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* Please read the whole post, I have some good news at the bottom, but it won’t make sense unless you read the whole post.
Do you know why I got into SEO?
Not many people know this, but I grew up in middle-class America, and I wanted a better life for me and my parents.
When I was 16 years old, I worked at a theme park called Knotts Berry Farm where I picked up trash, cleaned restrooms, and swept up vomit every single day.
I didn’t mind it because that’s life and I needed the money.
At 16, I realized I was too young to get a high paying job, so I did the next best thing… I started a business.
But making $5.75 an hour picking up trash wasn’t enough to market my business, though. The only solution that I could think of was SEO because if you put in the time and effort you can get the traffic for free.
It’s also the main reason I fell in love with it… it
gives the little guy a chance to compete with the big guys.
And over the years I wanted to pay it forward and help out all of the entrepreneurs and small companies so they can do the same… succeed without having to spend a lot of money.
Well over the years, I’ve produced a ton of free content, videos, and guides that help entrepreneurs and marketers of all sizes succeed.
And in February 2017, I decided to take it to the next level by acquiring Ubersuggest for $120,000.
When I first bought it, I had the dream of creating an SEO tool that could compete with the big players that charged $100+ a month, but of course, offer it for free.
The developers that I had at that time estimated that I could do this for $30,000 to $45,000 a month. That was perfect as I had no issue losing that much money each month.
But as we got rolling and kept adding in more features, our
expenses continually climbed. Just look at what I spent in the last month…
I spent $89,930 on hosting so far in January with an estimated spend of $128,680 for February. But again, let’s stick with January…
My back-end development bill from Tryolabs was $47,885 for January.
My data feed from SEO Power Suite, Data For SEO, and Shared Count totaled $75,253 for January.
And of course, my front-end developers as well as my dev-ops team Netlabs, which ran me $22,700.
Then if you add on miscellaneous costs, such as support, design, and project management, I was out another $11,450.
All in all, I spent $247,218 during the month of January 2020.
Keep in mind that my costs are continually rising. As the tool gets more popular, it costs me more.
One of the big reasons for the server expenses is scrapers.
Believe it or not, a lot of companies are scraping our data and continually rotating up IPs and creating fake accounts, which increases our server expenses. Especially when you consider that they are researching vague SEO terms or domains that aren’t cached in our system.
Now the purpose of this post wasn’t to make you feel bad or guilty (unless you are scraping me). I just wanted to be transparent about my situation.
Originally, I was hoping that I could convert a portion of the Ubersuggest customer base into agency clients but as we continually move upstream and work with bigger brands, the conversion rate from an Ubersuggest visitor to a paying consulting customer has been low.
As that didn’t work out the way I wanted, which I learned around 11 months ago, it became harder and harder for me to eat the costs as they continually grew and I didn’t have a way to pay for them other than to dip into my own savings.
So, I started searching for solutions, such as turning
Ubersuggest into a non-profit and raise money from foundations to help support
the cost. I tried that for 5 months and I didn’t gain much traction.
I also tried to see if I could get sponsors for the tool who would help cover the costs, but that didn’t work out well either. Instead, many of them offered to buy the company for millions of dollars (some in the 8 figures) but I didn’t want to sell it as I knew their goal would be to turn it into another $100-a-month tool, which didn’t sit well with me.
After running out of options, I had no choice but to make some changes to Ubersuggest (don’t worry it is not closing down). But you can guess what the changes are.
First and foremost, my goal is still to give as much away for free as I can. Within Ubersuggest, you will still be able to do a lot for free…
You will always be able to create projects and track your rankings. And just like before you always have been limited on the number of keywords you can track and that, of course, is due to costs.
Within the app, you will still be able to see keyword research data.
You’ll see a chart with the latest few months’ traffic volume, data on mobile versus desktop search volume, demographic data, and even keyword recommendations.
And you can, of course, continually find new keywords to target.
Sure, some of the data is blocked, but did you know that
only 14.3% of people used to register for a free account to unlock that data.
In other words, most of you never even registered because the application shows you enough for free without needing to log in.
Similar to before, you can also see popular blog post suggestions for any given keyword.
You’ll also be able to see the top keywords a blog post
ranks for and the backlinks pointing to that URL.
Again, keep in mind the majority of you only looked at the
top 10 results as 14.3% of you registered for a free account to unlock more
data.
You will still be able to look up any domain and get stats
on it.
Historical data is blocked, but you can see the last few
months which is enough for most of you.
You’ll also be able to see the top pages for any domain and the keywords that page ranks for as well as backlinks.
The same goes for the keywords any domain ranks for.
Some of the data is blocked, but just like before only 14.3%
of you registered to view that data. Which means 85.7% of you are happy with
the free data.
Not much has changed here, you can still analyze over 100 pages on your site and figure out which errors you have.
Here’s an interesting fact: Did you know the average site that goes through Ubersuggest only has 48 pages?
The median number of pages a site has in our system was similar at 43 pages.
And of course, there is the backlinks report, which now
shows new and lost links as well as historical link growth.
Similar to what I mentioned above, very few people really cared to see the blocked off information as only 14.3% of you registered.
My goal in life is to help people generate more traffic. And I believe Ubersuggest can get better results and give you a fighting chance.
I also want to continually make the tool better. For example, why can’t SEO be automated? If you can have self-driving cars, there is no reason why you can’t automate SEO through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
But with the rising expenses, I was left with 2 options… either shut the tool down (which isn’t an option for me) or figure out a way to cover my expenses.
In the long run, I can’t keep sustaining the loss of $247,218 a month forever, especially when that number is climbing (that’s roughly 3 million dollars a year).
My team and I came up with an interesting concept that we think is fair and hopefully, you won’t be upset about it.
Remember how I said only 14.3% of people register to view more data but 85.7% never register as they were happy with the free data?
Well, nothing will change for 85.7% of you.
As for the 14.3% who register to create projects and track keywords, you can still do that for free. But if you want to add more projects or track a lot more keywords, you can upgrade to a paid plan.
The same goes for keyword research. If you want to view even more data, you can pay for the blocked data. Or if you want to analyze thousands of pages on your site through the site audit, you can also upgrade.
Don’t worry though, I am still following my original
mission.
I promise to always keep Ubersuggest affordable (and mainly free). I decided to take the Netflix/Amazon approach and try to make the cost super affordable (as my goal is to only break-even).
On top of that, I made it a 7-day free trial.
You’ll also find that the pricing varies per country as my costs vary per country. In regions like India and Brazil when someone registers, creates a project and tracks keywords, my expenses are substantially lower than if someone from the United States registers and creates projects and tracks keywords.
The same goes for labor. My support team in India and other regions costs substantially less than the team in the United States or the United Kingdom.
If you also pay annually, you’ll get 2 months free so you can save even more money.
And as I mentioned above, I want to stick to the original mission, which is to help people generate more traffic without having to spend a lot of money.
There will always be a very generous free plan and I am hoping that I can break even by charging for a portion of the application.
Ubersuggest is going to continually get better.
To make things up to you, over the next month or two I am going to release a Chrome extension that will give you tons of insights for free. And of course, if you want a little bit more you can pay.
Here’s what the free extension will look like…
Whenever you perform a Google search you will be able to see
the volume for any search term in any major country. And if you click the “view
all” link you will see more data on that keyword.
