Keyword Clustering: Best Resources, Techniques and Tools

What exactly is keyword clustering?

To cluster keywords means to group your long overwhelming keyword lists by relevancy.

I have done an article explaining keyword clustering in a most easy-to-understand way.

At the heart of it, keyword clustering is what it sounds like: you take relevant keywords and arrange them together into groups.

Use these keyword clusters to:

• Better understand your topic
• Optimize your content for several keyword phrases instead of one
• Discover more concepts and subtopics inside your niche
• Broaden your content to include more related terms and phrases
• Structure your content by turning related terms into subheadings
  

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Before keyword clustering:

After keyword clustering:

Here’s how it helps:

Most importantly, keyword clustering helps to see concepts behind keyword strings.

Useful Keyword Clustering Resources

Goodbye Keyword Optimization: Welcome To The Age of Topical Optimization by Stoney deGeyter

Instead of optimizing your site for keywords and hoping to rank here and there, focus on building the site out to dominate a topic with multiple pages and blog posts.

Each page or post will target a tightly correlated group of keywords, but all built around a slightly broader topic. That gives you a chance to dominate a topic through multiple related pages, each focused on a specific visitor intent. That’s tough to beat.

Can SEOs Stop Worrying About Keywords and Just Focus on Topics? – Whiteboard Friday
by rand Fishkin

We’re going to take all the keyword phrases that we discovered… We’re going to group them by concept intents. Like “best days of the week” could include the keywords “best days of the week to fly,” “optimal day of week to fly,” “weekday versus weekend best for flights,” “cheapest day of the week to fly…”

Then, we can group these together and decide, “Hey, you know what? The volume for all of these is higher. But these ones are more important to us. They have lower difficulty. Maybe they have higher click-through rate opportunity. So we’re going to target ‘best times of the year.’ That’s going to be the content we create. Now, I’m going to wrap my keywords together into ‘the best weeks and months to book flights in 2016.'”

This kind of model, where we combine the best of these two worlds, I think is the way of the future. I don’t think it pays to stick to your old-school keyword targeting methodology, nor do I think it pays to ignore keyword targeting and keyword research entirely. I think we’ve got to merge these practices and come up with something smart.

How to Cluster Keywords: Tools and Techniques

So how to cluster those keywords?

The simplest and most obvious way to group keywords is to identify a frequently used common word in those strings and find all the phrases that include that word. Looking back at the initial “healthy diet” example, a separate group to look into would be all the phrases that contain a modifier “men”. That group would include strings like this:

• healthy diet plan for men
• healthy 7 day diet plan for men
• healthy liquid diet plan for men
• And many more.

All of the above topics fit nicely into one article on all kinds of diets for men.

You can identify those groups playing with your keyword lists in Excel. Here are a couple of tutorials (both of them is a living proof that the technique is nothing new):

• Discover and Track Your Long Tail Patterns with Excel (from myself from back 2007)
• Creating Keyword Opportunity Lists with Excel Custom Sort (from Kasy Allen from back 2010)

Tools that can help you with modifier-based keyword grouping:

• Wordstream Keyword Grouper
• Spyfu Keyword Groupie

While a very useful exercise, this keyword grouping technique is a bit outdated and limited. Search engines have gone far beyond simple keyword matching. We need to look at closely related concepts and they don’t necessarily have exactly the same terms to describe them.

Thus, this group has no keyword modifiers in common, yet it would totally make a great article:

Serpstat is a great tool that takes a different approach to keyword clustering that goes beyond word matching.

They analyze Google search engine result pages, find similar (or same) URLs ranking for different queries and based on how many results overlap for two SERPs they make important conclusions as to how related those queries are.

This way they are able to create keyword groups like this:

Of course, I would still play with Excel when analyzing keyword modifiers and groups but I would definitely use tools like this on top of that to discover more connections and related concepts, simply because a new approach lets you look at your lists slightly differently and discover new previously undiscovered content opportunities.

The Buzz Terms

What I really like about our young quickly-evolving industry is how fast we come up with new “cool” terms to describe any technique (even the one that has been around for ages, like keyword grouping).

