Author: Eric Sachs

SEO virtuoso, CEO @Sachs Marketing Group. Focused on being of service to business owners - helping to better position them in the eyes of their audiences.

Categories
SEO

Single Page Websites and SEO, Explained

Single page websites have become popular among minimalist entrepreneurs, product announcers, and newcomers to the world of websites. The idea is a single page website is easier to maintain while the entrepreneur is doing their work.

Some of these people are often offering services that are a little more in-depth than something that you can drop into an online shopping cart. Some are your consultants or life coaches and they just don’t have the time or resources to devote to a blog or maintaining a website with fresh content on a regular basis. Or perhaps the purpose of the site is to garner some early excitement about a future product, in conjunction with a Kickstarter or other crowdfunding campaign.

In the past, many folks have claimed that single page websites don’t work well and SEO is too difficult for these sorts of websites. This is often true; however, we are going to show you today that it can work and with ingenuity, work well.

 

Why Single Page?

Let’s face facts, our society has become so inundated with information that when they visit a website, you have only a matter of seconds to truly capture their attention. Many of them don’t stick around and really look through the site unless something catches their attention immediately. Single page websites, don’t have to worry near as much as those of us who maintain multiple page sites.

Yes, you still have those few seconds to capture their attention, but they should provide enough information to convert their traffic into clientele when they contact for more information about the service. The wonderful thing about single page sites is they load much faster than a multi-page site and they are fantastic for the mobile user.

Our websites often tell a story, even on a business level. We are telling a story in which we invite the reader to become a part of our world through product and service. Single page sites truly are devoted to telling the story of how we came into existence, what we offer, and who partakes in our story. When we connect on a personal level with our community, we can improve our business standing.

Updating the sites become easier. With a multi-page site, it can take longer to make sure products and services, blogs, and testimonials are updated. Often, multi-page sites rely on a webmaster to take care of that sort of thing. With a single page, your updates can happen on your schedule and quickly.

 

Doesn’t It Counter SEO?

The short answer is maybe. If you are relying on a wide range of keywords, your single page site will work against you. Single page sites are focused on one concept and that means you are limited in your ranking opportunities.With a multi-page site, your keyword range can widen due to the keyword ranking on a page by page basis. So, before you make a big switch, check in with your marketing team on how effective your range of keywords are working for you.

Let’s say you are a local yoga instructor. Your keywords will be limited to your profession within your town. Unless you are the only yoga instructor, your competitors, with multi-page websites, will gain a higher ranking naturally. If you are venturing into the world of websites for the first time, look at how your competition looks online and how keywords play into that. This could very well be the reason why you opt for or against a single page site.

While single page websites sound easier to maintain due to lack of pages, the lack of information can be counter-productive to your business. Many people will not even consider converting to a business relationship if there isn’t plenty information that engages them and makes them feel like you are a personality. Because people do businesses with people, not companies. Overall, some people may feel that only providing a small portrait of what you do is a lack of motivation to take your business seriously. Not always a fair assumption, but it does happen.

On the upside, as we have mentioned before, single page transfer easier to mobile devices. More searches are occurring on smartphone and tablets. While multi-page sites can transfer to mobile devices, they take longer to upload and if they are not optimized for mobile devices, they can be harder to navigate. You don’t have to take any extra steps with your single page site to make it easier for your target market to find you.

Advanced techniques, such as siloing, do not work on a single page site. Siloing involves a very specific structure to your website to maximize your authority and presence online. Each page is given a category and/or a subcategory to specifically improve SEO ranking. With a single page, it’s simply impossible to silo.

 

So How Do I Make It Work?

If you have decided that you simply prefer the idea of a single page site over a multi-page site, there are ways to master SEO and maximize your online presence. It will require some intuition and ingenuity to make your site the best it can be. The important thing to remember is to go with the flow. Grow your site in the direction it needs to so that it can nurture your business.  So, let’s talk about some strategy to help you find the recipe that will help you find your way!

 

Keep Your Site Fresh

There is this idea that with single page sites, you can just set it and then move on. Not true! For a high Google ranking, you need to update it regularly. The best solution to keeping your site fresh is to routinely change what information you share. If you have testimonials posted, change them out so that you are showing off the most recent. If you are in a lull with obtaining testimonials, rotate your favorites so that you give the appearance of a fresh face.

How regularly you update the site is solely up to you. Many successful sites update anywhere from daily to weekly. Be realistic with your time and energy so that you are updating often but not detracting from your other work. If weekly seems too often for your workload, consider hiring a social media manager and allow them to take over the updates. At the very least, begin with weekly updates and increase if you see an uptick in visits and conversions. If it’s working for you, keep the momentum going.

 

Define Your Sections

Many SEO experts suggest adding a page to your single page site. The problem is, that’s not really a solution but rather a nudge to change to a multi-page site.  Instead, you can create sections on your page to be sure you get all the necessary information on the page, while still allowing spiders to search the page easier. You can choose sections like About Us, Contact, Product/Service Information, Testimonials, and even a Blog. The last three are the sections that you want to keep fresh and update routinely. About Us should change only if your business structure, mission statements, or ownership changes regarding the business. Contact info should include all methods of communication and include any social media networks you are using to engage with prospects and clientele. That only changes if you add or remove a platform.

If you find that you must grow your site due to increased traffic and increased products or services offered, do make the change to a multi-page site. It is frustrating for your business flow if you continue to not allow the site to grow in the way that it needs to. It’s also a fantastic sign that your business is gaining the notoriety it deserves and should be nurtured!

 

Make It Readable

No matter what SEO tricks you use, it should not interfere with the readability and flow of your website. If a site is too cluttered or it’s a wall of text without any breaks, you will lose the interest of your target market. Most everyone scans a site to see if it piques their interest before really reading anything. If you are unsure of how well your flow is, ask your site visitors. Ask if they’ve looked at your website and if so, what did they think of it? Getting feedback from your users can let you know what works for them and what doesn’t.

 

You Can Still Use Navigation Links

For a multipage site, using navigation links are great for traveling between pages that you need to find. It saves people from getting frustrated when they travel from page to page and can’t find the information they want. You can do the same thing on your single page site between sections. It is only beneficial if you have a long page that requires a lot of scrolling through to information. It saves that same frustration people can experience with a multipage site.

 

Add Anchor Links

If you think you can’t add anchor links to your single page site, think again! You can do it through your CSS ID names. Using keywords as your anchor links act like a lighthouse on a foggy night. Because of this, search engines will lock onto your page and your SEO has just shot through the roof! Do make sure that they keyword match the overall tone of your page. If it’s out of place or just doesn’t match, you will frustrate your target market and increase your bounce rate.

 

Credibility Through Links

Your ability to be shared is a big boon to your online presence. Adding social media buttons to your page allows people to connect with you in a variety of ways and lends credibility to your sharable nature. Link building can be a huge help. Backlinks to guest blogs where you are interviewed or offer some expert advice is incredibly helpful. Reviews of your products and services, that include a link, allow search engines to find you more often and raise your ranking. Another wonderful thing about link building is the networking aspect. You will be working closely with others, developing fantastic business relationships, and it can turn into major sales in the future.

 

Add Header Tags

Multiple header tags (or H1 tags) are not the most popular amongst SEO experts, but in the case of a single page site, they are a blessing in disguise. The trick is to use an H1 tag per section of your page. Most notably, use them in the header of each section since the tags are designed for headers of pages. These tags truly increase your SEO ranking overall because the spiders are looking to see what is so important on that page.  Having multiple on your single page increases the likelihood that the spider will find you efficiently and raise that rank.

 

One Page Websites are Effective

While many may tell you SEO is difficult for a single page website, there are ways to make things work for you. Many experts will also suggest that single page websites should be limited to new sites and new businesses, but you should do what works best for you. Innovators have been told for centuries that things are impossible and then break the mold. Entrepreneurs with single page websites get to find innovative ways of breaking the mold and teaching us all new tricks. Beyond that, I encourage you to take on that multi-page website if you should outgrow your single page site.

Do you use a single page website? Do you find them helpful or harmful when you see them online? Tell me in the comments below.

Categories
Content Marketing

9 Content Marketing Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

Content marketing is one of the most effective forms of online marketing today. In a world where 200 million people are using ad blocking software, traditional display ads just aren’t as effective as they used to be. When you consider that content marketing costs 62% les than outbound marketing, yet generates three times the leads, it’s easy to see why so many brands are turning to it today.

But, just because you can do something a certain way, doesn’t mean you should. And just because you’re doing it, doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. Even if you’ve done a fair amount of homework ahead of time, there are some missteps you’ll want to avoid from the start. If you’ve already made one or more of these common mistakes, don’t panic. There’s time to adjust your approach and see results.

1. Skipping a Documented Content Strategy

If you think you can get away with keeping tabs on your content marketing strategy mentally, I hate to tell you, but you’re wrong. You may be able to make it work, of course, but research shows companies with a documented strategy see better performance compared to companies that don’t have it written down.

How you choose to document that content strategy is up to you, but you should seek to answer the following questions, per the Content Marketing Institute:

  1. What specific challenges are you trying to solve?
  2. What is your dream outcome?
  3. What’s the risk if your content marketing fails?
  4. Who is involved? Do you need permission from managers, board members, or any other higher-ups to participate?
  5. What is your budget?
  6. What happens if something goes wrong? What’s the backup plan if you don’t reach your goals as quickly as you want to? What happens if customers complain or another issue comes up?
  7. How long do you have to demonstrate success?

After you have those broad questions answered, it’s time to get specific:

  1. What do you need to reach the objective? Do you want to create leads or get higher-quality leads? Make direct sales? Get better customers?
  2. How big of an opportunity is it? Is it large enough to warrant spending time, energy, and money on it?
  3. How will your content marketing align with the rest of your business objectives and existing marketing?
  4. What are the risks? What could prevent you from reaching your goals? What can you control to minimize the chance of those things happening?

Then, move on to detailing who your audience is, the kind of content they need, how it will help them, why the audience cares about it, and what your unique value proposition is.

From there, you can develop a list of the content you’ll create as part of the strategy, making sure it offers something different from the competition.

2. Misunderstanding Your Audience

If there’s one thing that you must learn to succeed in all facets of online marketing – it’s your target audience. The more you know about them and what they want, the better you can craft content that will serve their needs. If you’re not clear about who you’re trying to reach, then you’re not going to get the best possible ROI.

Start with a customer persona for each segment of your audience. Then, pay attention to your analytics to see how well your personas match your actual audience. Adjust the personas and content accordingly.

If you think you’ve got a handle on your audience, I want you to take a second to evaluate that and come up with proof to support your answer. Why? Research shows 63% of customers don’t feel the brands they love understand them. So, there’s a bigger chance that you think you’re connecting with your audience, but you’re really not. And if you’re not connecting with them, the content you’re creating isn’t really as helpful to them as you’d like it to be.

You want to create content that the audience wants to hear – not content centered around what you want to talk about.

3. Selling Rather Than Teaching

Your content should always be designed to educate your audience first, and sell second. Never mention your business or yourself until your call to action at the end of the content. You should be aiming to teach your audience how to solve a problem and then show them who they can reach out to if they need help.

If your readers want to know how to change a tire, they should know how to do it by the end of the article or video. You want people to share your content so you or your client looks like an expert who is paid to perform related services or sell related products. In the case of changing a tire, this content could be used to market a mechanic or a tire shop, because it helps them show their expertise, without overtly selling their tires or repair services.

4. Poor Time Management

A lot of marketers struggle to produce enough content, with data from Content Marketing Institute showing it’s the second biggest pain point for B2B marketers, coming in just behind budget. Since we can’t slow the earth’s rotation around the sun to add more time to our day, the only way we can be sure we’re producing enough content while staying within our budget is to make efficient use of our time.

I challenge you to really take a look at how you’re spending your time at work. How many times a day are you checking your phone? How much time are you spending on Facebook games? Use apps like Rescue Time to track what you’re doing for the day, then make a plan of attack to reduce and eliminate those time sucks that are killing your productivity. (I see you over there, Candy Crush.)

5. Obsessing with the Top of the Funnel

Of course the top of the funnel matters, because that’s where your leads are coming in. But if that’s the only place your content marketing efforts are focused, you’re alienating the rest of your funnel. Before they can become a paying customer, which is ultimately what you want, you’ll need to move them the rest of the way through the funnel, right? Try to develop your content marketing strategy so there’s content aimed at audiences in each stage of the funnel.

6. Ignoring SEO or Thinking Only About SEO

This one can go both ways, and I find it typically depends on the marketer’s experience with SEO before delving into content marketing. Generally, those who consider themselves SEO aficionados before getting into the content marketing side of things are the ones who think about it too much, but that’s not always the case.

The reality is there’s room for both because SEO helps to drive traffic and helps bring your customer acquisition costs down. But, SEO is more than using keywords and phrases to get a good rank in the search results.