You’ll also see the average domain score for any given
ranking page and the number of links you need to rank in the top 10.
As you scroll down and go through each of the ranking
results, you’ll see the domain score for each URL, social shares, and the
backlinks pointing to that search result.
You can even drill down and see the top links pointing to
each URL.
Now if you head over to the sidebar, you’ll see a list of
related keywords as well as data on the top 10 keyword recommendations.
If you scroll a bit more, you’ll see a graph that shows how many backlinks each result has so that way you can see how many backlinks again you roughly need to rank in the top 10.
At the very bottom of the search results, you’ll see data on related keywords.
As time goes on not only will you have the extension, but I
will continually add more and more features for free.
I’m sorry that I have to start covering my costs, but I hope
you understand at the same time.
From my projections, it will take me roughly 6 months to break even, so I am going to be out a decent amount of money over the next 6 months… but that’s life.
I am not looking to recuperate my original investment and I don’t mind that being a loss, but once I break even on a monthly basis I will continue to either open up more stuff for free or consider lowering the monthly pricing if possible.
Again, I am really sorry, but I hope you understand that it isn’t sustainable for me to spend $247,218 a month indefinitely.
I am open to hearing your thoughts or ideas. I also want to let you know I appreciate everything you have done to support Ubersuggest and my site.
The post The Future of Ubersuggest appeared first on Neil Patel.
Ever seen the movie The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook?
In the movie, people kept saying “he’s wired in” or “they’re wired in” over and over again in reference to people coding intensely with their headphones on.
Not knowing anything about programming, I always imagined that being “wired in” meant the programmers were somehow listening to the computers, or that they were connected to the code somehow … or something weird that us non-programmers would never understand.
Turns out it just meant they were concentrating really hard with headphones on. Well, good thing I never hypothesized out loud.
We all misinterpret some of the techy terms floating around web and product design nowadays — but now more than ever, marketers need to be familiar with this vocabulary so we can communicate better with our IT, web design, or product development departments.
To help bridge the gap, here are 45 techy terms every marketer (and human) should understand.
(For a few of these, we drew on these 60 marketing acronyms every industry pro should know.)
A permanent redirect from one URL to another — usually from a company’s old website to their new website. They’re also used to redirect web traffic from those old web pages to the new ones that have replaced them.
Web visitors see 404 error pages when they try to reach a web page that doesn’t exist. This usually happens when the web page has been deleted or the visitor mistyped the URL. Check out HubSpot’s 404 page here.
“Alternative text,” or “alt text.” The text associated with an image. It’s usually the file name of that image, but alt text can be customized using most content management systems (like HubSpot’s). When an image isn’t able to load in an email, website, or blog post, the alt text is displayed instead.
It’s important for all the images on your website to have alt text because it’s the only way search engines like Google can understand what an image is about, which helps you optimize your website for search. It also makes images accessible to the blind because screen readers can read aloud the alt text.
“Application programming interface.” A computer programming term meaning a series of rules. APIs allow an application to extract information from a service and use that information in their own application, or sometimes for data analysis. It’s kind of like a phone for applications to have conversations — an API literally “calls” one application and gets information to bring to you to use in your software. APIs facilitate the data needed to provide solutions to customer problems.
HubSpot has APIs that developers use to get information from our software into theirs. It’s important for marketers to understand what APIs can do to factor them in to their marketing strategies. Learn more about how marketers can use APIs here.
Amazon Web Services is a service that helps web developers and ecommerce owners in developing certain shopping-related features of their websites.
The appliance or instrument through which a browser saves the data needed to see a website, like images and HTML. When you revisit a web page, it’ll take less time to load than the first time you visited it because a cached version of the page was already saved the first time you were there. Because you have a cached version of the page, your browser doesn’t need to send a new request to see that page. Learn more about browser caches here.
“Cached out” can also be slang for really, really tired.
In simple terms, blockchain is a ledger system that uses an open, distributed record to keep track of transactions — transactions could mean cryptocurrencies, medical information, voting or home records, and more.
When people add products to online shopping carts but don’t check out and actually purchase those products. According to Fireclick, 62.30% is the average online cart abandonment rate. It’s a common problem for many ecommerce stores. Learn 8 reasons for cart abandonment and how to combat it here.
“Content delivery network” or “content distribution network.” A system of servers on the internet that provides content rapidly to multiple users by duplicating the content on multiple servers and directing the content to users based on proximity. CDNs enable better performance and availability — plus, they offload traffic served directly from the content provider’s website. They’re especially good for streaming audio, video, and internet television programming.
To give you a better idea of how the system works, CDN operators get paid by content providers (like media companies and ecommerce vendors) to deliver their content to end users. In turn, CDNs pay ISPs (internet service providers), carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers.
A small file that a web server automatically sends to your personal computer when you browse certain websites. The identifying information they contain includes login credentials (including usernames and passwords), shopping cart information, and preferences. They’re stored as text files on your hard drive so servers can access them when you return to websites you’ve visited before.
Ever made a return visit to a website like Amazon and seen content tailored to your user preferences? That’s because on your first visit, a cookie was installed. When you came back, the website server read your cookie and recognized you.
Learn more about how marketers can use cookies here.
A CMS, or content management system, is a platform that allows less-techy people to build websites and content from professionally designed templates. More tech-savvy users can often further customize these templates or website themes with HTML edits or plug-ins, which you’ll learn more about on this list. Notable examples of CMSs include WordPress and WIx.
“Cascading style sheets.” A language that manages the design and presentation of web pages: color, look, feel, and so on. It works together with HTML (see HTML), which handles the content of web pages. “HTML is the skeleton of your web pages, while CSS is the clothing,” as one of our colleagues says.
With CSS, you can create rules to tell your website how you want it to display information. And you can keep the commands for the style stuff — fonts, colors, and so on — separate from the commands for the content. They’re called “cascading” because you can have multiple style sheets, with one style sheet inheriting properties (or “cascading”) from others. Learn more here.
A plan that helps an organization prepare in the event that its website goes down or something happens to the webmaster. These disasters could be hard drive failure, hackers, and so on.
Disaster recovery plans include recording important website information, performing and saving regular backups of your website, determining an implementation plan for recovering your website should anything happen, and keeping an extra copy of your website data in a safe place.
“Domain name server.” Servers that translates web addresses into one or more IP addresses. This is why you can enter HubSpot.com instead of having to remember our IP address.
“Denial-of-service” or “distributed denial-of-service” attack. An attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. DoS threats usually target websites or services hosted on high-profile web servers like banks and credit card payment gateways, but they’re also common in business in the form of website attacks.
For example, one common type of attack on businesses would be attempting a service overload — i.e. flooding a network with so much information that it either can’t respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly that it’s basically useless.
Sadly, there isn’t much you can do to avoid being a victim of a DoS attack except securing passwords and installing anti-virus software and a firewall. Signs of an attack are unusually slow network performance, unavailability of a website, or the inability to access a website. Contact your IT team if you sense something’s off.
The web servers where website files are housed, served, and maintained.
“Hyper-text markup language.” The language used to direct the architecture of your website, landing pages, and emails. HTML lays out the structure of your website, from the title and first header, to a bulleted list, to your footer. Remember, “HTML is the skeleton of your web pages, while CSS is the clothing.” Learn more here.
