How To Determine The Right Online Marketing Strategy for Your Business

 

It’s natural to feel a bit lost in the sea of online marketing strategies when you first take the plunge into the online world to market your business. If you’re focused on using a bunch of marketing jargon, investing in magazine advertisements, and putting up billboards, then you’re totally on the wrong track. What most businessmen don’t realize is that you’ll need to compel potential customers to view your business offerings on the World Wide Web.

Doing this is not tough if you know how to do it right. Simply having a website for namesake and a mere presence on social media won’t get you the growth you’re striving for. As a first step, you need to define your business and adopt a persona that you would be projecting online to Internet users. Below we’ve given you a complete lowdown on the best online marketing strategies to achieve your goals and successfully enter the booming cyber-marketplace.

Distinguish Yourself as a Brand
First and foremost, you’ll need to distinguish yourself from other competitors by thinking of a brand name, URL, tagline, trademark, and logo that suits your business. These should have the power to compel your online viewing audience to recall your company long after they’ve clicked away. A study at Penn State found that constant reinforcement of your brand can create a “brand recall” that boosts sales. While choosing your brand, ensure you keep your targeted audience in mind and gear it toward them. You should consider demographics like profession, location and age when making the final decision.

Learn from Your Competitors
If your competitors have already invaded the online world and gone viral, then you can learn a lot from studying their online marketing strategies. Look over their website’s product offerings, then brainstorm how you can offer more to your targeted audience. Find ways to differentiate yourself from these other competitors. In essence, think of starting off from where these other companies have ended their campaigns.

Zoom-In on Social Media
Most successful online marketing strategies today need to involve social media. Begin by exploring the different social media options available, such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. If there’s industry-specific forums, you might also want to have your presence there. Also, don’t forget about LinkedIn because this professional social media website can help you draw in contracts for your business. Make certain you build eye-catching social media profiles and start participating in the right groups or forums.

Set a Marketing Budget
Social media ventures on platforms like Facebook and StumbleUpon likely won’t yield good results if you’re marketing yourself without spending a dime. Unless you share exceptionally good stuff in your niche industry, you won’t have a far enough online reach without investing in some paid advertisements. There are many options available like Google Ads where you will pay per click. You can also splurge for hiring content writers and Web designers, but ensure you’re sticking to a budget to avoid a low ROI.

Crank Out Great Content
In today’s digital world, you don’t just need content. You need great content. Your entry into cyber-space must begin with crafting website content that explains the services and products you’re offering. However, once you’re done with that, don’t stop there. Go a step further by working on a blog. Keep publishing great articles, eBooks, podcasts, and white papers to pique the interest of readers. Learn about inbound marketing to attract even more customers with your content creation too.

Stop the Stuffing
Stuffing goes really well with turkeys, but not articles. Too much keyword stuffing within the content on your website will land you in trouble with Google Panda. For good search engine rankings, readability is a must. Over-stuffing content with keywords leads to both poor readability and turning off your potential customers. Search engine algorithms that index websites today take great pains to exclude and penalize websites that stuff keywords in spam.

Take Advantage of SEO Plug-Ins
Staying up-to-date with the latest online marketing strategies and managing your content for search engine optimization becomes much easier when you have handy plug-ins. SEO plug-ins for WordPress are available to just about everything from adding headers properly to writing your website’s meta descriptions. Having plug-ins take care of these details will make your content more apparent to the search engine algorithms. Also, use social media meta tags to guarantee that your blog posts automatically are published on social media accounts.

Engage and Interact
Having survey questions, free goodies like eBooks or discounts, videos, and questionnaires will keep visitors on your website longer. With successful engagement, customers are more likely to remember your brand name and eventually make a purchase. When it comes to content, don’t concentrate merely on the length of the articles. Instead, keep your posts interesting, informative and interactive. Ask questions and encourage readers to comment or share their views.

According to Google’s Matt Cutts, a smaller website which is frequently updated to engage users can rank higher than bigger websites. Therefore, always keep adding new items that will keep your customers coming back for more. Whenever you give out free goodies or interact with your audience, it’s important to collect their contact information. You shouldn’t be too pushy for contact details because a “like” or “follow” on social media will do. Asking for subscribers to a newsletter is another great idea for getting e-mail information.

Inspire Confidence
If your business’s websites allows customers to pay for products online, then having the right security certifications is a must. Show your customers that their confidential credit card information will not be misused through the transaction. You can display the logos of the security certificates right next to your payment logos for PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, etc.

Make It Mobile-Friendly
Most people today will use their Smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device to make the most of their Internet browsing. That’s why your website needs to be compatible with all mobile devices to avoid missing out on a huge potential customer base. Also, a website’s mobile friendliness is now used as a ranking factor for Google. Choose a mobile-friendly design that allows the best possible viewing experience even on-the-go.

