First of all, thanks for signing up to my subscriber list, it's great to have you on board! Now that you're part of the lucky few to receive exclusive content from my blog, you can also look forward to the following:

• Exclusive advice and techniques that are only sent through to my email subscribers.
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Hopefully these benefits will be enough to keep you interested :) I'm working on a lot of new projects at the moment so, as a subscriber, you'll be the first to hear about any of them. This will include beta access to any of my tools and courses, plus access to exclusive subscriber-only content. To get you started, I've outlined a few of my best articles that will gives you tons of insight into the techniques that I use to get results in my SEO, social media and content marketing campaigns. Also, I'll share an exclusive discount on one of my favourite tools... 1. Understand how I took one company from Zero to One Million pageviews in under 12 months. I give away tons of traffic growth tactics, some of which I've never shared openly before! 2. Check out my Guide to Growing a Social Following from Nothing - this 7,000+ word guide showcases my exact strategy for rapidly growing a social following. I uncover all of my techniques that I've used to grow social following from 0 to over 5,000 in less than 4 months with only relevant and engaged users (without spending more than $100 a month!). 3. Check out my guide to Link Building Techniques that Work Right Now - learn exactly how I create high quality links within my SEO campaigns. No fluff, only actionable techniques that you can go away and replicate within your own projects right now. I'm constantly updating this post so be sure to keep checking back on it. 4. Check out my Ultimate Guide to Running Online Competitions - this 5,500+ word article goes into great detail on how I set up and run successful online competitions to grow my social following, increase web traffic and generate direct leads. It walks through every step of my process and gives specific examples of where I've used these techniques to get results. 5. Check out Everything That's Terrible About My Content - a huge case study that I put together that shows how I carry out detailed analysis on my own content in order to evaluate success and improve the results that I get. I share my full process with tutorial videos and animated gifs so that you can quickly implement my custom process. This should be enough to keep you busy for now :) P.S I've got an exclusive discount on the URL Profiler tool (possibly my favourite marketing tool at the moment) to get 10% off of your purchase. Simply enter MB1001 to receive your discount. You can download the tool here. Enjoy! Matthew Barby.

Some of you may be aware that I became part of the growing team at HubSpot last year to look after SEO and growth. Since becoming part of the HubSpot team I've been shifting my focus more and more heavily towards conversion optimization. I've head a wealth of data to play with and have been working on some of the most exciting and interesting projects of my career to date. Within the may latest (and very much overdue) blog post, I've outlined my process for identifying optimization opportunities and given an introduction to the framework that we use within the Optimization team at HubSpot for prioritizing projects. As well as this, I've put together some projects that you can test out on your own website to grow traffic, increase conversion and hit your business goals. You can view the full post here: http://www.matthewbarby.com/website-optimization-opportunities/ As always, I'd love it if you guys could share the link on Reddit, Growth Hackers and Inbound.org. Oh, and I'd love it if you could give me some feedback on a new feature that I've added to my blog where you can view a summary of the article. Let me know if you think it's useful and whether you'd like something like this for your own site. Enjoy! Matthew Barby.

Competitive analysis should be a staple part of any businesses’ weekly tasks. Staying up to date on changes to your competitors’ pricing is essential to being able to adapt, especially within e-commerce. The only problem is that it’s really difficult to run this kind of analysis. Typically, you have two options. The first option is pay large sums for software that does this for you – most of the time the results you get aren’t that accurate and require a lot of setup time on your part. The other option is to trawl through your competitors’ websites and make a note of all their pricing manually – this doesn’t exactly scale well. Now I’m going to present a third option: hacking the whole process using scraping to instantly pull through all of your competitors pricing whenever you want, how often you want and for no cost to you at all. Check out how: http://www.matthewbarby.com/competitive-pricing-analysis/ Oh, and you don’t even need to have done this before. Just follow my step-by-step guide and you’ll be able to immediately reap the benefits. If any of you share on Inbound.org or GrowthHackers.com, send me the link and I'll chime in on the comments :) Enjoy! Matthew Barby.