GUI stands for “graphical user interface,” known also as simply “interface.” An interface is the part of a piece of software that the end user actually sees and interacts with.
IPaaS, which stands for Integrated Platform as a Service, is a cloud-based platform that connects various applications, systems, and technologies within the cloud or on-premise. It allows for the deployment and maintenance of integration flows without the need for hardware or middleware either within an organization or between an organization and third-party software.
“Internet Protocol address.” A numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.
“Internet service provider.” An organization (commercial, community-owned, nonprofit, or otherwise privately owned) that provides internet services.
A computer programming language used to create interactive effects within web browsers. For example, it allows you to perform calculations, write interactive games, add special effects, check forms, create security passwords, customize graphics, and so on. It has become the standard equipment in virtually all web browsers and is well-suited to a large range of non-web-related applications.
Mimification involves going into a web page or piece of content and pulling out all of the useless or excess code or spaces. This can help to increase page load speeds which can also boost your Google SEO.
Machine Learning is an artificial intelligence technique where algorithms are trained to recognize patterns and respond to them by performing tasks. For example, a customer service bot for a travel site might be trained to send you deals related to Bermuda if it recognizes the words, “beach vacation” or “Bermuda.”
NLP, or natural language processing, is when machine-learning algorithms are trained to comprehend large amounts of human language and respond to those commands. You might hear about this machine learning technique most when you are reading about voice assistant products that can respond to multiple spoken commands at once, like Amazon’s Echo.
You’ve probably seen those super-cool scrolling website designs like this one from Wildlife, this one from Bagigia, or this one from Honda? That’s parallax — a web design that takes a visual storytelling approach to guiding visitors through a website, and brings user experience to a new, interactive level.
Pixels from external ad networks work similarly to the HubSpot tracking code. Once installed on your site, the pixel detects visits to your pages. This data is the basis for creating ad audiences. These ad audiences to target ads can be used to target your ads at specific visitors. Pixels also collect data that can help optimize ads and measure your ads’ results.
A software extension that adds a specific feature to an existing software application. You’ve probably heard of plugins in the context of web browsers to add new features like virus scanners, for example. Ever enabled Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight QuickTime Player on your internet browser? Yup — those are plugins.
A company that registers domain names, like GoDaddy.
The method of designing web pages that automatically appear in their optimized form on all devices. In other words, responsive design automatically reformats your website for all screen sizes so your website visitors can easily interact with your site no matter what device they’re using. Due to the rapid increase in mobile usage in recent years, responsive design has become somewhat of a necessity.
Here’s how responsive design gets you more from your website.
“Rich site summary feed.” A web feed that publishes frequently updated information like blog posts and news stories. They let publishers syndicate data automatically, which is why they’re sometimes known as “really simple syndication.” When you subscribe to a website’s RSS, you no longer need to check their website for new content — instead, your browser will automatically monitor the site and give you timely updates.
SaaS stands for “Service as a Software.” This acronym categorizes platforms that help professionals and B2B employees with daily tasks or other aspects of their own job. Examples of SaaS platforms are HubSpot, Slack, and DocuSign.
A place to run a program for testing and experimenting in software development. Basically, it’s a testing environment that isolates untested code changes and experimentation. This isolation protects live servers and their data from changes that could be damaging.
A framework for managing product development used in agile software development. In Scrum, projects are divided into succinct work cadences known as “sprints,” which are usually one, two, or three weeks long. At the end of each sprint, the team meets to assess their progress and plan the next sprint. One key to Scrum’s popularity and success is that it has a simple set of roles, responsibilities, and meetings that never change. Learn more about Scrum here.
In computer science, a session is a dialogue, conversation, or meeting between two or more communicating devices, or between a computer and a user (like a login session). It typically involves saving information about the session history in order to be able to communicate.
SEO or search engine optimization is a strategy that optimizes your site and content so it can easily be found and promoted on online search engines.
Slang for anything that could stop the launch of a new product, like a bug.
Site maps show a hierarchical view of a website’s pages and content. It helps website designers figure out what content is needed on a website before they begin designing it. Site maps can also be web pages that offer links to all of the pages on a website.
“User interface.” A type of interface that allows users to control a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience by allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in an intuitive way. It includes a menu bar, toolbar, windows, buttons, and so on. Learn how to create a user-friendly website registration process here.
A UTM is a code that shows up in a tracking URL that allows a website, such as HubSpot to track views from a specific source, such as a social post or promotional email. Learn how to create and track UTMs and tracking URLs here.
“Uniform resource locator.” Also known as a web address, a URL is a specific character string that refers to a resource. It’s displayed on the top of a web browser inside an “address” bar. Learn how to optimize your URLs for search here.
The overall “user experience” a customer has with a particular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and even advocacy of that brand. To deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better, think about being the customer. Learn more here.
A computer graphics term to describe the use of “geometrical primitive objects” like points, lines, curves, and shapes to represent images. Here’s an example of a real phone that has been “vectorized.”
A sequential design process often used in software development processes, where progress is seen as “flowing” steadily downward through the phases of conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, production/implementation, and maintenance.
The point of waterfall development is to spend more time in the early stages of the software production cycle because catching bugs and other issues early on is cheaper and easier to fix than catching them later.
The ability for your website to be accessed by people with different physical and mental abilities, age, location, and so on. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes access to the web as a basic human right.
Properly designed websites and web tools can be used by people with disabilities. Here are a few examples from W3C of things to include on your website to make them accessible to people with disabilities:
Working with headphones on, indicating you don’t want to be disturbed. When programmers write code, sometimes they’ll plug in earphones to isolate themselves from the outside world so they can be totally focused on coding.
Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in July 2014, but was updated in November 2019 for comprehensiveness.
One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?
Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.
For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…
but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.
That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business.
(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)
Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.
To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:
Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.
Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!
When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.
Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:
Social + sales
“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”
When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.
With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.
At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.
One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.
You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.
Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?
Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?
Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?
This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.
To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.
For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.
Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.
(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)
You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.
Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.
Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.
This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:
For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.
Give yourself an advantage today.
The days of one-size-fits-all email marketing are long gone. To get better results, you need to send targeted, personalized emails.
By delivering hyper-relevant content to those who are most interested in it, your subscribers will open, click, and purchase more.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use tags to create more targeted segments (or groups) of subscribers and increase your engagement.
Tags are simple words or short phrases you use to categorize and group your subscribers based on their interests, behaviors, or other shared attributes.
They allow you to segment your audience, send targeted one-time broadcast emails, and trigger targeted, automated campaigns. This leads to better subscriber engagement, improved chances of hitting the inbox instead of the spam folder, and higher conversions.
Start getting more personal with your subscribers and try these 23 easy ways to tag your subscribers in AWeber.
The easiest way to tag a subscriber is when they opt in to your email list using a sign up form.
With AWeber, you can create unlimited sign up forms, and you can apply different tags to subscribers when they fill out different forms. This way, you’ll know exactly which form a subscriber used to sign up.
For example, if you offer a 7-day email course, weekly newsletter, and downloadable checklist as lead magnets, you can have three separate sign up forms that apply unique tags to your subscribers. This lets you see quickly which lead magnets they signed up for. Iff they opt in to all of them, all three tags get applied!
