By Lars Lofgren Consumers think with both their rational and emotional brains. Study after study says that when we buy, it’s for emotional reasons. Logic comes into play when we try to justify the money we have (or are about to) spend — especially when we’re giving into our wants. Here is what one Psychology…

By Quick Sprout Editorial Every website needs to prioritize link building. Regardless of your business type or industry, backlinks help drive more traffic to your website and are great for SEO purposes. So where should you start? Resource pages need to be a major component of your link building strategy. In fact, 56% of webmasters…

By Lars Lofgren There’s many things we can do in order to encourage people to purchase. But if we’re not careful… We’ll push people away. These are friction points, points in our marketing and business that PUSH customers away. In many cases, we don’t even realize it. Friction points are one of the top reasons…

By Lars Lofgren Color and visual cues can have a dramatic impact on conversion rates. On Quick Sprout, for instance, the Hellobar — a red bar on the top of the page accounts for 11% of all new leads. The same is true for KimberlySnyder.net — she generates around 20% of her revenue through a…

By Lars Lofgren If you’re running a business or marketing team, you’re probably focused on three key metrics: cost, revenue, and profit (or margin). Your goal is always to minimize costs while maximizing revenues. You may even work with a finance leader to set aggressive growth goals for your company. For many business leaders, pricing…

By Quick Sprout Editorial You’ve heard the term tossed around a million times. Content marketing. The phrase seems simple enough, but what exactly is it? Content marketing is just what it sounds like. It’s the process of engaging and growing your customer base through high quality content. Content marketing is an investment. It’s part of…

By Quick Sprout Editorial My parents like to tell a story from my childhood. When I was a toddler they would put me in the backseat of the car in child’s car seat when they would take me somewhere like to the store or to a friend’s house. When we would drive down the highway,…

By Quick Sprout Editorial Creating a content marketing strategy isn’t as easy as it may seem. You can’t just throw hundreds of articles up on the web and expect them magically to rank well on Google. Yes, understanding that you should be leveraging content marketing is the right first step, but before you launch your…

By Quick Sprout Editorial Not everyone will have to solve a specific problem for their content marketing, but most companies will. You can often learn methods to make your current or prospective content marketing more effective. The way to achieve this is to study other people who have successfully used content marketing to grow their…

By Quick Sprout Editorial Have you noticed a trend of people creating more detailed guides? You know, ones similar to my guides on SEO, growth hacking, content marketing, or landing page optimization that I have released on Quick Sprout? Vero just released a guide on email marketing, and Qualaroo released one on conversion optimization. What…

By Quick Sprout Editorial Some jobs are easy to define and prepare for: Want to be an engineer? Go to school and get an engineering degree. Want to code for Google? Go to school and study computer science. What do you do when you want to be a content marketer? Go to school and study…

By Quick Sprout Editorial Content marketing is different these days. You used to be able to publish blog posts on just about anything, and you’d get at least some traffic. But now, you won’t get any. Quality content marketing takes a lot of time and effort—there’s just no way around it. But there are, of…

By Quick Sprout Editorial There is a big misconception that content marketing doesn’t drive sales. But if it didn’t work well, none of my companies would exist. Content marketing is an absolute necessity for brand survival and I’ve grown each of my businesses through content marketing. If you want to generate hordes of sustainable, long-term…

By Corry Cummings One of the biggest myths in SEO is that quality content generates natural links. It doesn’t. Thousands of site owners bang out hundreds of pieces of quality content every single day…without a single backlink to show for it. To earn links in today’s crowded content world, you need to take your stuff…

By Lars Lofgren PPC marketing is something you’ve probably come across in some form or another. The paid channel advertising landscape is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2011, the ad-supported Internet contributed more than $500 billion to the United States economy. Holy smokes. That’s a lot of spend. The numbers alone tell us…

By Quick Sprout Content marketing can be a soul-crushing endeavor. It’s like this. You spend several hours or maybe even days meticulously putting together what seems like a brilliant blog post, slideshow, infographic, etc. But even with all your hard work and dedication, your content falls on deaf ears. You post it on Facebook, Twitter,…

By Quick Sprout Google Analytics (GA) is a digital marketer’s best friend. I use it all the time to check metrics, spot trends, and see what type of content my audience appreciates the most. Of course, there are other tools you could use to analyze your metrics, but they’re not as valuable as GA for…

By Quick Sprout I’m not going to lecture you. You already know that content marketing can be a very successful form of marketing. You also know that producing great content takes a lot of time or money, sometimes both. But there’s something that you might not know, at least not for sure. Just because a…

