Top 5 Inbound Marketing Articles of the Week: SMB LinkedIn Tips

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Did you know there are now over 12 million small business people on LinkedIn, and that this group makes up about 20 percent of LinkedIn’s total user base?

Our top inbound marketing article this week offers small businesses 10 tips — straight from LinkedIn itself — about how to use LinkedIn for business.

1. Ten Ways for Small Businesses to Use LinkedIn

Author: Guy Kawasaki on The LinkedIn Blog

In addition to the common ways businesses use LinkedIn (e.g. finding leads, growing their business globally, finding the right vendors), Guy shares additional ideas for how small businesses can benefit from LinkedIn engagement: a list he got straight from the horse’s mouth.

Some tips that make the list include acquiring new customers through online recommendations and word of mouth, building your industry network (online and in person), winning new business by answering questions in your area of expertise, raising funding, sharing blog content and keeping in touch with people who care most about your business.

Marketing Takeaway: LinkedIn has a lot of marketing potential. Use it to your advantage. 

2. 10 Fresh Tips for Community Managers

Author: Jolie O’Dell of Mashable

This one’s for all you community managers out there.  Jolie’s article offers several bits of advice to help you keep your sanity as you attempt to balance all the craziness that comes along with managing an online community of users.

Among other tips, Jolie advises her readers to adopt a zen-like attitude, leave users alone, be themselves, level the playing field, show their face and be a delegation ninja. 

Marketing Takeaway: As an online community manager, pick your battles wisely — it’s important to know when to participate in the conversation and when to sit back and relax.

3. The “Problem” With Authenticity: You’re Still Being Watched

Author: Todd Defren of PR-Squared

Speaking of community managers, Todd’s article stems from a conversation he had with a community manager of a global brand about a conflict he’d run into regarding the transparency and authenticity of his social media presence. 

Todd explores the discrepancy between the idea of being authentic in personal and corporate-represented brands on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and the human tendency to be wary about what is put out there on the web. Can a community manager be too authentic?

Marketing Takeaway: Balancing personal vs. corporate brands on the web is a touchy subject, but remember that being transparent and authentic is very important.

4. Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

Author: Gillian Muessig of SEOmoz

Gillian’s article focuses on the value of the long tail, citing Avinash Kaushik’s recent affirmation that the long tail provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics.  While she recognizes that the long tail is difficult to track and analyze, she offers a few tips to make it manageable, such as using tag clouds and keyword trees.

Finally, Gillian discusses the notion of segmentation analysis to help you determine what your customers want, when they want it and how to give it to them.

Marketing Takeaway: Don’t undermine the power of the long tail.

5. 5 Dumb Design Mistakes That Crush Copy (And How to Fix Them)

Author: Pamela Wilson of Copyblogger

We’ve said it a hundred times, and we’ll say it again: content is king. Yet, Pamela rightly points out that the way you present that content is important. You can have a very aesthetically pleasing blog, but if your content is terrible, you’ll never keep your visitors’ attentions. Conversely, a blog with great writing that expresses awesome ideas will never get read if visitors can’t get past an uninviting or uninteresting design.

Questioning the effectiveness of your blog’s design yet? Avoid Pamela’s top design mistakes you’ll find in her article, and you’ll be on your way to business blogging success (assuming you have remarkable content, too).

Marketing Takeaway: Don’t limit your content’s potential with a bad blog design.

Photo by Coletivo Mambembe

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