Related: How to tag an AWeber sign up form
Let’s say you want to know a bit more about your subscribers at the time they sign up, such as what topics they’re interested in, or their experience level in a particular skill you teach.
You can collect this additional information, beyond just their name and email address, using custom fields on your AWeber sign up form, and you can associate a tag with each custom choice.
This allows you to segment your subscribers from the time they join your list, and create personalized experiences for each of them.
Related: How to tag a custom field in an AWeber sign up form
Do you attend in-person events? Using the AWeber Atom App, you can create a sign up form on your mobile device to collect subscribers’ information in person, and use tags to remind you which event you met them at.
And if you attend multiple events, you can change which tags your Atom App sign up form applies. That way, you know where you met each particular subscriber.
You can even set up an automated welcome Campaign ahead of time that would go out to each new subscriber you met at that event.
Related: How to tag someone with the AWeber Atom App
Perhaps you have a list of new subscribers you’re migrating to AWeber. (Side note: We offer free migration support. Contact our experts to learn more!) You can easily import your list along with any existing tags or apply new tags.
You can also update existing subscribers’ tags when importing a list into AWeber. This will add any new tags in your import file to your existing subscribers.
Related: How to tag subscribers when importing into AWeber
You can use a landing page provider like Unbouce or Growtheme to invite your audience to subscribe to your email list, and tag them so you can send them the perfect email campaign based on the page or form they completed.
Although AWeber enables you to create sign up forms in your account, you can also integrate your AWeber account with other sign up form providers, such as OptinMonster, Hello Bar, MailMunch or ConvertFlow. These providers support AWeber tags, allowing you to tag your new subscribers in your AWeber account.
Have a digital or physical product? Providers like Shopify, WooCommerce, ThriveCart, 3dcart, and DirectPay allow you to easily add your customers into your AWeber account and tag them so you know who purchased from you.
AWeber’s Shopify integration even allows you to apply unique tags for each product your subscribers purchase.
Related: Watch this demo to learn more about AWeber’s Shopify integration
With AWeber’s Shopify integration, you can tag a subscriber who left items in their cart and didn’t purchase them. You can send them an automated email to encourage them to finish their purchase.
You can apply a generic tag when someone abandons any purchase , or you can apply unique tags based on the product that someone abandons.
Related: How to set up cart abandonment with Shopify
Quizzes are a great way to provide a fun, interactive, and educational experience for your audience. Tools like Interact and Quiz Cat allow you to create engaging quizzes and tag your subscribers in AWeber who complete your quiz.
Webinars are a great way to engage your audience directly and provide educational content to your subscribers. Tools like EasyWebinar allow you to add your webinar registrants directly to AWeber, and tag them based on the webinar they signed up for.
Then, you can automate reminder emails and follow up with your registrants after the webinar to share the recording and special offers.
Using a tool like Call Loop allows you to invite your audience to text a number to join your email list. Using the Call Loop integration with AWeber, you can add these individuals automatically to your email list, and tag them.
Contests are a great way to engage your community and grow your email list. Using tools like Gleam or ViralSweep, you can automatically add contest participants to your AWeber email list, and tag them based on the contest they joined.
Do you offer quotes, online calculators, polls or chatbots as part of your business? Tools like Outgrow allow you to add your interested prospects automatically to your AWeber account, and tag them accordingly, so you know exactly who they are and what they expressed interest in.
Do you use a CRM to manage client relationships? With tools like Agile CRM, you can automatically add your client and prospect contacts to your AWeber account, tag them with specific categories, and automate emails to keep your contacts engaged.
One way to tag subscribers is when they begin a campaign. This is helpful if you want to easily identify subscribers who are currently going through a Campaign so you don’t send them your regular broadcast emails as well.
Once they complete the Campaign, you can automatically remove that tag.
Related: How to use tags at the beginning of a Campaign
Another way to tag subscribers in a campaign is at the end of the series. This allows you to link campaigns together.
For example, you may have multiple welcome campaigns for different sign up forms, and you may want them all to flow into a general nurture campaign after each welcome campaign is complete. Simply apply the same tag at the end of each campaign, and then set the general nurture Campaign to start on that tag.
Related: How to use tags at the end of a Campaign
Let’s say you have a welcome campaign where your first two emails welcome your new subscribers and introduce them to you and your business.
Then, for the rest of the campaign, you’re trying to sell them on your products or services. You can apply a tag before the sales emails begin so you know which subscribers are being actively sold to. With this data, you can assess the effectiveness of your offers and improve the sales copy.
Related: How to use tags in the middle of a Campaign
Tags can also be used to record specific actions your subscribers take within your campaign. For example, you can tag subscribers when they open specific messages in your campaign.
This helps you identify subscribers who expressed an interest in the topic of the email by opening it.
Related: How to add a tag when someone opens a message in a Campaign
Similarly, you can tag subscribers when they click specific links within the messages of your campaigns. This is helpful when you’re trying to learn more about your subscriber’s preferences.
For example, in our blog welcome campaign, we ask what our subscribers are interested in learning, and we provide links within that email. Each link has a different tag, and it allows our subscribers to self-select their interests so we can better target them with relevant content.
Related: How to add a tag when someone clicks a link in a Campaign
You can also tag subscribers when they open one-time, broadcast emails. Similar to tagging subscribers who open your Campaign messages, this helps you identify who is interested in the topic of the email enough to want to open it.
Related: How to tag someone who opens a broadcast
If you’re promoting an upcoming webinar in a broadcast email, you can tag anyone who clicks the registration link and send them an automated email with the link to join the webinar. This improves the subscriber experience by eliminating the need to fill out another form to sign up for the webinar.
Related: How to tag someone who clicks a link in a broadcast
In addition to automatically tagging subscribers, there are times when you may want to manually apply tags to individual subscribers.
Let’s say you meet someone at an event and they agree to join your email list, but you don’t have a sign up form handy. You can add them to your list manually, and apply a tag that indicates where you met them. You can also apply another tag that adds them to an automated email campaign.
Related: How to manually tag an individual subscriber
Let’s say you want to launch a new automated email campaign to subscribers who are already on your list. You can create the campaign and set it to launch for subscribers with a certain tag. Then, identify which subscribers you’d like to add to the campaign, and apply a tag to them all at once.
Or, let’s say you’re launching a new course and want to promote it to subscribers who have expressed interest in the course topic in the past. You can search for those subscribers and bulk apply a tag to them. henThen, create a segment of subscribers with this tag and send a one-time email to them that promotes your new course.
Related: How to manually tag a group of subscribers
Using tags to organize your subscribers enables you to provide a more personalized experience for your subscribers and increase your engagement.
Not an AWeber customer yet? Start your free 30-day trial today and try AWeber’s tags today.
The post 23 Ways to Tag and Segment Your Subscribers in AWeber appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?
Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.
For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…
but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.
That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business.
(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)
Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.
To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:
Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.
Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!
When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.
Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:
Social + sales
“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”
When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.
With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.
At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.
One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.
You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.
Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?
Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?
Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?
This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.
To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.
For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.
Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.
(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)
You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.
Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.
Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.
This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:
For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.
