There are a lot of Cyber Monday deals to be had this week on SEO and online marketing tools so I've compiled a list of a few of my favourites. If you are on the look out for some new tools to add to your marketing tool kit then look no further…

Happy Bargain Hunting!

URL Profiler* –  Patrick has set-up an exclusive offer for you all to get a 30% discount off URL Profiler with the coupon code BF30 which is valid until November 28th.

WordAI* have a huge 50% discount on offer –  you can grab a copy of this awesome article rewriter for just $297, no coupon needed. Available until Monday November 28th.

Long Tail Pro* – From November 27th – 30th, Long Tail Pro will be $50 off, making the price just $47. Lifetime Long Tail Platinum will be $100 off, selling for $297. Long Tail Pro lets you find 800+ keywords from one seed word, as well as any available domain names and for just $17p/m there are a whole load more features such as the ability to bulk check 10,000 keywords at a time and get the SERP competitiveness score which works well in combination with Keyword Snatcher*.

SEMRush Pro* – Get 50% off SEMrush Pro for the first month for new customers November 27th – 30th. This tool is invaluable when it comes to researching your competitor’s organic and paid search keywords and strategies.

Ninja Outreach – a blogger outreach software perfect for influencer marketing. Empower your PR team to find and outreach to bloggers. Get 35% off for life on Ninja Outreach.

BlackhatStacks.com* – For only $297 you get an entire YEAR long subscription giving you full access to the forum, tools and training without any monthly fees. The deal is pretty insane, if you jump on it you’ll save over $450 on your BHS membership.

OptinMonster * – if you are looking for a great new optin box to capture all of your visitors email addresses then you'll get 35% off at checkout on OptinMonster if use the coupon code BF2016.

Accuranker – are offering a staggering 75% off on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. These offers are only available on Black Friday (27th of November) and Cyber Monday (30thof November) – not for the full weekend – so don’t miss out. For Black Friday: enter code BF75OFF at the checkout. For Cyber Monday the code will be CM75OFF.

Advanced Web Ranking* – are back with their Black Friday offers again. Get 20% off AWR cloud and 50% off the desktop tool.

Loganix.net – Loganix is a premium citation and link building service. Improve your local, or organic ranking with their one of a kind service. They are offering Black Friday coupons on four of their premium services:

• Loganix, Loganix+ and Social Citations, use coupon: BFCITATIONS (25% Discount)
• Citation Cleanup Service, use coupon: BFCLEANUP (40% Discount)

WP Engine* – the team at WP Engine are giving a 30% discount off of their managed WordPress hosting if you use their coupon code CYBERWPE

Hostgator* – are offering 55-75% discounts on their hosting packages with prices starting at $1.98 per month for their shared hosting. Their shared hosting is great for small niche affiliate sites and service is quite reliable.

iClickandHost – This Thanksgiving you can transfer to iClickandHost's web hosting service with a 15% discount for life! Use the coupon THANKS at checkout. The code is case sensitive and will expire November 29th.

SEO Powersuite* – $500 off the full SEO Powersuite package. Includes SEO Spyglass, Link Assistant and Rank Tracker.

Yoast SEO Premium – Save $20 on the popular Yoast SEO Premium plugin for WordPress! Price is already adjusted on site so no coupons needed.

Buzz Bundle* – Save up to 50% on Buzz Bundle was £159 now £79. If you are running lots of Social Media campaigns and watch a variety of forum profiles to monitor for mentions of your brand then this is the tool you need.

MyThemeShop – all of their themes and plugins are just $19, use coupon code TheMTSDeal until 1st December

Tesla Themes –  Offer:  50% OFF all WordPress Themes and Subscription Plans  Coupon Code:  50OFF  Valid from 26/11/2015 till 02/12/2015. 

Thirsty Affiliates – Cloak affiliate links and get organised with your affiliate marketing. ThirstyAffiliates will create pretty links from ugly affiliate links. Get 30% off this weekend.

