How to Sex Up Your Google Search Results With Authorship Info via Hubspot

Posted by Pamela Vaughan

Wed, Oct 24, 2012 @ 08:00 AM

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Have you ever been cruising through Google's search engine results pages to find that certain results are paired with a thumbnail-sized profile picture of the content's author? Ever wonder how you could make it so your picture accompanies listings for the content you've authored? Then boy is this post for you!
Through Google Authorship, Google allows you to associate the content you've published with your Google+ profile, pulling your profile image and other information into the search engine results for the content you author. The catch? While the process for applying is relatively simple, there seems to be no clear rhyme or reason to whose authorship requests Google chooses to approve. That being said, the application process is easy enough that it's worth applying. In this post, we'll cover exactly why this new feature is beneficial to marketers, explain the simplest way to apply, and disclose some Google-related nuances you should know before embarking on the application process.

Why Apply for Authorship?

In a nutshell, having authorship benefits makes your search engine listings sexier -- in addition to giving them a heightened sense of credibility, professionalism, and transparency. Let's take a closer look at the screenshot shown at the top of this post, picturing a particular search engine results page (SERP):



Ask yourself -- which results stand out? Probably the two with accompanying author images, right? And if your eyes did gravitate toward those two listings, it's pretty easy to understand the benefits. In addition, listings with author images and information attached will likely benefit from a perception of credibility and appease any suspicions of spammy content.
Those two listings aren't at the top of this particular SERP either. This means Authorship could give your content a much better fighting chance against other results that might organically rank higher. This is particularly noteworthy considering not many users have taken the opportunity to apply for Authorship, making it well worth it to apply sooner rather than later when, well ... everybody's doing it.
And while there haven't been any data-driven reports to surface on the benefits of Authorship yet, we've anecdotally seen a noticeable improvement in the ranking of HubSpot's content that has been associated with our various authors. In other words, it's very possible that Google is rewarding Authorship users with improved search engine rankings. If you're a content creator, that's not a bad perk, huh?
Finally, achieving authorship status also entitles you to even more data and statistics about the performance of individual authors' content in search results. You can read more about that from Google here.

How to Apply for Google+ Authorship

Convinced it's worth taking a few minutes out of your day to apply for Authorship? Here's how to do it:

1. Make sure your Google+ profile page has a profile photo that is a recognizable headshot.
2. Make sure you have an email address (for example, jdoe@hubspot.com) on the same domain as your content (hubspot.com). If you don't have an email address on the same domain, Google has an alternative method for linking your content to your Google+ profile. Learn how here.
3. In the "About" section of your Google+ profile, add that email address so it's easier for Google to associate your Google+ account with your domain.
4. In addition, make sure each article you publish on that domain has a clear byline identifying you as the author (for example, "By John Doe" or "Author: John Doe").
5. Furthermore, make sure that byline name matches the name on your Google+ profile.
6. Visit Google's Authorship page, and submit your email address to Google. Regardless of how many articles you publish on this domain, you'll only need to go through this process once. 
7. In the "About" section of your Google+ profile, make sure the profile discovery box, "Help others discover my profile in search" is checked.

Once Google approves your Authorship request, your Google+ profile will update with the domain on which you're a content contributor in the "Contributor to" section of your Google+ profile (as pictured below). By default, it will also automatically make your email address visible to the public. If you want to keep your email address private on your page, you can change its visibility here.



You may also receive an email confirmation from Google once your request for Authorship has been approved. It took about six days for Google to confirm my Authorship request.



That being said, it took longer for other members of HubSpot's marketing team to receive Authorship status, and some still have yet to be approved, so it's hard to know how Google is prioritizing approvals. And as we mentioned before, according to Google's Authorship information page, "Google doesn't guarantee to show author information in Google Web Search or Google News results," which explains why some of our authors haven't yet been approved.
If Google does grant your Authorship request, you'll start noticing that the search engine listings for content you've authored will start to be accompanied by your Google+ profile image, as in the example below:



Furthermore, you'll notice that the "by [author name]" link called out above in red sends people to your Google+ profile page, and the "more by [author name]" link called out in blue directs visitors to a more detailed page that lists the various indexed content authored by you, as you can see in the example below:



Remember -- if your website/blog has multiple contributors, it would behoove you to encourage your various authors to apply for Authorship. This way, even more of the search engine listings for your website's content will be associated with its individual author.