I know how difficult it can be to get in touch with journalists and influencers within your industry - trust me, I spent a lot of my time doing just this. That said, some of the most labour intensive work that comes with outreach (whether for links, social engagement or PR) is finding the right contact information for each of your targets. Luckily for you, I've mastered this process and am going to share with you a fool-proof strategy for gathering email addresses and other contact information for anyone online: Option 1: Use automated tools to scrape websites to find contact information in a matter of minutes. Tools like BuzzStream or Ninja Outreach are awesome for this. At the higher end of the scale are tools like GroupHigh that actually include full contact databases. Option 2: Find contact information within author bios where the person has published content online. You'd be surprised how many people leave an email address there. Option 3: Run advanced Twitter searches to see if they have tweeted their email address. You can do this by searching the following query in Twitter (replacing 'username' with their Twitter handle): from:username "my email" Click here to see an example of this in action. Option 4: Use this awesome email permutator spreadsheet to create a number of variations of possible email addresses for your target and then test them to check if they're valid using Rapportive. Option 5: Check the privacy policy on their website. More often than not, the privacy policy will contain an email address you can contact. Option 6: Use FullContact's Person API to check which email address they used to create their social media profiles. Get an extra tip on how to find email addresses via advanced Google search queries and see all of the above in more detail by checking out my full tutorial: http://www.matthewbarby.com/how-to-find-email-addresses/ Good luck! Matthew Barby.

For anyone starting a new social media campaign, it can become incredibly frustrating very quickly. Even though you're doing everything you should, your following doesn't seem to be growing by any meaningful figure, your driving little to no traffic to your website and you haven't even started to be able to demonstrate ROI from your activity. If you're running the campaign for a client then these frustrations are only going to be amplified. Don't worry though - I've shared, in detail (over 7,000 words!), exactly how I implement successful social campaigns from 0 followers. To prove it, I've showcased a case study where I achieved the following results in just 3 months:

• 4,700+ Facebook followers
• 850 Twitter followers
• 515 Pinterest followers
• 550 email subscribers (double opt-in)
• 15,000+ unique visitors from social media alone

That was just 3 months in - not bad, right? Well, if you want to find out exactly how I did it then you can view my full case study via the link below. I share specific strategies, tools and useful tips (no fluff, only actionable stuff - as always!). Check it out here: http://www.matthewbarby.com/social-media-strategy/ Enjoy! Matthew Barby.

If you own a local business or run an SEO campaign for one, you'll know that it can be tough to drive through lots of traffic to your website. More often than not, the total traffic potential isn't huge but it's dominated by a few big players - especially within the search engines. It's not always feasible to create giant pieces of content that could perform well on social media because this often brings through a ton of irrelevant traffic, especially if you're promoting a local plumbers website! What you need is a sustainable flow of relevant traffic from the search engines that can result in leads. Well, I'm going to show you the steps that I take to rank any local business, and believe me, I've done this a lot of times. Local SEO used to be the main area of speciality for me and it's constantly evolving. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, follow these steps:

Localised On-Page Optimisation

On-page SEO for local businesses conforms to some pretty old school SEO tactics. There’s quite a large weighting towards the on-page content in the local search listings, so it’s important that, where possible, you squeeze the most value out of your content. Here's a quick checklist to follow for local on-page SEO:

• Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page title tag.
• Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page H1 tag.
• Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page URL.
• Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page content.
• Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page image ALT attributes.
• Embed a Google map with your business marker into your landing page.

NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)

Consistency is key here. You need to ensure that you have your full NAP across your whole website (i.e. every page). Furthermore, you must use the exact same details/format when you mention your address on other websites (i.e. local citations). You’ll also want to use Schema.org markup on your NAP to give the search engines all they need to display your company information correctly. Here's the code that I use to add in NAP information to local websites with Schema.org markup (just adapt the areas in bold to suit your own business:

Link Building & Citation Building

Link building within local SEO campaigns is incredibly important and it’s also something that’s often overlooked. Compared to standard SEO campaigns, local SEO relies much more on links from other local websites that are really relevant to your business. It’s less about getting links from high authority websites (although that obviously helps) and more about getting links from websites local to you that are talking about similar things to what you do. This means that local directories are a useful resource for link building, especially when it comes to building citations. “A citation is an online reference to your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP).” These citations don’t even need to be linked, as long as they’re referencing your business NAP consistently in the same way. Here are a few ways you can get local citations:

• Use a service like WhiteSpark and get them to find and upload local citations for you.
• Go through the extensive list of citations on the Moz website and manually submit your citations.
• Use a tool like Ahrefs, Majestic or Open Site Explorer to run competitive link research and find citations that your competitors have gained.
• Set up alerts through Mention or Google Alerts to track new mentions of your competitors’ NAP listing.

To support your citations, you'll need to build some good quality links from local websites as well. Here are a few of the strategies that I use to build local links:

• Go to Meetup.com and search for a list of local events relevant to your industry. Find those that have websites and contact them about sponsorship (most of the time you’ll only need to put on a lunch for them). If they accept, you’ll get a link from their website (local to you) and their Meetup.com page (highly authoritative, local link). Here’s an example.
• Create a local resource from public data (here’s 30 different data sources) and reach out to local press to get coverage. That’s exactly what Krystian Szastok did and he got some amazing results (you really should read this case study).
• Run your own local meetup or event and bring through links from the local event page.
• Sign up to press request services to get quoted in local publications (huge potential for high authority, local links).
• Run an AMA on Reddit (within a relevant subreddit to your industry) and within other local communities.
• Line up interviews and columns within relevant online publications.
• Give a discount to local organizations for your products/services in exchange for a linked mention on their website.
• Enter local awards (or start your own if there aren’t any!).
• Spend time dedicated to local PR outreach to get online and offline coverage in local news.
• Run regular competitive link research and capitalize on any new opportunities that your competitors have gained.
• Offer scholarships (you get links from local universities) or offer jobs to students (you can get links from their careers pages).

I've tried and tested this approach and guarantee you that it works, so good luck and let me know how it all goes! Matthew Barby.

Ever wished you could know exactly who is visiting your website – I mean, like a list of individuals who went to your website? Well, with this sneaky LinkedIn hack you can do just that. Then, once you know this you can connect with them on LinkedIn and get in touch directly with them. Sounds good, right? I've been using this hack for around two months now and it's given me some invaluable insights into who is actually reading my content. You can see from the screenshot above that there's a huge spike in the 'people that have visited my LinkedIn profile'. Well, this is because they're actually people who've visited my website. I've just tricked LinkedIn into thinking that these visits to my website are actually visits to my LinkedIn profile page. The result - LinkedIn shows me the individual profile pages of each person that's viewed my content. Imagine how powerful this could be for generating leads for your business. You'd be able to know exactly who has looked through your services/products so that you can connect with them and follow up to convert them into paying customers. Here's how to set it up...

1. Sign up for a LinkedIn Premium account (if you haven’t already). You can just get the entry level package here – it’s just so you can view who’s viewed your profile. 2. Go to your website and add the following code within the and tags of the page(s) you wish to track visitors on: You will just need to replace the XXXXX with your LinkedIn user ID. You can find this by logging into LinkedIn, clicking the Profile button and then taking the numerical code from the page URL that directly follows the text ‘profile/view?id=’. 3. After a few days, go back into your LinkedIn account and click on the section to view who’s looked at your profile. You’ll notice that there are a lot of people in this list now. That’s because LinkedIn is now tracking everyone that visits your website (that’s still logged into their LinkedIn account) as someone who’s viewed your profile! 4. Go through the list and start building individual relationships with your web visitors through the LinkedIn platform. A perfect intro would be to offer them early beta access to get their feedback on your product.

Happy prospecting! Matthew Barby.