Related: 10 Common SEO Mistakes that Cost You Customers

Beyond knowing what keywords, you need to use in your content, you’ll also need to use them in the title tags and in paragraph headings. You’ll also want to optimize your content for Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms. Taking these steps helps increase the odds readers will find out about you and what you have to sell through finding your social media pages rather than an article or landing page you created.

If you’re thinking only about SEO, you’re focused too much on those keywords and phrases, and not necessarily producing content that the audience finds useful.

7. Foregoing Influencers

Influencers are an important piece of the content marketing puzzle, since amplification and promotion is just as important as the content itself. You can have the best content out there on a particular subject, but none of that will matter if no one knows about the content or can find it.

If you’re still relatively new to the industry and don’t have any connections with influencers, it can be especially tempting to skip connecting with them, but you have to start somewhere. 92% of consumers would rather make purchase decisions based on trusted recommendations and referrals than they would from other sources. If you’re able to connect with an influencer, and that influencer shares your content, you’ll be more likely to pick up customers than if the customer had found your content themselves. And just in case you need a bit more motivation to start building those relationships, businesses earn an average of $6.50 for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing.

 

8. Sticking to a Single Type of Content

Written content is the most common form of content used in content marketing, but treating it like it’s your only option could be hurting your strategy. It’s okay for it to be the core part of your strategy, but don’t be afraid to experiment with other types of content – especially if your data indicates your audience would be responsive to it. Your content is an asset, so writing a single post and archiving it once it’s had its moment in the sun is a waste. You can and should repurpose all your content in as many ways as possible to make the most of your assets.

 

9. Creating Content That’s Not Evergreen

And on a similar vein, any content you create today should have value to the reader years from now, too. You want that single piece of content to be out there working for you for a long time after you write it – even if you do have to come back and check on it from time to time. This means keeping things that are timely out of the picture – and writing about topics that will be as true today as they are 10 years from now. In other words, don’t write about how your favorite celebrities are getting married – because statistically, they won’t be married long. Evergreen content allows you to consistently add to your marketing assets and increase revenue without having to invest in new materials.

 

Keep Your Content Marketing Fluid and Flexible

Though I just preached the importance of a documented content strategy at the beginning of this post, I want to finish it with a reminder that you shouldn’t be rigid with that strategy. It’s all a guessing game based on what the data you have on hand indicates, and if you get a different result than you anticipated, there’s nothing wrong with making adjustments as needed and experimenting to see if your audience responds better to different types of content and promotional techniques.

What do you find the most frustrating about content marketing? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below.

Categories
SEO

Why You Need to Utilize NAP to Master Local SEO

NAP doesn’t refer to the short sleep you love to take in the afternoon, but instead stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. It is a critical piece of the local SEO puzzle, and without it, you will have a hard time getting a business to rank well. Search engines use the NAP information to determine which companies to show when users enter any kind of geo-targeted search. You may hear NAP referred to as “citations”. You get a citation when your NAP data shows up in a directory on the web.

 

Check Your NAP for Accuracy

Before you start working on increasing the number of citations you have out there, it’s important to make sure the information is accurate. It should be listed on your website, too. The information should match in every single citation you have. If there is a difference between how it is listed from one place to the next, the search engine bots may not be able to read it as the same place – thereby negatively affecting your ranking. Your online citations should match your business filings with your state, the information on your website, and match the information on file with the post office. Ideally, your NAP should also include a landline as a phone number.

You need to find all the variations in your citations before you begin working on local SEO in earnest. This means thinking about any previous business names you’ve had if you’ve ever changed your name in the past. You also need to think about any addresses you’ve had in the past, especially if you’ve moved offices recently or if you have additional locations. How many phone numbers are you using? Are you using call tracking numbers? Toll free phone numbers? Cell phone numbers? List all of that stuff out, and then go over to Moz Local and search for your business.

This tool lets you see all the primary data aggregators, so it’s easy to see any NAP variations you  may have. Add those to your list.

Then, head on over to Merchant Circle and Yellow Bot. These collect data from various sources but aren’t good at merging data from the sources, creating a lot of duplicates. Though it’s a pain to clean up, it can help you find variations you need to address.

Next, search Google. At this point, you’re looking for variations you’ve not already found, by searching with the phone numbers you have. Searching the phone numbers and excluding the names ensures you’ll get a list of results mentioning only the number, so you can catch any new names you didn’t already.

How do you search for this?

Phone number =”name1″ –”name2″, etc.

You can reverse this to find more phone numbers, by searching for the names, and excluding numbers you’re already aware of.

Name1 –”phone1″ –”phone2″ etc.

Repeat this process using the phone numbers and exclude address you’re already aware of, using only a portion of the address leaving out things like suite numbers.

 

What If There’s a Problem with the Information?

If you notice inaccurate or inconsistent NAP information, don’t panic. It’s not necessary to go through each listing one by one to manually fix it. Major data agencies collect, verify, and distribute your business data – which is why it spreads through the internet quickly. These companies generally make money by selling the data as leads, or by selling the data to other companies.

These major players include:

Start with these main companies, as correcting the data here ensures the right information will trickle out to other websites. Once the information is corrected with those sites, go on to the most authoritative directory websites, which include:

Once the information is cleaned up there, you’ll want to check other listings on the lower tier directory sites like:

But that doesn’t mean the job is easy, or done. When you fix an incorrect listing, it’s common for it to come back up again, since there’s not a single authority source of information for business NAP data. If you take the time to fix a Bing listing, Bing may see the listing (the wrong one) still exists on another site, and recreate it automatically.

As frustrating as the situation is, cleaning it up is essential to ranking locally. It will take time to get it done, and it will require diligence, but it can be done. The best part is, you can get the clean up done in ways that are not cost prohibitive.

 

Where Should You Enter Your NAP?

Your NAP needs to be entered using the same format anywhere it’s mentioned online – whether it’s your website, a newspaper article, a blog post, or a profile on any directory. It should always be included in text format, so Google and other search engine robots can read it. If it’s an image format, the search engines won’t “read” it like we can.

Here’s a list of some directories and websites to help you get started:

 

Building Citations

When you have all the NAP variations ready to go, you’re ready to start building citations. All you have to do is check all the NAP variations on the site before you submit a listing. This way, you’re not creating a duplicate listing.

You have two ways you can do this – using the site’s search feature to search by either the business name or phone number, or using Google. As simple as using a site’s own search feature is, it’s not the most reliable method, so I always recommend using Google.

Search it like this:

Site: domain.com “phone1”

Site: domain.com “phone2”

Site: domain.com “name1”

Site: domain.com “name2”

Site: domain.com “address1”

Site: domain.com “address2”

If you find an existing listing, follow the steps required to claim it and then update it. If you do not find a listing, follow the steps required to submit one. When you edit or submit listings, make sure they are fill out the profiles completely, with photos and descriptive copy.

 

What if You Have Multiple Locations?

Whether you have two locations, or tens of thousands of locations, clear and trustworthy location signals are necessary to high local ranking. But, with each location you have, keeping that information clear and trustworthy becomes more difficult.

You want a structured localized presence for your multiple location business, and you can do this using either subdomains or subfolders. Subfolders are typically the easiest, but if you only have a handful of locations, you could also create pages for each of them, and link out to them from a main location page. Treat the location pages as a landing page for each store location, optimizing accordingly for each locality.

If you’re a larger scale business with a bigger number of locations, you may want to consider the subdomain approach. You can piggy back on the root domain’s SEO “juice”, but now you’re able to optimize for the subdomain instead of the root. For example, if you owned redcars.com, and one of the countries you served is France, you could create france.redcars.com, and optimize the subdomain content specifically for your French customers. The local relevancy will boost your local SEO and improve your overall user experience to help increase conversions.

Do not rely on a single directory listing for multiple locations. Create separate listings for each location. Do not list corporate headquarter locations that do not serve customers. This approach doesn’t help local search or your customers. Many directories, including Google My Business now allow you to create multiple listings and optimize each according to their actual location.

 

Benefits of NAP Consistency

You’ll be able to increase your organic rankings since the information is the same and accurate across all channels. Whenever you move locations or change a phone number, you should update all citations as soon as possible.

You will appear higher in local search results on mobile devices and desktops. As such, you should see an increase in traffic, and hopefully an increase in calls from mobile devices. You’ll make it easier for new and existing customers to find your website and physical location.

 

Be Patient

NAP citations are a necessary evil for local SEO. If you find the process overwhelming, be patient and work methodically. If you’d rather not handle the task alone, the team here at Sach’s Marketing Group can take care of it for you.

Categories
Digital Marketing

How to Start a YouTube Channel for Your Business

YouTube, the Google-owned video network, is about more than funny videos and attempting to improve SEO signals. The network is a great way to connect to and engage with people in your audience, since it has more than a billion users. That’s more than 33% of everyone on the entire internet. Every day, people are watching millions of hours of content. Considering that on mobile alone, YouTube reaches more people between the ages of 18 and 49 than any cable network in the US, it’s a great place for small businesses to be. Except, less than 10% of American small businesses are actively using it. Why? Because it’s more difficult to produce video content than it is to create imagery and blog posts… or at least that’s how most people feel.

If you’re considering starting a YouTube channel to support your digital marketing efforts, it’s not just as simple as picking up the camera and pressing record. Just like with any other social platform, you want to think about goals and develop a strategy, so you can make sure your YouTube channel supports your overall goals.

 

Questions to Ask Before You Get Started

  • Why do you want to start a channel? Go beyond the obvious answers like “to get more leads” and “to make more money”. Get specific with the reasons why you want to create this kind of content, and it will help you shape the content you’ll create for the channel. Success on YouTube for most people, anyway, isn’t about uploading a single viral video and making millions of dollars. It’s about time, effort, and a plan.
  • What will your videos be about? Based on the reasons why you want to start a channel, think about what your core audience wants to know about your niche or industry. Then, start coming up with a list of ideas to cover in videos. You can go back to blog posts and other types of content you’ve already created for your business and create videos to accompany them, too; repurposing content is a great way to reach a broader audience with the same basic material.
  • Does your target audience use YouTube? If your customers, or potential customers aren’t on YouTube, then you may have a problem. But, considering how many people are using YouTube, chances are you’ll find someone who’s not only interested in what you have to say on your channel, but what you have to offer outside out of it. Use whatever you know about your audience – age, interests, income level, and other demographics to make sure you’re creating content that appeals to them on some level.
  • What other channels are serving the same audience? A competitive analysis helps you see what other channels are doing, so you know what you can do better. Look closely at the types of videos the other channels are putting out there, and how their audience is responding. Are there questions in the comments that you could weave into your video on the same topic? Look for ways your channel can improve upon existing content, so you can become the number one resource.
  • How much time do you have to dedicate to video creation? How often will you upload new content? It’s important to post content regularly if you expect to build an audience on YouTube. This means you’ll need to spend time thinking about how often you want to post new content, and make sure you have some videos lined up and ready to go before you officially launch. This way, if something happens and you’re not able to create new content right away, you’ll still produce a steady stream of videos to keep you audience happy. You must be realistic with this, because you don’t want to stress yourself out or be forced to pull an all-nighter to produce a new video. On the other hand, you want to make sure you’re uploading new videos often enough to keep your channel fresh in your audience’s mind.
  • How will you make your videos? What format will your videos be in? Are they going to be shot with a web cam? Your smartphone? A video camera? Will you be using screencasting software to avoid live action? Creating animations? What tools do you have at your disposal? What is your budget to get started? How will you be editing your videos?
  • How will you measure success? Think about the goals you want to accomplish to help you determine whether or not your YouTube efforts are successful. You can choose any number of metrics, such as the number of views, the amount of traffic driven back to your website, the number of channel subscribers…and so on.

 

Creating Your YouTube Channel

I’m going to assume you already have a Google account. If you don’t, create one of those first.

Start at YouTube.com. Click “Sign in” at the top of the right hand side. Login using whatever Google account you’d like your channel to be associated with. It’s a good idea to use an account multiple people have access to since the channel is for business purposes.

Next, you’ll setup your YouTube settings. Click your profile icon in the top right corner, then look for the settings wheel, and click it.

Under those settings, you’ll see the option to create a channel. Click the link to get started. Skip the personal settings, and click “Use a business or other name.”

At this point, you’ll name your channel and choose its category. Your options include:

  • Product or Brand
  • Company Institution or Organization
  • Arts, Entertainment, or Sports
  • Other

Now you’ve created your YouTube channel. A new Google+ page will be created for it, too.

Now it’s time to fill out all the information and get to work on your channel art so your page looks inviting to visitors.

 

Creating Your Channel Art

YouTube recommends using a single image that’s 2560 x 1440 pixels to ensure the image works well across devices. It should be at least 2048 x 1152 pixels, since this is the safe area where any logos and text can display without potentially being cut off on different devices. The file size should be 4 MB or smaller, and if your image exceeds this size, you can use a tool like TinyJPG (it works with PNG files, too) to compress the image without sacrificing too much quality.

