Let’s see – it’s been a couple of weeks since my last top 5 list, but never fear, I’m still here and reading all sorts of interesting insights from the industry’s top minds.

A quick update on my progress with the Online Marketing Superstars book – I’m getting closer, but between spending time on my LinkedIn profile, finishing up assignments for my clients and connecting with prospective clients, my day gets pretty full pretty fast.

With that being said, the chapter on Pintrest and how businesses can use it to generate traffic to their websites was really interesting.

Anyway, without further ado, I invite you to continue reading for my top 5 web marketing article picks for the last part of April, first part of May.

#1 – 5 Easy Tricks to Help you Write Catchy Headlines

The headline is one the most critical elements of any webpage. It tells your visitor what your page is about and should hook them into staying on the page. Weak headlines are typically skipped for the more clear and robust ones. This article from Jeff Goins discusses 5 ways you can really jazz up your headlines. You can use numbers, interesting adjectives like fun, free or incredible and other methods. He even provides a formula – “Number or Trigger Word + Adjective + Keyword + Promise”. Read more…

#2 – Can You Grow Your Organic Traffic Without Generating Content?

Everywhere you look, you find the same old cliché about how generating valuable content yields higher search rankings over time. While true, creating content isn’t for everyone. Does this mean a site with little content will never experience growth in their organic traffic? Absolutely not provided they have a strong backlink profile. While it isn’t as easy as generating valuable content for your audience, a site can employ a variety of legitimate tactics to build a strong backlink profile. According to a survey of 120 search marketers, link-related attributes accounted for 12 of the top 15 factors that impacts a site’s ranking. Read more…

#3 – Q&A: One Client’s Journey from Inbound Marketing Novice to Rockstar

Sometimes it’s easier to understand something when you have an example of how it worked in the past. This Q&A from Sprout Content and their client, Gilmore Services in Pensacola, Fla., provides some great insights into how a rather “boring” company was able to harness inbound marketing to build leads and revenues. The company’s Director of Sales explained how he first learned about inbound marketing as “educational based marketing” and that how tracking metrics really helps the company properly focus their efforts. Read more…

#4 – How to Avoid Losing the Value of your Value Proposition

Your site or company’s value proposition is the most critical thing to identify. Why should people buy from you rather than a competitor? What makes you unique? You may have what seems to be a strong value proposition but it isn’t delivering the results you’re looking for. Why is this? You may be revealing it too early in the process, which causes friction in the mind of your customer. To put it another way, what do you think the answer to a marriage proposal on a first date would be? Exactly. Read more…

#5 – 15 Words You Need to Eliminate from your Vocabulary to Sound Smarter

We all want to sound smart, but sometimes we unconsciously use unnecessary words in our web copy, business emails and so on – the word “that” is probably the best example. Pull up a recent email or blog post and read a sentence with “that” in it aloud. Then take the word out and read it again. It probably sounds much better, so take it out. Read more…

Well, that wraps up my latest top 5.

My series of articles on posture is coming along. I managed to meet with the massage therapist and get some great insights and other materials. I hope to prepare a draft in the next week.

And check back again for more personal insights about marketing your business online, or check out my Diigo profile today for a complete list of what I’m reading.