Hacking Competitive Pricing Analysis with Scraping

Competitive analysis should be a staple part of any businesses’ weekly tasks. Staying up to date on changes to your competitors’ pricing is essential to being able to adapt, especially within e-commerce. The only problem is that it’s really difficult to run this kind of analysis.

Typically, you have two options. The first option is pay large sums for software that does this for you – most of the time the results you get aren’t that accurate and require a lot of setup time on your part. The other option is to trawl through your competitors’ websites and make a note of all their pricing manually – this doesn’t exactly scale well.

Now I’m going to present a third option: hacking the whole process using scraping to instantly pull through all of your competitors pricing whenever you want, how often you want and for no cost to you at all. Oh, and you don’t even need to have done this before. Just follow my step-by-step guide and you’ll be able to immediately reap the benefits.

View the full post here: http://www.matthewbarby.com/competitive-pricing-analysis/

Growth Hacking Your SaaS Startup – a Guide

I've spent the past couple of months trying my hardest to finish this huge guide that I've been writing. Well, several late nights and more than 9,000 words later and it's ready... I've shared a ton of growth hacks for both pre-launch and post-launch that are geared towards SaaS startups, but can be applied to most businesses.

As a taster, here are a few of the hacks:

- How to get featured on Product Hunt and Hacker News
- Creating a viral sign-up form
Hacking LinkedIn to find out who visits your website
- Creating a press kit

These are just a few examples. Each hack has a full implementation guide and a list of useful resources and tools. Not only that but I've had comments from successful startup founders on their growth strategies.

Here's the link: http://www.matthewbarby.com/saas-startup-growth-hacking/

(You can also download the guide as a PDF)

How to Spend Less Than an Hour a Day on Email Marketing

For all of you running email marketing campaigns and wondering how you will find the time to keep it up - here's how: http://buildfire.com/spend-hour-email-marketing/

The Alarming Truth Behind Deforestation

Interesting infographic looking at the impact of global deforestation. Quite alarming that 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned down each day for cattle ranching...

Source: http://www.eco2greetings.com/News/saving-rainforest.html

Local SEO: How To Rank Your Local Business

My latest post on +Search Engine Land looks at how you can take your local business up the SERPs. I go into specific detail around local SEO ranking factors, on-page optimisation, citation building and local link building strategies. Hopefully you'll get a few useful tips from it.

View the full post here: http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-rank-local-business-218906

How to Find Website Optimization Opportunities

I've outlined the process that we take within the Optimization team at HubSpot to identify and take advantage of new opportunities within our website. Not only this but I've given some specific ideas for optimization projects that you can implement on your own website, no-matter how big/small it is.

You can view the full post here: http://www.matthewbarby.com/website-optimization-opportunities/

How to Combat 5 of the SEO World's Most Infuriating Problems

The image of the finished whiteboard from last week's Whiteboard Friday (+Moz) is great. For anyone that works on SEO campaigns, you've probably faced one of these issues - definitely worth bookmarking this image for clients or internal debates.

View the full post here: https://moz.com/blog/combat-5-infuriating-seo-problems-whiteboard-friday

How to Avoid a Google Penalty

There tons of infographics out there that talk about avoiding Google penalties but this one is a little different and contains really great advice. Instead of just saying "avoid guest posting at all costs!", it goes a little deeper into using specific methods in moderation, etc. Also, the point on branded searches is an important one.

Great stuff as usual from +Neil Patel. View the original article here: http://www.quicksprout.com/2015/05/01/how-to-avoid-a-google-penalty/

How to Promote Your Local Business Online: 40 Experts Share Their Tips

Really good post that looks at different ways to promote your local business online. Definitely one to bookmark - it's over 15,000 words long and it has contributions from 40 different local business experts.

Check it out here: http://buildfire.com/local-businesses-promotion/

Analyzing Our Long Term Blog Metrics With SQL

LOVE this analysis from the team at Periscope.io. It looks at analysing long term blog traffic to break down the real results of a content marketing campaign. Clever use of SQL here.

View it in full here: https://www.periscope.io/blog/analyzing-long-term-blog-performance-in-sql.html