Some Notes About Google's Nuances

Many of you are probably aware of Google's various little nuances, and those of you out there who have ever undergone a name change (myself included) -- or whose business uses Gmail for its employees' corporate email accounts (again, myself included) -- are probably all too familiar with the headaches involved in linking and merging multiple Google accounts. Be mindful that if you do suffer from the unfortunate problem of multiple accounts (in addition to content that has been published under different names), Google doesn't exactly make it very easy to sync the Authorship of all your articles to one single Google+ account.
While Google has released a tool that enables you to transfer connections from one Google+ account to another and set it as the default destination, Google mentions that Authorship information and Google+ business pages that you manage with your source account will not get transferred to the destination account. In fact, I've personally come to refer to this particular scenario as "Multiple Google Account Hell." My recommendation is to try to connect your Authorship with the Google+ account on which you have the most connections ... and to cross your fingers that Google improves and streamlines this process in the future.
Furthermore, while this post explains the simplest way of applying for Authorship, there are other routes you can take. In fact, the folks over at Search Engine Land were kind enough to publish an extremely comprehensive and technical article about those other options here.

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The Steps You Need to Define the Stages of Your Sales & Marketing Funnel by Hubspot

Often, one of the biggest blockers for sales and marketing alignment is the very different views each team has of the funnel. For example, they might disagree about the number of stages a lead passes through before becoming a customer. Furthermore, they often use different terminology to describe those stages. But in order to adopt an effective SMarketing (get it?) strategy, sales and marketing must have a unified picture of the funnel and standard definitions of each stage in the process. For example, HubSpot’s SMarketing team uses the following funnel stages:


But that's just our funnel ... what does yours look like? And how exactly can you make sure both teams are aligned in their definition of the funnel? Follow these steps to help define the stages of your funnel that both Sales and Marketing can agree upon and collaborate around.

Step 1: Understand Lead Quality

Focus on the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). This is the crucial handoff point between marketing and sales, so it’s essential that the teams agree on the terminology. Every company’s definition of an MQL will vary, but it should reflect a combination of traits and actions that indicate a lead is both a good fit for your company and ready to talk to a salesperson. Here’s one way to examine your funnel to assess lead quality and determine whether a lead is ready for sales follow-up:

Aspects of Lead Qualification

Is the lead a good fit?

Your company might target financial services companies with 5,000 or more employees, or small service businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Or, you may be only interested in manufacturing companies of a certain size. Within those categories, you also might identify individual lead profiles, such as title or job description and role in the decision-making process -- e.g., economic buyer, end user, influencer. How closely a lead aligns with your ideal customer profile will determine whether and when you hand it over to the sales team.

Is the lead interested?

A lead’s activity can reveal how close they are to a buying decision. For example, if a lead has only visited your website once, or has just begun following you on Twitter, they may be aware of your company but aren’t particularly engaged yet. A lead that requests a demo or views pricing information is showing a lot more interest.
Where a lead falls within the four quadrants of this matrix dictates the next step your marketing or sales team should take. For example:

• Good Fit & Interested: Leads in the upper right quadrant are a good fit for your company and are highly engaged with your marketing. These are hot leads that require immediate follow-up from your sales team -- usually in fewer than 24 hours.
• Good Fit But Less Interested: Leads in the upper left quadrant are a good fit for your company but don’t show a lot of interest yet. Perhaps they’ve only signed up for an email newsletter or downloaded one piece of educational content. These are leads that the marketing team needs to nurture.
• Lots of Interest, But Not a Good Fit: Leads in the lower right don’t necessarily fit your ideal customer profile, but are highly engaged with your brand. They might have subscribed to your blog and email newsletter, downloaded your ebooks, and attended your webinars. It’s worth having a sales rep do a low-cost follow-up with these fans to see if there’s an easy sale to make from a non-traditional customer. Sometimes leads that don’t seem like a fit have a good reason to buy your product. They can also turn into great evangelists for your products or services, thus providing you with indirect support as non-customers. That’s why you can’t automate the entire sales and marketing process. At some point, a good marketer or sales rep can spot an opportunity that your systems might overlook.
• Little Interest & No Fit: Leads in the lower left quadrant aren’t a good fit for your company and haven’t shown much interest in your marketing content. They’re definitely not worth a sales rep’s time. Don’t be afraid to take them out of your communication stream.

