Friday 30 January 2015
The Secrets to Tweets that Generate Engagement
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Thursday 29 January 2015
How Often You Should Post on Twitter and Other Social Media Networks
If you’ve been using multiple social media networks to market your business you’ll know that they aren’t all created equal. What is the norm on one network would be frowned upon on another, especially when it comes to the frequency in which you post updates.
For the recommended guidelines for each of the major social media sites take a look at the infographic below from Constant Contact.
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Wednesday 28 January 2015
10 Quick Tips For Marketing Your Website Effectively
Marketing your website properly is just as important (if not more important) as having a properly designed and developed website. In today’s digital world, having a website that works to increase revenue and sales is crucial, especially in a time where a nonexistent (or outdated) website could cost your company hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales.
It’s a necessity to have a marketing strategy in line with the goals of your company or organization, and in order to increase traffic and revenue at your website, it will take a heavy dose of effort to get your website where you want it. Use these tips below, and continue to research the world of internet marketing, there’s much left to be learned!
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Without further ado, here’s 10 quick tips for marketing your website effectively…
1. Make a BIG deal out of the launch of your website!
You should be proud of your new site, and use this as a tool to contact your customers to let them know things are changing, and for the better. Market the new features your site will have both online and offline, and let it be known that you’ve invested in yourself.
2. Start a subscription-based newsletter.
Every company, in my opinion, should have some sort of informative newsletter. Your newsletter should be published on a set schedule, but only one that you can maintain. Ideally, your newsletters should contain informative articles. You don’t need too much content, but the content you have should be eye-catching, easy to read, and something that people want to see. If you bore your customers with your newsletter, you won’t be helping to market your website. Create a newsletter that compels people to do something… write a how-to on something related to your industry, or a top 10 tips that people might find interest in (wink, wink).
3. Add your website to your company’s voicemail message.
Even if it’s something along the lines of, “Leave us a message, or contact us on the web at www-dot-yourwebsitehere-dot-com. Are you seeing a trend here? It’s important to TALK about your website, and if you have something people want to see (which you should with that fancy site of yours!), your work will pay off.
4. Put your website on your company building’s sign.
This one’s sort of a no-brainer, but what better of a way to get people to scope out your company in the comfort of their own home. People driving by will remember your address, especially if you have an eye-catching sign, and make your website large enough and easy to read from a distance.
5. Tell Google when you’ve got new content…
Take this tip straight from Google themselves, “If your site is very new, we may not know about it yet. Tell Google about your site. One way to expedite Google’s discovery of new pages is to submit a Sitemap. Even if your site is already in the index, Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages you consider most important.” If you aren’t sure if your site has a sitemap indexed with Google, or you’d like help building your sitemap and properly publishing it, contact your web developer.
6. Use an email signature in your correspondences, and make sure that a link to your website is in it.
Not only will this provide for an easy way for your customers (or potential customers) to find your site, but it will also allow for an easy portal for them to visit you.
7. Yes, your website is up and running, but now how are people going to find it?
Many companies build a website and forget about it… YIKES! Use social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter to broadcast your website to those you are in contact with. For small businesses and start ups, word of mouth can be the difference between success and failure!
8. Advertising your site offline is equally important as advertising your site online.
Make sure your web address is in your literature and publications (business cards, corporate branding material, fax cover sheets, etc.)
9. Update your website AT LEAST once a month.
I would say less than once a week is too little, but it’s important to keep your content fresh, especially if you have an informational site.
10. Make sure that your website is built with valid code.
Check your meta tags are properly used, and each page has a proper title. Consult your web developer about these items, as they are all important for your website to have.
Realize that the key to successfully marketing your website is a never-ending, integral process that you NEED to do. Take the time to properly work on the items above, and dedicate yourself to doing it right. You just invested in your website, right? Why not make the most of it and start seeing your hard-earned efforts pay off!
Tuesday 27 January 2015
8 SEO Trends Every Website Owner Must Pay Attention To In 2015
Do you know what SEO trends will affect your website in 2015? Want to make sure you’re keeping up with Google’s latest guidelines?
It’s essential for any website owner wanting to be found online to understand what Google is looking at when they crawl their site and, perhaps more importantly, what makes them decide who should rank above who.
Take a look at this infographic from CJG Digital Marketing for their 8 trends to look out for.
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Monday 26 January 2015
Consumer Biases: The Blemishing Effect
From ads in the newspaper to banners on websites, consumers quickly process advertising information to ease their decision making process. What if you could create a positive effect by using negative information about your products or services? Entrepreneurs, marketers and optimistic people in general tend to see (and to show others) the positive angle of things. That’s a great thing to keep your sanity. However, what if I told you that by presenting some negative information you could make things look more attractive?
Being Too Optimistic
Most marketers are trying to promote their company’s core values and benefits. They promote outstanding reviews about their companies and so on, sometimes to the point that it sounds “too good to be true.” Don’t get me wrong – you should definitely keep doing so.
