL
Filter Type: Go to custom then click on the lowercase radial.
Filter Field: In the drop down choose Request URL

3. Full Referral URL

If you’re trying to do link building and look at the referring sites in Google Analytics, you’ll find the data only shows you the main domain instead of the actual referring URL. With this filter you’ll be able to know exactly what page has offered up a link to you without nearly as much snooping around.

Enter your filter name: Full Referral URL
Filter Type: Custom, then clicked the Advanced radial, you’ll be presented with three fields below you.
Field A -> Extract A: Referral (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Do nothing here
Output to -> Constructer: User Defined $A1
Field A required: Yes
Field B required: No
Output override: Yes
Case sensitive: No

4. Include Only Your Site Traffic:

Remember that cool little snippet that was so easy to throw up into your code to install Google Analytics? Well, it’s really easy for another company to grab your snippet and put it into their site. Now instead of receiving data for only your site you’ll have another site mucking up all your great data. Let’s stop that:

On the Edit Screen:

Enter your filter Name: Include only your Site Traffic (you can name your title anything)
Filter Type: You have the ability of some pre defined terms, but you’ll want to click on Custom field for this filter.
Choose Custom Type: You’ll see an array of radial buttons, choose Include for now.
Filter Field: From the drop down box choose HOSTNAME.
Filter Pattern: Here is where you have to do a little regular expression work, but just input
^(?:www\.)?\example\.com$ and replace “example” with your domain name.

With these your data should be a whole lot easier to evaluate, and you’ll also see more accurate traffic results. Are there any filters you always put on a new profile that i did not mention above?  Let me know what other filters you use (and why) in the comments section below.

A/B or Multivariate Testing.

Most people make the assumption that A/B includes testing two different pages. One person sees A, and the next person sees B. It is a little more complicated than that. Most times A/B testing includes more than two versions, and instead of splitting 50/50 will choose a smaller portion to test. You can also devise a way that new visitors are the only ones actively doing the testing. In my opinion you get truer results by testing the new visitors because most people, your returning customers, don’t like change. Just look at the massive amount of Facebook groups dedicated to returning to the previous version of Facebook. Therefore, it is much easier to gleam information out of new visitors without inconveniencing your return traffic. Multivariate, on the other hand, deals with multiple variables that you check.

There are a multitude of tools out there to perform A/B or Multivariate testing. I personally enjoy Google Website Optimizer even though other tools out there may be more user- friendly. The Website Optimizer allow you to do A/B and multivariate testing with east-to-read page section reports at the end. The beauty, as with most Google tools, is that the Website Optimizer is free.

Crazy Egg (Heat Maps are Your Friend)

Crazy Egg is one of many heat mapping tools that easily translates user activity into a visual map.  This is a life saver if you have to show a client or boss who may have trouble understanding your slew of reports.  Additionally, it can help before you begin A/B testing to see where to put icons and to determine where a high portion of traffic is centered. Even if you’re not doing testing it still helps to narrow down design choices and overall layout of your page.
Crazy Egg starts out at nine dollars for their Basic package. For the price of a movie you get to peer into the mind of users. You really can’t beat that deal. Crazy Egg has additional packages up to 99 dollars per month.

User Testing:

What once was a luxury item available  only to large firms has become a reality for any SMB. Services like Usertesting.com now give you the power of remote testing with affordable prices. Set-up is simple. You supply your URL and instructions to soon-to- be visitors. The price per visitor is 39 dollars, but you receive written feedback and an online video of the visitor walking through your site. There is much debate on the amount of visitors you should have test your site. Use more than 1 but you could probably stop at around 5 or 6 visitors.
The real question is when you should use this kind of powerful testing.  I would strongly suggest taking this step to do final tweaking to your site. You have the ability to ask follow-up questions from the instructions you previously laid out.  Make sure the instructions are task oriented and able to be completed in a timely manner.  The follow-up questions should help you cement any additional thoughts that may not be answered by the visitor following your instructions.

These are just three ways in which to track how your visitors are viewing your site. There are many others.  The way to maximize your users’ experience is to see what they like and dislike. Consistent tweaking, monitoring, and questioning will provide you with a great understanding of what works for you site and what doesn’t.  Do you have a specific way in which you like to monitor or test your traffic? Let me know in the comments below.