Increase Your Reach on Social Media
Social media is supposed to be fun, so bring an element of fun to your online marketing strategies. Humor, information, and an element of awe are vital for effectively building a base of followers who turn into customers on social media. Create online banners that are both fun and engaging while also sporting the logo for your business. If your banner goes viral, guess whose bottom line will benefit? Make use of options like hashtags to get your message out.

Always Respond to Customers
Interaction is what social media is all about. If a person queries about your product or a customer wishes to file a complaint, you must respond immediately. Rather than focus on the negative and view them as a headache, look at the complaints as a medium for connecting with your customers. A person who quickly and efficiently gets their problem solved with an apology from your business is more likely to be satisfied than a person with no complaints.

Keep Using E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing will never become outdated because it by far gives the best results. That being said, it’s best to refrain from sending out junk e-mails that probably will only end up in the spam box. Send out “personalized mass e-mails” to your subscribers and social media followers. Tools like Mail Chimp make it extremely simple to use the name of your customers and add a small personal-sounding note with every email. These e-mails could invite the audience to a whole range of online activities you’re planning to boost engagement.

Consider Ad Retargeting
Approximately two percent of Internet traffic is converted in the first visit. This statistic tells us that people take time in making decisions about their online purchases. With an effective ad-retargeting tool, you can specifically bring your products before such people who have previously shown interest in your products. Ad retargeting is one of the effective online marketing strategies used to focus on interested customers and see a higher ROI. Likewise, Watchfinder clocks 1,300 percent ROI using precision retargeting With Google Analytics

Don’t Ignore Directories and Reviews
Listing your business in online directories and review sites can expand your presence and draw in more potential customers, especially the ones scouring the search engines. This will also give more insight into your business when done properly. For instance, if you are in the food industry, you might want to consider Yelp. If you have a hotel or resort, you must have a presence on TripAdvisor. Online Yellow Pages directories are often visited by people looking up phone numbers, so include your business here too. Targeting a smaller audience through local directories can also be effective.

Maintain Your Reputation
The World Wide Web can be quite abusive, especially when there’s a distraught customer. Your social media profile or directory listing may become filled with bad reviews and nasty comments. Then, there’s also the possibility that your competitors may try to sabotage your good name with fake negative reviews. This is why you should look into hiring a specialist who can effectively keep track of these happenings and work to maintain a positive online reputation.

Gauge Your ROI
At the end of the day, you’ll need to know which online campaigns are bringing you revenue and which are simply eating a hole in your wallet. Having a great ROI (return on investment) calculator can give you the right perspective. For instance, you can calculate ROI through Google Analytics or use a formula to find out your social media ROI. Then, readjust your online marketing strategies to ensure cost-effectiveness.

Overall, it’s essential that you remain in-tune with the constantly changing SEO norms and stay abreast of the newest trends in social media. The Internet is always evolving, so you need to keep pace with it to keep your business relevant. Use these great online marketing strategies to zero in on your target audience and adopt an online voice that connects them.

Custom Business Cards

15% Off All Business Cards

How to Generate Great Content for Your Site

 

 

Blogging burnout is a real thing in our industry. With the amount of demand placed on writers to come up with topics that are engaging and constructive, it can be difficult to keep the well filled enough so that you can keep cranking out great articles time and time again. Eventually you can run out of fuel for your fire.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. The Internet is the collected knowledge of all humankind and with it comes the best ideas that humans have ever had. It’s just a matter of tapping into this potential and finding something to write about.

Finding Hot Stuff For Your Blogs That Will Amaze Your Readers: 8 Methods
Developing a blog topic for a particular niche depends upon what you know about your audience. Once you leverage something your audience likes, it’s bound to be a hit.

Most times, we bloggers have a problem getting to that part. We have a problem getting something on paper that sounds good and will draw readers’ attention. For situations like this, the Internet is well equipped to give us a load of solutions. Whenever the old writer’s block sets in and you’re grasping at straws for possible blog titles, you should probably give these tested strategies a try.

1. Content Idea Generators: A content idea generator is a small app that allows you to input words or phrases and then randomly generate topics that may or may not be of use to you to for writing a blog. One of the most popular content idea generators is Hubspot’s Topic Generator. Given three nouns, it automatically generates topics that you can streamline to fit whatever niche you’re writing for. As a rough guide it’s indispensable for someone who’s short on time or ideas and has a looming deadline. It’s far from a sophisticated tool, but it saves you the time of having to juggle those nouns around with a pad of paper for hours before you hit upon the very same blog title the generator can spit out to you in half a minute.

What you should be aware of is that these content idea generators are solely meant to be a guide to start you on the path to a good blog entry. If content idea generators could write content as well as come up with catchy titles, we’d be out of jobs, my friend. Technology has a long way to go before it becomes that sophisticated, but it’s advanced enough to give you blog topics to think about (even though sometimes all you get are a mixed bag of jumbled words). When it comes to developing a killer blog post, sometimes all you need is the right headline to get you started.

