Focus Five is all about sharing. We love sharing. Here’s some cool stuff we’ve read this week about digital marketing and purpose-driven business. Grab a cuppa, take five, and enjoy.

Google’s new link building guidelines

Neil Patel

Google has just changed the rules for link building. There are two new types of links beyond a dofollow link and nofollow link. What are the new sponsored and UGC links and do we need to worry about them yet?

Neil Patel explains what this means for SEO. Read more >

Page Speed study

Brian Dean, Backlinko

Brian and his team analysed 5.2 million desktop and mobile pages.

Their main goal?

To figure out why certain pages load faster than others.

They looked at images. They looked at CDNs. They even compared WordPress vs. Squarespace.

And in this post they show you what they found.. Read more >

How to collect emails: 15 proven ways to grow your email list

Benyamin Elias, Active Campaign

I love email marketing and CRM tool Active Campaign. At Focus Mode we have recently migrated a client from Mailchimp to Active Campaign. I must admit, I have become a raving fan! From the tool itself, through to the onboarding, training and customer experience, this is a company that really gets it right.

This is a useful, practical post on how to collect email addresses to grow your list. At a time when it is getting harder and harder to get engagement in social channels, investing effort growing your email list is essential. Read more >

Now what?

Ryan Gellert, Patagonia The Cleanest Line

In an inspiring post for both businesses and individuals alike, Patagonia’s Ryan Gellert asks ‘now what?’ following the impressive worldwide action of the Global Climate Strike in September. Ryan explores how we can maintain the momentum for change in our everyday actions. Well worth a read. Read more >

Email marketers say data integration is the biggest obstacle to personalisation

Nikki Gilliland, Econsultancy

Econsultancy has published it’s 13th annual Email Marketing Industry Census. You can access the full report if you are a paid subscriber of Econsultancy. Read more >

Nikki Gilliland shares four key takeaways in this blog post.

1. Improving personalisation is the top priority for marketers.

2. There is a growing use of automation, but there is still room for growth.

3. Focus has turned away from device optimisation this year, perhaps as other priorities have taken over.

4. This year sees greater use of predictive technology for example for email scheduling and product selection.

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