By Quick Sprout Those of you who have been reading my blogs for a while know I’m a huge advocate of using visual elements to enhance my blog posts. In addition to being visually appealing, images can actually improve the performance of your articles. That’s because blogs with pictures receive 94% more views than posts…

By Quick Sprout Viral content is inherently unpredictable. You could have two similar pieces of content—with one receiving thousands upon thousands of shares and the other languishing in obscurity. In that regard, there’s no magic formula that will enable you to create viral content on command. It’s not like you can just flip a switch…

By Quick Sprout When I write content, I’m usually not that funny. My written jokes don’t go over too well, so I stick with solid, meaty stuff that helps my readers solve problems and achieve marketing goals. But I know humor is important. Some of you reading this article are funny people. You have a…

By Quick Sprout What do you think of the content that your competitors publish? My guess? It’s not great. It’s easy to judge others but tough to evaluate ourselves. I guarantee that all your competitors think the same thing—that most content in your niche is junk. And yet…they believe that theirs is the exception. No…

By Quick Sprout If you’ve tried (and failed) at blogging, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. Creating content, especially good content, is hard work. It takes a long time. Most of the time, you don’t see instant rewards. So, how do some people write three, five, or even ten articles every week? You might think…

By Quick Sprout The term “content marketing” is a wide umbrella. It encompasses a plethora of different strategies and techniques. But at the end of the day, one of your primary goals is to create content that ranks as highly as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is important because organic traffic is…

By Quick Sprout If you give it away—offer it free—they will come. This should perhaps be the quote to encompass the business model of freeconomics. It’s a model that involves giving away your best content. Believe it or not, more and more companies are integrating and seeing amazing results with freeconomics today. At first thought,…

By Quick Sprout We’ve all been there… You create the perfect piece of content; you hit the Publish button; and you just sit back and wait for the traffic to start rolling in, right? The only issue is the traffic never “rolls in”. As you already know, getting people to read, share and talk about…

By Quick Sprout Creating great content, week after week, has a set of challenges. It’s one thing to understand how to create high quality content, but it’s an entirely different thing to actually do it. What you’ll quickly find is that if you want to adopt an aggressive content marketing strategy, you’ll need a team…

By Quick Sprout Do your readers hang on to your every word? I bet they don’t. Okay, that’s not fair because mine don’t all either. The facts clearly show that a large chunk of your readers will skim your content, no matter what. But that still leaves a lot of readers. And these readers can…

By Quick Sprout Rarely do people read content from beginning to end. Maybe it’s because of our “microwave,” instant gratification culture. Maybe it’s because millions of other articles are vying for people’s attention. Or maybe it’s because reading from screens takes about 25% longer than reading from paper. Research has even indicated that readers experience…

By Quick Sprout How much content have you written in the past month? Are you happy with that amount? Most marketers answer no to that question. In fact, 44% of marketers say that producing consistent content is one of their biggest challenges: Believe me, I get it. Creating a high amount of high quality content…

By Quick Sprout Anyone can produce content. But content without a purpose is not effective. You need to consider the goals of your content marketing strategy. Ask yourself what you want your audience to do when they consume your content. Whatever that answer is, your content needs to be engaging if you want to accomplish…

By Quick Sprout As a B2B company, you need to learn how to properly market your brand to the right audience. That’s because your target market doesn’t consume content the same way as the average consumer does. Following the habits and trends of a typical consumer won’t help you. This is especially important for businesses…

By Quick Sprout Marketing is a chance for education. Sometimes, marketing takes the form of entertainment, but often, you get to assume the role of a teacher. This is really powerful. You can become one of the few educational influences in most people’s lives after they leave school. Beyond helping your business grow, inbound marketing…

By Quick Sprout Despite the proven effectiveness of native advertising, it’s a concept that remains a little murky for many marketers. Copyblogger performed a study on native advertising, asking people whether they knew what it was and how knowledgeable they were about it. Here are the results: Clearly, it’s still an ambiguous concept to many….

By Quick Sprout So, people are coming to your website, and that’s great. But how many of them are actually buying something from you? Chances are it’s less than 1% of your visitor base. But don’t worry! You can actually influence your visitors to make a purchase. How? you may ask. Well, I’ve created an…

By Quick Sprout Your content is great. You’ve been applying new strategies and learning how to master the art of storytelling to make your content more engaging. But now what? This is useless if you’re unable to distribute it to your audience. I see this problem all the time when I’m consulting businesses. They have…

By Quick Sprout No matter what type of business you have, you need to be using high quality images as a promotional tool. You can distribute these pictures across all your marketing channels. Share them on social media profiles such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Add photos to your website to make it look more…