Ask Amanda About Marketing

Amanda announces the return of the podcast -- with a twist.

LinkedIn ads expert and founder of B2Linked provides great actionable tips for creating successful advertisements on the popular social site.

Need a refresher on email marketing best practices, or are you looking for a boost in your current efforts? Digital marketing guru Wendy Maynard explains the importance of strategic email marketing, how to improve the quality of your list, and how to send emails that actually provide value to your audience.

I spoke with digital entrepreneur Dan Wesley, founder of CreditLoan.com and chief evangelist at Quote.com, about what it takes to take a site idea and turn it into a full-time gig.

If your idea isn't solid, you're setting yourself up for failure. It doesn't matter how wonderful your article is or how stunning your graphic -- or even how hard you try to pitch or promote it -- if the idea wasn't a good one, well, your content is probably screwed. This week I run through key ideation process tips. 

Everyone wants to know the secret. They want to know how to promote content AND meet their marketing goals. This week, we finally tell you. I interviewed fellow Fractlite Ashley Carlisle, who explains how promoting content is more of an art than a science.

You can't genuinely engage with anyone by throwing some links at them and then riding off into the sunset. Joel Renner, my guest this week, explains that you have to listen in order to begin the process of engaging with people and building a genuine community.

When you know you've created something amazing, using search engine optimization (SEO) allows the search engines to see your content is appropriate for your target audiences. In this episode, I chat with SEO expert Tom Casano of Sure Oak SEO to get his insight on what can be done to help increase your content's rank and how to use SEO to increase traffic.

I've spoken a lot about how emotion plays into content, both in this podcast and generally in my writing. But there's another way to think about your approach to creating successful content, and that's by creating ego-bait. Tune in to discover how to create content that appeals to people's sense of identity (prompting them to share!).

As marketers, we have to remember that we humans are social creatures. That's probably why niche online communities have been taking off so much recently. There's a ton of value in putting a bunch of engaged, like-minded people in one place. And the best part? Being natural and real makes "networking" way less tedious. Nathan Collier created an engaged content marketing Facebook group, and he's on the show this week to talk about how to build a social community.

You might think you're ready to blast off into the world of startup success...but are you fully prepared for launch? I'm joined by Justin Adelson, founder of Perfect Pixel Marketing, to discuss how to successfully prepare for a website's debut.

Listen in to learn about 6 common unfortunate situations in content marketing and what you can do to lessen your chances of encountering these road blocks.

Two of Fractl’s creative strategy experts, Kristin Tynski and Ryan Sammy, discuss the future of content marketing.

Tommy Walker joins us this week to answer the question: how do you find the soul of your blog?

In this episode, Amanda talks about six characteristics that makes content newsworthy. 

I totally get it -- sometimes it can be...difficult...to reach your target customers. You might be really wanting to reach out to someone, but if you're not talking about something that interests them in a way they like communicating, they'll immediately tune out. So how do you effectively get your message to your target audience? B2B content and email marketer Shayla Price explains it all.

Buckle up, ladies and gents. It's time to perform some EXPERIMENTS!  Well, not the beaker-and-test-tube type of experiments -- marketing experiments! The content marketing world is constantly changing, and if we want to succeed, we need to change with it. Content marketing experimentation can help you determine what new tactics and strategies are worth exploring to get the best results.  

Ranking #1 or #2 for your target keyword is every digital marketer's dream. But getting your website to the top of Google takes a lot of work. After investing a lot of time, resources, and brain power to the endeavor, though, it's actually possible to achieve. How do I know? Dmitry Dragilev has done it. And we talked to him about it to get his awesome insights.

Have you ever seen a truly terrible infographic?  Of course you have. Because when anything proves to be a super effective way to market or communicate, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, but not everyone does a very good job in executing. Which leads people to ask, are infographics no longer effective? Are they perhaps...dead? I talk to the Head of Marketing at Venngage, Nadya Khoja, to explore why infographics work.  

Rebranding isn't like flipping a switch -- it involves strategic planning and messaging to successfully transform a product, service, or brand. In this episode, I talk with Amazon.com's Alexa marketing team to discover how they've rebranded after being well known for its website ranking list but now offering a suite of paid tools -- a brand new value add. (Pun intended.)