If you’re struggling, or just want a little help getting started, you can use the Channel Art Template, available in both Photoshop and PNG formats, so you can figure out the layout for your channel, and get an idea of how it will work across platforms.

Now, let’s talk about your channel icon. It’s your profile icon – or where you’d put a picture of yourself on a personal Facebook page. It shows over your cover art, and will be what displays next to your videos on your channel and watch pages. You need something that looks good at small resolutions, which is why many brands choose to use their logo. Your channel icon should be 800 x 800 pixels, and in JPG, GIF, BMP, or PNG format. You cannot use animated GIFs.

 

Optimizing Your Channel for Success

  • Give your channel a great description. This is a 1,000-character space to describe your channel, brand, and the content you share on the platform. What you put here will not only show on your channel page, but will also be indexed by search engines. It may also be featured across YouTube in suggested channel categories. It’s a good idea to include keywords and calls to action in the first part of your description.
  • Add a channel trailer. When visitors come to your channel, you want them to be able to see the types of videos they will be able to find on your channel. The trailer is a great way to provide an overview of the kind of content they’ll find along with reasons to subscribe. It should grab attention as soon as it starts. Remember, the channel trailer will only appear for people who aren’t subscribed to your channel yet. Pay close attention to the description you add to this video, because it is featured prominently on your channel page.
  • Include contact details. YouTube has a section to allow you to include your contact details for anyone who is interested. From your channel homepage, navigate to “About” and scroll to “Details.” At this point, you’ll be able to choose whether to share your email address.
  • Optimize each video for SEO. Beyond the channel description, each video needs a clear description of what it is, complete with keywords and calls to action. Then, for good measure, add transcripts to your videos. These ensure people can understand your video when they’re not able to watch with the volume up, and can even help you create a blog post for your video later.
  • Work your videos into your social media editorial calendar. Promote your videos on your blog, Facebook, and Twitter. People won’t be able to subscribe to your channel if they don’t know it exists. You can also invest in paid advertising on YouTube to help drive traffic to your channel.

 

YouTube Is an Ongoing Effort

You can’t slap up one or two videos and expect YouTube to become a viable source of traffic and leads. You’ll need to promote your channel and videos with your other social media platforms. You’ll need to interact with your viewers consistently. If things don’t work out as you’d hoped at first, it’s not time to give up just yet. Instead, run some experiments and then adjust your strategy based on the results.

If you’ve thought about starting a YouTube channel but haven’t yet,  what’s holding you back? Tell me in the comments below.

Categories
Social Media

What to Look for in a Social Media Manager

If you’ve decided it’s time to hire a social media manager, not just any person will do. It’s tempting to ask someone who’s already working for you to take over the responsibilities for you, but that isn’t a good idea. You’ll likely overwhelm them with work, especially because social media management is more complex than scheduling a bunch of posts to share across social media platforms.

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), social media “specialists” are part of public relations. Other possible job titles include: online community manager, digital engagement specialist, and social media strategist. In May 2015, BLS said there were 2018,910 public relation specials working in wage and salary jobs with a median salary of $56,770. When you consider the average median salary of workers in the U.S. is 6,200, and there are many others working in the field as self-employed individuals, there’s a lot of opportunity for social media professionals.

What do you need to look for when hiring one for your business?

 

Someone Who Really Knows Social Media

I hate to be Captain Obvious here, but just having a Facebook and Twitter account doesn’t mean you know social media. To make sure they really know their stuff, ask them a few questions:

  • What social media platforms should we be using and why?
  • What are the two most important metrics we should be measuring, and why?
  • What’s the difference between a social marketing environment and a social customer service environment?
  • What’s the most important thing you as a social media manager should be doing?

If they really know what they’re doing, they will be able to describe your business in three words; they will have done their homework before meeting with you. As such, they should know which platforms you should focus on and why.

They should tell you to measure engagement and leads, because fans and followers who are just there – doing nothing – do nothing to help grow your business. If they don’t, they may not be as experienced as you need them to be.

They should tell you the marketing environment allows them to be more conversational because social isn’t focusing on the sale, but recognizing where the person is in the buyer journey and helping them get to their destination. They should tell you the social customer service environment requires the ability to resolve conflict, along with patience and empathy.

They should tell you their most important job is social listening – monitoring what people are saying – and then engaging accordingly so people know your business cares.

 

Someone Who Is Organized

Of course being organized is important, but it doesn’t have to be your top priority when choosing your candidate. You want someone who can make to do lists, and communicate effectively with the rest of the team. You’ll want someone who not only knows how to quickly and easily create their social editorial calendar, but one who is organized enough to spontaneously deviate from it should there be a call to do so.

That organization should involve everything from brainstorming ideas for content, to communicating with other members of the team, and testing, measuring, and analyzing. It means knowing how to use social listening tools like Google Alerts and Mention to see what your audience is saying, and knowing how to respond appropriately. It means taking time every day to look at what needs to be done, and asking for help when it’s necessary…. It means doing whatever it takes to get the job done.

 

Someone Who Knows How to Prioritize

There are so many things to do as part of social media management, it can be hard to keep up with everything. There’s a lot of room for wasted time, which means you’re paying for the manager to get distracted, to focus on things that aren’t necessarily the most important tasks, and so on. Yeah, some say prioritizing goes hand in hand with organization, but I think it’s worthy of a separate mention. Just because someone is organized doesn’t always mean they know what should be done first, and what’s the most important thing to accomplish before the end of the day, the end of the week, the month, or the quarter.

The ability to know what is important and what can wait makes all the difference in your social media manager. Your manager will get bombarded with requests for tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, and more. That means they must be able to think on their feet in the short term, but also be able to see the bigger picture of the long term, too. It’s important for the person you hire to be able to know the difference between what has to be done right this second, and what can wait till tomorrow, or net week. Encourage your new hire to create “do now” and “can wait” sections on their to do lists. Without those priorities, the random requests could easily get in the way of more important tasks that need to be done first.

 

Someone Who Can Research Well

Social media is always in a state of flux. Whether it’s because a new network hit the scene or an existing network added features, or changed the rules, again, the ideal social media manager must be able to research and learn, so they know how to adjust strategy when necessary. Not only must they be able to stay on top of industry news and trends, but they must be able to research and identify quality content for curation.

The majority of your social media content cannot originate with you, if you want to make sure you’re not being overly promotional. This means your social media manager needs to take time to find content from other sources that will be useful and/or entertaining for your audience.

The content curation phase involves research, but also involves organization. With efficient use of content curation tools, it is reasonable to expect your social media manager to easily find stuff to share on all your social media networks.

Your ideal social media manager should also be keeping a swipe file with information that will help them get things done. The swipe file should be a collection of things that are tested and proven, and it should include headlines, graphics, and other frameworks. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. It’s okay to copy what has worked well for others in the past, so long as you’re not blatantly doing it – adding your own spin to it, or at least giving credit where credit is due.

Your social media manager should be collecting images to use for inspiration, creating templates in Canva to make social media image creation easier on the fly, stock photos – and know where to go to get the best free ones – examples of social media posts that have done well, and more.

 

How to Find Qualified Candidates to Fill Your Position

Start buy asking your friends; there is a good chance they know someone or have worked with someone they’d be happy to recommend. Many social media managers work for multiple clients at a time if they’re self-employed. If you’re not in a position to hire an employee and need to go the contractor route, this could be the best way to go.

Post your job listing online, on popular job listing websites like Guru, Upwork, and Simply Hired, but also in social media groups and websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. You can jump in the group and ask for recommendations, or you can find a social media job group and post an ad of sorts.

In the listing, outline what you’re looking for in a candidate – and include the platforms you expect them to use and be proficient with. You don’t have to worry about discussing goals out right in the listing, as you may not want to share those until you’re at the interview stage.

 

What To Do When Applicants Apply

Closely examine their social media profiles. Someone who is going to earning a living managing your social media presence should definitely have one of their own. If they don’t, move onto the next applicant. There are a lot of people out there who claim to be social media experts who don’t have social media profiles. And even some “experts” with social media profiles haven’t’ posted in months or years. Look at how often they post, the quality of the content they post, and the way they carry themselves.

Ask them to show you their portfolio, and provide testimonials from past clients. It’s hard to verify the past experience of course, since social media accounts don’t say who is behind them. However, it’s a good idea to ask them for links to the social media profiles they manage, so you can see the kind of material they’ve posted in the past, and see how a strategy has come together. It’s always a plus if they can get a testimonial from the businesses they are managing.

If your applicant doesn’t have any kind of experience, it of course means more work for you, but the experience has to come from somewhere. You can consider letting them work for you on a trial basis, and use the answers to their questions in point number one to help you decide whether or not you want to give them the chance.

After you’ve let them see your social accounts and told them what your goals are, they should be willing to provide some kind of strategy to show you how they will help you achieve those goals. Then, make sure you are clear on the goals and how you expect the reporting to take place.

 

Ready to Roll?

Once you’re happy with all that, it’s time to talk pricing. Because social media isn’t something you can see results in advance – and it’s hard to edit after the fact, it’s best for your business if you avoid long term contracts. Opting for month-to-month pricing ensures that if things don’t work out the way you hope, you can move on to another social media manager.

Have you ever hired a social media manager before? What has your experience been? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Categories
Social Media

A Timeline of Facebook’s Acquisitions

A Timeline of Facebook’s Acquisitions: Facebook’s acquisitions timeline includes notable purchases like Instagram in 2012, enhancing its photo-sharing capabilities, and WhatsApp in 2014, expanding into messaging. Oculus VR in 2014 marked its entry into virtual reality. These acquisitions reflect Facebook’s strategy to diversify services, stay technologically ahead, and maintain dominance in social media and digital communication.

Facebook got its start in 2004 when founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg started “The Facebook” as a way for Harvard University students to connect. Eventually, the social network expanded to other colleges in Boston, all Ivy League schools, and then to all universities in the United States. In August 2005, it became Facebook.com; then high schools were allowed to sign up, then globally universities were allowed to sign up – and in 2006, anyone could join as long as they had an email address. Features have continued to develop since 2007 – as many of the acquisitions in this list below were for talent, rather than the companies themselves.

Over the years, Facebook (now under the Meta umbrella) has become an advertising powerhouse. If you’re interested in running ads on Facebook, take a look at our guide 10 Facebook Advertising Tips for Small Businesses.

Facebook’s acquisition timeline is a journey that highlights how the company has evolved into a major player in social media and digital advertising. Here’s an expanded view of key acquisitions and their impact:

Instagram (2012): Acquiring Instagram for approximately $1 billion was a strategic move that expanded Facebook’s footprint into the world of photo-sharing social media. Instagram’s strong appeal to younger audiences and its visually driven platform allowed Facebook to tap into a new user base and diversify its advertising offerings, particularly in mobile and visual content.

WhatsApp (2014): The acquisition of WhatsApp for about $19 billion was one of the largest tech deals at the time. This move allowed Facebook to gain a significant foothold in the messaging app market, a sector with immense potential for growth and user engagement. WhatsApp’s extensive user base provided a new channel for Facebook to explore advertising and business communication solutions.

Oculus VR (2014): Purchasing Oculus VR for around $2 billion marked Facebook’s entry into the virtual reality (VR) space. This acquisition was aimed at future-proofing the company, with VR technology anticipated to play a significant role in the way people interact and consume content, including advertising, in the future.

Atlas Solutions (2013): By acquiring Atlas from Microsoft, Facebook enhanced its advertising measurement and tracking capabilities. This purchase allowed advertisers to track the effectiveness of their ads across different devices, providing valuable data to optimize their marketing strategies and proving Facebook’s commitment to robust ad analytics.

LiveRail (2014): The acquisition of LiveRail, a video advertising technology company, further bolstered Facebook’s position in video advertising. LiveRail’s technology enabled more efficient targeting and delivery of video ads across the web, complementing Facebook’s increasing focus on video content as a key advertising medium.

Parse (2013): Acquiring mobile backend startup Parse was a strategic move to attract mobile app developers to the Facebook ecosystem. This provided Facebook access to a wealth of data from various mobile apps, enhancing its mobile advertising capabilities.

These acquisitions, among others, have been instrumental in Facebook’s transformation into a dominant force in social media advertising. They have allowed the company to diversify its offerings, access new technologies, and collect a vast array of data points to deliver targeted advertising effectively.

By integrating these platforms and technologies, Facebook has created a robust and versatile advertising ecosystem. This ecosystem enables highly personalized and efficient advertising solutions, making Facebook an indispensable platform for marketers worldwide. Its unparalleled reach, deep user insights, and advanced targeting capabilities have made Facebook a key player in shaping the digital advertising landscape.

