5 Tips for Creating, Promoting and Managing a LinkedIn Group

5 Tips for Creating, Promoting and Managing a LinkedIn Group

via HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog by Ellie Mirman on 5/4/09

It's no secret that LinkedIn is a great place to network professionally, post and find jobs, and answer questions and build thought leadership. But if you're using LinkedIn solely as a place to maintain an online resume, you're missing out on a great opportunity to reach and engage with potential customers -- LinkedIn groups.

5 Tips When Creating a LinkedIn Group

There are still a lot of industries or groups of professionals not yet represented in LinkedIn groups. If no one has created a group for your industry, go create one. A few tips as you get started:

• Your name is important! Consider which keywords your target members will search for. Make sure your group name is clear and includes these keywords.
• Create a group for your industry, not your company. People are more likely to join a group when it's not simply for fans of your company.
• Design the group logo to fit the small standard logo size. The group logos that are displayed will actually be quite small - keep this in mind, and don't cram lots of hard-to-read-text into the small image.
• Create a custom webpage for the group on your website. When we created the ProMarketers group on LinkedIn, we bought the URL www.ProMarketers.com and redirected it to a page on our site with more information about the group. This type of page will provide more context, engagement and visibility for your group. It can have as much or as little information as you like.
• Display the group in the Group Directory and on members' profiles. Take advantage of the functionality already in place on LinkedIn to help your group get more visibility.

5 Tips for Promoting a LinkedIn Group

• Invite coworkers, past colleagues, and customers to join and start discussions. Leverage your existing network to get your group started. After all, who wants to join a group with no members?
• Promote the group on your website, blog, email newsletter, and social media networks. Make sure people know that you have a group and how to join.
• Invite key industry experts to join and engage. If there are some heavy-hitters in your industry, invite them to engage with the community.
• Cross-market to related groups that you manage on different networks. Create a similar group or Page on Facebook and invite members of each network to join the group on the other network.
• Integrate LinkedIn into all of your marketing efforts. Every time you do a webinar or go to a conference, notify your group and invite those you meet to join the group as well.

5 Tips for Managing a LinkedIn Group

• Add discussions, news and jobs. The more opportunities for interaction you add to your group, the more valuable your group will be to the community. All of these features are standard for LinkedIn groups. Unfortunately, it's an all-or-nothing deal -- to add discussions, you must also add news.
• Use featured discussions to highlight particular content or offers. The group discussions can quickly get overrun and it can be hard to get your discussion thread noticed. But, as a manager of your group, you can mark a discussion as featured and this will pin your thread at the top of the discussion board. You can also unpin it at any time.
• Send announcements. Announcements are emails sent by you through LinkedIn to your group members. The benefit of sending these announcements through LinkedIn is that your recipients -- and their ISPs -- are more likely to recognize the email as trustworthy and your deliverability may be higher than if you had sent the email yourself. Announcements will also get added as a discussion thread for your group, and you also have the option to mark this thread as a featured discussion for extra visibility. Announcements are text-only, and have no analytics, so if you want to track clicks, use a URL shortener with analytics to measure the response to your announcement.
• Import your blog RSS feed. If you write a blog that's relevant to the group, you can import your articles automatically to the News section. Go to News -> Manage news feeds and add the RSS feed for your blog.
• Make your own LinkedIn analytics. LinkedIn is still catching up to Facebook in terms of a lot of its advanced functionality. One major piece that's still missing is analytics. So, if you want to track the success of your group, you'll need to make your own LinkedIn analytics. To track the growth of your group, check the number of members every week and keep track of the group size in a spreadsheet. To track the click through rate of links in your announcements, use a URL shortener with analytics like bit.ly. And, of course, be sure to measure the traffic, leads, and customers you get from LinkedIn over time. Hopefully, your group will help drive people back to your business.

If you want to check out a LinkedIn group in action, and want to connect with other marketers on LinkedIn, check out the Pro Marketers group on LinkedIn (and the Pro Marketers group on Facebook, too).

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Don't Make a Macro Mistake With Your Micro Site

Don't Make a Macro Mistake With Your Micro Site

via HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog by Rick Burnes on 5/14/09

Last week I spent some time speaking with Jess Dennis of Red Shoes PR about the firm's upcoming seminar, Bottom Line: Social Media for Business. (If you're near Appleton, WI on June 4, stop by -- I'm speaking!)

When we spoke, Jess explained that she and her business partners were trying to figure out whether to put the event website on a new domain (a microsite), or make it a page within their existing site (www.redshoespr.com).

Because they were hosting the event in conjunction with the Fox Cities Chamber of Commerce, they wanted to create some distance between the event brand and their own brand, so they were leaning towards a microsite on a new domain.

I agreed with their assessment.

I was fired up about the event when I got off the phone, so I turned to one of my colleagues who sits next to me here at HubSpot, and explained the situation. I got an unexpectedly sharp reaction: "Microsite -- why would they want to do that?"

Then he went on to explain the basic problem: Microsites can be SEO liabilities.