Keyword clustering is already a more complicated term that it should be. Keyword grouping would make as much sense and it would be much easier to understand.

Yet, we call it keyword clustering (which probably help us appear much smarter when we talk to clients).

Another buzz term that has come out of this is “pillar pages” which simply means that for any keyword group you need to create an indepth resource that would link to more specific articles going more indepth on each mentioned concept within this group.

If you try to dig deeper into the topic, you’ll probably find a lot more buzz terms that have simple commonsense and most often traditional technique behind them (like pillar page = creating indepth resource on a topic).

The bottom line is that keyword grouping is a smart thing to do. There are different approaches to it, and you need to try both of them. Creating content targeting a broader concept (group) rather than a single keyword string will help you diversify your rankings and create a solid resource. Skip the buzz terms if they confuse you and get to the point, that is creating solid content rocks and keyword grouping / clustering helps do that right.

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7 Trials and Tribulations Of Email Outreach

It’s the grand old way of getting your website noticed online, but despite its long-in-the-tooth reputation, the effectiveness of email outreach is showing no signs of slowing down – despite what some experts might have us believe.

An old-fashioned email campaign can seem like the loneliest method of promotion available in the 21st Century. It’s not unusual to write thousands of outreach emails knowing full well that well over half of your messages will never even be read.

Neil Patel believes that a reasonable expectation from an outreach campaign is to get around five links for every 100 emails sent, amounting to a success rate of 5%. Meaning that 95% of the time you spend composing messages and hitting that ‘send’ button will be a fruitless endeavor.

So why do we bother? In a world where cold emailing is heavily frowned upon, and a third of all emails are opened based solely on whether the recipient likes the subject line or not, you could be forgiven for thinking that it might all be just a waste of time and resources.

However, this isn’t the case. Email outreach is an extremely powerful tool when correctly utilized, but effective email etiquette is a minefield – and many people struggle to run engaging campaigns.

So it’s for this reason that I’ve decided to offer a list of the seven biggest trials and tribulations that face email marketers today.

1. Making Sure your Campaign isn’t too Spammy

It’s the first and perhaps the biggest point to make. Absolutely nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a cold email. They’re annoying, irritating, frustrating and every other synonym of awful. Think about cold calls – where you pick up the phone and listen to somebody with no idea of whom you are speaking from a script with the intent of getting you to give their business money. It’s soulless and often insulting. The cold email is just that in written form.

Like with many websites that aim to expand their network, we try to avoid the risks that come with cold emailing by adding a personal touch to our campaigns. It’s a tricky business because personalization takes time, but if you treat your target audience with respect, it can pay dividends.

In a bid to reach out to people personally, while keeping our quantity of outreach emails high, we’ve constructed a template to customize based on the individual we’re contacting. This enables us to utilize a personal touch that impersonal general marketing emails are devoid of. Here is the one we’re using:

Hey NAME,

Hope you’re doing well!

My name is Dmytro Spilka, and I’m a Head Wizard at Solvid, an Inbound Marketing Blog based in London, UK.

I recently stumbled upon your post on POST TITLE (LINK TO THE POST), and found it incredibly useful. In the post (point #7 to be precise), you mentioned a POST THEY’VE MENTIONED by NAME OF THE PERSON THEY’VE MENTIONED. Although it’s a great resource, it feels slightly outdated and incomplete to some extent.

Anyway, the reason I’m contacting is that I’ve recently put together YOUR POST TITLE (YOUR POST LINK). SOMETHING UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR POST. Basically, did everything to create the ultimate go-to resource.

In fact, our post has been recommended by Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz), Brian Dean of Backlinko and Smart Blogger (BE HONEST HERE).

I would really appreciate if you could please take a second to scan our post and see whether it could be of any help to you and your audience as an additional resource.

Apologies for eating up your time!

Best Wishes,

Dmytro

Web: https://solvid.co.uk
Email: hello@solvid.co.uk

As you can see above, we’re using a few personal touches.