Give yourself an advantage today.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore new management tools for Facebook Groups admins and moderators and how they can leverage the growth of […]
The post New Facebook Group Tools: What Group Admins Need to Know appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
* Please read the whole post, I have some good news at the bottom, but it won’t make sense unless you read the whole post.
Do you know why I got into SEO?
Not many people know this, but I grew up in middle-class America, and I wanted a better life for me and my parents.
When I was 16 years old, I worked at a theme park called Knotts Berry Farm where I picked up trash, cleaned restrooms, and swept up vomit every single day.
I didn’t mind it because that’s life and I needed the money.
At 16, I realized I was too young to get a high paying job, so I did the next best thing… I started a business.
But making $5.75 an hour picking up trash wasn’t enough to market my business, though. The only solution that I could think of was SEO because if you put in the time and effort you can get the traffic for free.
It’s also the main reason I fell in love with it… it
gives the little guy a chance to compete with the big guys.
And over the years I wanted to pay it forward and help out all of the entrepreneurs and small companies so they can do the same… succeed without having to spend a lot of money.
Well over the years, I’ve produced a ton of free content, videos, and guides that help entrepreneurs and marketers of all sizes succeed.
And in February 2017, I decided to take it to the next level by acquiring Ubersuggest for $120,000.
When I first bought it, I had the dream of creating an SEO tool that could compete with the big players that charged $100+ a month, but of course, offer it for free.
The developers that I had at that time estimated that I could do this for $30,000 to $45,000 a month. That was perfect as I had no issue losing that much money each month.
But as we got rolling and kept adding in more features, our
expenses continually climbed. Just look at what I spent in the last month…
I spent $89,930 on hosting so far in January with an estimated spend of $128,680 for February. But again, let’s stick with January…
My back-end development bill from Tryolabs was $47,885 for January.
My data feed from SEO Power Suite, Data For SEO, and Shared Count totaled $75,253 for January.
And of course, my front-end developers as well as my dev-ops team Netlabs, which ran me $22,700.
Then if you add on miscellaneous costs, such as support, design, and project management, I was out another $11,450.
All in all, I spent $247,218 during the month of January 2020.
Keep in mind that my costs are continually rising. As the tool gets more popular, it costs me more.
One of the big reasons for the server expenses is scrapers.
Believe it or not, a lot of companies are scraping our data and continually rotating up IPs and creating fake accounts, which increases our server expenses. Especially when you consider that they are researching vague SEO terms or domains that aren’t cached in our system.
Now the purpose of this post wasn’t to make you feel bad or guilty (unless you are scraping me). I just wanted to be transparent about my situation.
Originally, I was hoping that I could convert a portion of the Ubersuggest customer base into agency clients but as we continually move upstream and work with bigger brands, the conversion rate from an Ubersuggest visitor to a paying consulting customer has been low.
As that didn’t work out the way I wanted, which I learned around 11 months ago, it became harder and harder for me to eat the costs as they continually grew and I didn’t have a way to pay for them other than to dip into my own savings.
So, I started searching for solutions, such as turning
Ubersuggest into a non-profit and raise money from foundations to help support
the cost. I tried that for 5 months and I didn’t gain much traction.
I also tried to see if I could get sponsors for the tool who would help cover the costs, but that didn’t work out well either. Instead, many of them offered to buy the company for millions of dollars (some in the 8 figures) but I didn’t want to sell it as I knew their goal would be to turn it into another $100-a-month tool, which didn’t sit well with me.
After running out of options, I had no choice but to make some changes to Ubersuggest (don’t worry it is not closing down). But you can guess what the changes are.
First and foremost, my goal is still to give as much away for free as I can. Within Ubersuggest, you will still be able to do a lot for free…
You will always be able to create projects and track your rankings. And just like before you always have been limited on the number of keywords you can track and that, of course, is due to costs.
Within the app, you will still be able to see keyword research data.
You’ll see a chart with the latest few months’ traffic volume, data on mobile versus desktop search volume, demographic data, and even keyword recommendations.
And you can, of course, continually find new keywords to target.
Sure, some of the data is blocked, but did you know that
only 14.3% of people used to register for a free account to unlock that data.
In other words, most of you never even registered because the application shows you enough for free without needing to log in.
Similar to before, you can also see popular blog post suggestions for any given keyword.
You’ll also be able to see the top keywords a blog post
ranks for and the backlinks pointing to that URL.
Again, keep in mind the majority of you only looked at the
top 10 results as 14.3% of you registered for a free account to unlock more
data.
You will still be able to look up any domain and get stats
on it.
Historical data is blocked, but you can see the last few
months which is enough for most of you.
You’ll also be able to see the top pages for any domain and the keywords that page ranks for as well as backlinks.
The same goes for the keywords any domain ranks for.
Some of the data is blocked, but just like before only 14.3%
of you registered to view that data. Which means 85.7% of you are happy with
the free data.
Not much has changed here, you can still analyze over 100 pages on your site and figure out which errors you have.
Here’s an interesting fact: Did you know the average site that goes through Ubersuggest only has 48 pages?
The median number of pages a site has in our system was similar at 43 pages.
And of course, there is the backlinks report, which now
shows new and lost links as well as historical link growth.
Similar to what I mentioned above, very few people really cared to see the blocked off information as only 14.3% of you registered.
My goal in life is to help people generate more traffic. And I believe Ubersuggest can get better results and give you a fighting chance.
I also want to continually make the tool better. For example, why can’t SEO be automated? If you can have self-driving cars, there is no reason why you can’t automate SEO through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
But with the rising expenses, I was left with 2 options… either shut the tool down (which isn’t an option for me) or figure out a way to cover my expenses.
In the long run, I can’t keep sustaining the loss of $247,218 a month forever, especially when that number is climbing (that’s roughly 3 million dollars a year).
My team and I came up with an interesting concept that we think is fair and hopefully, you won’t be upset about it.
Remember how I said only 14.3% of people register to view more data but 85.7% never register as they were happy with the free data?
Well, nothing will change for 85.7% of you.
As for the 14.3% who register to create projects and track keywords, you can still do that for free. But if you want to add more projects or track a lot more keywords, you can upgrade to a paid plan.
The same goes for keyword research. If you want to view even more data, you can pay for the blocked data. Or if you want to analyze thousands of pages on your site through the site audit, you can also upgrade.
Don’t worry though, I am still following my original
mission.
I promise to always keep Ubersuggest affordable (and mainly free). I decided to take the Netflix/Amazon approach and try to make the cost super affordable (as my goal is to only break-even).
On top of that, I made it a 7-day free trial.
You’ll also find that the pricing varies per country as my costs vary per country. In regions like India and Brazil when someone registers, creates a project and tracks keywords, my expenses are substantially lower than if someone from the United States registers and creates projects and tracks keywords.
The same goes for labor. My support team in India and other regions costs substantially less than the team in the United States or the United Kingdom.
If you also pay annually, you’ll get 2 months free so you can save even more money.
And as I mentioned above, I want to stick to the original mission, which is to help people generate more traffic without having to spend a lot of money.
There will always be a very generous free plan and I am hoping that I can break even by charging for a portion of the application.
Ubersuggest is going to continually get better.
To make things up to you, over the next month or two I am going to release a Chrome extension that will give you tons of insights for free. And of course, if you want a little bit more you can pay.