Think about it. You spend years building links and optimizing pages on your main site. You build up some Google juice, you start ranking for some great terms. Then a new project comes along and because it has its own brand identity, the powers that be decide it needs to be on a separate domain.

Goodbye Google juice.

Instead of building on the SEO authority you worked so hard to accrue, you have to start building it all over again. And in the mean time, your new microsite isn't going to rank well.

Of course, there are circumstances in which a microsite makes sense. For example, if you're trying to build a new, long-lasting brand, a microsite is probably the right way to go.

When we set up the website for the Inbound Marketing Summit last year, we knew we wanted to keep the name and build it into a brand. So we went with a microsite.

That decision cost us search engine traffic in the short term, but it's now helping New Marketing Labs, the company that purchased the Summit from us earlier this year.

Microsites also make sense if you care more about the site's unique brand and user experience than about search engine optimization.

So what's the takeaway?

Simple. The next time you're considering setting up a microsite, ask yourself this: Is the new site a permanent brand I want to invest in? And, if that's the case, am I willing to take an SEO hit in the short term?

If the answer to either of those questions is no, you probably shouldn't go with microsite on its own domain.

What do you think? What reasons to use or not to use microsites am I not considering?

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Four Implications of Universal Search for Small Business SEO

Four Implications of Universal Search for Small Business SEO

via HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog by Ellie Mirman on 5/26/09

Google first announced a new kind of search - universal, or blended, search - back in 2007 that, in addition to text-based results (web pages), would integrate different kinds of results such as video, images, and news, just to name a few.

Roll out has been slow (a Google rep recently reported that 1 in 4 searches now contain universal search results) and research on the effect on consumer behavior is limited and potentially inconclusive (both OTO Interactive and iProspect have conducted studies - iProspect mid-2008 and OTO late 2008, to be released soon).

Still, there are a few clear implications of universal search results for businesses who want to better optimize their web presence for this new search landscape.

1.) New Real Estate

Before universal search, SEO (search engine optimization) was all about creating remarkable content that people would link to and would be optimized for certain keywords so that your web pages would show up as one of those top 10 search results (the first page). But now, those 10 spots are cut down to 9, 8, 7, or fewer. Some of that old real estate is now reserved for different kinds of content across the web - video, images, etc. - that are on their own ranking algorithm.

There are new opportunities to get on that first page of search results, and businesses need to create multimedia content to take advantage of this new real estate. That means posting videos to YouTube, photos to Flickr, and tagging this multimedia content as thoroughly as possible.

2.) More Emphasis on Top Search Results

With these new, visually appealing, search results part way down the first page of search results, there is now a visual barrier that focuses users' eyes even more on the top of the search results page. We already know from eye tracking heat map analysis that users focus on the "golden triangle" (planted in the top left hand corner of the SERP) and few people scroll to the bottom of the page or go on to the second, third, etc. SERP.

It's very possible that this multimedia will continue to focus users' eyes on the top of the first SERP, so your website better be one of the first search results.

3.) How Do You Convert Viewers of Multimedia?

Creating content is the absolute best way to attract more prospects to learn about and engage with your brand - on your website as well as social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr. But how are you supposed to turn YouTube video views into leads and sales for your business? With this new SERP real estate going to multimedia content, this issue has become even more pressing.

For all of your multimedia, give people a way to further engage with your company, whether it's by including a link to your website or relevant blog article in the video/image/etc. description, or including your logo or call to action within the multimedia.

4.) Are You Listening to Your Customers?

This multimedia content is yet another way for content written about you by you, your customers, or fans, to bubble to the top of search results. While you may not yet have posted any multimedia about your company, your customers are most definitely already talking about you online, in a variety of ways and mediums.

Universal search results make it that much more important for you to listen and engage with your customers online, so that you know what they're saying, and so that you can promote flattering content and respond to negative criticism.

How does your business plan to create multimedia content to leverage universal or blended search?

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4 Minutes to Optimize a LinkedIn Profile for SEO

4 Minutes to Optimize a LinkedIn Profile for SEO

via HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog by Mike Volpe on 5/22/09

There are two really quick things you can do on LinkedIn to optimize your profile for SEO -- both to make your LinkedIn profile more discoverable, and to make your profile work for you by sending some SEO authority (link juice) to other pages on the web that you choose.

The video below explains it all and shows you exactly how to do it in under 4 minutes.

2 Tips to Optimize a LinkedIn Profile for SEO

1. Customize your URL with your name. My LinkedIn profile URL is http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevolpe - and you can have one just like it with your name in the URL making it more likely for your profile to rank for searches for your name because the search engines do look at keywords in the URL. It is also a much easier URL to remember and looks nicer when you email it to people.
2. Add Custom Anchor Text to Links. You can have up to 3 links on your profile to other websites, and these links pass SEO authority. If you customize the anchor text on the links, you can get the most out of them because the search engines do look at the text of links to understand more about the content of pages they link to. So, if you want your marketing TV show to rank on the first page for "marketing video podcast", make sure to use that text in your link.

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SEO - The Best Blogs On The Web

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