Branding for One:

Ranking your Importance: Realizing what you want to accomplish and who is already interested in your endeavors will mold your online campaign. To accurately start a branding campaign for an individual you have to judge what level of demand you bring to the fray. On the low end you could have a person who is not well known online or off. Conversely you might be presented with a gold mine of success offline that just has to be implemented online. Obviously, if you’re just starting out, creating a brand identity is only limited by what you are trying to achieve. If you already have some clout in the real world your traffic may be easily established.

Finding your Niche:

The Internet is a fascinating place which encompasses a jungle of interests so obscure places on the Web still intrigue/terrify me. This opens up a wonderful opportunity to flourish in almost any environment you can think of as long as you can determine your niche demographic. Understanding what Social Media outlets and what content your niche demographic prefers will help in establishing a lucrative online presence.

Creating Social Media Outposts:

Setting up an online castle sounds way more awesome than it really is, but start to think of Social Media outlets as guard towers and your blog or website as the epicenter of your mighty online castle. By setting up these outlets where you know your demographic frequents you’ll be able to generate content that funnels that traffic back to your desired location.

Kidnapping People…Online:

Jordan, I found my demographic, set up Social Media outlets and I have a website but no one is coming, why? Well fellow Internet traveler, most people don’t like to go to parties of boring strangers. You have to start writing interesting relevant content and then promote that traffic through your Social Media outlets. By adopting a conversational tone and maintaining a certain level of transparency you’ll be able to elicit a response. It will not happen immediately. It will take time, persistence, and hours of Social Media labor to do it. Start small and find out who the influencers in your demographic are on twitter. Follow and open up a conversation with them, a Tweet you throw out that is Retweeted by an influencer will reach a larger portion of your target demographic. Over the course of several months you may find yourself an influencer in your field if you stay consistent with your efforts.

Balancing the Line:

Ever have conversations with a close talker? The warm moist breath blasting your face forcing you to focus on understating their favorite food, pastrami, rather than listening to the conversation. Now imagine that close talker is in his underwear, in your house, and you barely know him – dad? Scary, isn’t it? Well you can be a crazy, intruding, overly public close talker online as well. Utilizing Social Media should be done frequently but not obsessively. Transparency and humanization, to a degree, is great. It shows you to be a trustworthy individual increasing your credibility in your field and helps to open up dialogue to followers. Sadly, if done to an extreme you end up appearing more like a barely clothed man in a stranger’s house. In short, if you don’t find a balance you’ll either bore or push people away. Tread softly Web warrior.

Stalking online/Analytics!

Monitoring success online can be a relatively intense process. You don’t have to delve too deep into an analytics program to pull out some simple projections, though. Before you go all crazy and start making pie charts setting goals should be your next step. Are you only interested in traffic, or do you have a specific goal in mind when said traffic enters Online Cardiff? After setting up specific goals, you can then monitor which Social Media sites are funneling the most traffic to further those goals. This will allow you to focus your energy and be efficient with your time.

Think Twice:

Unlike the love I proclaimed for my high school sweetheart, all of your online actions last forever. Never for one second think anything you post online is private in any context. The easiest way to destroy your credibility is by having embarrassing photos or scandalous news circulating online; unless your identity is Amy Winehouse.

There is a certain freedom of having your name as an identity rather than a business. You can be more candid, write on any topic you want, and generally remain less uptight. The downside is when you’ve finished that six pack of wine coolers and decide to jump on Twitter Tuesday morning the only repercussion you’ll face is from yourself. Setting up a brand, of any kind, takes hard work and dedication; doubly so if you’re the only person responsible for its success or failure.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and focuses on the process of increasing traffic to a website.  Take for example that the company you’re working for sells red widgets, when a person enters a key phrase, into say Google, for “red widgets” it would prove beneficial to have your company ranked number one in the searches, because, on average, 40%, of all searchers will click on the number one spot. Below are some beginner articles that will expand on this:

Beginner Articles:

• This Beginner’s Guide from SEOmoz it will help you with the concepts behind SEO. Probably the best place to start first.
• This SEO Checklist also from SEOmoz, is the best place to learn the steps to do entry level SEO when starting out.
• This Internet Marketing Handbook runs through a list of tools and learning resources.

