Docstoc Releases New iP...

DocStoc , a document sharing site has been focusing on providing bundles of premium professional documents for businesses for some time now. But today, the startup is expanding to producing articles and videos related to starting and running a business, providing more than just form documents for professionals. Docstoc has launched four iPad apps: Legal and Copyright Small Business Toolkit ; Sales Techniques and Training Secrets ; Adwords and SEO Secrets ; and HR & Employee Management Advice to help businesses streamline operations, sales and more. As CEO Jason Nazar explains, in addition to becoming the go-to destination for documents for small businesses, Docstoc also wants to be a content resource as well. In addition to the four released this week, the startup will be releasing 30 “Teaching and Training” Apps for Small Business in Q1 of 2012. All the apps are free and include original video content with SMB and startup experts as well as articles and access to premium documents for free (for a limited time, Nazar says). Eventually, Docstoc will expand these apps to Android. Nazar explains, “We want to create a high quality Khan Academy for small businesses.” Currently, Docstoc sees around 20 million unique visitors per month and has almost 30 million registered users, with the highest concentration being small business owners and operators. Nazar says that Docstoc’s revenue has been growing 100% each year for the past three years and has been profitable for last 2 years.

Search Ad Spend Continu...

Search isn’t going anywhere. Social is great and it’s important and it is likely to continue to gain momentum. In fact, those in social should enjoy these early years because you can use growth numbers that tout high double digit jumps mainly because the industry is young and those numbers are possible. Search used to see the same numbers but as shown by a report from eMarketer the days of the big, gaudy numbers are likely over and that’s fine for two reasons. First it is unrealistic to expect 30, 40, 50, 60 percent growth. It is unsustainable as more of the market gets on board. Less people not exposed means less growth. Second, there will still be growth predicted through 2016! How many industries can say that today?! So if search spend remains strong who is likely to be happiest? Google of course. The likelihood that their dominance in the space is going to be dented is slim and, in fact, eMarketer predicts it will continue to rise. One thing we haven’t even discussed in this is mobile. Mobile search is likely to be the ad spend and SEO game changer over the next five years. There will be plenty to do and keep track of for sure.

3 Must-Take Steps to Br...

Long passed the days when we had to wonder why we should care about search results for our (brand) names. Google reputation management is a well-known phrase to anyone making a living online. Hence, you are most likely to know that in order to maintain stable presence in branded search results, one should be working continuously. If you are blogging a lot and care about your brand name and what people see when they are searching Google for your name, here are exactly three things you need to do once to improve your Google search results branding: 1. Verify the Authorship of Your Articles A few months ago Google got really serious about giving more credit to great content authors. As a result, you can see the author’s headshot right within relevant search results. Since then, claiming your content authorship has been step #1 in branding your search results. Luckily, following the community feedback, Google has made that a fairly simple task: 1. "Reciprocal" Links Method This method is about interlinking your Google Plus profile with your articles: Your articles & Your author page both link to your Google Plus profile Your Google Profile Links back to your Author page. Step 1 : Link your author page to your Google Plus profile. This tool will help you generate a pretty button for that. Alternatively, you can text-link using rel=author added right to end of the profile URL address: Google Step 2: Link your Google Plus Profile back to your Author’s pages from within "Contributing to" section. This tool will help identify if you have done everything right. This is what you should see after step 1 and step 2 are both passed: Hard to remember? Here’s an easy checklist for you: Link to: From Rel= Your Google Plus Profile Each of your articles + your author page "author" Link generator Your Author Page Your Google Plus profile "contributor-to" Verification 2. eMail-Based Method If you contribute in many places and don’t feel like linking to your Google Plus profile, consider an email verification process. Step 1: Create a separate email account to feature on all your guest posts (this can be name@yourdomain.com or anything. Mind that there is likely to be much junk mail after you publicize your address on your articles) Step 2: Add your email address to your Google Plus profile Step 3: Link to that email address whenever you guest post. Step 4: Link to all domains you are contributing to in "Contributing to" section of your Google Plus Profile (same section as in the first method) How to add a new email address to your Google Plus profile? It’s very easy: in "editing" mode scroll down a bit and click on a "Work" section. Select "email" from the drop-down and add your email address you want to verify (note that you’ll need to click a link inside the email sent to that email address for verification purposes): 2. Create a Master Feed of Your Contributions If you have built some popularity, you are most likely to be frequently invited to guest post . Or you contribute to a few blogs, or you maintain a (paid) columns in a number of online publications… In all the above cases, it’s a very wise idea to aggregate all your content in one RSS feed to promote all your contributions on auto-pilot and to showcase your work around the web. I have done a very detailed post on creating your master RSS feed for all your contributor accounts . In short, here’s a quick to-do list on creating the feed as well as sharing it on the web: STEPS HOW Step 1: Identify your author RSS feeds In many cases, you can find your author RSS feed here: http://www.blogdomain.com/author/ author-name /feed/ Yahoo! Pipes "Fetch Feed" tool Step 2: Create Feeds where you don’t have one Identify repetitive HTML mark-up of your author pages to extract links to your individual posts and to create an RSS feed of your author page Feed43 (optionally, premium) Step 3: Combine all your RSS feeds in one Create one master feed of all your author RSS feeds by uniting them in one Yahoo! Pipes ("Fetch feed", "Truncate", "Union" & "Sort by" modules). Here’s my pipe, feel free to clone it! RSSMix (easier but less customized) Step 4: Publicize your master RSS feed on your blog (blogs) You can share your master feed in a WordPress widget (WordPress has a default widget for that) or embed in a page. RSS include (paid) RSS Just Better WordPress plugin (free) You are done! Now, your guest posts and contributions are shared on an autopilot (which means more social shares, exposure, links and consequently better rankings for all your articles around the web!). Here’s my master feed embed in a page that serves as my guest post portfolio (as an example): 3. Claim Your Brand Name in Major Social Networks While this one is absolutely obvious, plenty of people are really too late to claim their brand names across social networks. While Google Plus is attempting to kill nicknames , we still have other huge players we can’t ignore. Here’s another quick to-do for you (together with important notes to remember): Social Network What to Claim What to Remember Twitter Username (the one you specify when registering an account or logging in) Twitter TOS don’t allow users to hold usernames just in order to claim them. You may want to keep it (at least somewhat active) and update it now and then Facebook Username (in the URL path): There can be a lot of Ann Smarties on Facebook but only one is able to have facebook.com/annsmarty profile address. Google loves short URLs with keywords, so if you want *your* profile to be #1 for your name search, claim it now! It can’t be later changed Fan page username (URL path) The page should have at least 25 fans; it cannot be changed as well. Gmail Username (username@gmail.com) You are most likely to be already too late to this party LinkedIn Username (Public profile URL path) Do not use spaces, symbols, or special characters The best thing about all the above exercises is that you need to only do them once – so they are really worth a one-time effort! Post image: If you don’t remember me The views and opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim. About the author Ann Smarty is a professional blogger and guest blogger. She owns My Blog Guest , the free community that connects bloggers to guest authors. She also maintains a few other smaller start-ups (including the most recent tool for guest post and link tracking). Ann is also an SEO ninja at Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas . Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Will 2012 Become the Ye...