• The actual name of the person. Believe it or not, a lot of ‘outreachers’ use phrases like Dear Webmaster, Hello Editor, Hi Sir, etc.
• We’re mentioning the exact location in the article where they’ve mentioned a resource. This shows that we’ve actually looked at the article and know what it’s about.
• We’re using influencers to add value to our resource. Be honest here. If, in fact, your post hasn’t been featured or mentioned by anyone – don’t make it up – this can easily undermine your credibility.

2. Nailing the Subject Line

The importance of the subject line can’t be emphasized enough. This is your big hook to get the recipients to read on – and there are plenty of theories behind the recipe for an irresistible heading.

Convince and Convert state that 69% of recipients report emails as spam based solely on the subject line, while 35% open emails because of the allure of the heading. These are substantial figures that underline the importance of the few words that pop up first in your recipients’ inboxes – so nailing your subject line is imperative.

So what’s the secret formula behind the perfect email subject? Throwing their two cents into the ring is Adestra, which believes that the use of words like ‘Alert’, ‘Daily’ and ‘Free Delivery’ bring marketers the best responses.

However, our outreach campaigns try to show honesty without the use of superfluous superlatives – our subject line is simple:

‘Typical outreach email’ shows that we have no interest in click-baiting our intended audience. It also indicates that we have enough faith in our service that we don’t need to rely on tricks of the trade to lure prospective customers in. That being said, email subjects will vary on a case-by-case basis. Hence, we’d suggest to A/B test different subject lines to see which one performs better. In our tests, ‘Typical outreach email’ performed much better, improving an open rate by roughly 20-30%.

3. Optimizing your Open Rate

You could be marketing the best product or service on the web, but if your open rate is lacking then it means that your recipients aren’t interested enough to even look beyond the subject line of your emails.

According to research conducted by MailChimp, the average open rate varies between 20 – 25% – depending on the industry you’re in. This is unsurprising and disappointing in equal measure, but it’s also a great benchmark to incorporate a bit of trial and error into your campaign.

All sorts of factors can influence your open rate, from the aforementioned subject line, to the relevance of your target audience, to the time of day that you send your emails out (no, really – RingLead have compiled stats that suggest the sweet spot for posting outreach mail is between 2 pm and 5 pm on a Tuesday afternoon).

Premium services like reply.io, buzzstream and outreach.io not only offer the opportunity to personalize automatic outreach emails, but also provide very useful stats on open rates and click-through rates, allowing you to monitor what aspects of your campaign is working better than others and giving you the chance to fine-tune your messages.

For instance, here are some open rate stats for our latest outreach campaign:

In all honestly, 71% open rate is pretty decent (even our regular email subscribers aren’t that active).

4. Sussing out Whom to Target

Figuring out whom to target is risky business – if you pick the wrong recipients, then you’re in danger of wasting valuable time.

There are many great services that can scout out relevant email addresses to aid your campaign, and hunter.io is a good example that offers a free email search engine (albeit with limited usage for non-premium members).

A good alternative to hunter.io is Voila Norbert.

To find an email address, simply enter the name of the person and a domain name of the company they work at.

Although the information isn’t 100% accurate all the time, this way of finding the right email address can save a lot of time, especially if that particular domain has hundreds of registered emails.

5. Finding the actual recipients

It pays to be attentive in finding which website staff to email – if you believe your blog has a resource that you feel should be added to a website’s list, you could contact the author of an existing article in which you believe your site would make a good reference point. However, a generic ask for a link would not bring the numbers, as it’s likely to be regarded as spam. Answer the following questions before asking for an inclusion of your link:

1. Is the site relevant to my resource?
2. Is my resource of an exceptional quality and is better than the rest?
3. Does the site look trustworthy?
4. Do I have the name of the website owner or the author of the article?
5. Do I have the right email address?
6. When was it published? If the article is 4-5 years old, it’s very unlikely that someone will update it for the sake of one additional resource.
7. Did I use enough personal touches? See point 1 for examples.

If only 2-3 of these questions fall under the category of ‘No’ or ‘Negative’ then it’s not worth the effort outreaching – simply because your email will appear spammy.