However, you should make your marketing messages seem more realistic and down to earth, by exposing some of the cons of using your service or product, but in a managed way. As in other aspects of life there’s no good without bad, you will experience no joy if you won’t know what sadness feels like.
A recent research conducted at Stanford University shows that a tiny bit of negativity actually strengthens a consumer’s positive impression of a particular product or service. As long as the negative information about a product is minor, the pitch to the customer might be more persuasive, particularly if consumers have already learned some positive things. This is called the Blemishing Effect.
The Blemishing Effect
The Blemishing Effect is one out of many natural biases that affect our decision making, and not necessarily in a rational way. As on an average day we make hundreds of decisions – all the way from choosing the right time to cross the road, through what to eat for lunch, and up to your rapid business decisions – our brain has sorts of “shortcuts” to allow us to make quick decisions.
In some aspects of our lives it works perfectly; For example, you don’t need to calculate the length of a road, speed of oncoming cars, your walking speed and so on, just to make a decision about crossing the road, but rather just look both ways and take action. Yet in some other aspects of our lives, especially when it comes to consumer behavior, our decisions are not that rational. The good news is, they are predictable.
When the negative information presented is very minor, it won’t help you to benefit from the positive effect. If it is too substantial, then it can actually hurt you (e.g. If you are selling shoes – having a very limited set of sizes in stock will hurt you). Typically smaller purchases rather than large expensive ones will benefit from listing a bit of negativity about the specific product.
Yet, there are limitations to the Blemishing Effect. First, the positivity must outweigh the negativity, customers cannot be too invested in their purchase and lastly, the positive must come before the negative.
Here are three ways to put the Blemishing Effect into full throttle:
1. Unflatter Your Product, Mildly
Most products or services have attributes that are less appealing than others, make sure to always list these attributes after you have already listed some strong positive ones.
For example, assuming that you don’t offer free delivery on a certain item, list your “low delivery rate” right at the end of the list of features, rather than emphasizing that.
2. Downgrade Your Offering a Bit
If you are in the hospitality services (e.g. Hotels, Restaurants), you might want to add a bit of negative news such as “During busy hours, service might take longer than usual”. Or if your product or service really does magic, you could mention that it might take a few months to start and see results (though it’s tempting, as marketers, to promise quick results).
3. Be Honest and Direct
There are always some difficulties along the way, and you already know about some issues that other customers gave you feedback on. Don’t be afraid to mention them to new clients. It could actually work to your benefit.
Saturday 24 January 2015
17 Stats You Should Know About Visual Content Marketing in 2015
Each year in mid-January, when all of last year’s research has been published, we like to read through some of the major reports on inbound marketing, content marketing, social media and online behavior.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, honestly, it’s amazing how fast things can change in twelve short months and 2014 was certainly no exception.
While reviewing this year’s research two major trends emerged and both highlight the effectiveness of visual content marketing. As you will learn, this year’s data reveals that marketers who are leveraging visual content are seeing significant increases in their blog traffic, social media engagement, visitor-to-lead conversion rates and inbound customer acquisition results.
Let's begin by examining a few statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on social media reach and engagement.
Over the last 12 months almost every major social network, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram have increased the prominence and importance of visual content. Keeping pace with this trend, several research studies conducted over the course of 2014 point to the rather amazing effectiveness of visual content for social media.
Here are a few stats, specifically related to social media, that you should consider while you are crafting your 2015 content marketing strategy:
1) Last year the amount of video from people and brands in Facebook's News feed increased 3.6X year-over-year.
2) Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets.
3) Socialbakers.com looked at the top 10% of posts made by more than 30,000 Facebook brand pages and found that posts with photos saw the most engagement—accounting for a whopping 87% of total interactions.
4) In 2014, 39% of B2B buyers identified that they share infographics on social media frequently.
5) Adding a photo URL to your tweet can boost retweets by 35%.
6) Images and photos are the most important tactic in optimizing social media posts.
7) Visual content is a key component in each of the top 5 most effective B2B marketing tactics.
8) 70% of marketers plan to increase their use of original visual assets in 2015.
9) The top 3 content formats that B2B buyers seek out to research a purchase decision include: Whitepapers (78%), Case Studies (73%), and Webinars (67%).
10) B2C marketers are more likely to use original videos (63% B2C vs. 56% B2B) and original visual assets (63% B2C vs. 56% B2B).
11) 95% of B2B buyers agreed that they preferred shorter content formats.
12) In a recent study 86% of buyers expressed some level of desire to access interactive/visual content on demand.
13) Social Media Examiner recently asked marketers which forms of content they most want to learn about in 2015. Creating original visual assets took first place, followed by producing original videos.
14) In 2014 the use of video content for B2B marketing increased by 8% to 58%, while the use of infographics topped the adoption list increasing in usage by 9% to 52%.
15) Interactive content formats such as Brainshark and SlideShare increased in popularity during 2014, up from roughly 21% in 2013 to 28% in 2014.