1: How does one get started in SEO

At the moment there is no educational degree that is mandated to actively do SEO, I see this changing in the future but many already doing it will be fine due to experience and already having degrees in other fields.  I would say networking would be the best way, but additionally setting up a vanity site, www.yourname.com (just an example), would help in two ways. It would allow you to actively work on doing SEO and individuals could find you easier. Additionally learning basic coding languages will help – HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc. There are numerous conference and panels that go on around larger cities, I would make it a point to try and attend at least one of these a year or more if possible. It will allow you to network with individuals in the field or have the possibility of getting some side work. Once again keep reading because the field changes constantly. Here are some great sites to put in your online reader:

SEO Sites You Should Be Reading:

• www.seomoz.org
• www.searchengineland.com
• www.seobook.com
• www.seoroundtable.com
• www.searchenginejournal.com
• www.conversationmarketing.com
• www.seobythesea.com
• www.blogstorm.co.uk
• www.marketingpilgrim.com
• You could just throw those into an SEO folder in your reader and you’ll have a great start of up to date, relevant SEO knowledge.

2: What’s the job like?

For me I spend the majority of the time doing these things:

1. I monitor analytics programs and pull out metrics that may need to be changed or monitored more closely.  This allows me to keep track of traffic and conversions for goals we have initiated on the website. I also do A/B testing to continually try to improve the visitors experience and try to convert more traffic. Additionally, I complete on-site optimization, such as URL redirects, dynamic to static URL’s, etc.
2. I am responsible for my company’s link building campaign. I produce almost all the content, monitor what inbound links we are receiving, and keep abreast of competitors linking strategies.
3. I’m responsible for all social media outlets and utilizing them for online marketing and brand identity. Through these outlets we brand Nurelm in a light and attempt to funnel these media outposts back to our epicenter/hub – our website.
4. The rest is normal work stuff.

3: Is it difficult to get involved?

For me it wasn’t too rough to start. It can be hard to get in, but ramps up quickly if you can actually do it for a living. Interning is another great way to learn the job and take that knowledge with you into the field.

5: Does it pay well?

I’ll direct you to a post by my hero of the SEO world, Rand Fishkin, entitled SEO Salaries – How much should you make? The salaries are broken down by job description and are centered for Seattle, WA so expect a lower base figure, but it should help to give you a ball park figure for all SEO positions. Have a question or other relevant information about beginning to learn about SEO? Let us know in the comments.

Always on the mind of a marketer is how to turn valuable analytical data into more efficient and profitable campaigns. The main goal of an email marketer is to turn numerical data about open rates and click through rates and use it to build a relationship with your prospects and customers.

So where do you start? The easiest and most successful strategy is to split test different emails, subject lines, and link strategies to figure out which combination of these sends the most buyers to whatever page you’re looking to drive traffic.

Figure out why your audience does what it does

• Identify Subsets of Your Overall Audience: if you send an email to a large group of people, you’ll start to notice that people will respond to different stimuli. Some people will open all your emails and click through while many will never take any action on any of your offers no matter what you send. By observing which people take what actions you can create smaller “niche campaigns” within an overall list. This is a great way to increase your profits by simply targeting people who are interested in a subtopic that you cover.

• Conversion Analysis: is a way to monitor which people bought, which ones didn’t, and which ones got cold feet somewhere in the middle. This information is very valuable for tweaking your buying process by eliminating excuses not to buy.

• Source Analysis: Compare the data between email subscribers and general traffic to your website. This information will help you determine whether your email readers continue on to your website pages and the correlation between email subscribers and general traffic in regards of who buys more and what. Good information to figure out where your customers are coming from and which demographic prefers is converting more.

• Tracking What People Do On Your Site: track what people in a group do on your website. Measure how they react to certain emails and styles. This data can include purchase, registration, or acquisition data.

• Track your abandonment to find the “leaks” that reduce conversion rates. Something as simple as reducing the fields to fill out can easily produce a major increase in conversion rates. In addition, look over your offline marketing to figure out how it relates to your online marketing efforts.

How to Create Messages Based on a Specific Action

Real-time messaging is an extremely profitable email that also makes your customer happy. What happens is the customer receives an email based on what they’ve done recently such as signed up for a report or bought a specific product. To be successful with real-time messaging, it’s important to know where your customer is at in terms of “customer lifecycle” and where email will be most effective.

The five stages of the customer lifecycle are acquisition, conversion, growth, retention and reactivation. Each of these different times are important and have specific action steps that must be taken. By figuring out what you want to connect about and how you’ll do it, you can design an effective real-time messaging strategy. By taking raw analytical data and integrating it into your email marketing strategy, you’re going to get a more complete picture of their activity than if you used just one data source. By using both of these data sources, you can make email campaigns that are more complete.