You need to be observant – if you’re targeting an author of an article that you feel your work would benefit as a reference, be sure to check whether the author is a guest poster or a member of staff for the business. If it’s the former, you’d be better off contacting the editor – though getting in touch with the original content producer may lead to your work being linked in future publications.

Many websites now shy away from publishing emails of editors and content producers in favor of using website contact forms, but if you’re looking to get your posts or resources noticed, the best way of having your message read by those who matter is to find the details of the content producers themselves.

6. Keeping on Top of Your Follow-Ups

It can be easy to neglect a follow up to your outreach email. If the recipient didn’t want to reply the first time, why would they bother a second time? While chasing a less responsive target may seem counter-intuitive, it works as a great simple call to action and indicates to them that you’re serious about showing off your work.

Our follow up template is a simplified reminder of our original email – our intention is to drop a subtle reminder that we have a great product that would benefit the user and their readership:

Hey NAME,

Just a quick follow-up on a message I sent earlier (attached below) about our awesome POST TITLE (LINK TO THE POST): I would really appreciate to hear back from you.

Best Wishes,

Dmytro

Web: https://solvid.co.uk
Email: hello@solvid.co.uk

We use the reply function on our initial email for ease of reference for the recipient, while including a transparent subject line informing our target that we’re simply following up to an original email.

It’s important to refrain from trigger-happy follow-ups. Becoming a nuisance outreacher risks alienating your audience and even damaging your reputation. Therefore, we wouldn’t suggest going for more than 2 follow-ups after the initial outreach email.

7. Managing the Scale of Outreach

The business of outreach is a long-winded one that carries no guarantee of success. You could invest days of hard work into emailing 1000s of recipients and receive no interest in return.

Luckily you can maximize your chances of success and minimize the time spent chasing poor leads by doing a little bit of market research.

Try to understand who your target would be and whether they would have any affiliates or backlinks that would also benefit from utilizing your work or service.

It’s better to have 100 quality recipients than 1,000 poorly researched ones – this is how we got 20-25% success rate of our latest email outreach campaign.

We like to run tidy outreach campaigns, so take the preemptive measure of identifying leads to investigate to assess whether associated websites would benefit from using our work. If we feel that they would, we add their information to our spreadsheet and invite them to take a look at a relevant piece that would make a good reference point.

Conclusion

So there you have it – with some good prep and honest marketing, the age-old slog of email outreach doesn’t have to be such a pain.

As long as you’re outreaching to a relevant personal with a resource that can potentially bring value to that website’s audience while keeping your emails reasonably personal (without being too creepy), you should see a positive return for the time spent.

Now it’s time to get out there and put your website on the map!

 

About Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.

 

 

About the Author: Dmytro is a Head Wizard at Solvid, a creative inbound marketing & software development agency in London, UK. His work has been featured and mentioned in a wide range of publication, including The Next Web, Business2Community, Huff Post, Crazy Egg, Sitepoint, SEMRush, and more.

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Is Personalized Content Worth The Hype?

YES! I Recently had the pleasure of joining Howard Sewell & Jason Oakley on a webinar where we focused on how to Drive B2B Engagement with Personalized Content. Howard is the President and Co-Founder of Spear Marketing Group, and Jason is the Product Marketing Manager at Uberflip

Although Howard already shared his thoughts on the Spear Marketing Blog, I wanted to highlight three key themes I took away from learning from these marketing leaders:

Focus on relevance, not noise
It appears that many marketing teams, focused on delivering personalized experiences, tend to over-index on creating noise rather than essential moments for their prospects. This critical distinction between relevance and sound is a fine line that must be considered when taking approaches like Account-Based Marketing (ABM) where the latter is often the outcome. The focus must be on creating a seamless buyer’s journey where a prospect is equipped with the right content, at the right time, to move them through the marketing funnel efficiently. Is this how your marketing team creates content, or are you merely creating noise?

