Yodelpop's Blog

Look at the website of a company that’s successful at marketing and you’ll find a resource hub, loaded with content that their ideal customers can access when they’re ready.

They talk little about their brand, and instead demonstrate their unique value to the buyer with blog posts and case studies that position them as experts in the field.

I recently got the following email from one of our inbound marketing clients:

"I had another organization call us and wanted to use some of our blogs. Could we let them use some of them if they gave us credit or linked back to our site? And how would that affect our SEO? What is your opinion on this?"

Since this issue affects businesses and nonprofits across the board, I thought I'd share my answers to these questions here, including:

• Who should be allowed to republish your content
• How to prevent damage to your search ranking
• How to make sure a republishing partnership benefits you

An AB test can be a great tool for nonprofit or small business marketing. Whether you're doing the marketing yourself or overseeing a team, it's important to understand how AB testing works — when to do it, how to do it, and what kind of effort you can expect to put into it.

Having worked in the nonprofit world for many years, I know the feeling of being ashamed of your nonprofit's website. The organization is doing great work, but the site just doesn't do it justice. Or the site seems to somehow draw more attention to the organization's shortcomings than to its strengths. The design may be outdated, traffic may be low, there may be no engagement, donations, or e-mail subscriptions coming in through the site—all of these are symptoms that there's a problem.

Fortunately, you can turn your nonprofit website around—even if you don't have a budget for a totally new site.

At their best, annual reports are a golden opportunity for nonprofits to showcase their accomplishments through storytelling and photographs, thank their donors and supporters, and issue a clear call to action to readers for how they can help keep the momentum going.

At their worst, reports are a ho-hum recitation of donor names (yawn), actions taken (so what?) and dry data (zzzzz).

Your job is to make your annual report do the former, not the latter. But there are so many formats and storytelling approaches — which one is best for your organization? To help you answer that question, below are some examples from nonprofits that are leading the charge in transforming annual reports from meh to marvelous. I hope you find them helpful and inspiring! 

For more ideas, check out my Best Nonprofit Annual Reports post, which presents annual report "winners" in categories from Best Donation Generator to Best E-Book format.

Nothing compares to spending 4 days with 22,000 marketers, a handful of inspiring celebrities and hundreds of educational sessions on all things marketing, sales and the human experience.

Inbound17 was everything I’ve grown to expect from HubSpot's yearly conference: totally moving keynotes (Michelle Obama), entertainment that makes my spouse increasingly jealous every year (Judd Apatow), free massages and head shots and a stunning variety of food trucks everyday at lunch (vegan!) and of course leading thought in the sales and marketing industry.

HubSpot's INBOUND conference, held every fall in Boston, is the one conference Yodelpop has attended every year since we were founded. Not only do we tap into an incredible amount of marketing information that we bring back to our work, we always make great connections with clients, marketers, and HubSpot team members. Watching the video recap reminds me of the impressive range of the stories HubSpot brought before 21,000 people this year: keynoters included Michelle Obama, Roxanne Gay, Billie Jean King, Issa Rae, Piera Gelardi, Brene Brown, and so many more people I admire. 

When looking for SEO help, small business owners can get some pretty complicated advice, because SEO is constantly changing. Search engine algorithms change, and social media and other advertising platforms continue to challenge our ability to attract traffic from organic search. 

But the fundamentals of good SEO haven't really changed: attracting traffic is about publishing content that's valuable to your ideal customers, and SEO is about showing that value to them when they're doing online research. (This was all true back in 2014, when we published this SEO blog.) Finding the language your ideal customers are using, and employing it effectively, is still a great method of not just getting traffic but improving your understanding of your business. 

Researching long-tail keywords and building them naturally into your content will help you better optimize your site for search, which will result in more organic traffic, leads and, eventually, customers. 

In this blog I'm going to share some foundations of researching and using longtail keywords. 

Email marketing for small business is either (a) the tool that will rescue your marketing plan from certain disaster, or (b) a relic of marketing strategies past, as obsolete as a 1980s "portable phone." It depends on who you ask. 

If you ask me, based the evidence I've seen, email is a small business marketing tactic that's worth its word count in gold. Here's why:

I happened to pick up the Wall Street Journal while traveling last week, and this story caught my eye: PetMed Asks Google to Remove Tramadol Ads From Search Results. In it, an executive blames Google's algorithm for displaying the company's ads with certain problematic search terms.

The PetMed story raises important questions for current and potential PPC advertisers: What if any risks do you face in engaging in PPC? Who bears responsibility when it plays a role in illegal or harmful activities? And what can you do to minimize the risk of that happening?