2. Read Comments in Niche Blogs: This doesn’t even have to be comments on your own blog. As someone who writes for a niche, one would assume you follow a lot of blogs that also write on the topic (you do, right?). The most popular sites usually have comment storms, hundreds of comments all saying what they liked or disliked about the piece, maybe asking for more information or clarifying information on the original post. Sometimes unique discussions go on in comment sections of blogs that can fuel new ways to think about accepted ideas. It’s these hidden gems that you’re looking for.

To truly fuel a reader’s want for good content, you have to know what you’re audience is looking for in the first place. You can write a lot of great articles that people simply ignore because it’s not what they want to discuss, or what interests them. Comments from real users give you a unique insight into what the readers in this particular niche are talking about. From there you can simply develop a set of headlines based around that topic and start writing on it. As a method of getting new ideas and inspiration, it can take quite a bit of time. Reading through hundreds of comments can get tedious, but quite often it’s worth it to find that one statement that fuels your writing fire for another post.

3. What’s Happening that’s New? You know what changes every day? The news. In a particular niche or industry, there is always something new being discussed. Technological advances over the last decade have outpaced our ability to report them and because of that there will always be a ready audience for a news topic. But what news topic do you write about? Where do you find the information? Can you still do a news report on something if you’re not a news blog?

All of these are good questions. To sum it up, you don’t need to be a news blog to develop good content based on something that happened or is happening that has the potential to impact your niche. Thanks to Google, you can find out exactly what the cutting edge of your niche is and what’s going to happen in the near future. From there it’s just a matter of following the links and getting informed on a topic so that you can deliver a succinct summary to your readers about something that they probably haven’t heard about yet, but would be grateful to know.

4. Keep an Eye on Social Media: Social media has been a godsend to us bloggers, even though many of us overlook the powerful potential that lies just beneath the surface. Social media links you with your audience in the most direct manner that has ever existed since the dawn of the Internet. What this means is that it allows you to observe firsthand the things your audience is discussing with their social group. An insight like this has a lot of potential for generating leads for great content production. By using this information you can develop content around the most important topics that your users have chosen to discuss.

User generated content is not a new invention. This is a little bit like community generated content, but it depends upon you to flesh it out. The people that understand your readers the most are your readers. You can do a whole lot worse than depending on them to give you ideas for writing blog posts. If you spend an hour monitoring the trend of discussion on your audience’s pages, you can easily come up with a couple topics that you can discuss. Alternatively, you can pose a question to your audience and from their responses, craft some riveting content.

5. Base your Post off Other Successful Posts: Again, this doesn’t have to be previous posts that you have done (although these are the easiest for you to get your hands on). Look at the best performing posts of the top four or five blogs you follow. What makes them unique? What causes them to perform so well? Once you figure that out, it’s simple to craft a post that mimics the style and the structure of the successful post. It’s a relatively easy way to give yourself ideas for new content in a short space of time. Your content may not perform as well as the original, but it still has a lot of potential.

Sometimes, as I mentioned before, all you need is a killer headline. Taking a look at popular titles in other niches can give you a great springboard from which to base your own headlines. By developing headlines in this way, you can get a new perspective for something you may have written about before. Although this method can be a bit tricky, it could also lead to very popular headlines if it works. The downside is, of course, that this only gives you a headline and you still have to get your own research done. Sometimes in doing your research you might stumble across something else that you could possibly write about in future posts. Which brings us to our next point.

6. Take Copious Notes: Whatever you do, wherever you go, have a small notebook with you so that you can take notes as things pop into your head. The brain is a weird and wonderful organ and the times that inspiration strikes it are unpredictable. Like a Cub Scout, you must always be prepared for when your brain lights up with an idea. Having a notebook handy allows you to record the details of the idea in a solid form because, let’s face it, not everyone’s memory is photographic. You can also use a recorder to take voice notes about your idea, but being an old-fashioned type of writer at heart, I find something comforting about a notepad and pen.

With a notepad you can outline the idea you have as soon as you come up with it, maybe putting in possible sources for reference or other odds and ends that would make for a great content story. Ideas that come this way usually flesh themselves out fast. Once, on a forty-five minute train ride, I completed the draft for an entire article of about fifteen hundred words. Later that evening when I sat down to actually flesh it out, it was almost as if it wrote itself. It’s times like these that you realize exactly how powerful taking detailed notes can be when transferring an idea from your head to the screen.

7. Be Experimental: One of the reasons that people like to read is because they are afraid of doing some things themselves. A sheltered, harbored life isn’t the place for thinking about climbing Everest, but through the magic of words and imagination, they can almost feel the cold sun on their skin and taste the frostbitten air near the summit. It’s things like these that make for unforgettable content. By helping people experience something that they would never try on their own, allowing them to live vicariously through your words, you attract your reader and they become invested in you. It’s not like you have to go out on a limb yourself…that’s what Case Studies are for!