There are a number of different ways that you can get links from Wikipedia and luckily for you, I'm going to share all of them with you here. Let's begin with the first part, which is all focused around Wikipedia citations. [Note: this is a fairly lengthy email so you may want to set aside 10 minutes to go through it properly] Here's the process: Step 1: First things first, hop on over to WikiGrabber.com. If you haven't heard of WikiGrabber before then you're missing out - big time! In a nutshell, it's a tool that identifies any pages on Wikipedia that are missing citations or contain dead links (you can view a full list of Wikipedia pages that have dead links on them that need replacing here). Step 2: Search for a keyword related to your niche within WikiGrabber to find articles that may be relevant to you that need citations. For example, you could search for Marketing. Here's an example of an article that needs citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_marketing (the article is titled, The History of Marketing). Step 3: Click on one of the Wikipedia entries in the list of results from WikiGrabber and press CTRL+F on your keyboard (if you're a Windows user, that is) and search for 'citation needed'. This will show up all of the different citations that are needed within the Wikipedia entry. These are all of the opportunities for you to create some content that could be used as a citation. Step 4: Build out a piece of content that can be used as a citation for the specific sentence/paragraph that requires one. You can check out a few of the other cited articles within the Wikipedia entry to get a feel for what is required. I usually write up a short brief for a specialist freelance writer and get them to create a piece of content that does the job. Credibility is very important here and you need to ensure that you're referencing all of your sources within your article correctly. Treat it like an academic article and use Harvard referencing. Once you've created the content, publish it on your website. Step 5: Now it's time to get the Wikipedia article updated with your citation added. One way to do this is to create a Wikipedia account and edit the article yourself. There's a problem with this though... Wikipedia editors are very strict. The way to give yourself the best possible chance of success is to work with an experienced Wikipedia editor. This is the way I go about it and it works a treat. You're probably wondering how you find these editors, right? Well, hop on over to People Per Hour and there are a few there. I'd avid Fiverr.com for this but UpWork.com could also be a good starting point.

Option 2: Wikipedia Dead Links

This is a similar but slightly different approach to the above process. Instead of creating a piece of content from scratch that can be used on a Wikipedia article needing a citation, it will focus on Wikipedia article that have citations with broken links. Step 1: Go back to WikiGrabber and search for a keyword relevant to your niche. This time, instead of going through to Wikipedia entries that need citations, look for those that have dead links (you can check out an extensive list of these pages here as well). Step 2: Select one of the entries (here's an example page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_marketing) within the list and search the webpage (with CTRL+F) for the words, dead link. This will show a link through to a citation that is now responding with a 404 error (i.e. the webpage no longer exists). This is your opportunity to replace that link with your own. Step 3: Grab the URL of one of the dead link in the Wikipedia entry and jump on over to Wayback Machine. If you don't know already, Wayback Machine is a huge archive of webpages over the past years. Using Wayback Machine you can check out what a webpage used to look like some time ago - this is exactly what you're going to do for the dead link(s) in the Wikipedia entry you've found. Step 4: Using the snapshot of the webpage from Wayback Machine, you can rewrite the article so that it covers all of the same points but becomes an original piece. If you'd prefer, you could just brief a copywriter to do exactly that - it should make for a really easy job and wouldn't cost a lot at all. You could even use a service like iWriter to do it. Step 5: Publish the rewritten content onto your website and have an experienced Wikipedia editor edit/update the citation within Wikipedia. You're much more likely to get the edit accepted because you're following a proven and trusted piece of content as a guide. This is 10x easier than creating it from scratch. An Added Bonus... Yes, there's even more! You can also plug each of the dead links into Majestic, Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs to find out if any other websites are linking to them. If they've been cited in Wikipedia then the likelihood of this is very high. Once you've identified any other sites with broken links to the same resource, get in touch with them and send them through the link to your updated resource - you should get a pretty good response from this.

Option 3: Create Your Own Wikipedia Page

This one's fairly self-explanatory but often overlooked. I've worked on a number of campaigns where I've had Wikipedia pages created for companies that I've worked with. They don't even need to be huge businesses in most cases - it's more about structuring the page correctly and following Wikipedia's guidelines. Again, it's important to have an experienced Wikipedia editor upload the article and also check through it to ensure it follows Wikipedia's guidelines. Take it easy. Matthew Barby.

