Creating personas can be valuable and powerful for improving your marketing efforts. This post is a round up of some really valuable resources for creating personas.

Creating Personas

Check out this case study by the Amplify Interactive team: Creating Personas Improves PPC Campaign Performance by 152%!

Case study from our own team here at Amplify Interactive demonstrates the power of personas for search marketing campaigns.

Case Study from Marketing Sherpa: Content Marketing: Targeted Persona Strategy Lifts Sales Leads by 124%

Creating personas helps this company create better content for each segment of its audience. This article will give you specific ideas about to approach personas and tailor your content.

Personas for SEO – How To Build Them & Use Them

This presentation from Mike King (@ipullrank) presents a process for persona development and gives excellent insight into where to get data for personas and how to use it.

The B2B-centric series includes:

1. How To Create Buyer Personas
2. How To Most Effectively Use Your Buyer Personas
3. Reviewing Your Buyer Personas
4. Bonus: Persona Development Worksheet

Neilsen’s interactive tool that lets you investigate segment groups based on demographics and behaviors. This thing is DOPE!

Another interactive tool for researching personas based on key traits and even ZIP codes.

3 Steps to Creating Effective Buyer Personas

There’s a link to a PowerPoint template for creating buyer personas.

4 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Developing Personas

Don’t get derailed when building personas.

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That wraps up this edition. Since you made it this far, you might as well follow Amplify Interactive on LinkedIn.

Amplify Interactive provides search engine & social media marketing services for a wide range of B2B clients. Part of our process is creating personas. Check out our SEM services and our clients or download one of our SEM whitepapers.

Amplify Interactive offers Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services for small to medium sized businesses. Contact us today to chat about your SEO strategy.

The Broken Link Building Bible

Jessica’s Link Building Bible

This a wonderful blog post on SEOmoz regarding broken link building. It’s a huge post, with tons of great tools, tricks, and strategy ideas on how to get this type of link building campaign running. Not to mention this great quote from the author:

Broken link building is appealing because the success of the campaign is directly proportional to how much good you do for the web.

We all love to do good, right? So take a look at this post and start implementing them in your link building strategy today. Lastly, make sure you appreciate my beautiful drawing of a “Link Building Bible.”

Portent Staff Survey: “What’s Your Biggest Question(s) About SEO?”

How awesome is this? We’ve done these at Amplify, but never really put down the questions and answers in a blog post. My favorite questions:

• Do rankings even really matter anymore? What about the whole personalized search thing?
• Why are my search results progressively less helpful every time Google has an algorithm update?
• The new HTML5 elements (i.e. section, article, etc.) are a big deal for accessibility. How do they play into SEO?

There are a lot more in the post, so make sure you stop on by there and see what else people are wondering about when it comes to SEO.

@pontifex – The Pope on Twitter

I love that the pope is finally doing social – I know, I don’t do the Social Round Up anymore, but I just can’t help noting this. So here are the Pope’s awesome first tweets!

Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.

— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012

How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?

— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012

Did you see something that I missed? Add it to the comments below. Check out more articles I’ve liked / +1′d on my Google+ Profile.

Amplify Interactive offers Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services for small to medium sized businesses. Contact us today to chat about your SEO strategy.

Bing Webmaster Tools: Stay On Top of Critical Issues with New Crawl Error Alerts

Bing Webmaster Tools Crawl Information Tool

Bing announced at the beginning of the month that they will be sending out new crawl error alerts to their users. New alerts include:/p>

• DNS Failures – if Bing tries to crawl your website and they get a DNS issue, they will add the URLs they tried to crawl to the Crawl Information tool. These URLs will be add to a new column called DNS Issues.
• Connection Timeouts – this information will also be in the Crawl Information tool under the Connection Timeouts column. This error will occur when a website’s server refuses a connection or does not respond with a HTTP status in a timely fashion
• Detailed 4XX and 5XX Response Alerts

A Basic (Yet Essential) Pre & Post Content Launch Checklist (with Guidelines)

SEOmoz promoted an awesome blog from YouMoz today from Mackenzie Fogelson, owner of Mack Web Solutions. The blog has some great suggestions on things to check before and after you launch content on your website. Below are a few of the best ones:

• Use Google Suggest to get content ideas and target keywords.
• Make sure you use keywords in the Page Title, Headings, Body Copy, Alt Text, and Images.
• Make sure your content is readable. Do you have headings and subheadings? Short paragraphs and images?
• Make sure you have share icons on each post.
• Do you have a conversion point?
• Analytics and tracking metrics are important to know if your content made an impact.
• Let people know about your content. Connect with people you’ve mentioned. Use social to spread the word.