Categories
Social Media

Time Saving Tricks for Social Media Managers

While most people use social media to chit chat with friends, share funny memes, take quizzes, and kill time, it’s literally your job. And because there are so many clients, and so many platforms – metrics to check, content to curate, comments to respond to, posts to schedule, images to create, and a community to moderate, it seems impossible to get everything done in eight hours a day.

While I can’t promise these tips will help you regain a massive amount of time, they will at least help you make more efficient use of your time, allowing you to accomplish more over the course of your day.

 

Harness the Power of the Chrome Profile

Every day, there are countless accounts to log in to – email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and so on. When you combine these accounts for personal and professional use, then add accounts for any clients, it’s a logistical nightmare. Unless, of course, you create a Google Chrome profile for each client.

You can create as many as you need – one for work, one for your personal stuff, and one for each client. This allows you to toggle back and forth between accounts as needed. Plus, you can customize each one with bookmarks, saved passwords, Chrome apps, and more. There’s no need to rely on Chrome’s incognito feature or use multiple browsers at the same time.

On your computer, open Chrome, then click the button that either says your name or “Person.” Click “Manage people” then click “Add person.” From there, choose a photo and type in a name. Then, click save.

At this point, a new window will open and you’ll be asked to sign in. Sign into that Chrome profile with the google account for that profile. The bookmarks, history, passwords, and other settings will automatically sync.

When you want to switch to another person or profile, just click the button with your name and then choose the person or profile you want to switch to.

 

Rely on Automation – But Not Too Much

If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a free tool for automating monotonous tasks such as cross-posting your Instagram photos to Twitter. You can setup recipes with 62 platforms, helping you do anything from turn your phone on vibrate when you get to the office, to backing up social media profiles in Google Drive or Dropbox.

Missinglettr allows you to schedule multiple tweets with each blog post. All you have to do is connect your blog’s RSS feed to it. When the tool finds a new blog posts, it creates a series of tweets, where each tweet focuses on different parts of your article over the next year. It will even create quotes and images. 26 tweets are created, so you’ll want to go through and edit them for suggested tweets and images, and possibly the suggested hashtags. But, it’s relatively easy to do and won’t take much time.

You can also use IFTTT to cross-post your updates to other networks, but I don’t recommend this approach since your content should always be adjusted appropriately for each network. You can rely on automation with tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your social media posts, but you should always check in live, too. This way you can actually interact with your followers, instead of just keeping things running on autopilot.

 

Keep Those Screenshots Organized

Social media managers are constantly having to screen shot everything – especially because things could disappear in just moments. But, keeping those screenshots organized for clients can be a pain in the behind.

Skitch, which is part of Evernote, is a wonderful screenshot tool, and because it’s already integrated with Evernote, it will store your screenshots there. Then, you can tag, edit, share, annotate, and categorize as needed.

The free plan allows for 60 MB of new uploads per month and will sync across two devices. Paid plans start at $34.99/year and allow for at least 1 GB of new uploads every month, and will sync across all devices.

 

Need More Than 140 Characters?

Twitter’s claim to fame was the fact that messages were limited to 140 characters, because at the time, that was the length of a single text message. But today, there are instances where you need more than that to get your point across. While many people will just tweet again with a continuance of the previous tweet, it can be hard to follow in the stream. So, what’s the solution?

Reply to your own tweets. Remove your @ name, and keep going. Then, when a user wants to follow the entire conversation, they can see it.

 

Use Google to Get Around LinkedIn Restrictions

If you don’t want to invest in a premium LinkedIn membership, but still want to get in touch with someone, Google is your friend. The majority of LinkedIn profiles are indexed there, so using Google actually gives you a more comprehensive search.

In Google type: site:linkedin.com “name of person” if you know the person you’re looking for, but can’t see their profile because of restrictions on LinkedIn.

If you’re looking for a group of people, however, such as marketing professionals who mention something specific in their profiles, type this into Google:

Site:linkedin.com//pub “marketing professional” specific thing

With these work arounds, you can see a great deal of the information, though not necessarily all, of what’s hidden through LinkedIn’s barriers.

 

Make Moderation a Bit Easier

We all know social media success lies at least in part in the community you build for the brand. But with community building and management comes the hassle of moderating comments. And if you’re in a niche where controversy is common, it will definitely take you more time.

On your Facebook page settings, go to “Page Moderation”. Add words that are often used to attack your business or other fans. When someone uses one of those words, the general public doesn’t see the comment, but the person who left it, and their friends, can still see it. This way, the person who left it doesn’t think you’ve deleted their comments, but you don’t have to worry about diffusing a situation.

If a troll gets past the moderation filters, don’t worry about deleting the comment or banning the user. You’ll often get accused of being against freedom of speech, and you may even find your email box clogged with a bunch of “why did I get banned” complaints. Instead, just hide the comment.

Much like the moderation settings, this allows the person who left the comment and his or her friends to see it, but the general public cannot. Plus, when you have trolls engaging on your page, it helps you boost reach on Facebook – so you win. Trolls who know you’ll hide the comments will eventually stop commenting. And if they haven’t figured it out, then they’re just helping you expand your reach.

 

Save Time Adjusting Images for Each Platform

Each social media platform has its own image sizes and formats for the best quality. Creating a single image and then optimizing it for each platform can be quite time consuming. That’s where Magic Resize from Canva comes in handy. You’ll need Canva for Work, which is the paid plan that starts at $9.95/month, but it’s worth the investment. You’ll be able to create an image and adapt it to any other size with just a few clicks – meaning you can create images for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest in minutes. Plus, with Canva for Work, you can save your brand’s color palette and font to create branded templates, saving even more time on graphic creation.

 

Optimize for Productivity

All the hacks in the world won’t matter if you don’t have a plan. First, you’ll want to determine which tactics have the biggest impact so you’re getting more for your efforts, and spending less times on things that don’t yield results. To avoid wasting time, prioritize your week. If you have two hours per day to dedicate to social media management tasks for each client, what can do you to make the most of those two hours each day? Think about what your top distractions are and take steps to eliminate them.

Next, think about what time of day you are most productive. Is it early in the morning? Late at night? Somewhere in the middle? Try to develop a daily schedule and a routine, as this can greatly improve your productivity. You’ll also want to consider how this relates to the best times to post for social media engagement.

Use tools to help you curate content and schedule posts in advance. Close your email when you’re working on social media stuff. Dedicate a chunk of time in the morning to answering emails, and do it again before you “clock out” for the day.

Have you ever worked as a social media manager? What did you find effective when it came to time management? Have you ever hired a social media manager? What has your experience been? Tell me all about it in the comments below.

Categories
Content Marketing

7 Content Marketing Hacks to Help B2B Marketers

When it comes to B2B, content marketing is an entirely different beast than for the B2C market. Of course, the purpose remains the same – you want to create content that draws in a bigger audience for your business, content that strengthens your brand, and ultimately increases your leads and sales. The only thing that makes it different is it is content made by businesses, for businesses; it is not the typical consumer-facing content. As such, the content absolutely must be useful above all else. Can it be humorous and entertaining, too? Yes, of course, but without utility, it’s worthless. Does this mean B2C content doesn’t have to be useful? No, but there’s a bit more freedom with it.

 

1. Identify Your Audience

Before you’re able to provide the content your audience needs, you must first learn as much as you possibly can about said audience. You’ll segment your audience by the stage of the funnel they are in, but each audience is made up of various individuals. We’ve talked about buyer personas before, but in this case, we’ll talk about developing reader personas.

Use your Google Analytics data to determine more information about your audience. Of course you can see basic information like gender, age, and location, but there’s a bit more detail that can help you along. When you take a closer look, you can also see topics they’re interested in. If you notice these topics aren’t necessarily central to your business, it’s still important information to keep in mind. It gives you a way to expand your content into new areas that are still somehow relevant subjects, that will keep your readers interested.

When you see the summary of the interests data, you may be surprised by what you learn about your readers. At this point, you can safely begin to draw conclusions about who they are, allowing you to speak to them more clearly with your content.

It’s important to note that the percentages you see in the affinity categories is based on a samples of your overall traffic, therefore, it’s not necessarily exact data. This will be based on the amount of traffic your website receives.

When you’re identifying your audience, make sure you can answer these questions:

  • What do they expect from my content?
  • How should I interact with them?
  • How are they interacting with each other? Or are they?
  • What motivates their buying decisions?

 

2. Keep Ideation Fresh and Consistent

One of the challenges of content marketing, regardless of niche, is coming up with fresh content ideas consistently. When you’re just getting started, it’s easy to come up with all kinds of ideas. But once things are rolling, and you’ve covered everything you came up with in that initial wave of excitement, it becomes increasingly difficult to produce quality content. You’ll eventually reach a point where you feel like you’re running out of ideas. That’s a completely normal part of the process.

When it comes to beating writer’s block, you can of course look at your existing content for ways to repurpose and expand upon it. But, if you’re looking to find new topics in your niche, or want to know more about what people are sharing and talking about on social media, BuzzSumo is a quick and easy way to do this.

With it, you can see real-time data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. You can see which topics are trending in a niche, the most popular writers on a website, which topics are doing well on major publishing outlets, which topics are doing well on the competition’s site, and more.

With this information, you can create content that presents a new angle on a topic, or provides a counterpoint to a popular opinion about a topic that’s relevant to your business. But as you generate new content ideas, think about user intent. You already know more about your audience because of the demographic data from Google Analytics, but you must also anticipate not only what they what they want they read, but they want to accomplish by reading it.

Readers are only asking themselves one thing – “what’s in it for me?” And your job as a content marketer is to show them. You have to use your content to convince them you’re the better option than the competition… and one of the ways you can do this is by showing the benefits of using your product or service instead of the competitor.

As you come with ideas, always try to answer these questions:

  • Is this something my audience would like to read?
  • Is this a topic that would be useful in at least one stage of the purchase path?
  • What questions does the content need to answer?
  • Does this topic align with the overall marketing strategy?

 

3. Test Your Content Before You Create It

Testing your content before you go through the full creation process allows you to see which topics will do well in terms of engagement. This way, you’re only investing time in topics you know will resonate with your audience. I recommend using Twitter for testing purposes, since Facebook has made organic reach so difficult to obtain.

If there’s a topic you have in mind, you could find a similar piece, and tweet it, and then see what happens. You could find an infographic and share it. If it does well with your audience, consider writing a blog post based on it, and then publishing that. Chances are you’ll see much better engagement results than you would if you just used the old “publish, promote, and hope” approach.

 

4. Focus on the Lead Magnet

Your lead magnet – the thing you’re giving visitors in exchange for providing their contact information – needs to be a high value item. It should provide information you can’t find elsewhere on the internet, and information your target audience finds useful. Any number of things can be a lead magnet, from an eBook or free industry report, videos, audio, templates… the options are nearly limitless.

The lead magnet doesn’t have to be long, complex, or take you a long time to create. All that matters is that it solves a specific problem with a specific solution for a certain segment of your market. Your prospects must consume the magnet for it to have any kind of impact.

 

5. Promoting Your Content

If you’re relying solely on organic methods to get eyeballs on your content, you’re not going to get the best possible ROI. An advertising budget is essential to building traction on Facebook, especially since organic reach has been on the decline.

Social media is still a critical piece of the puzzle for the B2B sector, since you still have to build relationships and foster engagement. In the B2C world, we sing the praises of automation and scheduling updates with tools like Buffer and Hootsuite. While these tools are still an option, there’s another solution, specifically targeted at those in the B2B space – Oktopost.

With it, you can create and manage social media campaigns and editorial calendar with automation. You’ll also get analytics information to help you see what social activity translates to leads for your company – along with social engagement, audience and content analytics. It also includes content discovery and custom RSS feeds to make content curation easier, along with social listening so you can see who’s talking about you on social media and what they’re saying.

There are numerous ways to promote and amplify your content – including search engine optimization, email marketing, influencer marketing, paid advertising, and even having your employees promote the content. Regardless of which type of promotion you use, you’re helping your content reach a wider audience, that’s still relevant to your business. Each promotional tactic helps increase the chances of building engagement, brand awareness, and customer loyalty naturally.

 

6. Analyze Campaign Results

You should always be looking at metrics to see how well you were able to reach your KPIs and goals before you jump into additional campaigns with more content creation. Let’s say you created an eBook with the intention of increasing your email list subscribers and generating leads. While the eBook helped you get more social mentions, you find it didn’t help you get the leads you were hoping for. Because of this, the eBook campaign wasn’t successful, at least not at this stage. This could be because you were using the wrong goals, wrong distribution, or the wrong audience. At this point you’d need to re-evaluate your strategy to make sure your results expectations are in line with the rest of your content marketing efforts.

If you’re not already, consider using additional intelligence tools to get the most of your data. An average of only 2% of your site visitors will actually leave contact information and become a lead, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose out on the other 98%.