Here’s what the free extension will look like…
Whenever you perform a Google search you will be able to see
the volume for any search term in any major country. And if you click the “view
all” link you will see more data on that keyword.
You’ll also see the average domain score for any given
ranking page and the number of links you need to rank in the top 10.
As you scroll down and go through each of the ranking
results, you’ll see the domain score for each URL, social shares, and the
backlinks pointing to that search result.
You can even drill down and see the top links pointing to
each URL.
Now if you head over to the sidebar, you’ll see a list of
related keywords as well as data on the top 10 keyword recommendations.
If you scroll a bit more, you’ll see a graph that shows how many backlinks each result has so that way you can see how many backlinks again you roughly need to rank in the top 10.
At the very bottom of the search results, you’ll see data on related keywords.
As time goes on not only will you have the extension, but I
will continually add more and more features for free.
I’m sorry that I have to start covering my costs, but I hope
you understand at the same time.
From my projections, it will take me roughly 6 months to break even, so I am going to be out a decent amount of money over the next 6 months… but that’s life.
I am not looking to recuperate my original investment and I don’t mind that being a loss, but once I break even on a monthly basis I will continue to either open up more stuff for free or consider lowering the monthly pricing if possible.
Again, I am really sorry, but I hope you understand that it isn’t sustainable for me to spend $247,218 a month indefinitely.
I am open to hearing your thoughts or ideas. I also want to let you know I appreciate everything you have done to support Ubersuggest and my site.
The post The Future of Ubersuggest appeared first on Neil Patel.
Ever seen the movie The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook?
In the movie, people kept saying “he’s wired in” or “they’re wired in” over and over again in reference to people coding intensely with their headphones on.
Not knowing anything about programming, I always imagined that being “wired in” meant the programmers were somehow listening to the computers, or that they were connected to the code somehow … or something weird that us non-programmers would never understand.
Turns out it just meant they were concentrating really hard with headphones on. Well, good thing I never hypothesized out loud.
We all misinterpret some of the techy terms floating around web and product design nowadays — but now more than ever, marketers need to be familiar with this vocabulary so we can communicate better with our IT, web design, or product development departments.
To help bridge the gap, here are 45 techy terms every marketer (and human) should understand.
(For a few of these, we drew on these 60 marketing acronyms every industry pro should know.)
A permanent redirect from one URL to another — usually from a company’s old website to their new website. They’re also used to redirect web traffic from those old web pages to the new ones that have replaced them.
Web visitors see 404 error pages when they try to reach a web page that doesn’t exist. This usually happens when the web page has been deleted or the visitor mistyped the URL. Check out HubSpot’s 404 page here.
“Alternative text,” or “alt text.” The text associated with an image. It’s usually the file name of that image, but alt text can be customized using most content management systems (like HubSpot’s). When an image isn’t able to load in an email, website, or blog post, the alt text is displayed instead.
It’s important for all the images on your website to have alt text because it’s the only way search engines like Google can understand what an image is about, which helps you optimize your website for search. It also makes images accessible to the blind because screen readers can read aloud the alt text.
“Application programming interface.” A computer programming term meaning a series of rules. APIs allow an application to extract information from a service and use that information in their own application, or sometimes for data analysis. It’s kind of like a phone for applications to have conversations — an API literally “calls” one application and gets information to bring to you to use in your software. APIs facilitate the data needed to provide solutions to customer problems.
HubSpot has APIs that developers use to get information from our software into theirs. It’s important for marketers to understand what APIs can do to factor them in to their marketing strategies. Learn more about how marketers can use APIs here.
Amazon Web Services is a service that helps web developers and ecommerce owners in developing certain shopping-related features of their websites.
The appliance or instrument through which a browser saves the data needed to see a website, like images and HTML. When you revisit a web page, it’ll take less time to load than the first time you visited it because a cached version of the page was already saved the first time you were there. Because you have a cached version of the page, your browser doesn’t need to send a new request to see that page. Learn more about browser caches here.
“Cached out” can also be slang for really, really tired.
In simple terms, blockchain is a ledger system that uses an open, distributed record to keep track of transactions — transactions could mean cryptocurrencies, medical information, voting or home records, and more.
When people add products to online shopping carts but don’t check out and actually purchase those products. According to Fireclick, 62.30% is the average online cart abandonment rate. It’s a common problem for many ecommerce stores. Learn 8 reasons for cart abandonment and how to combat it here.
“Content delivery network” or “content distribution network.” A system of servers on the internet that provides content rapidly to multiple users by duplicating the content on multiple servers and directing the content to users based on proximity. CDNs enable better performance and availability — plus, they offload traffic served directly from the content provider’s website. They’re especially good for streaming audio, video, and internet television programming.
To give you a better idea of how the system works, CDN operators get paid by content providers (like media companies and ecommerce vendors) to deliver their content to end users. In turn, CDNs pay ISPs (internet service providers), carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers.
A small file that a web server automatically sends to your personal computer when you browse certain websites. The identifying information they contain includes login credentials (including usernames and passwords), shopping cart information, and preferences. They’re stored as text files on your hard drive so servers can access them when you return to websites you’ve visited before.
Ever made a return visit to a website like Amazon and seen content tailored to your user preferences? That’s because on your first visit, a cookie was installed. When you came back, the website server read your cookie and recognized you.
Learn more about how marketers can use cookies here.
A CMS, or content management system, is a platform that allows less-techy people to build websites and content from professionally designed templates. More tech-savvy users can often further customize these templates or website themes with HTML edits or plug-ins, which you’ll learn more about on this list. Notable examples of CMSs include WordPress and WIx.
“Cascading style sheets.” A language that manages the design and presentation of web pages: color, look, feel, and so on. It works together with HTML (see HTML), which handles the content of web pages. “HTML is the skeleton of your web pages, while CSS is the clothing,” as one of our colleagues says.
With CSS, you can create rules to tell your website how you want it to display information. And you can keep the commands for the style stuff — fonts, colors, and so on — separate from the commands for the content. They’re called “cascading” because you can have multiple style sheets, with one style sheet inheriting properties (or “cascading”) from others. Learn more here.
A plan that helps an organization prepare in the event that its website goes down or something happens to the webmaster. These disasters could be hard drive failure, hackers, and so on.
Disaster recovery plans include recording important website information, performing and saving regular backups of your website, determining an implementation plan for recovering your website should anything happen, and keeping an extra copy of your website data in a safe place.
“Domain name server.” Servers that translates web addresses into one or more IP addresses. This is why you can enter HubSpot.com instead of having to remember our IP address.
“Denial-of-service” or “distributed denial-of-service” attack. An attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. DoS threats usually target websites or services hosted on high-profile web servers like banks and credit card payment gateways, but they’re also common in business in the form of website attacks.
For example, one common type of attack on businesses would be attempting a service overload — i.e. flooding a network with so much information that it either can’t respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly that it’s basically useless.
Sadly, there isn’t much you can do to avoid being a victim of a DoS attack except securing passwords and installing anti-virus software and a firewall. Signs of an attack are unusually slow network performance, unavailability of a website, or the inability to access a website. Contact your IT team if you sense something’s off.
The web servers where website files are housed, served, and maintained.