This post comes from our SEO channel sponsor Link Assistant . The mobile Web has been gaining HUGE momentum in the past few years. Different statistics pertaining to the mobile Internet paint a vivid picture of the latter growing bigger each day:   76 percent of the world population (5.3 billion people) use mobile devices, of which over 1 billion are smartphones. The average iPhone user only spends 45% of his on-device time making voice calls Facebook pages drive 80% of newsletter sign-up’s through mobiles The number of mobile searches has grown 400% in the last year For many products, 1 in 7 searches comes from a mobile device 1/3 of flowers sold on Mother’s Day were through mobiles  The mobile Web is expected to grow bigger than the desktop Internet by the end of 2014, etc. This makes one wonder, “Oh my, isn’t it time I optimize my site for mobile users?” But thing is, while some Internet marketers are very excited about the Web going mobile and all that, a big portion of SEO’s are still rather skeptical about mobile taking over the “normal” search, which is well-illustrated by the fact that only 21% of online businesses have already optimized their sites for mobile users. I’m not trying to say that “hey, there is no need to optimize your site for mobile”. Actually, that will definitely NOT hurt. However, a little bit of critical approach towards the mobile Internet won’t hurt either. So, let’s take a closer look at what the mobile World Wide Web is like. People use different gadgets for different purposes According to Google , people do different things on mobile devices than they do on their desktops. Although it is quite self-evident, what does it mean for SEO’s? Can you expect to find your target audiences among the mobile crowd? Are the majority of your users going mobile in the nearest future? Let us see what mobile users mostly use their devices for: -1 out of 3 mobile searches is somehow related to local search This means, if you have a local business, it’s time to give the mobile version of your site some serious thought. Also, get listed on Google Places ( here are some tips on how to do it) and get your site indexed by corresponding vertical search engines, such as OpenTable.com or similar. -36% of mobile Web surfers use their mobile devices to check out the news So, if you are a news website (say, a blog that covers celebrity news), you stand a good chance with mobile users. -49% of mobile users use their phones for social networking This information would probably be of interest to those who invest heavily in social media marketing and expect users to “land” on their sites via particular social networking sites (for example, Facebook). -79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping , from comparing prices, to finding more product info, to locating a retailer. Thus, if such users cannot find your site using the mobile search engine, or your site provides a poor mobile user experience, you are running the risk of losing quite a big portion of your potential customers Conversion rates on the mobile Web are way higher The good news is that those browsing from mobile devices convert times better than your average desktop user. For instance: 28% of people who see a mobile ad take action 33% of mobile users who access sites via their smartphones make purchases on them 59% of users visit an online store after looking it up online. Pretty cool, huh? So, consider this when weighing the pros and cons of optimizing for mobile users. Mobile apps perform better than mobile sites A normal website would NOT, in most instances, look that good on a mobile device. A way out would be to either (1) serve a special mobile style sheet to mobile users, (2) create a special mobile version (usually a subdomain) of your site or (3) design a special app that mobile users can employ. As for mobile style sheets, these are normally stripped of all the bulky content and the content that serves for decorative purposes only (for example, eye-pleasing images). The mobile version of a site, in its turn, would normally be more compact and more easily navigable than a company’s “regular” website. As far as mobile applications are concerned, www.opentable.com/mobile, for example, offers an entire range of mobile apps that can be installed on all sorts of mobile devices. And, in case your device is not supported, they have a neat mobile version of their site, too – http://m.opentable.com. Besides, mobile apps tend to perform much better in terms of usability than the other 2 options (CSS sheets and mobile subdomains). According to Jakob Nielsen : Full (non-mobile) sites have a 58% success rate (perform well only on iPads and laptops)  Mobile sites have a 64% success rate and Mobile apps have a 76% success rate. The future of mobile SEO Many experts believe that, with mobile browsers, sites and apps evolving, the bar for the mobile user experience is being constantly raised. Besides, mobile users have gotten savvier and already know what to expect from their browsing experiences. So, in the future, we are likely to see more mobile optimization wonders, in both site optimization (making a site render faster on different mobile devices) and user experience enhancement. Has your business gone mobile yet? Perhaps it’s time to think about it. Not long ago, we did a post on how to optimize websites for mobile users that you can use as a practical guide to mobile pages creation. Just see if that would be a priority in your niche and consider which one of the mobile SEO options (a CSS, a mobile site or a mobile app) to choose. The views and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim. About the Author Aleh Barysevich is Marketing Director and Co-Founder of Link-Assistant.Com, a major SEO software  provider and the maker of SEO PowerSuite tools. Link-Assistant.Com is a group of SEO professionals with years of SEO experience. Based on their expertise, company’s four-app  SEO toolset was created, setting the industry’s benchmark for technology-powered Web professionals with years of SEO experience. Based on their expertise, company’s four-app  SEO toolset was created, setting the industry’s benchmark for technology-powered Web promotion.