That’s where marketing technology like Leadfeeder comes in. It works with your Google Analytics account, and lets you see who’s visiting your site, whether they leave contact information or not. By matching the IP address of the visitor’s computer to companies on LinkedIn, Leadfeeder makes it possible for you to see the companies that are interested in your products and services. From there, you can see if you know anyone at the company, or reach out to someone in your network for an introduction.

 

7. Remain Consistent

No matter what you do, it’s important to produce a steady stream of content. Create a mixture of blog posts, infographics, eBooks, white papers, case studies, reports, and other types of content to educate and inform your audience. What matters isn’t the volume of content, but the consistency and quality. Though your strategy and approach may change, consistent content is key.

What is your experience with B2B content marketing? Share in the comments below.

Categories
Digital Marketing

A Timeline of All of Google’s Acquisitions Since 2001

Google’s acquisition timeline since 2001 features key purchases like Android in 2005, pivotal in mobile OS; YouTube in 2006, expanding into video sharing; and DoubleClick in 2007, enhancing online advertising. The acquisitions demonstrate Google’s strategy to expand its services, invest in new technologies, and strengthen its position as a tech giant.

Google got its start in 1995 when founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met. The following year, they started working on a search engine called BackRub, but once it clogged Stanford University servers after a year, they registered Google.com on September 15th, 1997. Let’s take a look at how the most used search engine on the internet has grown into something much more. Since launch, the tech giant has acquired more than 200 companies.

Google’s acquisition timeline is a fascinating journey that highlights the tech giant’s strategic growth and diversification. Here’s an expanded view of some of their most significant acquisitions:

2001 – Deja: Google’s acquisition of Deja, a Usenet discussion service, marked its first major purchase. This acquisition was instrumental in developing Google Groups, enhancing Google’s data collection and community-based services.

2003 – Pyra Labs (Blogger): The purchase of Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, signified Google’s entry into the world of content creation and management, paving the way for a surge in user-generated content on the web.

2004 – Keyhole, Inc: Keyhole, a geospatial data visualization company, was acquired and became the foundation for Google Earth. This acquisition showcased Google’s interest in mapping and 3D visualization technology.

2005 – Android Inc.: Perhaps one of Google’s most impactful acquisitions, Android Inc. laid the groundwork for the development of the Android operating system, which would go on to become the most widely used mobile OS in the world.

2006 – YouTube: Acquiring YouTube, the popular video-sharing platform, for $1.65 billion was a major step for Google in dominating online video content, significantly enhancing its multimedia offerings.

2007 – DoubleClick: The purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion expanded Google’s advertising capabilities, particularly in display and video advertising, and bolstered its data collection for targeted advertising.

2008 – Tonic Systems and Marratech: These acquisitions were crucial for developing Google Docs and Google Meet, respectively, expanding Google’s suite of productivity tools and collaboration software.

2009 – reCAPTCHA: Acquiring reCAPTCHA not only improved Google’s security measures but also contributed to its machine learning and book digitization efforts.

2010 – AdMob: This purchase allowed Google to extend its advertising empire into the mobile domain, capitalizing on the growing smartphone usage.

2011 – Motorola Mobility: Although Google later sold Motorola, this acquisition was significant for its portfolio of patents and for providing insights into the mobile hardware industry.

2014 – Nest Labs: The acquisition of Nest Labs marked Google’s foray into the smart home industry, showcasing its interest in expanding its reach beyond digital services into physical products.

2015 – Alphabet Inc.: While not an acquisition, the creation of Alphabet Inc. as a parent company to Google and several former Google subsidiaries marked a major restructuring and diversification of the company’s business interests.

2019 – Looker: Google acquired Looker, a big data analytics company, enhancing its cloud computing services and data analytics capabilities.

2020 – Fitbit: The acquisition of Fitbit represented Google’s significant move into the wearable technology market, focusing on health and wellness.

These acquisitions, among many others, illustrate Google’s strategy to continuously evolve, enter new markets, and integrate innovative technologies into its ecosystem. They reflect a combination of enhancing existing services (like advertising and content platforms) and venturing into new territories (like mobile OS, hardware, and cloud services), making Google a multifaceted corporation with a vast influence across the technology landscape.

 

 

Categories
SEO

Does Web Hosting Influence SEO?

Web hosting is an integral piece of the online business and marketing puzzle. Without it, you don’t have a way to get your website online. But, because it gives your website a place to live on the internet, it may have a small impact on your search engine rankings. Does that mean you should choose your web host solely with SEO impact in mind? Not really. Let’s take a look at why and how your web host may affect your rankings, and what you should think about when you choose the web host for your website.

Types of Web Hosting Plans

Shared: You have an account on a server that’s shared with other websites. While this is the most economical option, and is the ideal choice for websites that are just getting started, there are some disadvantages. Because you’re sharing the server with countless other sites, the hosting company has a number of limitations on your account. You’ll need to pay close attention to what features are included, the amount of space and resources you’ll have. You’ll have the same IP address as every other website on your server.

Virtual Private Server (VPS): A physical server is split into multiple virtual private servers, and you have access to a single account on that server. It allows you to control the environment on your slice of the server, as if you have a dedicated server. This is the ideal choice for websites that are not suited for shared hosting, but are not quite ready to go to a fully dedicated solution. You get independence from other customers on the server, with a bit more flexibility, but you don’t have the pay the higher cost of a physical dedicated server. The drawback to this is you still have the same IP address as other websites that are on the same physical server.

Dedicated/Managed Server: You pay for access to a full server, and it is not shared with anyone. These are expensive, and generally do not make sense for average small business owners and bloggers. You do, however, get full control over the server in terms of operating system, hardware, and other software. You’ll have reliability and speed – where you won’t really have to worry about bandwidth or downtime.

These of course, are the most common types of web hosting plans, but are not the only options out there.

How Web Hosting Could Affect SEO

There are a few factors related to hosting you need to think about as you decide which company to host your website with:

  • Speed: We know how fast a page loads is one of the many things search engines look at when they determine where to rank your website. Even though it is only a small portion of the ranking, it’s worth paying attention to. You’re in control of page loading time for the most part, since you’re in charge of the code and configuration. But, if you know your code is as clean and optimized as it can be, and you’re still experiencing a slow load time, it could be time to ask your web host to migrate your site to another server. Because shared accounts are often on the same server as hundreds of others that are also bogging down your resources, the slower your website will load. When you move your website to a server that’s not as busy, or decide you’re big enough to move to a VPS or dedicated server, your page load speeds should dramatically improve because there are more resources available.
  • Uptime/Downtime: Pay close attention to the uptime your prospective host advertises. This refers to the amount of time your server is up and running. If the website is down too often, this will upset your user base, and cause issues with traffic. If your website is frequently crashing or unavailable, then crawling it will be difficult, and ranking can be affected. The majority of web hosting providers guarantee 99.9% uptime, but just because you read it doesn’t mean it’s true. Take a look at reviews to see what customers are actually saying. The reality is, crawlers will likely try to visit your website several times a day, and if they see it down repeatedly, your site will get labeled as unreliable. Let’s put that 99% uptime in perspective for you – over the course of 30 days, you can expect your website to possibly be inaccessible for seven hours a month. Of course you want your website to be up 100% of the time, but server updates mean there will be unavoidable downtime. You can use a tool like SiteUptime to get notifications if your site goes down.
  • IP address: This is the number that identifies the location of your server on the internet. If you are on a shared server or VPS, your website is sharing the same IP address as every other website on the server. If you are on a dedicated server, then you have a dedicated IP address.
  • Location: Google considers the server’s physical location when determining where to rank a website in both local and general searches – where location-specific searches are concerned. This means if you’re building a website for your local business and anticipate people searching for it by location, it’s best to find a hosting provider nearby. The server’s IP address is assigned based on the country where it’s located, so hosting with a UK based server will help you rank higher in UK searches. That’s fine and well, if you’re in the UK. If you’re in the US, however, it makes it harder to rank for US search phrases, and gives you unnecessary additional work on the SEO front.

How to Choose an SEO-Friendly Web Host

Once you know the type of hosting you want to use for your website, it’s time to start thinking about what you need from it.

Do you need something simple like a WordPress blog, or something more complex? Do you have certain requirements, like needing a certain version of PHP? Do you have to have Windows applications? Are there any special software requirements your website needs? The answers to these questions will vary greatly on the type of website you’re building, and why you’re building it.

Then, start looking at your options for companies – and compare the costs. Then narrow it down to a list of three to five companies you want to look into in more depth based on those costs. Keep in mind that cost isn’t always an indication of quality.

Here is a list of some of the most popular web hosts, according to PC Mag. I’m not going to give you a recommendation of my favorite, because I don’t want to potentially sway you. I will tell you that none of these links are affiliate links – and I have nothing to gain.

Research each of the hosts you’re interested in so you can make sure they offer everything you need. Pay close attention to their features, the terms and conditions of any guarantees, uptime, and upgrade options. If you plan on growing your business, and thus your website traffic fairly quickly over the next two or three years, definitely choose a host that allows you to upgrade from a shared hosting account to a VPS or dedicated server. Having to find a new host to accommodate your growth in the middle of dealing with everything else associated with business growth – plus dealing with downtime as the result of the switch – can be a big pain. If you’re able to stay with the same company, it’s a bit less of a hassle.

Something else to consider is whether or not you’ll be adding on new domains. Any time you have an extra domain, you’ll need more hosting space. Some shared hosting accounts allow for you to add a finite number of domains, while some do not allow for any extra at all… and still others allow for an unlimited number of add-on domains.

And before you think you’re getting an awesome deal, remember, hosting companies often advertise discounted prices for new customers, meaning that when you renew your plan, you’ll pay a higher price tag. Make sure you are aware of what that price tag is so that you’re not shocked when the time comes – or are ready to switch everything to a new host.

Read customer reviews to find out more about what people have experienced with the company. Simply searching the name of the web hosting company with the word reviews should give you plenty to work with. If you notice a lot of issues, move onto another host.

Look at the email feature to make sure you have what you need for hosting email accounts on your domain. If you can’t find a host that makes that easy for you, but everything else works out, G Suite, formerly Google Apps for Work, allows you to get Gmail (plus Drive, Docs, and other Google Apps services) for your domain, starting at $5/user/month.

So Which Web Host is the Right One?

I wish I had the answer, and unfortunately, there isn’t one “right” company. Many quality web hosts exist, and what’s right for you has a lot to do with what your website requires. What works for the average small business owner isn’t going to be appropriate for a large website like Amazon or Facebook.

All of these things considered, choosing one web host over another won’t necessarily give you any kind of SEO boost. But, choosing the right host from the start can mean you avoid potentially significant (and costly) consequences you may face if you chose the wrong one.

Speed and uptime/downtime are two things that can fluctuate significantly from month to month, so it’s important to review them on a regular basis. If you notice a problem, notify your web hosting company immediately, because they may or may not know about the problem. They have a lot of servers to maintain, and you can’t assume that someone else on your server has already called to let them know something’s going on. And even if know something is going on – they may not even care.

This is why it is a good idea to pay for your hosting over the short term, instead of paying for years at a time, because if you notice the standards start to slip and you want to move to another host, you can do so without losing a lot of money.

Your web hosting sets the foundation of your success, so it’s important to do your homework. Worry less about bells and whistles designed to grab your attention like, “free website builder” and focus more on the details that matter.

Which web host do you use? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Categories
Social Media

Twitter Hack: Creating RSS Feeds from Twitter Activity

Most people know how to search Twitter to find a profile or a hashtag, but thanks to more advanced features, it’s possible to get a great deal more data from the social media platform. In this guide, you’ll learn how to use advanced search features to zero in on information you can use to improve your marketing and social customer service.  I’m going to show you how to go beyond simply saving a Twitter search to turning your Twitter feeds into an RSS feed so you can stay on top of everything with ease.

 

What Can You Turn into an RSS Feed?

Twitter is one of the best social listening tools out there, but because there’s always so much going on, it can be a pain to get to what you need. That’s why turning your Twitter timelines into RSS feeds is the ideal solution. The good news is anything – from search results, to user lists, and even user favorites, can be turned into an RSS feed, so you can increase your social media efficiency. Your options are nearly limitless. You can use these feeds to find influencers to connect with, publications to pitch for media placements, market research, competitor monitoring, and more.

 

Creating Your Advanced Searches (And Saving Them)

Advanced Twitter searches are a great way to find out when people are talking about you, find out when people mention your competition, see who’s talking about you in certain geographic areas, and so on.

Let’s say you want to see who’s talking about your brand.

Search for your brand in the Twitter search box at the top right of your screen.

On your list of results, click “More options.”

Now, you’ll be able to choose more specifics, if you want. You can choose to see all results, just tweets, accounts, photos, videos, and news. You’ll also be able to choose whether you want to see those results from everyone, or just people you follow.