“Hyper-text markup language.” The language used to direct the architecture of your website, landing pages, and emails. HTML lays out the structure of your website, from the title and first header, to a bulleted list, to your footer. Remember, “HTML is the skeleton of your web pages, while CSS is the clothing.” Learn more here.
GUI stands for “graphical user interface,” known also as simply “interface.” An interface is the part of a piece of software that the end user actually sees and interacts with.
IPaaS, which stands for Integrated Platform as a Service, is a cloud-based platform that connects various applications, systems, and technologies within the cloud or on-premise. It allows for the deployment and maintenance of integration flows without the need for hardware or middleware either within an organization or between an organization and third-party software.
“Internet Protocol address.” A numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.
“Internet service provider.” An organization (commercial, community-owned, nonprofit, or otherwise privately owned) that provides internet services.
A computer programming language used to create interactive effects within web browsers. For example, it allows you to perform calculations, write interactive games, add special effects, check forms, create security passwords, customize graphics, and so on. It has become the standard equipment in virtually all web browsers and is well-suited to a large range of non-web-related applications.
Mimification involves going into a web page or piece of content and pulling out all of the useless or excess code or spaces. This can help to increase page load speeds which can also boost your Google SEO.
Machine Learning is an artificial intelligence technique where algorithms are trained to recognize patterns and respond to them by performing tasks. For example, a customer service bot for a travel site might be trained to send you deals related to Bermuda if it recognizes the words, “beach vacation” or “Bermuda.”
NLP, or natural language processing, is when machine-learning algorithms are trained to comprehend large amounts of human language and respond to those commands. You might hear about this machine learning technique most when you are reading about voice assistant products that can respond to multiple spoken commands at once, like Amazon’s Echo.
You’ve probably seen those super-cool scrolling website designs like this one from Wildlife, this one from Bagigia, or this one from Honda? That’s parallax — a web design that takes a visual storytelling approach to guiding visitors through a website, and brings user experience to a new, interactive level.
Pixels from external ad networks work similarly to the HubSpot tracking code. Once installed on your site, the pixel detects visits to your pages. This data is the basis for creating ad audiences. These ad audiences to target ads can be used to target your ads at specific visitors. Pixels also collect data that can help optimize ads and measure your ads’ results.
A software extension that adds a specific feature to an existing software application. You’ve probably heard of plugins in the context of web browsers to add new features like virus scanners, for example. Ever enabled Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight QuickTime Player on your internet browser? Yup — those are plugins.
A company that registers domain names, like GoDaddy.
The method of designing web pages that automatically appear in their optimized form on all devices. In other words, responsive design automatically reformats your website for all screen sizes so your website visitors can easily interact with your site no matter what device they’re using. Due to the rapid increase in mobile usage in recent years, responsive design has become somewhat of a necessity.
Here’s how responsive design gets you more from your website.
“Rich site summary feed.” A web feed that publishes frequently updated information like blog posts and news stories. They let publishers syndicate data automatically, which is why they’re sometimes known as “really simple syndication.” When you subscribe to a website’s RSS, you no longer need to check their website for new content — instead, your browser will automatically monitor the site and give you timely updates.
SaaS stands for “Service as a Software.” This acronym categorizes platforms that help professionals and B2B employees with daily tasks or other aspects of their own job. Examples of SaaS platforms are HubSpot, Slack, and DocuSign.
A place to run a program for testing and experimenting in software development. Basically, it’s a testing environment that isolates untested code changes and experimentation. This isolation protects live servers and their data from changes that could be damaging.
A framework for managing product development used in agile software development. In Scrum, projects are divided into succinct work cadences known as “sprints,” which are usually one, two, or three weeks long. At the end of each sprint, the team meets to assess their progress and plan the next sprint. One key to Scrum’s popularity and success is that it has a simple set of roles, responsibilities, and meetings that never change. Learn more about Scrum here.
In computer science, a session is a dialogue, conversation, or meeting between two or more communicating devices, or between a computer and a user (like a login session). It typically involves saving information about the session history in order to be able to communicate.
SEO or search engine optimization is a strategy that optimizes your site and content so it can easily be found and promoted on online search engines.
Slang for anything that could stop the launch of a new product, like a bug.
Site maps show a hierarchical view of a website’s pages and content. It helps website designers figure out what content is needed on a website before they begin designing it. Site maps can also be web pages that offer links to all of the pages on a website.
“User interface.” A type of interface that allows users to control a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience by allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in an intuitive way. It includes a menu bar, toolbar, windows, buttons, and so on. Learn how to create a user-friendly website registration process here.
A UTM is a code that shows up in a tracking URL that allows a website, such as HubSpot to track views from a specific source, such as a social post or promotional email. Learn how to create and track UTMs and tracking URLs here.
“Uniform resource locator.” Also known as a web address, a URL is a specific character string that refers to a resource. It’s displayed on the top of a web browser inside an “address” bar. Learn how to optimize your URLs for search here.
The overall “user experience” a customer has with a particular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and even advocacy of that brand. To deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better, think about being the customer. Learn more here.
A computer graphics term to describe the use of “geometrical primitive objects” like points, lines, curves, and shapes to represent images. Here’s an example of a real phone that has been “vectorized.”
A sequential design process often used in software development processes, where progress is seen as “flowing” steadily downward through the phases of conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, production/implementation, and maintenance.
The point of waterfall development is to spend more time in the early stages of the software production cycle because catching bugs and other issues early on is cheaper and easier to fix than catching them later.
The ability for your website to be accessed by people with different physical and mental abilities, age, location, and so on. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes access to the web as a basic human right.
Properly designed websites and web tools can be used by people with disabilities. Here are a few examples from W3C of things to include on your website to make them accessible to people with disabilities:
Working with headphones on, indicating you don’t want to be disturbed. When programmers write code, sometimes they’ll plug in earphones to isolate themselves from the outside world so they can be totally focused on coding.
Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in July 2014, but was updated in November 2019 for comprehensiveness.
* Please read the whole post, I have some good news at the bottom, but it won’t make sense unless you read the whole post.
Do you know why I got into SEO?
Not many people know this, but I grew up in middle-class America, and I wanted a better life for me and my parents.
When I was 16 years old, I worked at a theme park called Knotts Berry Farm where I picked up trash, cleaned restrooms, and swept up vomit every single day.
I didn’t mind it because that’s life and I needed the money.
At 16, I realized I was too young to get a high paying job, so I did the next best thing… I started a business.
But making $5.75 an hour picking up trash wasn’t enough to market my business, though. The only solution that I could think of was SEO because if you put in the time and effort you can get the traffic for free.
It’s also the main reason I fell in love with it… it
gives the little guy a chance to compete with the big guys.
And over the years I wanted to pay it forward and help out all of the entrepreneurs and small companies so they can do the same… succeed without having to spend a lot of money.
Well over the years, I’ve produced a ton of free content, videos, and guides that help entrepreneurs and marketers of all sizes succeed.
And in February 2017, I decided to take it to the next level by acquiring Ubersuggest for $120,000.
When I first bought it, I had the dream of creating an SEO tool that could compete with the big players that charged $100+ a month, but of course, offer it for free.
The developers that I had at that time estimated that I could do this for $30,000 to $45,000 a month. That was perfect as I had no issue losing that much money each month.