It's been a little while since I've published a big guide on my blog. One of the reasons for this is that I've been working on something big. All of my free time has been taken up recently by testing out new SEO tactics. This has resulted in me compiling 19 of my most effective tactics to hit #1 in Google and ultimately see huge increases in your organic traffic. No fluff. No "just create great content". Only actionable and effective SEO techniques. I guarantee you that you'll take away at least (and I really mean "at least") 2 new tactics that you've never thought of before. The best thing is that ALL of the tips that I've outlined can be implemented right away, regardless of whether you're a brand new startup or a well-established business. Alongside this 10,000 word guide, I've compiled all 19 tactics into a custom checklist that you can download as a PDF for quick viewing. The checklist also has a bonus list of tools that I use within my campaigns. Stop what you're doing and go check it out now: http://www.matthewbarby.com/seo-tips/ Now I need something from you... Whilst you may want to keep all of these techniques to yourself (I don't blame you), all I ask is that you help me out by sharing/upvoting the post on Inbound.org and GrowthHackers.com. If you have time then it'd be great to get a share on Twitter too. I've made things easy for you with a quick-share link below: Click here to share the post on Twitter. Happy ranking :) Matthew Barby.

In the past few years Google have been refining the way that it displays results to users. In particular, Google has been increasing the number of Featured Snippets that it displays for search queries. These Featured Snippet listings are becoming huge traffic generators from organic search and I'm going to let you know how you can start appearing in them. What's a Featured Snippet? So let's start by explaining what a Featured Snippet actually is. If you go into Google.com and search for something like 'how to make bread' then you'll see a slightly different set of search results to what you're used to seeing in previous years. Commonly known as the 'answer box', the Featured Snippet provides a direct answer to a query within the search engine results page (SERP) itself. Here's an example: Seem familiar now? Why Should You Care About the Featured Snippet? One of the first conclusions that a lot of people involved with SEO jumped to was that featured snippets would have a hugely negative impact on the amount of people that actually click through to the pages within the results. This actually hasn't been the case. In fact, it's dramatically increased the click-through rate (CTR) of results ranking within it. From a sample of just under 5,000 queries, I found that the CTR to the HubSpot website for high volume keywords increased by over 114%, even when we ranked #1 (just below the Featured Snippet). How to Rank in the Featured Snippet I've analysed thousands of Featured Snippet SERPs to identify factors that correlate with ranking within the Featured Snippet. Here are some takeaways that I can share that should help you out:

1. Link signals matter much less for featuring in the Featured Snippet when you already rank on page 1. 2. There should be an area on the page where the search query appears in a header (h2, h3, h4, etc.) and then the content you want to appear in the Featured Snippet (the answer to the query) should be directly below it in a (p) tag. 3. The 'answer' should ideally be between 54 and 58 words long. 4. Google doesn't always just pull through a whole paragraph of text into the Featured Snippet. If you add "Step 1:", "Step 2", "Step 3", etc. to the start of each subheading within a page (h2) then Google will sometimes just pull through the subheadings and list them chronologically, like in the example above for this URL. This is particularly prevalent in question-based queries. 5. Featured Snippets for the same query often have different content within Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.com.au and Google.ie. Try "how to search on google" as one of many examples. 6. For shorter, less question-orientated keywords that display a Featured Snippet (e.g. "Inbound Sales"), it's much more likely that Google will pull through a paragraph of text as opposed to a step-by-step. Page structure is incredibly important here. 7. Google tend to prefer 'answers' that begin logically as an answer would. For example, it begins with "The first step is...", "You can KEYWORD HERE by doing...", "To start with...", "Step 1: Do...", etc. Here are a few examples:

I hope this helps. Be sure to let me know how you get on, and if you have any questions, just drop me a tweet. Matthew Barby.