Once you make a choice there – and I recommend “from everyone,” you’ll be able to choose between “from everywhere” or “near you.” The “from everywhere” option is best if you’re a national or global brand, while the “near you” option is best if you’re a local business focused on a narrower audience.

Before you save your search, click “Advanced Search” so you can choose to refine your searches even further. Here, you can target tweets that feature keywords, phrases, hashtags, and so on. You can filter tweets based on the language they’re written in. If you want to see when people are tweeting at you, you’ll need to add your username to the “to these accounts” box.

You’ll also want to select whether to include questions, retweets, positive, and/or negative. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to save your search.

Repeat these steps for everything you want to track using RSS.

If you want to be sure you’ve got the search parameters setup just right before you go through the rest of the steps to create RSS feeds, use Warble.co to test your searches as daily emails. Then, when you’re satisfied, you can create your RSS feed.

 

Finding Relevant Twitter Lists

Now, we’re going to search for lists to subscribe to. You’ll start with the same search box as above, and search for whatever you want to target. For instance, let’s say you want to target doctors. Search doctors in the box. You’ll get a wide variety of search results including people, news, and photos.

Unfortunately, there’s not an option to get just lists, so you’ll want to move your parameter from “Everything” to “Timelines”. Now, you’ll be able to find the lists you’re looking for. Take a few minutes to look through them and subscribe to the ones you find most valuable. Once subscribed, you’ll get updates from the people on the list.

Google can also help you find Twitter lists, if you know what to search for. In Google, type: site:twitter.com “topic” list where “topic” is replaced with what you want to find lists about – so ours would be site:twitter.com “doctors” list. Now, browse through and subscribe to as many lists as you want.

 

Creating Your Own Twitter Lists

Sure, the lists other people create are useful, but of course you’re free to create your own. This allows you to segment things as you need. You can use them to stay updated on what’s going on in your industry, and even spy on your competition. Lists allow you to monitor accounts without following them.

Click the gear in the top-right hand of your homepage, then choose “Create a List.”

Give it a name along with a short description, and choose the visibility. If you want others to be able to subscribe and see whether or not they are a member, choose public. Use the private setting to keep an eye your competition, since you’re the only one who can see the list.

Now search for people using either their name or username. When you find a person to add to a list, all you have to do is click the gear next to their profile information and choose “add to or remove from list”. You’ll see a popup that lest you choose the list you want to add them to. If the person is already on the list, you can uncheck the box by their name to remove them. Click OK and you’re done.

Private lists are great for keeping tabs on clients and competitors. They’re also good for keeping track of influential users you want to notice you. If you want someone to notice you, adding them to a list lets you keep up with their updates, so you can engage with their tweets, making them more likely to follow you. Keep the list small so you’re not trying to work with too many people at a time. When someone on the list follows you, take them off the list and find someone else to add in their place.

Use public lists to provide resources for customers, keep up with industry news, and industry thought leaders.

 

Creating Widgets and Feeds for All Your Twitter Feeds

Here comes the fun part. Now that you have everything you want to track via RSS, it’s time to create widgets for all the timelines. In your settings, look for “Widgets.” Now, create a new widget, choosing from:

  • User timelines
  • Favorites
  • Twitter Lists
  • Collections
  • Search Results

Publish the widget and keep track of the ID – found in the URL. Next, check out this Google Script – using the link to copy the script to your own Google Drive. Open the script, then go to Run > Twitter_RSS to authorize it. This is a one-time, yet required step.

Inside the Google Script Editor, you must follow these steps:

Publish > Deploy as Web App > Save as New Version.

Check to be sure the permissions are set to “Anyone, Including Anonymous” and then click Deploy.

At this point, you’ll have a URL you can use for your RSS reader, but there’s one more step. Remember that widget ID? You have to add it to the end of the URL like this:

https://script.google.com/macros/s/ABCD/exec?TwitterWidgetID

So, if your widget ID is 68321p, your URL would be:

https://script.google.com/macros/s/ABCD/exec?68321p

 

Adding Your RSS Feeds to Your RSS Tool

Once you’ve created widgets for everything and ran the script, you’ll have a URL for each of the Twitter timelines you want to track. All you have to do is add those URLs to your feed reader, but make sure you’ve got the unique Twitter widget ID for each.

Once they’re set up, any time something new meets the parameters – like someone mentions you in conversation – it will automatically be updated in the feed.

 

Improving Social Media Efficiency

Though it can take quite a bit of time to go through all these steps initially, it’s worth it in the end. You can set aside a few minutes every day to chip away at your searches and Twitter lists if you’re worried about spending too much time at once. In the end, you’ll be able to keep up with the data much better than if you had to look for it every day. This approach helps you block out the noise of Twitter and get straight to what matters most to you and your business.

Categories
SEO

The One-Two Punch That Will Help You Master SEO in 2017

Let’s get one thing out of the way: despite what trendy social media experts might have you believe, social media marketing is not the new SEO.

Search Engine Optimization and social media marketing exist on two different ends of the spectrum, with very little overlap. Social media marketing is all about, well, being social. It’s about injecting humanity into your business, finding a way to connect with your audience and creating an environment on social media that encourages them to become a loyal community.

SEO is… none of those things. Granted, they both share the same end goal (turning a potential customer into a paying one), but they exist in two very different worlds. Social is a more creative space, with elements of analytics and metrics incorporated into it. SEO could be seen as the polar opposite of that, with a heavy emphasis on analytics and metrics, but still with some room left for creativity.

With that in mind, you can see SEO can be such a tricky topic to understand (especially if you’re trying to look at it through the lens of something like social media marketing). As if that wasn’t confusing enough, small business owners who are already having a tough time wrapping their heads around concepts like keywords and backlinks are being bombarded with every SEO tool on the market.

It’s confusing, frustrating, and when your success is dependent on you making the right choice? It can be downright frightening.

So in the spirit of helping the average small business owner, here’s a little list we put together to provide some guidance. By the end of this article, you’ll know what aspects of SEO to focus on right now and you’ll even have a few tools to help you get started.

 

SEO Audit

Since we’re focusing on the technical side of SEO today, it only makes sense that we start our list off with the role of the SEO audit.

For starters, it’s worth mentioning again just how important the technical side of SEO is in the wake of search engines like Google relying on complex algorithms to determine which companies end up on the first page of their search engine results. The biggest problem with the algorithm is how static they can feel sometimes. Even if your content and website presentation is the same as your leading competitors, if they’re in Google’s SEO good graces, you’ll be a step behind every single time.

Knowing that, it’s important to recognize that there’s a high chance that a variety of different SEO issues are present on your site that need to either be reviewed or completely fixed altogether. While we could write an entire article dedicated just to the importance of the SEO audit, for our purposes today we’ll just be tackling some of the general ideas at play.

When it comes to SEO auditing, the first thing you’ll need to focus on is the visibility of your site. After all, it’s going to be pretty difficult for Google to direct traffic your way if it can’t find your small business easily.

How exactly does one go about ensuring their site’s visibility? Well, if we’re being honest, this entire process will end up being significantly easier if you use SEO tools like the ones Ahrefs offers. With tools like Content Explorer, small business owners can gain access to analysis like never before.

First off, you’re going to want to look at the way your site’s codes and files are set up. Make sure that things like the robots.txt file are not restricting access to your site and that all your site URLs are error free. While it might seem overly simplistic (you might be getting a bit of a “did you try turning it off and on again?” vibe at this point), there’s no getting around that these seemingly minor mistakes can have massive implications on the visibility of your site.

Once that’s over and done with, it’s time to start looking at the indexability of your site. If you have no idea what that means, the easy way to think of it is seeing whether or not search engines are listing your site. Again, this probably seems too simple, but remember: you need to walk before you can run. And when the prize is a successful small business, making sure that you have every possible advantage over your competition seems like a small price to pay.

Fortunately for small business owners that aren’t quite that tech-savvy, most search engines offer a “site:” command that allows them to search for website-specific content. Using these commands will give you a rough idea of the number of pages indexed by a specific search engine.

Of course, you can dive even deeper than that, ensuring that your pages and even your company brand name are indexed. The important thing is to make sure that Google is aware of your existence because let’s face it: if Google doesn’t know who you are, no one does.

 

2. Rankings Analysis

Moving right along, there’s the subject of ranking and what it all means for your small business. More specifically, which factors matter and how they can be fine-tuned.

First off, there are a series of on-page ranking factors that you’ll need to consider. You’ll want to perform page level analysis because of how useful it is when it comes to identifying certain examples of optimization opportunities.  Beyond that, the domain level analysis will help small business owners identify and define the level of effort necessary to make these site-wide corrections.

Going back to the topic of URLs, there a few issues that need addressing. First off, it’s important to make sure your URL contains relevant keywords. The better your URL describes its corresponding content, the more effective your overall SEO strategy will be.

Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Having a concise URL matters as well, with the best URLs clocking in at around 115 characters total. Your URL should be using subfolders instead of subdomains, with the former being easier for search engines to identify. Even something as simple as using hyphens instead of underscores to separate words can have a noticeable effect on your SEO effectiveness.

While on-page ranking factors are certainly important, they’re still only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Off-page ranking factors (or the ranking factors that are generated by external sources) are just as important.

At the cornerstone of understanding the off-page ranking factors of your website is your online reputation. More specifically, how reliable you are when it comes to reputable information. Or to put it simply: are you seen as a trendsetter in your industry?

While that might seem like a pretty vague description, there’s actually a tangible application to all this. The most straightforward one? Making sure that your site isn’t accidentally providing your users with malware and spam. There’s a fantastic Google service called Safe Browsing that can help you by providing references off of blacklists. Also be sure to check for keyword stuffing, hidden text and cloaking, all of which can land you on Google’s naughty list.

But beyond general concepts of reliability and the popularity of your site in relation to your competitors, there’s a critical off-page ranking factor that deserves to be mentioned here.

The overall quality of your site will inadvertently be determined by the quality of sites that link back to it. That’s why understanding the backlink profile of your site is such an important part of this process.

If you have no idea where to start, here are some concepts and ideas to keep in mind. First off, how many unique domains are linking to your site? Are you getting 10 links from 1 root domain or 1 link from 10 root domains? Ideally, you’re getting the latter instead of the former. Are the backlinks from these sites actually relevant? Google doesn’t care for random links and these kinds of links do little to establish your small business as an online authority in your industry.

Clearly, understanding your site’s backlink profile (and how best to proceed once you have an accurate picture) can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are a variety of SEO tools you can use, like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Tool, designed to aid with the backlink profile creation and editing process.

These two steps, the SEO audit and analysis of rankings, might seem small when you consider the ridiculous amount of SEO advice being given out these days. And yet, these are the foundation of any solid SEO strategy. With these two steps down, your small business will be well on its way to dominating the competition and being an online authority.

Categories
Social Media

How to Use Hashtags to Enhance Your Brand

Hashtags (#hashtags) are an important part of how people communicate online. They are also a critical part of online marketing, as they allow you to organize content and track discussions across social media based on the hashtag or keywords.

The hashtag first beginning with Twitter in 2007 as a way to group tweets. it has since spread to other social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, and Pinterest.

You cannot use spaces in hashtags so even when your hashtag contains more than one word, group them all together. If you want to make it easier to read, you can capitalize the first letter in each word. Using uppercase letters will not change the search results. you can also use numbers, but you should not use any kind of punctuation mark or special character.

The beauty of hashtags is there’s no preset list. You can create a brand new hashtag simply by putting the hash symbol before a series of words. If it’s never been used before, you’ve   invented a hashtag.

If you’re looking to capitalize on hashtags for your online marketing, it’s not as simple as jumping right in with the hashtags you think will be the best fit for your brand. For a hashtag to be an effective enhancement to your brand, you must consider how your target audience currently uses them, the potential abuse of any branded hashtag you may create, and more. It may seem tempting to just jump on the trending hashtag train every time you see one, but this action can do some damage to your brand.

 

Research Hashtags Before You Use Them

I’ve mentioned it here on the blog before – the story of DiGiorno Pizza jumping in on the trending #WhyIStayed hashtag before they researched it. Long story short, the hashtag was a response to domestic abuse surrounding Ray Rice and his wife. Instead of researching the hashtag, the brand jumped on the bandwagon with a “#WhyIStayed You had pizza” tweet that was in poor taste. Of course the brand deleted the tweet and issued a swift apology, but had they taken the time to research the hashtag first, they could have avoided the entire thing.

Take a look at these tools to help you research hashtags before you consider working them into your social strategy.