Step 2: Develop Your Definition of an MQL

Using this matrix as your guide, develop an MQL definition based on the combination of fit and interest that’s right for your company. Some marketers may focus more on fit because they have a tightly defined market; other marketers may have a broad customer base and focus more on interest level. That decision depends on your business model.
MQL definitions in those two cases might look like this:

1. A Focus on Fit: A contact with XYZ title or role who has filled out a landing page form and works at a financial services company in the U.S. with more than 5,000 employees.
2. A Focus on Interest Level: A contact with the ABC title or role who has requested a product demonstration from a sales rep and works at any U.S.-based company.

Whichever approach you chose, base your definitions on data -- not on gut instinct. Even experienced marketers and salespeople can be way off base in their assumptions about what makes a good lead.

Step 3: Implement Lead Scoring

Using a lead scoring or lead grading program that relies on data from your closed-loop analysis can help you determine the importance of different activities. Here is an example of what lead scoring can look like for you:

Here's how to implement a lead scoring system:

Examine Behavioral History

Examine the activity history of recent customers and analyze how many actions they took before becoming a customer -- i.e., the number of page views or number of conversions, such as downloading a report or registering for a webinar, etc.

Identify Patterns

Look for patters that indicate a lead’s likelihood of closing. For example, if a lead that downloads ten pieces of content from your website or visits your site more than 15 times in one month, she is more likely to close. Consider incorporating frequency measures into your MQL definition.

List Activities

Also, list all the activities that a lead can take before becoming a customer, and analyze the close rate for each one. For example, to determine the close rate for a webinar, look at all customers that had watched a webinar, then divide that number by the total number of leads that originally registered for the webinar. That gives you the close rate for leads from that
particular event.

Calculate Average Close Rates

Using the close rates for individual actions, calculate the average close rate for all your marketing activities. Then look for actions that have a significantly higher close rate. For example, if your average close rate is around 1%, you might find a handful of actions that
have a 3%-5% close rate. Add these top-closing events to your definition of an MQL. Any lead that engages in at least one of these activities, and is a good fit for your company, would be considered an MQL. Use those close rates to decide what score to give different activities in your lead scoring or lead grading system.

Step 4: Optimize the Stages of Your Sales Funnel

Now that you've identified the different stages of your sales funnel, it's important to optimize each of those stages on an ongoing basis. And that means continual analysis of key metrics at each stage of the funnel, such as:

• Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate
• Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate
• % Sales Accepted Leads
• Lead Work Rates
• MQL-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate
• Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Sales Cycle Length
• Average Cost Per Sale

You should be looking at these metrics all the time so you can assess whether you're slipping in any one area ... because you don't want to suffer a blip in your funnel. If your funnel develops a clog or hole somewhere along the way -- and it will, it's only natural -- you need to be able to identify it and fix it to keep your sales and marketing machine efficient. And if you are working with multiple different types of leads, these metrics should be considered for each segment of lead, too, so you know if some segments are more valuable to your business than others (or, even better, if some segments have more potential than you once realized)!

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Link Building by Hubspot's Pete Caputa

Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?