16) B2B marketers are employing on average 12-14 formats of content.
17) The popularity of whitepapers as a B2B content marketing format is actually declining in relation to more interactive, easily digestible formats such as video.
Given that white papers were previously the most widely used form of marketing content for inbound marketers I might be so bold to call this shift the birth of content marketing two point zero.
Friday 23 January 2015
7 Ways Marketers Can Get the Most out of LinkedIn
When you use the site to bolster your personal brand, you also strengthen your company's brand image.
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LinkedIn may tag you an “All-Star” on Your Profile page—but you're a minor leaguer if you don't fully exploit the marketing and sales powers of the social medium used by more than half the world's professionals. “If your profile has the wrong information, it might as well be your tombstone,” says Mark Amtower, a consultant who specializes in LinkedIn strategy.
At stake are the current 313 million members, as well as the two joining per second, as LinkedIn reports. And let's not forget 3.5 million companies present there.
Facebook may have the B2C sex appeal, but when it comes to B2B marketing—and personal branding—LinkedIn is where it's at. Marketers can boost their own and their firm's reputations, market their wares, establish themselves and their organizations as industry thought-leaders, and harvest sales leads—with most of those benefits costing nothing.
“In my 30 years as a marketing consultant, I've never seen a platform that does so much,” Amtower says. “Traditional B2B direct marketers that do not fully embrace LinkedIn miss the opportunity to develop deeper relationships with key customers or be found by prospects looking for what they sell.”
Here are seven ways marketers can maximize LinkedIn themselves and their companies:
Juice Up Your Profile
LinkedIn Profiles average 53 million views daily. A marketer's profile should reflect that she's the face of her brand, not a job hunter. To entice prospects, marketers should share their expertise areas, the market they serve and what their company does, Amtower says. “Top the profile with a summary that's informative and fun, so it'll be read.”
Also upload six to 12 slides, PowerPoint presentations, or videos of your work to intrigue prospects without giving away too much to competitors, he says. And remember the basics: phone and email, so you can be easily reached.
Maximize Your Company Page
Sporadic updates aren't enough. See a company page as a mini website with appealingly packaged and SEO-jammed information, links, and contacts.
Look to marketing software firm HubSpot, which feeds its page almost daily with visually-adorned entries on products, achievements, new hires, and industry-related trends. It also cross-promotes the page across blogs, emails, and other channels. “We ask customers who give appreciative feedback on surveys to consider sharing their opinions on LinkedIn,” says Kipp Bodnar, VP of marketing.
The result: HubSpot touts 40,000 followers, 272 product recommendations, and a Culture Code slide share that's been viewed nearly 2 million times.
Each follower and comment packs heat, amplifying the firm's visibility on his or her own LinkedIn feed, Bodnar says: “For us, LinkedIn traffic converts into leads more than traffic on other social platforms.”
Leverage Your Employees' LinkedIn Profiles and Activities
“Employee profiles become mini-marketing reaches that put your best face forward,” says Mike Derezin, LinkedIn's VP of sales solutions. “The more you provide, the more likely the message will be uniform.”
All of HubSpot's 900 employees have personal profiles and active feeds, Bodnar says. Executives set the tone by posting blog entries on their LinkedIn pages, and the firm provides profile tips, professional headshots, and a clear mission statement to new hires.
Join or Form a Likeminded Group
Sharing insights about an industry pays off: 86% of buyers say they'd engage with salespeople if they offered such knowledge, LinkedIn reports. Become a known thought leader and that rises to 92%.
HubSpot launched its Inbound Marketers group seven years ago, where 111,000 members currently discuss strategies and trends. Those who participate get 4 times the profile views of those who don't, Bodnar finds.
“Each member is a potential prospect,” Amtower says. “Useful entries also reinforce your name and brand.”
Use “In Messages” to Follow Those Who Check You Out
Look regularly to see who's examined your profile, as Amtower does thrice daily. Then pounce.
“Check out their profile, and if you see potential, reach out via message or In Mail,” he says. “You can say, ‘Hey, I saw you looked at my profile. Are you interested in chatting or connecting?' Start a conversation while it's hot—not two days later when they might not remember who you are.”
Use Sales Navigator to Convert Cold Calls
You can arm yourself with the personal information that thaws cold calls into warm introductions via LinkedIn's Sales Navigator app. Stats and analytics on targeted accounts reveal who you know in common, where workers went to school and other information, whether you're LinkedIn or not.
“It's hugely valuable, especially if you're B2B,” says Bodnar. “It's a lot easier to get prospects.”
Reach Those Who Really Matter Via LinkedIn Ads
Why advertise to the irrelevant? LinkedIn's display ads can target a desired audience by job title, company size, or other attributes—and HubSpot occasionally uses this feature along with its other LinkedIn efforts. “We've used some display ads in sponsored updates,” Bodnar says, “but we're advertising less on all channels, thanks to the success of nonpaid efforts, like those on LinkedIn.”