“Nobody reads ads. People read what’s interesting to them, and sometimes that’s an ad.”
-Howard Gossage

Stay competitive, not complacent
Let’s face it – every company, in virtually every industry, deals with competition one way or another. Even indirectly, one of the most challenging hurdles for marketing teams is getting the attention of a buyer who has an attention span shorter than a goldfish (it’s true). When your team starts planning for next quarter or fiscal year, how are you innovating to remain top of mind for prospects and customers? Don’t be overwhelmed by the multitude of options your team has to choose from. If you don’t take a step out of our comfort zone and experiment with new tactics to acquire customers – your competitors will.

 

“This change in mentality from measuring your team’s success against vague industry benchmarks versus striving for greatness is what separates good marketing teams from great ones!”

Be yourself, be genuine
It may be my own bias creeping in (oops) but the more customers I speak with, the more I am confident in saying that marketers and salespeople need to let their figurative ‘hair down.’ For marketers, strive for telling a simple story in words that you and I use day-to-day, no more fluff, and buzzwords! For salespeople, bring the human connection back to your cadences to build meaningful relationships with your prospects. Automation is effective, sure, but is that creating more noise than relevance in your prospect’s inboxes? Personal video messaging is one of these tactics that industry-leading organizations like HubSpot and Terminus are finding success with.

A personal challenge to you – try living by a one take rule to ensure your prospects can connect with the real you, and not a scripted robot version! Deal?

The post Is Personalized Content Worth The Hype? appeared first on Vidyard.

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Skip the Content Gurus and Trust Yourself

Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week’s episode, Tyler is joined by Jay Acunzo, Keynote Speaker and Show Host of Unthinkable, to discuss the importance of finding and trusting your intuition when it comes to creating standout content.

 

Here are a few of our favorite moments:

I’m curious, about the topics you’ve explored, the people you’ve talked to, the research that you’ve done, as it relates to this idea of intuition and it’s role in the content development experience?

I started thinking about why is there is so much average stuff out there? Nobody actually sets out to do average work, but a lot of our work ends up average. When you talk to people they’re like, “Well, I actually do aspire to do better work. I want to do something exceptional.” So I’m focused on that gap between the two. It’s never been easier to just figure out what the average is because you can ask somebody on social or Google it or go to YouTube and find a tutorial. So average is not our problem. Our problem is going from average to exceptional. If you look at the word “exceptional,” again I do the words thing for a living, so I’m fascinated by the make up of a word, exceptional has that root word “exception.” So what makes each person an exception is their own intuition.

Is intuition a part of everybody’s job within the creative process?

Yeah, let’s switch the phrase. I mean it’s a great question, but if you switch the phrase from intuition to thinking for yourself. Then the question becomes, “Who should think for yourself inside the business?” And I’d hope most companies would say everybody, right? Obviously you have some corporations that you might point to from the outside and be like, “Those people treat their employees like cogs,” but I would assume everybody listening to this show is thinking, “Yeah, I’d like to think for myself. I’d like to come up with better, more differentiated answers and ideas, and I’d like my team and my boss, my peers, my direct reports to do that too.” So, to answer your question, I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to do that in any job and if you do have a creative production-related job, it becomes all that more important. Because now, is it not only about thinking for yourself, it’s also about differentiation in a marketplace full of copy cats.

 

If you want to hear the full podcast, we’ve posted it above, and you can read a full transcript of this talk on Convince & Convert, where it was originally posted!

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3 Shortcuts for Business Owners to Market Effectively Without Wasting Time

9-to-5 jobs are never truly 9-5.

There’s always something that comes up that needs to get done. ASAP. No questions asked.

Thank your boss for that one. Actually, don’t. That’s probably not a good idea.

But running a business is a whole new level of busy. Being a business owner in today’s world is damn near impossible.

Want to have a normal work-life balance? Good joke.

Need to take a vacation to refresh your brain? Sure. If you’re okay with a business-level apocalypse.

Family asking you to go apple picking this weekend? It ain’t happening.

As a small business owner, you’ve got to run every single department, constantly making sure everything’s running smoothly.

That means creating new content, generating big ideas, speaking with clients, landing sales, checking emails, running marketing reports.

The list goes on.

You simply don’t have enough time in the day to complete all of these tasks.