Being a blogger means utilizing the available information you have to craft content that appeals to your audience. A truly skilled master of the craft can take a boring, dry case study about a startup in Anywhere, USA and turn it into a story about facing struggles, the perils of being an innovator and the overwhelming joy of success with just a few turns of phrase. Case studies give you a place to start to craft your story and by reading interviews and other articles on the topic at hand you can build a very good story that allows your audience to experience life through captains of industry.

8. Shine a Different Light on Old Content: This one is probably the simplest and most overlooked way to generate new content – just use the old content! And no, I don’t mean copy the exact same post word-for-word and repost it under today’s date. Content is a fluid thing and whereas you may have represented something in words before, by taking the salient points out of that post and combining it with images, you can create a stunning infographic that gets your point across while at the same time doesn’t take any more work in terms of research than what you’ve already done.

Repurposing content like this and repackaging it is an old strategy. Companies in the middle of the twentieth century realized that people would more quickly buy something in shiny new packaging than the wrappers they were used to, and it changed how the industry presented products. Not many bloggers repurpose their content like this, either through fear of doing something completely untested or because they don’t feel comfortable covering ground they have already passed over. In any event, if you’re on a deadline and really need a jump-start for your inspiration, this is a great way to generate great content in a short time.

Deadlines
Award-winning author Douglas Adams once said that he liked the sound deadlines made as they whooshed past him. We bloggers don’t have that luxury. Our content needs to be produced on time and must be of a high enough quality so that we keep impressing our audience. If you’re really strapped for ideas and you’ve tried all of these, you can always get a professional company to provide blog posts for you in the form of a package. But if you still want to be a hands-on type of blogger, you’re going to have to face facts that sometimes your inspiration just dries up. These tips really help when you’re waiting for the well to fill back up. Eventually it will, and you’ll be glad for these little gems to tide you over until you can once again pull magnetic headlines out of your head.

Custom Business Cards

15% Off All Business Cards

Email Marketing Tips for Startups

To establish a startup business it is first imperative that you have a strong user base via different social media platforms. This is also seen as a primary point of focus in the initial stages of any startup. As such, for the sake of better performance in the starting years, the business’ social media marketing must be able to complement all email related customer engagement activities.

Today, online users from all across the globe regularly use email services. McKinnsey & Co, a well-renowned global management consulting firm, stated that email marketing is as much as forty times more effective than Twitter and Facebook combined. This effectiveness is even more evident when a startup is seeking new customers. Moreover, startups should utilize the services of prominent email marketing agencies, such as Mailigen to be able to reel in their target audience more efficiently and effectively.

Furthermore, email tends to underpin everything in social media marketing and sales. Therefore startups must always go for an approach that lets them make the best use of email marketing. Additionally, when engaging with customer email, the overarching strategy should be to deliver “wanted email messages” consisting of “appropriate content” to the “deserved receivers” at the “best possible time.”

Here is an interesting fact: Transactional and marketing emails that include notifications, receipts, password resets, promotions and social alerts help any startup to better connect and engage with customers. As such, this can significantly aid the growth of the new business. Moreover, when marketing emails are not delivered to the senders, it results in loss of sales and poor customer service on behalf of the startup. This only signifies how important email marketing services are for any business, and not just for startups.

“Content is King”
The phrase “content is king” applies perfectly to any email marketing strategy. As such, a startup must always give their audience top-most priority and therefore design a message that tends to emotionally connect with the receivers. This will aid the startup in bringing all relevant information to their customers. Additionally, if the message is personalized, this will end up establishing a relationship between both sender and target audience. This is why today, providers of mail marketing solutions greatly emphasize the “personalization” factor.

Moreover, the subject line report from Adestra has stated that businesses can get up to 20% more traffic just by personalizing their email messages. Accordingly, the right approach here should be to create a short and compelling subject line that customers can easily understand. As per several marketing studies, emails with six to eleven words in the subject lines rank with the highest open rates. Professional email marketing services make sure that subject lines are “eye-catching” for the viewer. And for this purpose, they often take benefits from existing facts to show how they can benefit the reader.

Email Marketing allows Startups to “Segment” their Target Population
Via email marketing, any startup can divide its target population in segments. This will allow the firm to give all of them a different marketing message that better suits each segment’s taste. For example, a startup can choose to have a different marketing approach for receivers aged 18-30 as compared to those aged 40-50. Moreover, this will allow the business to have a positive and constructive start that provides significant benefits in the long term.

Finally, it is important to state that employing the services of mail marketing solutions providers is critical for any startup company. Likewise, with the aid of the right email marketing strategy, the startup’s founders will surely acquire more engaged users. Besides this, a good email deliverability system will also have a positive effect on different areas of a startup such as sales and social media marketing.

As such, once the startup begins to scale, email marketing should continue to be the center of the company’s attention. This is because any slide in performance may mean that hundreds or even thousands of customers are not receiving emails as per their expectations.