Thursday 22 January 2015
20 Twitter Best Practices That Will Build Followers and Increase Engagement
Are you making the most out of Twitter? With over 645m users posting 790m tweets per day it’s a monster of a network and it can provide massive results when used in the right way.
The infographic below from Passion Digital gives you 20+ best practices to use that will help you to build new followers and increase engagement.
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Wednesday 21 January 2015
5 Reasons to Use Social Media Even If It’s Not Driving (Free) Traffic
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| Image via BigStockPhoto.com |
Picture this situation: You’ve chosen the right social media platforms for your business and are posting good content to each one of them, but you’re not getting any more than just a handful of clicks.
How does it make you feel?
Frustrated!
But let me ask you a question: How many, of all the links that appear in your newsfeed throughout the day, do you actually click? The fact remains that you see oodles of links you don’t bother clicking. Hopefully, you’re feeling a bit relieved after this stark disclosure.
However, if traffic’s been dying down (especially after the recent organic reach debacle), you may need to revamp your social media marketing strategy (if you have one already) or create a new one with the assistance of an expert or an agency.
Today, the organic reach of Facebook page posts has reduced by a drastic 80%–90%. For example, a Facebook page like Picsity (with close to 1.3 million Likes) that regularly enjoyed a reach of 10,000 per typical post a few months back now suffers from an incredibly low reach of 500 per typical post.
But should you stop using social media sites because they aren’t driving your websites and blogs enough organic traffic anymore? Well, you shouldn’t (and, actually, you can’t) because there are ample reasons to be on social media other than traffic.
Here are five of them.
1. Build Relationships
Consistently, social media experts have reiterated that the focus should be more on “social” and less on “media.” You shouldn’t measure the worth of a social media account by the total number of its fans or followers. Social media, at its very core, is about building meaningful relationships, which depend on the quality of the conversations you have with your community. Lack of strong bonding renders even thousands of fans and followers useless.
In the traditional business world, organizations or companies are connected with their clients through transaction-based associations, as opposed to relationship-based associations. Relationship building gives social media platforms their uniqueness, and it’s something that traditional advertising can never achieve.
A few relationship building tips include:
- Participate in conversations in a genuine way
- Exchange original ideas with others
- Pay attention to others’ hobbies/interests
- Find opportunities to help others
Social media has been helping companies or business owners find partners, customers, and investors. If you approach social media as a relationship building tool, it’s still as powerful as it’s always been.
You shouldn’t measure the worth of a social media account by the total number of its fans or followers. — @obaidulhaque
2. Remain on Top of Industry News and Best Practices
For a business, social media is not just about tweeting or posting updates to Facebook. Recently, LinkedIn conducted a survey to understand how SMBs look at social media in regard to their businesses. 81% of the SMBs the company surveyed use social media.
Of this group, 94% use social media as a marketing tool. However, 49% of the surveyed SMBs admitted that they also use social media as a tool to keep themselves abreast of the latest industry news and best practices. By following other businesses, industry experts, and thought leaders, they learn more about individual niches and markets while also getting answers to many of their important business questions.
3. Generate Content Ideas
Social media sites are excellent when it comes to finding intriguing content ideas. By creating meaningful conversations of your own or simply participating in the existing ones, you’ll be able to gather a lot of ideas to create a variety of useful marketing content.
Copyblogger, for example, creates a discussion on LinkedIn after they’ve published a new post on their blog. This opens up opportune avenues for them to discuss a particular topic on a deeper level, engage with the audience, ask for their feedback, and collect out-of-the-box ideas for future blog posts and content in other formats.
The Twitter Search feature is another good tool for finding content ideas. It allows you to quickly track the trending hashtags and eavesdrop on existing public conversations for new topics and ideas. Social media websites, groups, and communities, therefore, offer you abundant material to help with the content generation process on an ongoing basis. All you need to do is turn on your social listening ears when you’re using social media sites.
4. Find Better Hires
If you don’t want to waste time digging through a pile of resumes or wading through a sea of bad candidates when planning to hire talented professionals from a specific industry, social media is your answer. According to a report published by Staff.com, as much as 92% of companies leverage platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to locate, screen, and hire quality candidates for numerous job positions.
In an interview of 40–60 minutes, it can be quite an effort to evaluate an applicant in terms of their skills and personality. With the help of social media, however, you can quickly screen a candidate and identify the traits that could affect their performance at work. It’s crucial to note that 73% of recruiters say they have made successful hires though social media. Conversely, 1/3rd of employees also rejected applicants on the basis of what they found in their social media profiles.
There are several ways to find potential job prospects via social media, from your own social referral network to special features like Advanced LinkedIn Search. Once you’ve spotted potential candidates, you can start analyzing their social media profiles in terms of current employers, skills, work experiences, joined groups, interests, connections, quality of updates, and more.