You can’t scale your business to new heights if you ignore any of them though.

They need to get done. Your business and livelihood literally depend on it.

So what do you do?

You need to automate. Put boring, tedious, time-consuming tasks on autopilot to save yourself hours every week.

Marketing automation isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if you want to scale your business without dying from sleep deprivation.

Here are the reasons why you need marketing automation and three tips for small business owners to automate and scale.

How marketing automation can be your saving grace

Marketing automation is just what it sounds like: automating marketing-based tasks.

If you’re not too familiar with marketing automation, here’s a simple definition from Google:

The goal is to save you time and increase your ROI.

Automation does this by cutting out time spent on tedious processes. Meaning you’re using less labor. And less labor means less overhead.

But here’s the biggest benefit of all:

Less time spent working means more time looking at pugs.

Yes, it’s a real addiction that affects thousands every year (source: N/A).

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The more you can automate, the better.

According to the latest data, the vast majority of marketers using marketing automation strategies are successful in achieving their objectives:

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Another study discovered that 50% of marketers using automation tools found either some increases or massive increases in leads:

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But effectively gaining leads isn’t all that comes with marketing automation.

It shouldn’t even be the main focus.

Sure, it’s great that marketing automation can increase leads; don’t get me wrong.

That’s amazing.

But the goal here is to reduce time spent working without reducing profit.

If you don’t see a massive spike in leads, but you’re cutting out 10 hours of marketing work each week with automation, you’re effectively increasing profit by reducing labor.

See what I mean?

Even if the process doesn’t generate 10x the amount of leads, you’re spending less on labor.

Less labor = less overhead = more profit.

This is where people tend to go wrong. When you only focus on lead increases, you lose sight of profit and business growth.

There are dozens of ways to achieve profit and growth that don’t include landing more clients.

And according to Aberdeen, companies using marketing automation can reduce their marketing-to-close time by 49%.

That potentially means completing your work in half the time.

If you’re strapped for time and haven’t slept in weeks, it’s time to implement marketing automation.

It will not only cut down on your working hours, but it’ll also reduce your labor costs and help you generate more leads.

Here are three great ways you can automate your growth today.

1. Automate your Content Promotion

Content promotion is critical to business growth.

When it comes to driving new organic traffic and leads, nothing competes with top-notch content.

But having good content alone won’t always drive traffic.

So most marketers turn to promotion on social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

All of these platforms are an easy way to generate more leads.

But it takes time. And lot’s of it.

In fact, Statista found that the majority of marketers are spending anywhere from one to 10 hours per week on social media.

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By scheduling content and loading it into your Buffer queue, you can quickly waste a few hours every week.

Coming up with tweets and trying to squeeze your content into 140 characters sucks.

Especially when you’re re-sharing that post five different ways.

Content sharing is a necessary process that’s tedious and often time-consuming.

On top of that, it doesn’t always equate to a perfect return on investment.

So it’s sometimes thrown on the backburner.

But that’s not an option in today’s world that’s obsessed with social media.

Thanks to marketing automation, it doesn’t have to be.

You can automatically share content from your blog to social media without lifting a finger.

Here’s how.

Start by creating an account with Zapier.

It’s a popular automation tool that connects thousands of different SaaS tools that you use daily.

Once you make an account, click on the explore tab and head to the “Marketers” section:

Next, you should be able to locate the following “Zap,” or automation process:

This is legitimately a life saver.

If social media is the bane of your existence, you will save hours every week from trying to post and come up with new ideas.

Click “Use This Zap” to start a new automation workflow.

Next, you’ll have to link your public blog RSS feed.

If you’re not sure what that is, you can set up an RSS feed in just a few minutes with this Google tutorial.

After plugging in your feed URL, you can head to the “Action” step, which is where your social post will happen:

All you have to do here is link your account, and you’re good to go.

So next time you publish a blog post on your site, Zapier will trigger this automation process and craft a tweet for you instantly.

You can use this automation technique for all of your social channels. If you don’t want to use an RSS feed, Zapier allows you to connect WordPress too:

Ditch the hours spent crafting tweets and social posts. Automate it instead.