15% Off All Business Cards

VIEW ALL

Pale Grey Pearl Finish Business Card

$60.05

White Pearl Finish Business Card

$60.05

White Business Card (Matte Finish)

$44.25

White Business Card (Matte Finish)

$44.25

Semi Gloss Business Card

$58.55

Thick Business Card Template #2

$68.95

Thick Business Card Template

$65.40

Pearl Finish Business Card Template

$60.05

How To Showcase Your Personal Voice on Social Media

 

 

Translate

When you head to a social channel and follow some of the top posters and profiles, you will see some great personal interaction. Each post reads like someone talking to their reader and helps create relationships with followers. This is an excellent way to reach out to your audience, but writing in a personal voice might be difficult for you, especially if you aren’t used to writing for social media.
Just how can you incorporate a personal voice on social media? This post is going to take a look, giving you excellent tips you can apply to your social media campaign immediately.

Putting Your Personal Voice Out There on Social Media
Being personal on social media is a great idea to help promote engagement with your audience. However, you are probably wondering just how you can add your personal voice on social media and how it can help. Let’s take a look at some great ways you can create a great social media campaign and presence.

1. Use Personal Pronouns in Your Social Media Posts. When you are writing for your social media content, it seems like it might be more professional to write in third-person. However, adding a first or second person viewpoint could be quite helpful. As you write up your content, utilize personal pronouns like “I, you, we” and others to help create a personal connection with your social media posts and followers.

2. Use Related Industry Leaders as Great Content Sources. You can easily add a personal sound to your social media content by sharing information from related industry leaders, instead of staying one-sided and sharing content that is only from your industry. The more you share from related industries, the higher your chances of creating connections within that related industry.

3. Use Creative, Free Sites Like Canva for Social Media Images. Images can add a great personal touch to any social media campaign, and an excellent tool to use is Canva. It helps you create incredible images that are trendy and appealing to the eye. The great thing about Canva is that it is free and it is easy enough that anyone can use it. Try it out and create some excellent images that can create a personal connection with followers and readers.

4. Share Trendy Things That Don’t Particularly Match Your Industry. As I said earlier, sharing content from related industry leaders is an excellent idea to add more personality to your social media content. In addition, sharing trendy items that don’t necessarily relate to your industry can be a great idea. This can mean doing something related to Game of Thrones or the latest meme that has gone viral. It might not match your industry, but tweeting about the latest, trendiest things can help make it look like you have an actual person running your social channels, which is great to promote engagement.

5. Make Sure You Post What Your Audience Wants to See. Your social content could have personal pronouns and trendy items, but if you are posting things your audience doesn’t want to see, you’ll lose that personal touch. People want to follow a social channel that provides them with what they want to see, and you need to make sure you know what that is before investing in, and beginning, a content campaign. A great way to make sure you are sharing and posting content your audience wants to see is to run polls and ask them questions, and by following them on social media. You can also use social media to learn more about them, helping you create a way to learn what your audience wants.

6. Click-Bait Headlines Don’t Help Generate a Personal Tone. Click-bait headlines used to be a great way to garner clicks. However, they are incredibly impersonal and can chase away your readers and followers. As Jordan Kasteler from Marketing Land says, avoid click-bait sounding headlines and create great, engaging, and personal headlines to connect with readers and get legitimate clicks.

7. Respond to and Thank Your Clients. When your clients or followers comment on your social media posts, always be sure to respond to them. If they say something awesome about your service, thank them and if they ask a question or say something funny, answer back. This shows that you are willing to engage with clients who take the time to talk with you. It also adds a personal voice because it shows that you aren’t just scheduling posts and ignoring your channels.

8. Did Someone Share Your Article? Re-Tweet It. A great thing about Twitter is that you can usually tell when someone shares your articles or blogs because they mention you. When this happens, re-tweet it. This isn’t really to help you get more clicks on the article, but that can happen. What it does is help you show your followers that there are others sharing your articles, and this can encourage them to share. It also encourages the sharer to keep sharing your articles.

9. Ask Open-Ended and Direct Questions to Generate Engagement. Getting people to dialog with you, creating a personal feel on social media, can be difficult for some, especially if you only post about your content. However, if you take the chance to ask your followers open-ended and direct questions, you will encourage them to answer and open a dialog with you. When they answer, always follow point seven and answer back. This can help create great personal engagement with your clients, adding the personal voice you so want for your social channels.

10. Don’t Hesitate to Ask Your Clients to Share Your Content. Another great way to put a personal voice on your social media posts is to ask your audience to share your content. You don’t have to voice it in a question but cheer people on by saying, “Share this” or saying something similar to your audience. Just keep it happy and upbeat and people will likely share when you ask. Once you start getting more people sharing your content, even more will jump on board and share. This is a great feeling when it happens, trust me.