5. Become More Productive
Being on social media, if you aren’t aware, increases productivity at work. According to a recent study by Ipsos and Microsoft, 46% of people agreed that using social media enhanced their productivity. But the result depends on what exactly you use social media websites for. If you’re checking out industry-related tweets and Facebook updates by competitors, it will certainly give your productivity level a quick boost. On the other hand, using the social platforms only for personal reasons won’t help much.
Don’t let social traffic become an obsession. Driving traffic to your websites and blogs should be one of the reasons to use social media, but not the only one. Change the way you look at social media, and you’ll soon see that it has a lot more to offer than you could ever expect.
Tuesday 20 January 2015
SEO is Dead! Here’s What You Should be Doing Now
We’ve been harping on for a while now that content marketing is the new SEO. CopyBlogger have taken this theory that one step further and claim that SEO is officially dead and has been replaced by the term OC / DC which stands for Optimising Content for Discovery and Conversion.
Their infographic below takes you through the steps they believe have replaced the traditional SEO methods of keywords and link building. Whilst we agree with the principal, we won’t stop using the term SEO just yet.
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Monday 19 January 2015
The Penalty-Proof Way to Build Backlinks
Ranking penalties, as the result of Google algorithm updates, have plagued search marketers and webmasters since the search engine got serious about defeating spam back in the late 2000s. The Penguin update of 2012 and its subsequent iterations were responsible for most of the link-related ranking volatility of recent years, distributing penalties to sites with irregular, irrelevant, or otherwise non-valuable backlink, leaving many to abandon or dramatically overhaul their offsite SEO strategies.
Today, backlink building is still an integral part of any SEO strategy, as a means of increasing your site’s domain authority and making it easier to rank for almost any phrase. While there are modern tactics to build a high quantity of links without earning a penalty from Google, the safer approach is to incorporate a long-term, penalty-proof system of link building, which will keep you safe in the short-term and protect you against any future Google updates.
Step One: Choose Your Sources Wisely
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Your first step is to build and maintain and inventory of quality external sources where you can build links. Consulting and abiding by this list will protect you against penalties based on the type of sources you use, and help boost your domain authority even further by increasing your relevance and building meaningful associations.
As a general rule, you should scout for sites that are authoritative (meaning they’ve been around for a while, they have value for their users, and a respectable amount of traffic), and sites that are directly related to your industry. You can find these sites by performing regular Google searches, using an aggregated news feed, or by examining the link profiles of your competitors using a free tool like Open Site Explorer. Collect a long list of these possible sources and begin making requests for your links on a rotating basis.
Be sure to avoid the following types of non-authoritative sources:
- Article directories. Article directories exist for the sole purpose of publishing random articles for the sake of building backlinks. Such sites are few and far between since Google began their crackdown, but stay far away from them regardless.
- Link farms. Link farms, much like article directories, exist solely to help other sites build backlinks. They publish hundreds of links pointing back to your domain, but all of them are very low quality and will likely result in a penalty.
- Payment-based sources. Google has an explicit policy against paid link building, which means that any links you pay for (other than advertising or affiliate links) can earn you a harsh penalty.
- Irrelevant blogs or forums. Forums, blogs, and directories can all be quality sources for backlinks—but only if they are relevant to your specific field. Posting a link on an irrelevant forum, or in an irrelevant conversation, can do more harm than good.
Step Two: Post Like a Person
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If the search engine giant suspects that your link was built through automation or by a scheme to improve your rank, it will penalize you. So if you post like an ordinary, unbiased user with no ulterior agenda, you’ll be in the clear.
There’s no “trick” to getting past these evaluations of Google’s algorithms. Instead of trying to make your post look like it was posted to improve user experience, bypass that step and post content that is actually valuable.
The biggest key here is relevance. When you find a thread on an industry forum that seems like it might be a good fit for a link, read through it before you post. If your company doesn’t have anything to do with the topic, move on. If there’s a blog post that elaborates on a topic mentioned or substantiates a claim made in the thread, post a link to it! And don’t just post the link and be done with it; take the time to write up an explanation of why you’re posting the link, and why you think it would be helpful to the conversation.
Similarly, you’ll need to ensure that all your guest blogs and offsite content align with the expectations and standards of your offsite sources, and of course, ensure that they are well-written. Keep your hyperlinks to only what’s necessary or what’s helpful in understanding the article.
Step Three: Diversify
Another key in making sure you avoid any penalties in the future is to diversify your entire strategy. You’ll want to include as much variation as possible in every step of the process if you want to hedge your bets against the search engine’s next moves and stay ahead of the game no matter what.
First, you’ll need to diversify your sources. Hopefully, you’ve got a fairly long list of potential sources to draw from; take advantage of its entirety. Rotate your sources regularly, and never post too many links on any one source.
Second, you’ll need to diversify your timing. Don’t post all of your links on one day of the week or even worse, one day of the month. Spread your links out at random times over random days in an irregular pattern. Links look more natural that way.