Posted by Pete Caputa

Tue, Sep 30, 2008 @ 08:15 AM

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In a recent blog post discussing the importance of link building for search engine optimization, I asked people to share how they build links to their website. I recommend you go read the responses. I also recommend you read that article so you know how to construct inbound links so your business can rank higher in search engines for your target keywords.
Link building is not easy. And it's not that intuitive until you do it. There are also many different techniques and methods that will have varied results. Below is how I recommend clients start and master link building.
I tell people that there are 4 Levels of Link Building Excellence. And it usually takes 4 years to master it - just like high school:

9th Grade: Links You Can Build Yourself That Require Little Time Investment

Before I get into this, I'd like to stress that you should have a really good keyword strategy and make sure you've optimized each page on your site around a different keyword phrase. Any link you're building should be designed to help a specific page rank high in the search engines for a specific keyword.
That said, the first set of links that every business should get are the ones that don't require anyone else's help. There are lots of business directories out there where you can just submit your URL, company name, and a description of your business. Some of them require approval. Some of them require a fee. Yahoo's directory, Joe Ant, Aboutus.org are some of the ones you should do right away.
In this class of Level I links, there are also many social media sites where you can simply build links to your site. Most of these no longer pass SEO credit, but they're still good links to get, assuming your target audience visits the site or these sites rank high for your keywords already.
It's arguable that you should hire someone to do (or start) this stuff for you. It's low level work that generates low level returns. Just make sure that you don't hire a firm that will get you 1,000 links for < $1,000 dollars. If it's too good to be true, it is.

10th Grade: Links You Build Yourself that Require Effort

Before I get into this level, I'd like to stress that launching a business blog should be done before doing this. Without having a blog on your site with lots of good, well-optimized content, you don't really have anything to link to.

That said, there are two very common link building techniques that work well that don't require you to be a "thought leader". Yet. These activities require a bit more time investment and a small financial investment. They are article marketing and press release optimization. With both of these methods, you have to create relevant content that will appeal to your market. So, it requires more time than Level I. Also, the process of getting your articles syndicated and your press releases submitted and picked up - takes effort. You might consider hiring a wired pr firm or a strong SEO firm to do some of this stuff for you.
If done correctly, both of these methods can significantly increase the links to your site. Also, if you write your articles and press releases with a keyword strategy in mind, and with links that support your keyword strategy, it can significantly increase your rankings for specific keyword terms. Run your press releases and your articles through press release grader to determine whether they're going to help.

11th Grade: Links You Network For that Require a Significant Time Investment

This part of link building is kind of like sales. Cold calling can be done effectively with persistence. But, networking, getting referrals, giving first, the law of attraction, etc is a better way of getting new clients.
Link building is the same way.  If you're more of a cold caller type, and there are lots of potential places you can get a link, you might consider just creating a list of webmasters and asking them for a link.
If you're a natural networker and you're in this for the long haul, I'd recommend being a bit more patient. Apply your persistence and spend your time building relationships.
No matter what route you take, the goal of this level is to make yourself visible among people interested in the same topics as you. This process is a bit self promotional. But, you must promote yourself in a way that you're adding value. You master this level by acting like a resource for people in your industry. How do you do this? It's all about networking and building meaningful relationships. The first step is reading other people's blogs. Then, commenting on them. Then, eventually starting a relationship where you're communicating 1-on-1 with them. I recommend you take the leap from reader to 1:1 with a blogger, by pointing them in the direction of other people's content that might be interesting to them.  In the non-marketing world, this usually happens through email. In the marketing world, this usually happens through Twitter. If you're techy, this might happen through Delicious. If you use StumbleUpon or Digg, those are great platforms to share things with peers. Even google reader lets you do this kind of networking. But, it can certainly happen through any social networking platform or system that enables 1:1 communication.
From a link building perspective, the ultimate goal of this level is to get invited to write a guest article for other people's blogs or website. For example, I wrote an article about inbound lead generation for Aaron Ross not too long ago. In the article, I linked to relevant resources on my blog and the HubSpot blog and site. These are great links from an authoritative  source. Aaron reaches our target market sending relevant traffic. These links also help us rank for our target keywords.
During this process, you're also building up a group of people that will most likely begin following you...

Seniors Rule! (12th Grade): Links Other People Give You Because You Create Remarkable Content. 