Pretty Link Pro – Enjoy 10-20% off Pretty Link Pro between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, friends don't let friends blog with uncloaked affiliate links.

iThemes Toolkit – “With the Toolkit, you get our entire library of plugins, themes and training
+ everything we release during your membership year for one amazing low price.” Offer: 50% OFF the WordPress Web Designer’s Toolkit (Entire Library of Themes, Plugins & Training) Coupon Code: SAVEBIG50  Valid from now until 30/11/2015. They are also offering 40% off site wide with coupon code:  JINGLEWP40  

99Robots – Get 50% off of all the products, including 22 WordPress plugins for publishers that help with lead generation, page peel advertising, interstitial overlays, content sharing, fancy quotes, author lists, tags, notification bars, and more using the code BLACKFRIDAY50. This deal expires Monday, November 30th at midnight EST.

Knowem – lets you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 500 popular and emerging social media websites. There's a 20% discount on their packages.

Udemy – whether you finally want to learn to code, get better at stats or improve your online marketing knowledge then there are some amazing deals on offer for Udemy training courses.

NameCheap – “Namecheap’s Annual Black Friday/Cyber Monday Super-Sale is almost here! This year, for two entire days — Nov. 27th and 30th — we’re laying out  $10 million worth of savings like a sumptuous holiday banquet. The discounts will be deep and the deals change hourly to keep you on your toes.”

Best of the Web – Get 50% off your directory listing on Best of the Web from now through December 6th using discount code CYBER50.

Feedly is one of the industry’s most popular feed (RSS) reader tools. They are offering 30% off your first year of Feedly Pro. Having Feedly pro allows you to integrate other apps like Buffer and Hootsuite to make your social scheduling easy.

WP Rocket – one of the best caching plugins for WordPress are celebrating by offering you 35% OFF all WP Rocket license upgrades!  If you were thinking about upgrading your licence, then now is the PERFECT TIME. All you have to do is use the coupon: BF2015  This sale is good through 11:59pm EST Monday November 30th.

Piktochart – They are offering 70% off their annual pro subscription, for creating amazing infographics, for 36 hours from November 29, 2015 12:00 PM EST until November 30, 2015 23:59 PM EST.

I will update this list as I find more offers – please feel free to contact me with offers you discover!

Some of these products include affiliate links, but they are all products I have used and recommend.

If you run a website which gets traffic then a very good way to build on that audience to create a long-term relationship is to collect their email address. This gives you a one-to-one way of communicating with them to share new content or to promote services or products they might be interested in.

What are autoresponders?

Autoresponders are emails that are sent automatically send emails to subscribers when a certain event or action is triggered. If you want to email folks the week after they sign up to see how they're enjoying your content you can easily do that with one of the many email autoresponder services that are available.

Note: A few years ago, the term autoresponder was used to only mean those automatic replies you sometimes get when somebody is on holiday. For example:

I'm on vacation until the 5th of January. Any urgent messages can be forwarded to John Smith at john.smith@example.com.

These are still technically an autoresponder, however they are more often referred to as an auto-reply since email marketing software has become commonplace.

What can an email autoresponder be used for?

There are dozens of ways that you can use triggers and events to set up an autoresponder depending on what you want to achieve with your website. A few examples of this include:

• Sending a new subscriber a link to your archived content when they subscribe to your site.
• Promote a product, service or new article that you're publishing soon based on a specific date.
• Let a customer know when a free trial they signed up for has expired.
• Remind a customer if their annual membership is due to expire or be renewed.
• Send a free report or ebook to subscribers as a thank you for joining your newsletter.
• Wish your subscriber a happy birthday each year.
• Contact customers that haven't been active for a while and invite them back with a special offer.

Chances are you may have seen some of these types of email in your own inbox. With email autoresponders you can do this yourself as well.