2. Only Focus on the Important Emails

If you’re like me, you spend too much time checking your email.

It’s obviously not because you want to, but simply because your inbox is jammed with emails.

HubSpot’s latest research shows us that marketers spend an average of nearly four hours just sending emails every week.

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That doesn’t include checking your email. That’s just typing and sending emails.

Brutal.

Email sucks. It’s boring and often filled with junk.

Yet, your iPhone is blowing up every two minutes from new emails, distracting you from the task at hand and killing your productivity.

So, how do you only get notifications for the important stuff? How do you cut out those nearly 4 hours of sending emails each week?

By automating your email process.

In Zapier, you can set up an automation workflow that allows you to get notified only when specific people email you:

Do you have important clients that email you frequently?

Or even employees that ask time-sensitive questions?

Then you need this. It’s extremely easy to set up, too.

Click “Use This Zap” to get started. Be sure to connect your Gmail account to Zapier and select your work email as the inbox.

Next, you need to type in the search string that will trigger this process.

For example, you can enter a few different search strings:

Try using direct email addresses from clients, employees, or even another boss (like your significant other).

You can also set up simple subject lines like “from:client name.”

Once you save this automation workflow, you’ll get pinged on Slack whenever an important email comes in.

Meaning you can respond instantly and only spend time on the most important emails.

So silence your email notifications, get some work done, and respond to the big-ticket clients.

Stop spending four hours weekly on email with this automation tip.

3. Automate your lead flow

Collecting leads is awesome.

You just drove some quality traffic to your site and converted a few of them.

Great. Now what?

Do you download the data and upload it into a CRM? Or into your favorite email campaign platform?

Lead flow processes can quickly become tedious and time-consuming.

From downloading, formatting, and uploading lists, you could be spending hours on it weekly.

Plus, if you don’t follow up with a lead fast, you risk losing them.

Automation is critical when it comes to perfecting a lead flow.

From automatically sending nurturing emails to uploading lists without doing the work, you can quickly cut down your hours.

One of my favorite Zapier integrations is adding new sales leads directly to a CRM or email platform without doing the actual work.

You have much more important things to do besides uploading lists and creating new campaigns.

With Zapier, you can actually automatically upload new leads from your site or social media ads directly into a CRM or email campaign.

Zapier is great for this simply because of the integrations they offer.

You can connect it with the top services like MailChimp, HubSpot, and more.

If you use it, they most likely have it.

This is one of my favorite Zaps:

If you don’t use Constant Contact or Gravity Forms, don’t fret.

You can connect nearly anything with Zapier.

This is just an example of two integrations that are amazing.

If you set up this Zap, you are automating the process of lead gen to nurturing without ever having to worry about it.

With your favorite email platform, you can usually turn on settings to send newly-added leads a welcome email, too.

Meaning you are virtually skipping these steps:

Checking your leads, downloading the lead list, formatting it for your platform, uploading it, creating and sending a new campaign.

That’s potentially hours of work every week.

If you’re a lazy business owner like me, you can get tons of value from automating lead flows.

Conclusion

Running a small business is one of the toughest ventures you can embark on. Besides kids.

Don’t get me started.

From sleepless nights (or weeks) to chasing the ever elusive “work-life balance,” you’re always strapped for time. Your plate is constantly full to the point where nothing gets done.

Your workload exceeds human capabilities. And unless you’ve got the hookup on some new age brain transplant technology, you’ve only got one option:

Automation.

If you notice that tasks are piling up and taking up your time, you need to automate.

Do you want your business to have any shot at scaling and achieving new growth? If so, you’ve gotta cut out the junk that, though necessary, doesn’t directly contribute to growth.

But you can’t ignore it full scale. You just need to automate it, filter it out, or delete it entirely.

Freeing up time doesn’t just save you time. It can also help make you a lot more money in the long run.
 

About Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.

 

 

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

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Giving Tuesday: Why You Should Bake Community Betterment into your Business Model

This #GivingTuesday, we’re taking a moment to reflect what it means to give back as a business. We’re proud that community impact is one of our top priorities at Vidyard from our participation in Salesforce’s Pledge 1% to the launch of our community initiative, PlugIn.