This level is like the last month or two in high school when you've already passed midterms and you've been accepted to the college of your choice. You've done the hard work already. Now, it's time to go to parties and enjoy being the carefree big man on campus.
You don't necessarily halt the activities above. But, you spend more of your time just creating remarkable content.  (And some link bait.)
At HubSpot, we do some guest articles once in a while and we optimize our press releases. But, mostly we just put time into churning out content on our blog and producing other online marketing resources like webinars and white papers. Some of you seem to think this stuff is pretty remarkable. As a result, it generally creates great conversations in our comments, strong attendance at our webinars and lots of white paper downloads. And regularly, people link to our webinar announcements and blog articles of their own accord.
This doesn't start happening overnight, unless you're already famous. We have a lot of advantages at HubSpot. Website Grader's success, funding in the bank, successful clients, smart founders who started blogging before they had a product and now... a lot of employees who contributor to the blog, a strong social media following, etc.
But, we did it in < 2 years. If you're a small business and you follow the path above, there's no reason why you can't stake your claim on the web. Link building is an important part of that. Hopefully, this post demystifies the process a bit and gives you a roadmap to get started.
The biggest mistake that newbie internet marketers make is thinking that creating great content on their blog will be all it takes to be successful internet marketers. My biggest frustration is when newbie bloggers pack up shop after just a month of writing because the blog doesn't have an immediate impact on their search traffic and lead volume.
At the end of the day, if you publish great content on the web AND connect, relate and build relationships with other humans, really good links will come naturally. Until then, put in some homework and earn your way through link building high school. 

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How Workflows Take Marketing Automation to the Next Level via Hubspot

Lead nurturing is a crucial part of any effective marketing strategy. Why? Because if you’re not managing your leads properly, you're wasting your time, marketing resources, and money.
Workflows take lead nurturing to the next level. As one of the most powerful tools available to marketers today, workflows enable you to build stronger relationships with your leads, send higher quality leads to your sales team, and save more of your time as a marketer.

So ... What Are Workflows, Exactly?

A workflow is series of automated actions that you can trigger to occur based on a person’s behaviors or contact information. Workflows go way beyond simple marketing automation, though. With workflows, you can send emails, update contact information, add or remove contacts from lists, and trigger email notifications.
So let’s say an existing lead downloads a piece of content from your site, and now you want to send this lead to your CRM system because it’s "sales ready." Based on what you know about the lead’s history, you want to increase their lead score because now they’re more qualified. With workflows, you can move them from a "lead" to an "opportunity" stage, and you can deliver a personalized call-to-action.

Your goal here is to waste less time, define the rules you want, and be able to automate it. Workflows make all that possible, and -- better yet -- they make it easy. With workflows, you can trigger actions based on any information you have about your leads, allowing you to send the right message to the right person at the right time. For instance, you can send a series of emails to:

• Leads who have viewed a certain page on your website
• Leads from companies with more than X employees
• Leads from companies in XYZ industry or XYZ location
• Leads with a specific website history like page views, clicks, downloads, etc.

3 Reasons You Should Be Using Workflows for Your Lead Nurturing

Workflows are one of the most powerful tools available to the modern marketer. Let's take a look at 3 of the reasons you should be using a workflows tool for easier and more effective lead management:

1) Workflows Help You Convert More Leads Into Customers

Workflows give you the opportunity to do extremely powerful segmentation. Being able to group your leads based on different properties and behaviors means that you can very closely target your emails and your nurturing process to their specific interests and needs.
Gone are the days of sending one big email to all of your leads and hoping it’s relevant enough for some of them to click through or engage with it. It’s time to start using smarter tools to send your leads what they’re looking for and make them sales ready faster.
According to a report released by Lenskold Group and The Pedowitz Group, 60% of survey respondents who use marketing automation say it has increased the quality of the leads that get passed to sales. Market2Lead also found that leads that go through automated workflows have a 23% shorter sales cycle. Imagine what your sales team could do with 23% more time!

2) You Can Customize the Content and Timing of Your Workflows

In addition to allowing you to send targeted content to various segments of your audience, workflows also let you set custom timing for your campaigns, so you can decide when each email or action should be triggered, down to the minute after the lead is entered into the campaign.
For example, if you have a handful of leads that are much closer to being ready to buy than
others, you can set up a workflow to send them three emails per week instead of one. If your leads who own small businesses respond better to emails sent on the weekends, you can set your workflow for these leads to only trigger emails to send on Saturdays and Sundays, and maybe just in the mornings.
You choose the times you want, and you put those times in the tool -- not your calendar.