Finally, it’s a good idea to diversify your link structure. Avoid posting the same link to your homepage over and over again. Instead, use deep links from your interior pages and blog posts to vary your external posts—it will also help ensure that your posts are specifically relevant to the conversation at hand. For good measure, be sure to build a significant number of linkless brand mentions as well. Brand mentions pass authority without garnering the negative attention of excessive backlinks.
Step Four: Audit Regularly
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Unfortunately, maintaining solid best practices throughout your implementation isn’t enough to fully protect you against the possibility of a penalty, or even against the possibility of error in your own work. If you want to maintain the quality of your strategy and catch potential problems early on, the best course of action is to audit your backlink profile on a regular basis.
There are a few ways to do this, but the easiest is to consult a link-based search tool like Open Site Explorer, which we mentioned above. Here, you’ll be able to review all the links on the web that are pointing back to your site, and evaluate them for diversity, appropriateness, and authority. If you find any links that are irrelevant or questionable, you can easily get rid of them by asking the webmaster to remove them. If you find that your strategy doesn’t include as much diversity as you’d like, or if you spot too many patterns in your posts, you can adjust your process accordingly.
Plan on implementing a full backlink profile audit at least once a month, possibly more often if you have an aggressive link building strategy in place.
Put these steps into action for your entire offsite SEO strategy, and you’ll protect yourself against whatever new algorithm updates Google throws at you. Google’s entire motivation in rolling out updates is to make the web a better place with more relevant, accurate content—so if you focus on creating the best possible online experience for your visitors and modern searchers, there will be nothing for the search engine to penalize.
Friday 16 January 2015
Was Your Site Hit By Google’s Panda Or Penguin?
Was Your Site Hit By Google’s Panda Or Penguin? This Flowchart May Help You Find Out.
Columnist Janet Driscoll Miller has put together this handy flow chart to help you determine if your site has been hit by one of Google's infamous algorithm updates.
I regularly receive emails and calls from desperate website owners trying to understand why they saw sudden drops in traffic to their site.
Unfortunately, most of these site owners don’t have time or know-how to follow the algorithm updates, so they’re often baffled about what the cause might be.
When I’m contacted by one of these site owners, I first try to determine if the root cause was an algorithm update.
Because algorithm updates tend to have a specific timetable associated with them, I find them often easier to identify than other site changes — especially since many website owners do not thoroughly document changes made to page content or other areas of the site.
This lack of documentation can make it difficult to ascertain exactly what actions may have led to a rankings loss, whereas losses within a certain window of time may correlate directly with an algorithm update, often making the problem and the solution faster to diagnose.
In conjunction with Search Engine Land, I developed this flow chart to help others follow a process to determine if a Panda or Penguin algorithm update may be affecting their sites.
The flow chart should only be used as a guide, however. It is not a guarantee but rather a potential indicator that your site may have been hit by one of these updates.
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Thursday 15 January 2015
7 Really Easy Ways to Get More Twitter Followers
Some people want more Twitter followers as they think it makes them look good, some because they like to be social and engage with others, the rest know that more targeted followers means more web traffic, more potential leads and ultimately more sales.
Whatever your motivation for gaining Twitter followers here are 7 really easy ways to get more of them. Infographic brought to you by Wishpond.
http://blog.red-website-design.co.uk/2014/03/27/7-really-easy-ways-to-get-more-twitter-followers/
Whatever your motivation for gaining Twitter followers here are 7 really easy ways to get more of them. Infographic brought to you by Wishpond.
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http://blog.red-website-design.co.uk/2014/03/27/7-really-easy-ways-to-get-more-twitter-followers/
Tuesday 13 January 2015
9 Creative Ways to Add a Customer Loyalty Program to Any Small Business
One of your best assets as a small business is your connection with your customers and the connection they feel to you in turn. In order to remind your customers how much you appreciate their continued business, and to run a more efficient business, you might want to implement a customer loyalty program. Of course, these programs will vary wildly depending on the type of business you run (B2C businesses will show customer appreciation differently than B2B businesses, for example).
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| Customer Loyalty Program / Shutterstock |
These nine ideas will help get your creative juices flowing to help you find the right customer loyalty program to implement for your customers. The fact of the matter is, every business should have some sort of customer loyalty program, whether you’re B2B or B2C.
1. “Gamification” – Track Points
A more complex version of the punch card, keeping track of “points” based on dollars your customers have spent (and then rewarding them accordingly) is a classic way to reward loyalty. The psychology behind it is simple: when a customer gets close to the next reward threshold, they’ll spend more in order to enjoy the next reward level. When you offer sales, include offers like credit card companies do, double points for the day’s purchases or some similar enhancement to the point program. You’ll create competition amongst your most loyal and regular customers if you put up a “leader board”. Give you top 10 point earners special perks, even if it’s just a handwritten Thank You card- it will matter to them!