As a busy CEO with an equally busy team, I understand that making time for giving back can seem like a nice-to-have versus a critical priority. I strongly encourage other founders to move beyond this way of thinking. For the past few years, we’ve been moving at breakneck speed, but with a little creativity and a lot of heart, we’ve managed to successfully bake community betterment into our business model. This includes donating 1% of our product and of our people’s time to supporting nonprofits in our area. How did we do it? Check out my video for some tips:

PlugIn has been an undeniable win for the community, local business owners, and Vidyard employees. I love this next video because it shows the impact that’s possible. Special thanks to our friends at House of Friendship, Big Brothers Big Sisters and Lutherwood for participating:

Getting your message out isn’t always easy. At Vidyard, we’re also proud to offer in-kind services to create videos for the charities we support and help raise the profile of their work. Here’s a great example (just make sure you have some Kleenex on hand):

I feel motivated to continue our focus on community impact as we grow. It inspires me to see many other companies prioritizing these same values. I’d love to hear about how you or your company are moving the needle for the causes the matter to you and I’m always happy to share what’s worked for us here at Vidyard.

Feel free to share your comments below or find me on Twitter: @MichaelLitt

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If Your Marketing Team Were Game of Thrones Characters

Even though winter is well on its way in our part of the world, it’s looking like it’s going to be many months before the release of season 8 of Game of Thrones (noooooooooooooo!).

Jon Snow Sad

I don’t know about you, but we here at Vidyard are in some serious GoT withdrawal. To tide us over in the meantime, we’ve imagined what it would be like if we worked alongside the characters from GoT. 

And, as we’ve discovered, some of our favorite Game of Thrones characters have characteristics that would make them uniquely suited for roles in Marketing. Here’s what we would hire each of them for if they decided to apply to work with us!

Cue music! Dun dun da da dun dun da da dun dun da da dun dun…  

(Spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned.)

 

Jon Snow
Resume: Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, The King in the North

What we’d hire him for – CMO

Contrary to popular belief, Jon Snow does know some things. In fact, he’s a natural leader whose sincerity, authenticity, and dedication to those he leads cause people to rally around him in support. Most importantly, he’s not afraid to challenge the status quo and shake things up when they aren’t working. We think his thoughtful leadership style and innovative attitude would make him a great addition to any executive team!

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Daenerys Targaryen
Resume:  Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons

What we’d hire her for – Demand Generation

If there’s anything Daenerys is good at, it’s traveling the world and rallying allies to her cause. We’re confident she would be just as successful generating leads for a sales team as she was convincing an entire army of Unsullied and a Dothraki horde to pledge their undying allegiance to her.

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Drogon
Resume: Being a motherf***ing dragon

What we’d hire him for – Content

While we’re not entirely sure how well he’d collaborate with his teammates, there’s no doubt in our minds that everything Drogon creates would be ~fire~

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Arya Stark
Resume: A Girl Has No Resume

What we’d hire her for – Digital Marketing

Adventure has a way of following Arya Stark—making her scrappy and resourceful, two traits we think are essential to being a part of any marketing team. Besides, we believe her time serving the many-faced god would give her an edge when it comes to being able to empathize with a range of different customer perspectives. It’s surprising we haven’t hired her already (probably because we haven’t managed to track her down!).

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The Three-Eyed Raven
Resume: 300 Year Old Greenseer & Mentor to Brandon Stark

What we’d hire him for – Video Production

If there’s anything the three-eyed raven has demonstrated his skills in, it’s visual storytelling. We think his background in sending messages to Bran through visions and dreams would translate well into a video-production role—and his third eye would give him an edge when it comes to recording the perfect shot. (After all, what is a camera but a kind of third eye?) 

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Like all good GoT episodes we are leaving this one on a cliffhanger—tune in next week to see who took over as VP of Business Development and the battle to claim the title of BDR…

Psst…we are hiring! Interested in working with our marketing team? Check out our careers page.

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