Free email autoresponder services

The autoresponder feature is just one of the many features included in popular email marketing software today. There are a number of free or inexpensive options available as well, which means that autoresponders and email marketing newsletters are easy for any webmaster to create themselves.

Here are a number of email marketing solutions that will allow you to set up autoresponders for your newsletter, sorted from free at the top, to cheap, and to more costly solutions at the bottom:

• MailChimp. This is an excellent place to start your email autoresponder and newsletter building. For the first 2,000 subscribers, your account is completely free and you're allowed to send up to 12,000 emails a month to your list.It's very easy to use and set up an autoresponder campaign right away. For more advanced autoresponder options, you would need to upgrade to a paid account however if this is your first email newsletter then the free options will be more than enough. Plus, prices start from as little as $10 when you do want to get more serious.
• ReachMail. I haven't tried this piece of software myself, but it is another free option that allows you the full email marketing package, including autoresponders. Their free account allows you up to 5,000 subscribers and 15,000 emails per month – which is very good.My personal recommendation would be MailChimp, as I've used them and enjoyed the product. However this is a good alternative if you've used MailChimp previously and want to try something different.
• Aweber. This is like the gold standard of email and autoresponder software, but there is a small cost involved. However, if you want to deliver a professional email newsletter with advanced autoresponder options, Aweber is one of the best.Prices start at $1 for the first month and then $19 for your first 500 subscribers. It comes with a very easy to use interface and plenty of templates you can use to customize your autoresponder design. This would be my second pick after MailChimp.
• Campaign Monitor. This is another paid offering, and one I haven't used but it's very well priced at $9 per month for up to 500 subscribers. The focus of the Campaign Monitor autoresponders is a high quality design and they have some really good looking templates to choose from.I have heard that these templates are a little more difficult to modify and design than MailChimp, but it may be a great choice if you're a designer.

There is a symbiotic relationship between news media and the growing internet population. Both parities continuously raise the bar for instantaneous modes of communication and commerce. The pressure from the consumers is on, but those on the other end have adopted, becoming just as responsive and dynamic. This exponential trend has kept online marketers and PR specialists on their toes, crouched and ready to spring at the next chance for the media spotlight to gain exposure to those consumers. The fluctuating nature of media and consumerism has revitalised the traditional methods that once made media coverage possible. Resultantly, the blueprint for online PR has evolved into what is known as newsjacking.

Most importantly Newsjacking can help you generate the high quality links that Google loves. When you position yourself right, and properly implement a real-time PR strategy, you could be looking at a formula for overnight success. Now isn't that just music to your ears?

 What is Newsjacking?

The term was coined by David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and bestselling author. In his own words, he describes newsjacking as:

“the process by which you inject ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.”

[Read more…]

I've had the following rant percolating in my mind for some time now.  It is a familiar gripe that rings as true in me as any.  It can be summarized as:

Pure white hat marketers need to shut the hell up and stop pretending their shit does not stink.

It has felt to me for a long time that Google, whether consciously or not, has been effective at turning the SEO community against itself.   Hearing “thought leaders” side in favor of outing, and casually characterizing, large groups of marketers as “spammers” feels treasonous to me. Not just because I wholeheartedly disagree, but also because their focus seems completely misdirected.

To my thinking, there are only three sides in the SEO game.  This is how I break it down.

#1. The Search Engines

Despite what has been said, search engines view ALL SEOs as the enemy. That is because the entire industry is a force aligned in direct opposition to their interests.

Not only does the persistent  onslaught of SEO strategizing put immense strain on their algorithms, but SEO's compete directly for the exact same marketing dollars.

The gesture’s faux transparency and aura of servility are a ruse.  It is merely an instance of keeping their enemies closer.

If Google could get every SEO in a room and use that flashy thing from Men In Black to erase our memories… they would. And trust me, once Rand and Danny had gotten everyone's attention and had them focus on the light, their minds too would be similarly disposed.   [Read more…]