2. Discounts in Exchange for Email Addresses
Offer free shipping or 10% off their first order in exchange for an email address. Then, remember to stay in touch! Extend the occasional discount to those customers who stay on your email list to let them know you’re glad they stuck around. You can run similar offers with feedback cards, surveys, you name it! A super effective version of this strategy is to ask the customers for a person whom they think would like your services/goods. Get that individual’s email, and send them a message explaining that their friend suggested them. This a new, but highly effective sales tactic, much like a personal or word-of-mouth referral!
3. Track and Reward Customers with Taggo
It’s the punch card reimagined. Let customers join your “Fan Club” to give them access to your best offers, and get word of mouth social marketing in return. Taggo is great because it’s connected to social networks; your business gets more “social proofs” (more fans and followers) and you gain some additional data about your customers. Win:win!
4. Check-in Specials
Use social media to offer discounts or promotions to customers who “check in” to your business on apps like Foursquare or Facebook. This shows their friends that they’re patronizing your business, and you reward them for doing so. Social proof of this variety is worth every penny! Combine this tactic with an actual sale to more effectively spread the word about your promotion/sale!
5. Celebrate Birthdays
If you have basic information about your most loyal customers, make sure to celebrate their birthdays. Go all out with a nice little surprise: a free scalp massage with their haircut this month, a discount on their paper order that week, or even a thoughtful care package to enjoy the day. This tactic will definitely put you on the fast track to turning more of customers into super-fans!
6. Creative Experiences
Arguably, the best rewards are experiential, at least according to FoBoGro. This independent grocery store offers creative rewards, like a 30-second, all-you-can-grab sweepstakes. Give your customers the opportunity to win an experience… and a story they’ll tell their friends about later. This can take the form of behind the scenes tours, all you can stuff $20 paper bags, or a chance to pick some of your merchandise for next season.
7. Connect with Emails
Sure, you can give the customers on your email list access to unique discounts or cool content. But you can also use a loyalty program like Belly to enhance your loyal customers’ in-store experience. Personalize your emails as much as possible. When sending sale info or discounts, be sure to tell them it’s for “email subscribers only”! Sending special opportunities via email will make your customers look forward to hearing from you, and encourage their friends to join your newsletter too. Use this email tactic for two-way communication when possible. Ask your email subscribers to vote on upcoming store merchandise, or new additions to the store, again making sure they know this is a perk for “email subscribers only”. Tactics like this will make your email subscribers feel like the are a special part of your business, and in a special club.
8. Reward Referrals
If a customer refers a friend, don’t just reward the referrer; reward both of them! And rather than just giving a straightforward discount to the person who referred your business, go out of your way to thank them. Give them a T-shirt or sticker so they can continue to wave your flag proudly. Consider offering a larger reward if they refer five or more friends, etc.
9. Turn Your Customers into Celebrities (with their Permission)
A particularly long-devoted customer deserves more attention. Ask if you can highlight them in a newsletter or with a Polaroid on the wall of your store. Customers love small snapshots into the lives of others, and the interviewed or featured customer will very much enjoy their few moments of “fame”.
When crafting your rewards program, don’t be afraid of technology. There are dozens of new apps and POS add-ons to make tracking your customers (and then rewarding them) easier than ever. Now, rather than worrying about logistics, you can use all your creativity to imagine your ideal customer, what he wants, and then give it to him!
Monday 12 January 2015
What is Retargeting and Why Should You Use It?
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While you may not have heard the term retargeting before, you have definitely seen it in action. For instance, have you ever been browsing the web and seen an ad promoting a product or website you just looked at or visited? It can be kind of creepy, actually, until you understand how retargeting works. This post will look at what retargeting is, and how you should be using it for your business!
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| Example of retargeting (a.k.a. remarketing) on Facebook |
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting is essentially a type of advertising strategy that lets your ads ‘follow’ your website visitors around the web. It is an extremely popular strategy that many big brands are now using for one simple reason: it works.
Typically, when you purchase an ad spot, you have the opportunity to put a static banner ad on a particular site. If you are using Google AdWords, for instance, your static banner ad gets shown across their network, either next to search results or on their display network (or both).
"With retargeting, however, you have the opportunity to have your ads shown to visitors who have already visited your site."This is HUGE! These people have already visited your site, so you know they have an interest in what you’re selling or promoting. Retargeting lets you reach out to these visitors, and target your message in a more specific way.
How to Use Retargeting for Your Business
"Remarketing or retargeting, when done right, can result in better conversion rates, increased brand recognition and improved advertising ROI."Rather than having to introduce your business or products to ad viewers, you can jump right into the good stuff: convincing them to come back and buy from you.
Following are 5 ways to make the most of retargeting for your business.
1. Target visitors who have abandoned their cart
If you have ever bemoaned the number of visitors who leave your site and abandon a full shopping cart, you are going to love retargeting! According to this infographic, ad retargeting brings 26% of lost customers back to complete their purchase. Try offering a discount or free shipping to entice customers to come back and complete the checkout process.