  • HashAtIt: This is a hashtag search engine so you can see the way the hashtags are used across multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
  • Hashtagify: This free tool lets you explore Twitter hashtags, but one thing that makes it unique is it also visualizes the relationships between hashtags. The analysis based on a 1% sampling of all tweets, since this is the max that Twitter will give for free.
  • org: This will provide information about how individuals and brands across the globe can improve their social media branding.
  • RiteTag: This tool helps you find the best tags to go alongside the content you’re sharing. It works with Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube to name a few.
  • TagDef: This is a big one to help you avoid the DiGiorno fiasco, because it helps you see what hashtags mean and find related hashtags. Plus, if you’ve invented a hashtag for your brand, you can add your own definitions, too.

 

Types of Hashtags

You can break hashtags down into five basic categories.

  • Related Hashtags: Finding hashtags related to the ones you’re already using helps you get insight into current trends and related concepts. An important thing to consider is when it comes to using hashtags on Google+, they are reflective of what’s trending right now, so that’s a good way to find topics that will resonate with your audience. It helps you find concepts to base your new content on, and can be useful in finding niche slang. You can use this approach when you’re planning content for a week or two ahead of time. Otherwise, stick to Hashtagify.
  • Local Hashtags: These hashtags are harder to find with a tool, so you’ll have to rely on your own knowledge and Google Maps. These hashtags rose to popularity thanks to Instagram, but have since become popular on Facebook and Twitter as well. You can look for neighborhood and city names, sights, restaurants, shops, and community names. It’s also a good idea to look though local and hyper local web directories to get more ideas. You can turn the local topics into hashtags you can then search on Twitter and Facebook. Pay attention to the hashtags that give you the best results so you can keep using them. Put the best ones in Google+ to find related trends and concepts.
  • Event Hashtags: No matter what industry you’re in, you can find a variety of annual events. Hashtags are a great way to build relationships with attendees, speakers, and sponsors you believe would fit your ideal customer profile. And, if you cannot attend the event for whatever reason, you can use the hashtag to follow along during the event.
  • Holiday Hashtags: You can always work a holiday theme into your industry, and using holiday hashtags can help spread the content a bit further. For instance, you can do something like “Our X New Year’s Resolutions for 20XX #HappyNewYear20XX #NewYearsResolution” or “X Things We Want for [Holiday] #[holidayhashtag]” Going beyond the nationally recognized holidays, you could always look into unofficial holidays related to your niche, like National Chocolate Day, or National Left Hander’s Day.
  • Brand Hashtags: Brand hashtags are often used when people tweet about the brand’s customer service, products and services, or causes or events they support. Running brand hashtags through related tools can help you find other keywords people are using in the niche, so you can capitalize on the traffic they bring.

 

Create a Branded Hashtag

When you want to create a branded hashtag, keep your brand’s identity at the forefront of your brainstorming activity. If you want it to take off, you must remain authentic and true to your brand. One of my favorite examples of branded hashtags is Charmin. Toilet paper is something everyone needs, but doesn’t necessarily like to talk about. But, they’ve done a great job with a few different branded hashtags, such as: #tweetfromtheseat, #charmin, #enjoythego.

You should create a branded hashtag that ties into your marketing activities without having to force it.  Keep it short, but unique – the longer they are, the less likely they are to be remembered, and the harder they will be to use within Twitter’s character limits.

Make it clever or funny. That’s what has worked so well for Charmin, but a word of caution. Check it for possible double meanings that trolls could have fun with. #NowThatchersDead was a trending hashtag a while back when Marget Thatcher passed away. Needless to say, others changed it to #NowThatChersDead, which created a storm of rumors that Cher had passed away. If there’s room to change it or make fun of it, you can bet people will do it. Look for hidden words and phrases within the phrase as you intended.

Encourage your followers to use the hashtags when they’re on social media, and you can use them as another way to track buzz about your brand. Check and see if there are any hashtags you see your followers repeatedly using to describe your products, and then use those. Before Chobani ever ventured onto Instagram, they noticed followers were using #chobani and #creationaday, so they just joined the conversation. You can do the same if you notice a trend.

 

Take a Look at Trending Hashtags

Like I’ve already mentioned with Digornio, it’s a bad idea to jump on a trending hashtag just because you want to get some juice for your brand. But, there’s another reason to look at what’s trending. You don’t want something to be too close to your hashtag – because it could be typo’d and end up creating some negative press for your brand.

You also don’t want to use something that’s too general like #notguilty. Entenmann’s decided to use that hashtag to promote their low-calorie product options, which turned out to be a bad idea. That hashtag was trending because of the Casey Anthony verdict.

But, if there’s a trending hashtag that fits with your brand, and doesn’t have a negative connotation, jump on it.

 

Use Hashtags on Multiple Social Platforms

To create cohesiveness, and to ensure the hashtag gets wider reach, use the hashtags you choose or create across social platforms. You may have some customers who don’t use Twitter, but are constantly on Instagram or Pinterest. You may have customers on Facebook and Twitter, but not on Instagram. Track the hashtag on all the platforms you use it on and see which ones are doing the best and where.

 

Don’t Overdo Hashtags

Pick one or two hashtags that make the most sense for your content. If your post is nothing but hashtags, it’s hard to actually communicate something to your followers. Plus, it gives them the impression that you’re spamming them. Nobody likes spam.

 

#Hashtags Enhance Your Brand When Used Correctly

When used the right way, you can expand your reach, engage your customers, and track social media chatter. But just like anything else in your online marketing campaigns, you should take your time and research. If you jump on a trend without researching, you could easily damage your brand. If you create the wrong hashtag and trolls go rogue, that too, creates a mess.

What are your favorite hashtags? Why? How have hashtags helped (or hurt) your brand? Tell me in the comments below.

Categories
Social Media

Why Backing Up Your Social Media Content is Crucial

You should be backing up your social media and blog content on your local machine and somewhere on the cloud. You never know when the server that hosts your content may go down, resulting in the loss of your content, or a temporary delay in the delivery of that content. You also may run into a situation where a platform where you have been contributing content gets old, shut down, or change his policies to where content is no longer accepted. This has happened with several platforms, such as Wired’s Innovation Insights, Yahoo! Voices (formerly Associated Content), and Engadget’s Public Access.

There’s also the possibility that a social network May get rid of a certain feature, or the entire network. Take a look at what has happened to Blab and Vine. If you’ve spent years building up your blog using LinkedIn publisher or Facebook notes, just to find out one of those features is being discontinued, you have to either back up that contents or risk losing it forever.

If you start backing up your content now, you’ll be one step ahead of many marketers in terms of handling unforeseen events.

 

Backing Up Your Blog Posts (And Other Long Form Content)

No matter where you right your blog posts, you should be saving the final version of your content to either a Word document you can save on your local hard drive, or right your contents in Google Docs so it is in the cloud, too.  even though word press can save various versions of your posts, it’s always a good idea to have a backup on your local hard drive period and in case your hard drive becomes fried, it’s a good idea to keep a backup somewhere in the cloud off your web hosting server.

If you are a content creator who generally writes content for a single outlet, and uses t other social networks to promote the content, it’s a good idea to create a special name and convention to save it, making it easier to track what you’ve used and where. If you find out that a publication has closed its doors, or form example Facebook has decided to get rid of the notes feature, you still have content that you can use to promote the article or blog post on another network.

 

Benefits of Backing Up Long Form Content

This backup system also helps you maintain a personal library of the topics you’ve covered, and sites you’ve been published on. This allows you to get a better idea of how you can repurpose all of that content. Many freelance writers begin only with text based content. Sometimes, they decide they want to do video. To make the process easier for them, they could easily go back to that backup system to see all the posts they’ve done and create videos for them. Then, they can use the text-based content to promote the video content and vice versa.

If you start from that basic content archive, you could add your post to Facebook Notes, Medium, and Linkedin Publisher to help them get more visibility. It also provides insurance that if any of these websites are networks go down, your audience will still be able to find your content and other places.

 

Backing Up Your Mobile Videos

We know video marketing is all the rage these days, and with good reason. After all, including video in an email can increase click-through rate by as much as 200 to 300%, and including a video on a landing page can increase conversion by 80%.

When you’re using your smartphone to record video for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or Snapchat, don’t stop once you upload the videos to any of these networks. Save a copy of these videos to your device after you’ve recorded them or after the video was published on social media. You can also use a cloud storage platform like Dropbox or OneDrive to automatically upload any video content saved on your phone to the cloud.

Regardless of which social media network you recorded the video for, it is possible to reach share these videos on other video sharing networks. If you record any videos for use on social using a traditional camera, or a webcam on your computer, be sure you’re also taking the time to back up those videos locally and to the cloud. Don’t trust the video content to a single social media network.

Some browser extensions will help you scrape video from a page if you have to, such as Video Downloader Ultimate.

 

Backing Up Your Testimonials

Customer testimonials are also an important thing to back up on a regular basis. You can use the browser extension, such as Open Screenshot for Chrome, that will allow you to capture an entire web page, or a tool like Skitch, or Jing to create screenshots from your desktop.

 

Downloading Your Profiles and Pages

Facebook

Login to Facebook and navigate to your account settings. On the general account settings page, go to the bottom and look for the download copy link. On the next page, click “Start My Archive”. At this point, for security purposes you may be asked to re-enter your password.

You’ll see a box that will alert you to the fact that your archives may take awhile to generate depending on how many things you put on the network. you will receive an email from Facebook when your archive is ready. You must click the button in the email to start the download process.

If email never comes, which I’ve seen some users report, you can at least get an archive of your Facebook messages using a Chrome extension.

This does not backup any Facebook pages. You must go to the general tab of your page settings, for each page you want to back up, and click the “Edit” link next to the download page option. Then, follow the prompts to download a copy of your page posts, page information, photos, and videos.

Twitter

To download your Twitter archive, login to your account and navigate to your account settings. From there, click “Request your archive.” It may take a while to receive the email, because you won’t get anything until your archive is ready for download.

Once you get the email, click the download now button to login to your account again. At that point you’ll get a message that indicates you’ve received a login verification code. Once you type in that verification code, you’ll be able to download a zip file of your Twitter archive.

Unzip the file and click index. HTML to view your archive in your computer’s default browser.  this option does not keep a backup of your direct messages. However, you can use TwInbox which is an Outlook plugin, to manage your tweets like emails. This method allows you to keep a copy of everything you tweet, direct message, or anything you are mentioned in.

LinkedIn

With the LinkedIn export tool, you can backup all of your connections data along with your profile.

Once you’re logged into LinkedIn, navigate to your account settings. near the bottom you will see an option that says “Getting an archive of your data”. You’ll be able to download a file that includes your posts, connections, and more.

You can choose between two different formats, the fast file, or the fast file with other data. The fast file option includes your connections, contacts, recommendations, and profile information. You’ll get a link to the download, about 10 minutes after the request. The second option includes two bundles of data that will be delivered over 24 hours. The second file also includes your account activity and history, so it takes longer to generate.

Pinterest

There’s not a native tool for exporting Pinterest content, but there are a couple third-party solutions you can use to back up your account.

Pinback.it is a free bookmarklet that allows you to backup and Export all of your  Pinterest data. It runs and your web browser and exports your pins to an HTML file.

Pin4Ever is only available for the Firefox browser. It includes a variety of tools, depending on which plan you choose. The free forever plan allows you to move, copy, delete, and rearrange pins. You can also rate pins, and work with prior backups. There’s a free trial plan that last one week that allows you to run backups and work from them to restore your account.

Paid plans begin at $4.99 a month or $24.99 per year and allow you to backup your followers in addition to the ability to backup your pins and store and view your backups. The Premium plan, with this price at $49.99 per year allows everything from the previous plan with additional features that include kill duplicate and low performing pins, as well as power following and unfollowing, and bulk image uploading. The Ultimate plan, priced at $99.99 per year allows you to promote Etsy and eBay product listings, both update your pin descriptions and links, back up YouTube videos, and other features in addition to everything included in the lower tier plans.

Google + and Other Google Products

Google Takeout is the official service to backup any or all of your data with Google owned services. You can choose which services you want to include in your archive.  Once you have selected the services you want to include in the archive, click next, then choose your archive format. If your archive is larger than the maximum size, it will be sent in multiple files.

You can choose your delivery method – either as a download link sent via email, a file added to your Google Drive, a file added to Dropbox, or a file added to OneDrive. Your archive may take hours, or even days to create, depending on the size of the file and the number of products included in the archive.

 

Tools to Back Up Your Social Media Feeds

If you’d rather not take the time to manually backup everything – and I can’t say I blame you – here are a few tools you can check out. These will take the hassle out of it for you. Alternatively, you can spend some time setting up actions on If This Then That or zaps on Zapier to back everything up for you.

Frostbox

Frostbox will backup data from Gmail, Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With it, you can back up your follower lists, videos, and photos. The data is stored in the cloud, so you can access it from any computer. There’s also the option to create a backup on your local hard drive. The free plan includes 1 GB of storage space, and allows you to earn additional storage by referring friends to the service. Paid plans start at $9.99/month for 20 GB and go up to $29.99/month for 200 GB. If you opt for annual pricing, you’ll get two months of service for free.

