
TRENDING: The All-In-One Digital Marketing Software
Andy Crestodina is a co-founder and the Strategic Director of Orbit Media, an award-winning 38-person web design company in Chicago. As a top-rated speaker at national conferences and as a writer for many of the biggest blogs, Andy has dedicated himself to the teaching of marketing. Over the past 15 years, Andy has provided web strategy and advice to more than a thousand businesses.
“If you expect to rank for a phrase, you need to use that phrase in the title, the header and the body text.”
“Advertising is temporary, content marketing is forever.”
“Use interviews to make connections with new potential referral partners. Content can also help create new partnerships. Just find people in non-competitive businesses who work directly with your target audience and include them in your next article.”
“Entrepreneurs understand where they can thrive, and how to create value.”
“There are ‘cognitive biases’ built into all of us. We can’t help it. Marketing either works with or against cognitive biases.”
“Don’t choose colours arbitrarily.”
“Would sports be fun without a scoreboard? No, it would be kind of boring. One thing that happens is when you measure things, your motivation increases. Your interest in that thing increases.”
“Collaboration equals partnerships. Use interviews to make connections with new potential referral partners. Content can also help create new partnerships. Just find people in non-competitive businesses who work directly with your target audience and include them in your next article.”
“You get what you give in content marketing. We are competing to be the most generous.”
“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best-promoted content that wins.”
“High-performing content marketers use data to decide what to do after publishing. They audit their content to learn what the best opportunity is for each piece. Different content has different advantages, depending on how it’s performing. Traffic champions are getting a lot of traffic. Potential champions are on the edge of greatness. Falling stars are the articles that were getting traction but are starting to decline. Better mousetraps are the articles with the highest conversion rates.”
“Seventy-five per cent of content gets no links. Original research crushes this.”
“Use your content as a way to start conversations by reaching out to cold leads for contributor quotes. By making your process collaborative, you’ll both improve your content and create allies for promotion and sharing. And, once it’s published, that content will stick around—unlike ads. Reference it, send it to new prospects, and improve it over time. Repurpose content to get value from it in different ways: podcasts become blog posts, blog posts become videos, and all of it can be used for sales collateral or training materials.”
“The job is not just to answer all of your prospect’s questions, but it’s to raise questions they didn’t think of asking and answering those.”
“Best practices are really just good hypotheses that should be tested.”
“Use analytics the right way. The purpose of analytics is to know which things to double down on and which things to stop doing. It is a decision support tool: don’t use it for reporting. Use it to make decisions about where to invest much, much more and what to quit doing because good stuff is 10x the bad stuff. It’s not good and bad like something’s a little bit better—it’s good and bad like some things are amazing and some things are worthless.”
“Best practices aren’t ‘best.’ Best practices are only useful in the absence of first-party data. They’re not necessarily the best practices for a particular company, a certain industry segment, a specific audience, or for you or your client’s unique goals. In the hierarchy of what should be driving your decisions, opinions are the lowest, followed by best practices, and then first-party data analytics. The top dog? A live A/B split test in real-time, with two versions of the same content shown to the same audience.”
Geoff Breitling: If you want to build or scale a 7 figure SEO agency, you should watch this short video.