3) Using Workflows Saves Time

Not only will workflows help you do smarter marketing, but they’ll also help you save time. Just set up your campaigns, and once they’re live, they’ll simply keep running with no active work required on your part. No need to be constantly sending a new batch of emails every time you add more leads to your list; these leads will be automatically added to your workflows, and you won’t have to do a thing.
And really, what marketer doesn't enjoy having more time back?

When Is the Right Time to Start Using Workflows?

More effective marketing? Saving time? Converting more of my leads to customers? Alright, you’ve got me hooked! But how do I know when it’s the right time to start using workflows in my marketing?
There’s no explicit answer for this, and it’s really up to you when you want to start integrating workflows into your marketing strategy, but we will offer you some indications that it’s time to think about getting started with workflows. If any of these are true of your marketing process, you should consider using a workflow tool (like HubSpot's!) to improve your lead nurturing and make your marketing more effective.

Indications It's Time to Use Workflows:

• You’re generating leads but ignoring the ones who are not yet ready to buy.
• Your sales team is unhappy with the quality of the leads you’re sending them.
• You’re sending the same emails to your entire list.
• You’re collecting valuable lead information, but not using it for segmentation.
• You’re not targeting your offers and messaging based on your leads’ needs.
• You’re sending or following up to all of your emails manually.
• You’re mass updating contact information manually.
• You want to convert more leads to customers with better lead nurturing.

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You probably know all too well by now that content creation is a very necessary function of successful inbound marketing. And for the inbound marketers who embrace that, a business blog is one of the most reliable and effective platforms for publishing much of the content they create.
But if you’ve been consistently blogging for a while, you probably have all the business blogging basics down pat. So wouldn’t it
be great if you could take your blogging to the next level, scaling the impact of your blog so it makes an even bigger, better, and more powerful dent in your marketing results? Enter the concept of 'blog marketing,' which refers to implementing a marketing strategy to grow and scale the impact of your blog. There are three critical steps to blog marketing: 1) getting your blog discovered by new visitors, 2) converting those visitors into dedicated subscribers, and 3) leveraging evangelists to share your content and attract brand new audiences.
So let's say you've worked through step 1, and you've got a good amount of blog traffic flowing. How can you get those folks to stick around and keep coming back so they become avid readers and fans of your blog content? Step number 2: Converting those visitors into subscribers! In this article, which is an excerpt from our new ebook, How to Grow & Scale Your Business Blog, we’ll give you some great step-by-step tips for turning those casual visitors into valuable, dedicated subscribers.

Step 1: Blog Frequently

First things first: frequency matters. How can you expect visitors to subscribe to your content if you rarely or infrequently publish anything for them to come back to. You wouldn’t exactly be making the strongest case for subscription, would you? If you really want to scale your blog, you need to make a commitment to boosting your blogging frequency. According to an internal study of HubSpot customers, businesses that blog more than once per week add new blog subscribers at twice the rate of businesses that blog just once per month.
Yes, frequency matters -- so work your way up. If you’re currently blogging once a month, work your way up to once a week. If you blog once a week, work your way up to a few times a week. Truthfully, the most successful blogs publish content daily -- or multiple times a day.

Step 2: Create a Blog Subscription Landing Page

Sure, you probably already have a ‘subscribe’ module on your blog’s homepage. It may look something like what you see to the right. But if you start promoting subscription to your blog via other marketing channels like social media, email, and calls-to-action, it will start to get a bit complicated to direct visitors to that module. You'd have to say something like this:
“Go to blog.hubspot.com, and ... see that little field on the top, right-hand side of the blog? Enter your email address there to subscribe.”
That isn’t exactly the optimal way to promote blog subscription, is it? And can you imagine trying to fit that into a 140-character update for Twitter? Furthermore, it also sounds pretty darn unprofessional and confusing. You’re guaranteed to lose out on some valuable subscribers along the way.
So what’s a more effective way to convert blog visitors into subscribers? Think … you know the answer. It’s the same way you convert website visitors into leads. A landing page! Create a blog subscription landing page to convert those blog discoverers into dedicated blog subscribers. This will become the heart and soul of your blog subscriber conversion efforts, allowing you to more easily promote blog subscription through your other marketing assets. So instead of that convoluted message directing people to the little module on your blog’s homepage, you can just say something like, “Visit http://blog.hubspot.com/subscribe to subscribe to the HubSpot Blog!” So much simpler, right?