11. Share a Few “Real Life” Images Occasionally. Being personal doesn’t just mean writing and being creative; it also means sharing “real life” images. This can be behind-the-scene images from your company or workflow, sharing pictures of your coffee or tea, or posting images from any event you may hold. You can share images for events that were only for your employees, as well as images of any events that incorporated your client base. You can even use those images to encourage more involvement with other clients during future client events.

12. Go to a Convention and Live Update About It. Is there a convention that your company can attend? Then go to it and live update about it, especially for popular conventions within your industry. Let your clients and audience feel like they are involved with you at the convention even if they cannot attend. This will help them feel like they are part of something major and that can be a huge encouragement to your audience, especially when it comes to engaging with you.

13. Share a Joke or Two. Humor is a great addition to any content campaign, especially when you are using social media. It can add a fun, personal touch to your posts and help people laugh. When people laugh, they will be more likely to share your content, and this can help you branch out to more people and broaden your audience and client base. You can do fun, cheesy jokes, create a long one that takes a few weeks to complete, or joke about something currently trending. Always be sure you handle humor professionally and avoid being mean or offensive. If you focus on being funny in a positive way, people will respect you and choose you over other negative jokesters online.

14. Use Popular, Normal Language When Posting. Using older or overly professional sounding language can make your social channels come across as stilted and boring. If you use typical, popular language when posting, you will create a trendy, easy-to-relate to post that has a higher chance of being shared, re-tweeted, and engaged with. Just be fun and casual with your social media posts and you will find it easy to write in the typical voice and verbiage of today.

Add a Personal Touch and Engage More With Your Followers
Following these tips can help you create a great, personal sounding social media campaign, helping bring about more engagement. If you have trouble with any of these, you can always hire a social media manager who can follow each and every suggestion. Express Writers has a great team of social media managers that always write with a great, personal tone that can help set up relationships and engagement with your clients. Take a look at our social media services to see what we can do for you and your social media campaign!

Custom Business Cards

15% Off

How to Create Evergreen Content That Helps to Earn Backlinks

 

 

Backlinks are still one of the most important factors for ranking well on search engines. Google had earlier said it tested both the search results with and without backlinks as a major factor for rankings Web pages and the results that were based on backlinks yielded better search results. Backlinks get counted as true votes for judging the quality of a website.

Earning backlinks is not an easy task. Webmasters often take the wrong turn and fall into the trap of buying cheap links that ultimately harms the entire site’s presence on Google. Preventive measures of link spamming taken by Google include the Penguin update that takes into account the entire link profile of a site before ranking them. The more natural the link profile, the better are the chances of ranking higher on Google.

Here are the top five strategies that will not only help you to earn quality and natural backlinks, but help your link profile to stay clean, thereby providing you better search engine rankings.

1. Research Content That Generates Natural Backlinks and Create a Comprehensive One
Studies have shown that content of at least 2,000 words tends to perform better in the search results. This means writing comprehensive content is a great way to earn more natural links. Companies often invest time and money in creating more and more pieces of short content but ultimately in the long run, they prove to be useless. Think about Wikipedia as a resource while creating content. A well written article will answer far more search queries and the search engines find it easier to measure the overall context of the article. If the content serves the user’s purpose, then it starts to receive a lot of natural backlinks.

Ever wondered why Wikipedia ranks so high in most of the search results? Simply because Wikipedia has content that is comprehensive and a lot of natural backlinks which it has acquired over the course of time.

2. Say More in Less — People Love Tables, Images, Videos and Infographics
People are a great lover of images and gravitate toward content represented beautifully and creatively in the form of images and infographics. Even videos are a great choice. Infographics are a great way to showcase your content to a wide audience. You can also submit the created infographic on infographic submission sites and that will help you to acquire some backlinks. Infographics can also serve as a great resource of referral traffic. Ultimately, the more traffic on your site, the greater are the chances of people linking back to it.

3. Write What People Want to Read and Not What You Want to Write
Make use of Google keyword Planner and Google Trends to find out the topics people are more interested in reading. Take note of the top landing pages on your site — those that are having the minimum bounce rate, in order to find out which content is receiving maximum user engagement. This will help you to write content that is well received by your audience.
Tommy Griffith of ClickMinded SEO training course, who had earlier served as an SEO manager for PayPal, believes BuzzSumo is a great tool in finding content that receives maximum social shares. As displayed in the below screenshot, you can simply enter the topic on which you wish to find the content pieces that went viral and BuzzSumo will show you a list. Producing content focused on such topics will help to earn more links.



4. Write Things Differently and Add Your Own UWP (Unique Writing Point)
All of us have heard about USP (Unique Selling Point) but very few of us must have heard about UWP (Unique Writing Point). An article with UWP tends to perform better in acquiring natural backlinks. People want content that is new and fresh — they don’t want to read something that has been said again and again. It can be difficult to bring something unique to each piece, but it is worth the effort to be creative and will pay off in engagement.