But as we got rolling and kept adding in more features, our
expenses continually climbed. Just look at what I spent in the last month…
I spent $89,930 on hosting so far in January with an estimated spend of $128,680 for February. But again, let’s stick with January…
My back-end development bill from Tryolabs was $47,885 for January.
My data feed from SEO Power Suite, Data For SEO, and Shared Count totaled $75,253 for January.
And of course, my front-end developers as well as my dev-ops team Netlabs, which ran me $22,700.
Then if you add on miscellaneous costs, such as support, design, and project management, I was out another $11,450.
All in all, I spent $247,218 during the month of January 2020.
Keep in mind that my costs are continually rising. As the tool gets more popular, it costs me more.
One of the big reasons for the server expenses is scrapers.
Believe it or not, a lot of companies are scraping our data and continually rotating up IPs and creating fake accounts, which increases our server expenses. Especially when you consider that they are researching vague SEO terms or domains that aren’t cached in our system.
Now the purpose of this post wasn’t to make you feel bad or guilty (unless you are scraping me). I just wanted to be transparent about my situation.
Originally, I was hoping that I could convert a portion of the Ubersuggest customer base into agency clients but as we continually move upstream and work with bigger brands, the conversion rate from an Ubersuggest visitor to a paying consulting customer has been low.
As that didn’t work out the way I wanted, which I learned around 11 months ago, it became harder and harder for me to eat the costs as they continually grew and I didn’t have a way to pay for them other than to dip into my own savings.
So, I started searching for solutions, such as turning
Ubersuggest into a non-profit and raise money from foundations to help support
the cost. I tried that for 5 months and I didn’t gain much traction.
I also tried to see if I could get sponsors for the tool who would help cover the costs, but that didn’t work out well either. Instead, many of them offered to buy the company for millions of dollars (some in the 8 figures) but I didn’t want to sell it as I knew their goal would be to turn it into another $100-a-month tool, which didn’t sit well with me.
After running out of options, I had no choice but to make some changes to Ubersuggest (don’t worry it is not closing down). But you can guess what the changes are.
First and foremost, my goal is still to give as much away for free as I can. Within Ubersuggest, you will still be able to do a lot for free…
You will always be able to create projects and track your rankings. And just like before you always have been limited on the number of keywords you can track and that, of course, is due to costs.
Within the app, you will still be able to see keyword research data.
You’ll see a chart with the latest few months’ traffic volume, data on mobile versus desktop search volume, demographic data, and even keyword recommendations.
And you can, of course, continually find new keywords to target.
Sure, some of the data is blocked, but did you know that
only 14.3% of people used to register for a free account to unlock that data.
In other words, most of you never even registered because the application shows you enough for free without needing to log in.
Similar to before, you can also see popular blog post suggestions for any given keyword.
You’ll also be able to see the top keywords a blog post
ranks for and the backlinks pointing to that URL.
Again, keep in mind the majority of you only looked at the
top 10 results as 14.3% of you registered for a free account to unlock more
data.
You will still be able to look up any domain and get stats
on it.
Historical data is blocked, but you can see the last few
months which is enough for most of you.
You’ll also be able to see the top pages for any domain and the keywords that page ranks for as well as backlinks.
The same goes for the keywords any domain ranks for.
Some of the data is blocked, but just like before only 14.3%
of you registered to view that data. Which means 85.7% of you are happy with
the free data.
Not much has changed here, you can still analyze over 100 pages on your site and figure out which errors you have.
Here’s an interesting fact: Did you know the average site that goes through Ubersuggest only has 48 pages?
The median number of pages a site has in our system was similar at 43 pages.
And of course, there is the backlinks report, which now
shows new and lost links as well as historical link growth.
Similar to what I mentioned above, very few people really cared to see the blocked off information as only 14.3% of you registered.
My goal in life is to help people generate more traffic. And I believe Ubersuggest can get better results and give you a fighting chance.
I also want to continually make the tool better. For example, why can’t SEO be automated? If you can have self-driving cars, there is no reason why you can’t automate SEO through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
But with the rising expenses, I was left with 2 options… either shut the tool down (which isn’t an option for me) or figure out a way to cover my expenses.
In the long run, I can’t keep sustaining the loss of $247,218 a month forever, especially when that number is climbing (that’s roughly 3 million dollars a year).
My team and I came up with an interesting concept that we think is fair and hopefully, you won’t be upset about it.
Remember how I said only 14.3% of people register to view more data but 85.7% never register as they were happy with the free data?
Well, nothing will change for 85.7% of you.
As for the 14.3% who register to create projects and track keywords, you can still do that for free. But if you want to add more projects or track a lot more keywords, you can upgrade to a paid plan.
The same goes for keyword research. If you want to view even more data, you can pay for the blocked data. Or if you want to analyze thousands of pages on your site through the site audit, you can also upgrade.
Don’t worry though, I am still following my original
mission.
I promise to always keep Ubersuggest affordable (and mainly free). I decided to take the Netflix/Amazon approach and try to make the cost super affordable (as my goal is to only break-even).
On top of that, I made it a 7-day free trial.
You’ll also find that the pricing varies per country as my costs vary per country. In regions like India and Brazil when someone registers, creates a project and tracks keywords, my expenses are substantially lower than if someone from the United States registers and creates projects and tracks keywords.
The same goes for labor. My support team in India and other regions costs substantially less than the team in the United States or the United Kingdom.
If you also pay annually, you’ll get 2 months free so you can save even more money.
And as I mentioned above, I want to stick to the original mission, which is to help people generate more traffic without having to spend a lot of money.
There will always be a very generous free plan and I am hoping that I can break even by charging for a portion of the application.
Ubersuggest is going to continually get better.
To make things up to you, over the next month or two I am going to release a Chrome extension that will give you tons of insights for free. And of course, if you want a little bit more you can pay.
Here’s what the free extension will look like…
Whenever you perform a Google search you will be able to see
the volume for any search term in any major country. And if you click the “view
all” link you will see more data on that keyword.
You’ll also see the average domain score for any given
ranking page and the number of links you need to rank in the top 10.
As you scroll down and go through each of the ranking
results, you’ll see the domain score for each URL, social shares, and the
backlinks pointing to that search result.
You can even drill down and see the top links pointing to
each URL.
Now if you head over to the sidebar, you’ll see a list of
related keywords as well as data on the top 10 keyword recommendations.
If you scroll a bit more, you’ll see a graph that shows how many backlinks each result has so that way you can see how many backlinks again you roughly need to rank in the top 10.
At the very bottom of the search results, you’ll see data on related keywords.
As time goes on not only will you have the extension, but I
will continually add more and more features for free.
I’m sorry that I have to start covering my costs, but I hope
you understand at the same time.
From my projections, it will take me roughly 6 months to break even, so I am going to be out a decent amount of money over the next 6 months… but that’s life.
I am not looking to recuperate my original investment and I don’t mind that being a loss, but once I break even on a monthly basis I will continue to either open up more stuff for free or consider lowering the monthly pricing if possible.
Again, I am really sorry, but I hope you understand that it isn’t sustainable for me to spend $247,218 a month indefinitely.
I am open to hearing your thoughts or ideas. I also want to let you know I appreciate everything you have done to support Ubersuggest and my site.
The post The Future of Ubersuggest appeared first on Neil Patel.