Brands, Google Plus, and the Knowledge Graph: A Love Triangle

GM Knowledge Graph

Very interesting post from Thomas Redmond which supports the need for Businesses / Brands to have a verified Google+ page. His basic experiment: conduct a Google search for top 100 brands to see which brands have a Knowledge Graph and from where the datafor the Knowledge Graph is being. Below are the most interesting stats:

• 47% of the brands have verified Google+ pages
• Only 24% of the brands have a Knowledge Graph
• 92% of the Knowledge Graph info comes from Google+
• 96% of the brands with a Knowledge Graph have verified Google+ pages

…there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between brands that have verified Google+ pages and those brands that trigger a Knowledge Graph entry when their name is searched. Additionally, if a brand does have a Knowledge Graph entry, it’s very likely that the information displayed there is coming from its Google+ page.”

Did you see something that I missed? Add it to the comments below. Check out more articles I’ve liked / +1′d on my Google+ Profile.

Amplify Interactive offers Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services for small to medium sized businesses. Contact us today to chat about your SEO strategy.

The focus of today’s B2B & Inbound marketing  roundup is content marketing. I’ve rounded up a few recent B2B content marketing studies, tips & tricks and infographics. I KNOW I missed something – comment with your link to something recent for B2B content marketing.

B2B Content Marketing Stats & Charts

2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends

This study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs highlights features about 20 slides of stats via Slideshare. Highlights include tactics used by B2B content marketers, the effectiveness of various content marketing tactics, social media sites used by B2B content marketers to distribute content (LinkedIn took the lead this year), challenges facing B2B content marketers (guess what? the biggest challenge is in creating content. I’ve got some tips for you below), and more.

12 Revealing Charts to Help You Benchmark Your Business Blogging Performance

This study from Hubspot features a lot of excellent charts that basically show how blogging has a direct impact on traffic and leads. Since blogs are usually where MOST B2B companies center their content marketing efforts, this study has some really nice numbers to support how much blogging it takes and how long it should take to really start seeing the results of your content efforts. Spoiler: for most B2B companies – it takes at LEAST 15 posts a month and 150+ posts before you really start seeing a return. 

B2B Content Marketing Tips & Tricks

As the study I referenced above points out – the biggest challenge facing content marketers is creating content. This post features a handy list of ideas for creating content. My favorite? There are a lot of tips for creating content where you barely even have to do any writing! Check it out.

This post directly addresses the study I pointed out above and focuses in on the stat that “64 percent of B2B content marketers say they are challenged with producing enough content”. So – this post breaks down how much content is enough with a simple math equation, and how to pull together the time and components to create enough content.

Might as well throw a platform-specific tip into the roundup. As you’ll see in the benchmark study from the section above, SlideShare is less noisy than some of the other channels, but it’s a perfect place for B2B marketers. The tips here are excellent. Interesting note – turns out long presentations (60+ slides) tend to do quite well on SlideShare. That’s pretty different from other sites…

B2B Content Marketing Infographics

Why Content Marketing is the New Branding

Sweet infographic on the various types of content formats from social media to infographics to whitepapers to interactive games and the ease of implementation vs value.

Content Plays a Critical Role Throughout Tech Buying Cycle

There’s a nice infographic in the middle of this post that breaks down the types of content that your target customers are looking for at various phases of the buying cycle. For example – “how to” content is great at the top of the funnel whereas demo’s, case studies and tools are better at the bottom of the funnel.

10 Useful B2B Marketing Infographics

That’s right, I’m putting a roundup in my roundup. That’s like a double bonus! The infographics included are:

1. How Social is B2B? (InsideView)
2. Is Content Marketing Traditional Advertising’s New Rival? (Marketo)
3. B2B Social Marketing Universe (Marketo)
4. Six Steps to Inbound Marketing Success (Impact BND)
5. B2B Marketing: LinkedIn vs. Facebook (BopDesign)
6. The Content Marketing Explosion (Blue Glass)
7. What Works for Social Sharing. B2B vs. B2C (Compendium)
8. The Business Marketers’ Guide to Instagram (Marketo)
9. The B2B Customer Reference Funnel (TechValidate)
10. The B2B Lead Generation Manifesto (Unbounce)

Ben’s Tips for Better Living

• Eating and Drinking: I went to Kansas this last weekend – my first ever visit to the midwest. Our first stop upon landing in Kansas City was to eat at Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ. 4.5 well deserved stars on Yelp. Then I proceeded to eat a lot more beef brisket and other types of BBQ over the next four days. Nothing quite lived up to Oklahoma Joe’s though.
• Favorite Distraction: Check out these photographs of dogs underwater 
• The Rawk: You might not know that I like to rock.
  • The new Sword record came out. Not quite as hook-tastic as the first 3 but solid nonetheless
  • Since my last update I’ve been to the following shows: The Deftones, Local H and Red Fang. All were completely solid. I’m heading out to see Helmet tonight.

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That wraps up this edition. Since you made it this far, you might as well follow Amplify Interactive on LinkedIn.

Amplify Interactive provides search engine & social media marketing services for a wide range of B2B clients. Check out our SEM services and our clients or download one of our SEM whitepapers.