Tip: Optimize Your Landing Page

Optimize your subscription page using the same best practices you would for any other landing page on your website. Include a descriptive headline that captures visitors’ attention and summarizes what they’ll get, demonstrate the value of subscribing in your landing page copy, include a high-quality image, and emphasize email subscription by placing the form above the fold. You can also incorporate other elements -- like social proof -- to help boost conversion rates. Speaking of boosting conversion rates, don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing like
you would for any other landing page (here's a great article on landing page A/B testing to get you started).

Tip: Encourage Email Subscription

But let’s backtrack a second. Notice how I mentioned that you should emphasize email subscription? Remember, there are two ways your visitors can subscribe to your blog -- via RSS, and via email. Both are valuable, but email subscription can have a much bigger impact than RSS subscription. Email boosts traffic to your blog, since subscribers get emailed whenever new content gets published (compared to RSS, which subscribers have to manually check on their own).
In fact, 13% of monthly traffic to the HubSpot Blog comes from email. Furthermore, it drives subscribers back to your website, where you have the opportunity to convert them into leads, as opposed to an RSS reader that they never have to leave. And to tie this all back to the importance of blogging frequency, in that same study of HubSpot customers, we learned that businesses that blog more than once per week generate 9x more blog email traffic than businesses that blog just once per month. Convinced that you should put more of an effort into generating email subscribers yet?

Step 3: Promote Your Blog Subscription Landing Page With CTAs

Now that you’ve built your blog subscription landing page, you need a way to drive traffic to it! It’s easy enough to share a link to your page through social media accounts, but other channels can accommodate more sophisticated and effective methods -- like call-to-action buttons!
If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can use HubSpot’s Call-to-Action manager to create or upload call-to-action designs -- and A/B test CTA variations. If you’re not a HubSpot user, you can also create CTAs using a tool like PowerPoint, or hire a designer to do the work for you.

Tip: Be More "In Your Face" About Subscribing

Once you’ve designed some CTAs for your landing page, be more “in your face” about converting your blog visitors into subscribers by placing these subscription CTAs directly within each of your blog articles. Don’t worry -- they don’t have to replace your articles’ lead-gen CTAs; just insert your blog subscription CTA directly below the one you’re using for lead generation (like we've done at the bottom of this very post!). And if you’re worried about it impacting the clickthrough rate on your lead-gen CTA, just keep a close eye on your CTA analytics. When we implemented this on the HubSpot blog, we didn’t notice a dip in CTR on our lead-gen CTAs, but you should always test for yourself.

Where appropriate, use your blog subscription CTAs on other pages of your website to give visitors a low-commitment conversion alternative, as opposed to an offer for which you require full form completion. For HubSpot customers, also consider adding your blog subscription CTAs to Smart CTA groups, which allow you to automatically customize which CTAs get shown to users in different lifecycle stages or based on specific list criteria.

Step 4: Do Some Email Marketing

In addition to promoting blog subscription through social media and CTAs on your website, email marketing can serve as another effective channel for driving blog subscriptions. Here are two great email marketing methods through which to promote blog subscription:

1) In a Dedicated Send

Promote blog subscription to different segments of contacts in your marketing database. Tailor the messaging and language you use in your dedicated send to the interests and needs of that segment. For example, you could segment your list by people who recently converted on a particular offer, and promote subscription by providing examples of articles related to topic of the offer they downloaded as a way to demonstrate the value of subscribing.

2) Within Lead Nurturing Workflows

Not every email within your lead nurturing workflows needs to promote a lead-gen offer. Switch it up by featuring some of your big hit blog articles targeted at the types of people you’re emailing in your segmented workflows.

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