Real-time messaging has a lot of potential to generate a high ROI for your time and money since they offer specific things that are highly related to what a person is doing online. If you plan smart, you can easily product very positive results with little effort.

Types of Triggers

• Transactional Triggers: Transactional triggers are simply based on an event between you and your customer. Some examples are a prospect purchasing an item or opting in to receive a free report. These events are easy to define and you can create a specific message related to the event. A transactional trigger message would be a “thank you for purchasing” with their download link or a cross-selling email sharing with them another product of yours.

• Recurring Triggers: Recurring triggers are defined by a profile rather than something actually happening. For example, a recurring trigger could be sending a bill to someone or a “happy birthday” email.

To become good at email marketing you need to learn how to turn analytical data into actionable steps that reward or correspond with the analytical data. Using email marketing, a marketer can build a relationship with follow-up messages. Email is fast, inexpensive, measurable, direct and automated, which means you can tie website behavior to a user.

Getting Started

Once you’ve figured out what you want to accomplish in your business, it’s critical to devise a way to use email marketing to help you get there.

• Get People to Buy More “Stuff” From You: you can offer related goods to someone who has just bought a product from you. Dropping them a note about something else that makes using their original purchase easier or faster is a good way to figure out what to send them.

• Turn Tire-Kickers In To First Time Customers: for example, if someone signs up for a free report related to a main topic, you can send educational emails encouraging them to purchase your introductory product. You could even include a special coupon that rewards them for taking action.

• Retain the Customers You Already Have: send emails to customers to continually build a buying relationship. If a customer hasn’t purchased recently, you can reactivate them by offering a stellar deal on some new products they might have not seen.

If you’ve got so much data you don’t know what to do with it all, just relax! Simply start with transactional messages, which are pretty easy to start using since most email services have automated follow-ups you can send out in a certain pattern after the initial transaction. Once you get transactional messages out there, start segmenting your list based on the actions they take. Lastly, make sure you’re constantly split-testing all your conversion points to slowly but surely increase your conversion rates (which means higher profits). The critical part of email marketing is to keep it simple by focusing on implementing new items, monitoring the results, testing new stuff to improve your system, and keep it running into the future.

Remember, “Build it and it will convert” doesn’t happen in the email marketing world. If you provide a good customer experience you’ll have all the success you need with impact email marketing.

Turn Old Content into a Vertical Metric:

I realize rehashing old content might not be the freshest way to produce content, but other companies have been doing it for years and marketing products as something completely different. Gather together a couple old how to articles that coincide together and make an informative video you can post to your YouTube channel.

Conversely, if you don’t want to edit a video you can pull together a slideshow with Scribd and embed it into an article. Although Podcasts aren’t really indexed well due to the algorithms of the search engines it might prove beneficial to your interested traffic. By offering multiple avenues of informational content it will help you cover multiple areas and give you a breather for a week.

Don’t try to do it alone:

Even if you’re the main content guy/gal at your business variety can be helpful in any situation. Even if you convince several people to write one or two articles a month you might have a whole week of content to distribute. This can give you a much needed break to recharge those creative juices and allow your readers a different perspective on the topics you typically cover.

If you know you’re going to be unable to write for a decent amount of time you can also line up a week or two of guest blogs, much like late night TV hosts do at times. It allows the guest blogger greater exposure, a link back to their website, and helps you relax knowing your blog is in good hands.

Harnessing Query Deserves Freshness (QDF):

If you’re like me and pour through a lot of blogs and online articles you’ll understand that certain topics can be time sensitive. Depending on the time the stars might align and you’ll have a topic that is extremely new. Usually product reviews and relevant releases within in your industry are perhaps the best to jump on and offer input. A cautioning word though, there will be a numerous amount of people reviewing the new product or release. Therefore, you’ll have to take the appropriate measure to accurately test the product and to think of a way to offer up a new twist or perspective. This only applies to smaller sites, but I highly doubt Cnet is reading this blog right now.

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but should help you get the ball rolling in the right direction. Sometimes a copious amount of caffeine and a brainstorming session is all it takes, but for when those attempts fail trying any of the above suggestions will hopefully help you get your creative juices stirring again. Let me know what steps you take to overcome writers block in the comments below.