5. Think What Evergreen Stories Editors Look For and Create Content Based on Those Stories
Editors of esteemed publications look for stories that can generate buzz. Newsworthy stories receive a lot of attention, but evergreen pieces can be harder to pitch. If you are able to create an evergreen content piece that is able to grab the attention of the editors then you have found a jackpot. An evergreen article is one that will be interesting today, tomorrow, next month and next year. An article offering tips on potty training, saving money with DIY projects or reeling in a fish on every fishing trip will always be interesting as long as people are having children, doing home improvements and fishing.

Earning backlinks requires a lot of research and creativity. Hopefully the above tips will help you in your endevors. Do you have any other ideas for earning natural backlinks? Please share with us in the comments below.

Custom Business Cards

15% Off!

The Battle Between Search and Social: Which Is Best For Business?

 

 

Translate

There is a battle for online dominance brewing. Google and Facebook are leading the charge, and emerging social sites flank both sides.
Social media networks even aid search engines. But is it a ruse? While Facebook keeps Google away from its top secret info, Twitter has deflected to the search engine. Is this a bid to defeat their rivals? It’s all very cloak and dagger stuff.

The fight of course, is for the biggest share of ad revenue, and while the corporations make battle decisions, they take casualties. Usually small businesses.

Both sides are readying new and more powerful weapons in the form of paid advertising, but not every online business has the marketing budget to activate these weapons.

Marketers, therefore, have to decide if search or social work best for their business.

The need for search and social
It is safe to say that both search and social have specific benefits for most businesses and, for optimum online marketing results, should both be included in your strategy.

However, some businesses will find that one or the other is more effective, while others may find both search and social work in equal measure. The question is, which option should you channel most energy toward?

The easy option, of course, is to go down the paid advertising route on both search and social, but if you have a limited marketing budget, a positive ROI is not guaranteed.

In the absence of a paid advertising, companies have to look at alternative methods of attracting customers. The main driver in this game is content marketing.

So let’s concentrate on organic visitors and weigh up the pros and cons of targeting clients through search engines and social media.

Social pains
For marketers to reach a full complement of connections on social media networks, paid advertising is the way to go. Otherwise, you only reach a small percentage of customers willing to engage in your content and visit your online store.

Facebook in particular has cut back on the number of “friends” that receive content, and gives users the option to stop receiving your posts in their news feeds. Tweets are typically gone in a flash.
To combat limitations, trimming the number of contacts in Facebook and Twitter enable you to identify customers that are engaging with your brand over those that are not. Your content is then at least landing in the laps of consumers who are more likely to buy.

In their attempt to accrue revenue through paid advertising, social media networks cut off your supply line to customers. And even with paid advertising, users have the option to prevent your content landing in their newsfeed.

If you already get a flow of organic traffic from Google et al, social channels may not perform as well for you as search engines.

Emerging social networks
There are social alternatives of course. Google+ performs well in Google search (no surprises there!) while B2B companies fare reasonably well on Linkedin. There is also a spate of emerging social networks worth checking out.

For businesses targeting an audience of 14- to 25-year-olds, Snapchat is threatening to challenge the top two for number of users. Furthermore, not many marketers have tapped into this social platform yet, so early adopters could get a clear run at users.

There are also a spate of networks that categorize content to target specific readers. For the time being, users are in short supply, but sites like Quora, Medium and Bubblews could grow if marketers and readers recognize the opportunities and benefits.

The major positive to this type of social media network is that your audience is genuinely interested in reading your content and is specifically looking for the subjects you are writing about. In this regard, there are parallels with search.

Social networks also enable you to connect with customers instantly and provide a human touch in a digital environment. It is worth investing in social tools that notify you when your brand or keywords are mentioned whereby you can be on-hand immediately to advise prospects.

Attracting buyers
For new businesses, social media networks will outstrip search engines in terms of reaching an audience and attracting customers. But the key is to find the right audience rather than accumulating as many followers as you can. The expression “quality over quantity” works well as a strategy to keep in mind.

If you have already been active on social media and have accrued a steady following, do some analysis to determine how many are actually interacting with your content, and what content is performing well.

Social media marketing requires finding an audience that genuinely wants to receive your content and actively engage with it rather than an account of random followers that do not show interest.
Is it time you trimmed the number of connections in your social accounts? If you have a huge following, but little engagement then, yes, it is.

Search engine upgrades
On the opposing side of the digital field are the search engines. Google has been the driver of online search for almost two decades, during which time the California-based company has endeavoured to improve search results for its end-users.

Whether Google has improved its service is open for debate. Which way the vote will swing depends on if you are a winner or a loser. Businesses that have a solid SEO strategy and persist with it for several years are more likely to give the search engine the thumbs up. Losers will, “huh.”

Personally, for ranking, Google increases the visibility of my site and drives more traffic than
Facebook or Twitter. But for research purposes, the quality of websites ranking in the top berths often leave a lot to be desired.