Consider Shifting Empha...

This post was created by our Reputation Channel sponsor Webimax. Numbers reflecting user participation on social sites were issued recently, stirring the interest of marketers and brands leveraging popular sites like Facebook and Twitter. Out of 2,000 U.S. web users asked, an astounding 85% had Facebook accounts. About three-quarters of the population use the social platform daily, and over half of those asked have at least a hundred friends. Wow, the opportunity to engage markets is there. The Consumers Have Arrived, Where’s the Businesses? Further research showcased what consumers do with brand-produced media. It seems consumers are more than happy to share videos, mention companies in updates, read brand-produced editorial, “like” businesses, “retweet” posts, and interact with brands in other ways. So, consumers will interact but will brave brands? I tease the reluctance of some small businesses by using the word, “brave.” Some brands are hesitant to engage in real time platforms, which behold opportunity for consumers to state both positive and negative sentiments. However, the research shows most of those who do comment, provide positive comments and those who make negative comments, do it less often and don’t participate as much, creating reason for small brands to shed reluctance. Social Media Influences SEO The main title refers to a reputation’s influence on search. In most cases, each brand needs to chase highly-competitive keywords aligned to its respective industry. Social media optimization (SMO) supplements search engine optimization, and when done well, could help lessen the importance of chasing competitive, SEO-campaign, search terms, sought by many if not all vendors in most industries. Reconsider Marketing Dollars Marketing research reflects interesting data regarding “desired” information. A significant 80% of consumers, partaking in social media platforms, desire information related to discounts and coupons. If a high number of people use social sites, are willing to share brand information, and mostly desire info related to discounts and promotions, perhaps it’s a good idea for some companies to reconsider how marketing dollars are spent. As mentioned, every small brand needs to chase competitive, broad keywords, investing a lot of dollars in the process. Marketing data illuminates a different avenue of opportunity for small brands, one leading to social media engagement. Would it make more sense for your brand to begin shifting its online marketing campaign’s focus, placing more emphasis on social participation and building reputation, while placing less focus and dollars into chasing hard-line, competitive search terms? For instance, shifting more resources and money away from chasing those golden terms, reserving them for social-platform-launched promotions and sales, could produce more “bang” for a small-brand-sized budget. Conclusion I’m not diluting the importance of obviously popular, user-leveraged search terms aligned to a brand’s respective industry, but suggesting some small brands survey the landscape of their industry and behavior of its target markets, especially regarding social site participation. While you’re pulling your hair out, trying to secure rankings for those golden terms, you could also be building your brand’s reputation, creating numerous consumer-to-brand avenues through social engagement. Sources: AYTM and SEJ . The views and opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim. Todd Bailey is Vice President of Digital Strategy at WebiMax, a leading SEO company with 500+ clients and 150+ employees as well as Lead Contributor at SEOservices.com