2. Offer a free product related to the product they looked at
This could be a product sample, related eBook or even free shipping. The point is to entice them back to your site by offering something of value. This can also be a great way to get these visitors into your funnel and email list.
3. Cross-sell to existing customers
Retargeting can also be a great way to reach out to existing customers to entice them to buy products related to what they have already bought. For instance, for customers who have already purchased cameras from you, you could promote camera accessories like tripods or carrying cases.
4. Reach customers who are part of a limited time membership
If you offer any kind of free trial on your site, you’ll love this one! Set up a retargeting campaign that advertises to customers who have signed up for your trial. When it starts getting close to the end of the trial, target your ads to remind your customers that their membership is going to expire.
5. Create general ads for all website visitors
If the strategies above feel a bit daunting, no problem! Start by simply creating a remarketing campaign aimed at all visitors to your site. Entice them back by offering a free eBook, free shipping, or even just promote a great piece of relevant content.
"Retargeting is a powerful strategy that all business owners should be incorporating into their marketing mix."‘Banner blindness’ is alive and well, and remarketing can be just the way to make sure your ad stands out and gets noticed!
http://kimgarst.com/what-is-retargeting-and-why-should-you-use-it
Sunday 11 January 2015
What Are The Best Times to Post on Social Media?
Are you sending out your social media posts at the right time? Do you feel your posts aren’t getting noticed?
The best time to post on social media is very common question but is quite difficult to answer. There are a number of factors that can affect this such as the type of business you are, the social networks you are using, or even your target demographic.
There are certain noticeable trends when it comes to timings though and QuickSprout have put those together in the infographic below.
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http://blog.red-website-design.co.uk/2015/01/07/faq-what-are-the-best-times-to-post-on-social-media/
Saturday 10 January 2015
Boost Your B2B Marketing With Google+
Despite a rocky beginning, Google+ has grown significantly in the past years and now is the second largest social media network with over 500 million active monthly users. While its numbers continue to climb steadily, there are still many marketers who have yet to embrace it as an effective tool for B2B marketing. In fact, only 39 percent of B2B marketers use Google+ to reach out to interact with current and potential customers. If you are daunted by the task of learning yet another new social platform consider this: 70 percent of brands now have a presence on Google+. There's no better time to get started on Google+ than now and the following steps can help you increase your follower base.
Engage with Others
Social media is all about interaction and this holds true for Google+. The difference is that Google+ focuses more on finding people who share the same passions and connecting with them. This makes it much easier for you to find people who are actually interested in your industry and start meaningful conversations. There are several ways you can do this:
- Circles - Circles gives you control over how you consume content as well as who you share your content with. This targeted sharing ability can improve your engagement rate and retain your niche following.
- Communities – Like Facebook Groups, Communities brings together people who share similar interests. As with all groups, you should take the time to listen more than you speak. Keep track of what others are saying and leave thoughtful comments to other people's posts. The more informative your comments, the more you will position yourself as an expert on the matter.
- Influencers – It's easy to find and add people on Google+. All you need to do is search for a name and then add them to the appropriate Circle. Once you add them you then can read their updates and comment when appropriate. The more you interact with these influencers, the better your chance of capturing a portion of their and their audience's attention.
- Hangouts – Hangouts is by far the most popular feature of Google+ for good reason. You can video conference up to 10 people and record these sessions to share with people who could not attend. It's a great way to connect with others and create content for your content marketing strategy.
Create Quality Content
Content marketing continues to be the most effective way to build an audience and this is where Google+ really shines. Unlike other social sites, Google+ gives you the ability to format your text to be bolded, italicized or striked through for additional emphasis. As well, there is no character limit to your updates, so you can use it almost like second blog platform. There are also standard features you can use to improve the reach of your content like hashtags and @mentions.
Like other social networks, your posts should provide informative or entertaining content first and promotional content second. Once you've built a large following you can level off the ratios a bit, but even then remember that your content should always provide some kind of value to your followers. The more you share the more authority you will build, but it's still best to practice some moderation. Keep it to 2-3 updates per day if possible.
Encourage Easy Sharing
Social shares are one of the many signals included in Google's search algorithm so it stands to reason that shares and +1s on Google+ will greatly impact your search engine ranking. And in a way it does. When people are logged into their Google+ account, they receive personalized results based not only on their previous searches but also their Circle. The best part is that the improved search ranking doesn't just apply to your followers, but also the followers of the people who +1 your content. This means that if a major influencer +1's your content, you can potentially get a lot of exposure.
If you want to take advantage of this huge boost in your search rank, the easiest thing you can do is add a +1 button for each article on your site. If you want your Google Plus followers to +1, sometimes all it takes is to ask.
Master Google+
It will take some time to see the fruits of your labor, but the longer you use it, the more you'll understand how you should approach your target audience. Keep track of the posts and updates that do the best and try to see why it performed so much better than others then apply this information to future posts. You'll soon see your follower count and engagement rate grow and you will most certainly boost your B2B marketing with Google+.
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