Marketers can also face a challenge from search engines. Updates to algorithms are performed every so often that forces them to change their strategy. To be fair to the search engines, this is because marketers are using “black hat” tactics that fall outside the guidelines in an attempt to manipulate search results.

If your digital marketing agency understands the best — and only honest methods of improving search results, you should never have to worry about algorithm changes unless it relates to your Web design like the recent mobile-friendly upgrade.

Attracting traffic
Search engines attract organic traffic based on intent. The advantage this gives online businesses is that a higher percentage of visitors are more likely to convert into sales because visitors are looking for specific products and are ready to buy.

In this respect, search engines have the edge on customers you hope to attract through social media. The downside, however, is that if your Web pages are not ranking, you do not attract much in the way of organic traffic.

Typically, if you rank outside the top two pages of search results, you cannot expect to receive many visitors, certainly not if your website and blog is fresh fodder for crawlers.

Start-ups typically need to attract new traffic through paid advertising, but AdWords can be an experimental process which is not always easy to master. If you do not have much of a budget, it is difficult to compete with larger companies affordable, yet effective keywords.

Essentially, whether search or social work better for you is a matter of metrics. Social certainly gets the nod over search for new starters while Web pages that rank well typically outperform social media marketing.

The battle for online supremacy between search engines and social networks will rumble on for many more years yet. In the meantime, online marketers have to continue fighting on both fronts.

Custom Business Cards

15% Off

How to Lose a Prospect’s Attention in 5 Seconds or Less

When you make contact with a new prospect-either by telephone or in a face-to-face meeting-you have an extremely short window of time to connect with them. If you fail to achieve this they will quickly tune you out. Here are several things you can do to lose your prospect’s attention in the first five seconds of the conversation:

1. Start a telephone conversation with, “Hi, how are you?”
2. Open your conversation by introducing yourself, your company and what you do.
3. Make small talk about “stuff” you see in their office (awards, plaques, photos, etc).
4. Give them an overview of your products and services.
5. Explain how your product or service will benefit them.
6. Tell them what other companies you have worked with.
7. Show them the awards and accolades your company product has received.
8. Give them a brochure that outlines your key products or services.

Unfortunately, most sales people fail to effectively open the sales conversation with a new prospect. Most of the sales calls and meetings I have been subjected to over the years have started with one or more of the above. However, the moment your prospect senses that you are trying to sell them something that they don’t need or want they will tune you out and look for a way to disengage or disconnect from the call. They don’t care about you. They don’t want to know about your company. They don’t want to listen to you talk about your products or service. They want a solution to a problem. They want to know how you can help them improve their business. Here is how you do that.

Focus your attention on the prospect!
It may sound simple but most sales people don’t get it. They still believe that selling means talking at great length about their company, their product or their service. However, truly effective salesmanship is all about asking the prospect the right questions and demonstrating that you can help them solve a particular problem or issue. That means you need to direct ALL of your attention on their situation and resist the opportunity to talk about your company or your offering.

If you are making cold calls you can accomplish this by modifying your opening statement or voice mail message. State a specific problem they are likely facing (based on your experience or research). For example,

“Mr. Big, if you’re like other companies in ABC industry, I suspect that you (fill in the blank with the problem). If this is the case, call me at 800-555-1212 and I might be able to suggest a solution. By the way, it’s Kelley calling and my number is 800-555-1212.”

This also applies to face-to-face meetings as well. When you meet with a new prospect for the first time, the last thing you want to do is to start blathering away about your product or service. Instead, open the conversation by asking, “Mrs. Prospect, many of our clients are currently experiencing (insert the problem here). How does that compare to your company’s situation?” This demonstrates that you are knowledgeable of their business and/or the industry and it gives your prospect the opportunity to tell you about their chief concerns.

Over the last fourteen years I have learned that most people will tell you anything you want to know providing you give them a reason to do so. Launching into a product demo does not achieve this but showing interest in their business does. The key is to develop and ask high-quality questions.
Several years ago I worked with a company who regularly participated in industry trade shows. I observed them at one show and noticed that their sales reps simply talked about the products that people showed interest in. Not surprisingly, their closing ratio was low because in most cases they gave information that was not relevant to that prospect’s situation and that they talked to people who had little or no motivation to buy. After some training, they began asking people a few high-quality questions to determine the people who had problems, challenges, and were seriously interested in their products. They were instructed to let “tire-kickers” look around and focus their time on people who had pressing concerns. At the end of the show their sales were slightly higher but they also had a list of highly- qualified people to follow up with and many of these individuals ended up buying from my client.

Here’s the bottom line. The more time you spend talking about your product, the less inclined a prospect will want to continue that conversation. The more you focus your attention on their situation, their problems and demonstrating how you can help them improve their business, the more you differentiate yourself from the competition.

You only have few moments to connect with a prospect so keep it brief. Keep it focused. Keep it about them. And you will keep their attention.

Custom Business Cards

15% Off