Digi.Me

Digi.Me backs up your social data to your local computer, rather than backing it up to the cloud. It works with Facebook profiles and pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Flickr, Pinterest, and Vidadeo. It can also work to back up your blog. You can access the information via keyword search or a timeline calendar. Annual fees are based on the number of accounts you want to backup, starting at $6.99 a year for four accounts, and topping out at $27.99/year for up to 20 accounts. You can archive up to four accounts for free. Your license is valid for a year and does not require renewal unless you want to keep new backups. Your backed up data will always remain safe, whether you renew or not.

Backupify

Backupify is a service targeted at business accounts, and as such, has multiple service levels to address businesses of all sizes. Its focus is primarily on Google products, such as Google Drive, Apps, Gmail, Calendar, Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. Nightly backups for your choice of up to five services costs $4.99/month, and $19.95/month for up to 25 services.

 

Backups Are Worth It!

You never know when technology will fail you. You’re taught to back up everything because hard drives inevitably fail, so why not add your social media, blog posts, and video content to that list?

Have you ever backed up your social media data? Why or why not? Will you start now? Share your thoughts below.

Categories
SEO

How Not Disavowing Links Harms Your SEO Strategy

Not disavowing links harms your SEO strategy. Bad links from spammy or irrelevant sites may lead to penalties from search engines, harming your site’s credibility and rankings. Regularly auditing backlinks and disavowing those that are low-quality or unnatural is crucial to maintaining a healthy and effective SEO profile.

Thanks to changes across the SEO industry over the last couple of years, online marketers have had to make some major changes to their strategies. It is becoming increasingly difficult to rank high in Google for competitive keywords.

Because black hat SEO is becoming more difficult to execute and less likely to deliver results, marketers have turned to an option known as negative SEO. This uses unethical technique to sabotage the competition’s ranking in search engines. Negative SEO may involve building spammy links to your website, creating fake social media profiles to damage your online reputation, removing the best backlinks your website has, and pointing links to your website using poor keywords such as” poker online”, “Viagra”, and similar phrases.

Negative SEO is a real threat, and it is much easier to prevent than it is to fix. That’s an entirely different article outside the scope of this one but the reason I bring up negative SEO is because of the backlink building tactic that can be used to sabotage your profile.

If you find spammy backlinks during a routine backlink audit or have discovered your rankings declined recently, it’s time to make sure there are no poor quality backlinks on your website. If you do find them, don’t panic. Thanks to Google’s Disavow Tool, you can tell the search engine robots you don’t want these link counted toward your link juice. This is particularly helpful when you are unable to remove the link to your website yourself. But, if you aren’t careful, you could do more harm than good with the tool. That’s why I’m going to show you how to use it correctly.

Related: 10 Common SEO Mistakes that Cost You Customers

Monitoring Your Backlink Profile

If you want to be proactive against spammers, perhaps the most important thing you can do is closely monitor your backlink profile. Typically, they will perform negative SEO campaigns against their website by building low quality backlinks or redirect. When you know someone is launching this kind of attack, you can stop it in its tracks with disavows.

There are several tools you can use to keep an eye on them your domain’s backlinks. These include:

Each of these options includes a paid upgrade feature that will allow you to develop a more comprehensive inbound link profile. with the exception of monitor backlinks, you will have to manually run reports everyday.

 

Creating a Spreadsheet of Backlinks

Instead of relying on a tool, you can create your own list of back length and a spreadsheet. You’ll begin by downloading links from a number of sources. I like to start with the Google Search Console. Once you’re logged in, go to the Search Traffic menu, then click Links to Your Site, then click More. Download both the sample links and the latest links, so you can get a more accurate picture who is linking to your website.

If you have a website that has more than 1,000 linking domains, it is possible to get more links from the Google search console by downloading your sample list of links everyday for a few days. You can also download your links from Majestic, Open Site Explorer, and Ahrefs.

Once you have everything downloaded, combine all of the links into a single spreadsheet. In each the source file, locate the column that has the URL of the site that links to you. Copy the entire column into a new spreadsheet. you can do this using either Excel or Google Docs.

When you’ve gone through every source, you’ll end up with a massive spreadsheet that contains every link reported by each tool. As such, you’ll have a lot of duplication but it’s easy to deal with.

You are also free to include additional columns that could help you with your audit, such as the anchor text used for each link, or the nofollow/dofollow status. But, I’m going to keep this tutorial simple and just focus on the URL.

Now, here comes the fun part where we start getting a little technical with formulas in the spreadsheet.

Create a new column to the left of the one that features your URLs. Then type in this formula: =left(B1,find(“/”,B1,9)-1)

Next, highlight column A. Press control+D. This adds the formula in every cell in the column so that you end up with the root domain in column A.

Highlight column A again so we can get the spreadsheet to convert the formula results to values. This is necessary so that you can copy and paste in this column. With column a selected press ctrl-c to copy and then go to the edit menu. Select paste special, and then paste values only.

The next step is to use find and replace to break these down to the subdomain level. with column A highlighted, go to edit and click find and replace. Type http:// in the “Find” field, and leave the “Replace” field blank. Click “Replace All.” Repeat these steps again using https:// and www.  At this point, you’ll have nothing but the domains and subdomains in column A.

Next, we have to remove duplicate links so the spreadsheet contains only one link from each domain. A lot of the spreadsheets have a deduplicate function built-in, but if you were dealing with a large number of rows, this can crash the spreadsheet. It’s a good idea to sort column A Using alphabetical order and then create an additional column to the left of the domains and add a formula.

=if(B1=B2,”duplicate”,”unique”)

Highlight the new column, then press control+D to fill down the formula again like we did before. Now you’ll be able to see the duplicate entries. Filter the column to show only the duplicates and delete the rows.

Now you have a spreadsheet that is a ready for your audit.

 

Audit Your Spreadsheet

Now, visit each one of the websites to determine whether or not you want to disavow the link. Add a column in your spreadsheet so you can keep track of the ones you want to keep and the ones you want to disavow.

If you’re not sure what to do with one link, give it a different designation and come back to it after you’ve looked at more of your backlink profile. This way, you can make a decision about the link if you notice any kind of unnatural linking patterns.

As you think about each link, consider whether the link was made only for SEO, whether it will actually help your clients get to your website, and if you would be worried if a competitor, or someone from Google saw it.

 

What is a Disavow File?

The disavow file is what the Google tool uses to stop counting them as part of your backlink profile. It’s easy to make using your audit spreadsheet.

Filter the disavow column so that all you’re looking at is the links you’ve chosen to disavow. Create a new sheet in your workbook. Copy the domain column over to the new sheet. So it works for Google, you have to add “domain:” in front of each URL.

You can disavow at the URL level, but doing so runs the risk of missing bad links. This is why you should always disavow at the domain level.

Copy =”domain:”&A1” in column B. Copy the formula down the rest of the column. Then, copy the results, and then make sure you’ve chosen paste > special > and paste as values.

Voila! What you see in Column B is the disavow directives Google will follow, but you’re not quite done yet.

Your disavow file must be a txt file, either in 7-bit ASCII or UTF-8 format.

To do this, create a new document in Google Docs. Copy your disavow directives in the document. Then click File > Download as > Plain text.

You can leave comments in the file by starting lines with #. It’s important to remember that no one from Google will read the comments since the entire disavow process is done by bots. Reserve the commenting to leave notes for yourself, such as the date you disavowed the links, and why you disavowed them.

 

Using Google’s Disavow Tool

When you’re happy with the resulting text file, go to the Disavow Tool. Choose your site from the dropdown list. From here, you’ll click “Disavow links” twice, and then “Choose file”. Now navigate to where you stored the text file on your computer and upload it.

If you’re successful, you’ll get a message that says the file has been successfully uploaded. You may see errors, which are likely the result of special characters in domain names. If this is the case, you’ll have to delete them from your disavow file. If you see domain names with ports attached, remove the ports and try again.

If you need to update your file, you’ll need to download the file from the disavow tool. Your results will be in a .csv file, so you’ll need to copy the column, put it in a text file, then add the new sites, save it as a text again, and reupload it.

The disavow starts working as soon as you upload your file and it because to crawl the web. The next time it crawls the domain that’s on your disavow list, Google will add an invisible nofollow tag to prevent the link from being involved in algorithmic calculations. While most links are disavowed within a month, some can take up to three months.

 

Removing vs. Disavowing Links

If you can control the link and it’s easy to remove, then you can remove it. If you’re dealing with an algorithmic issue, it is easier to disavow the links than to spend time emailing each every single webmaster and hoping they’ll not only read the email but actually take the time to remove the link.

 

Oops – I disavowed the wrong link!

If you accidentally disavow a link that you didn’t intend to, you’ll need to edit your disavow file. Download it, copy it into a text document, remove the link you didn’t mean to disavow, and then reupload the file.

 

Monitor Your Site’s Backlinks Regularly

Because new backlinks can come into play all the time, monitor your backlinks often. The sooner you see an issue with bad backlinks, the easier it is to manage. Just because you aren’t engaging in spammy link practices doesn’t mean you won’t potentially fall victim to a negative SEO attack.

Have you seen your rankings improve as a result of disavowing links?

Categories
SEO

Are Your Ads Killing Your SEO?

Many online businesses monetize their websites using display ads – either through a network like AdSense, or by selling ads directly. One of the first banner ads online belonged to AT&T, and was first displayed in October 1994. Logically, it makes sense that if you have a decent amount of traffic, you should make it work for you with ads.

And while you certainly can, it’s a bit more complex nowadays than it used to be. It’s no longer as simple as throwing up ads wherever you want on your website. If you’re not properly implementing ads, you could dramatically harm your search rankings. And if your search rankings plummet, your traffic, and thus earning potential will suffer.

 

How Ads Negatively Affect SEO

Too Many Ads Above the Fold

Your website visitors want to get straight to your content – and if they see a bunch of ads rather than they content they came looking for, they’re not going to be happy. Don’t make your visitors scroll past a bunch of ads to get to the article or blog post that brought them to your website in the first place. Chances are they’re not going to click those ads anyway –so you won’t make money either way.

If you’re not sure about the best placement for your ads, Google has an extensive guide that outlines their policies. Following these guidelines will ensure you’re not subject to penalties for too many ads or accidental clicks.

Too Many Ads in General

Google wants to make sure the websites that are ranking at the top are providing real value to users – providing the information they are looking for. Remember, Google is a business with customers (searchers) to keep happy, and if searchers aren’t happy with their experience, their business suffers.

Let’s talk about the prevalence of ad blockers for a second. In 2016, an estimated 69.8 million Americans used ad blockers, an increase of 34.4% over the previous year. It’s expected the figure will increase another 24% to reach 86.6% million this year. And while the use of ad blockers is more prominent on computers than smartphones and tablets, as mobile internet usage increases, so will the number of users relying on ad blocking software.

As scary as that is for publishers, The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a report that shows about 66% of consumers using ad blockers could be convinced to uninstall them in the industry changed the habits users find most annoying. These include:

  • Making sure ads don’t auto play, or use video in environments where customers aren’t expecting them
  • Ensuring ads do not block content
  • Have safeguards in place to protect users from malware
  • Ensuring ads don’t slow browsing.

This approach would not only make the experience better for users, but for Google as well.

Ads are Killing Your Site Load Time

Each time an ad requires an external call, it means the browser has to download something from another server. While you’ll likely have some non-ad related external calls, each one can contribute to site speed issues. Yes, there are load stacking tactics you can use to counter it, but that only works to a certain degree.

When you consider that 47% of people expect a website to load within two seconds or less, and 40% of people will abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load – there’s no point in having ads on your site for people to click, if they don’t even stick around for the site to load in the first place. Since site speed is a ranking signal, bogging your site down with ads can harm your ranking, too.

Want to know how your website is doing? Use a site speed testing tool like Pingdom or Web Speed Test. Then, turn off your ads, and run it again. Of course, your ads are not the only thing that can negatively affect your site load time, but the tool will help you with suggestions for improvement.

You’re Overloading the Crawler Bots Resources

Each ad on your website is a potential obstacle for users, but that also includes the bots that are trying to crawl your website for indexing and ranking purposes. When the ads require a lot of resources, it slows the bots down, and the bots don’t like it. If they have to work too hard, they’ll just give up and move on to the next time. The bots are tasked with crawling literally everything on the internet – and that requires a lot of resources. If you overload them, they’ll move on not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to.

Google has a crawl budget. This is the amount of resources Google will use to index your site. They don’t place a specific set limit on it because they know each site is unique – and larger websites will clearly need more resources. But, every time the bots hit a resource call (whether ad related or not) it’s a place for the bot to stop the crawl because of excess trips to the server and back delaying page rendering.

Many things can cause delays in page rendering. If your ad network isn’t compressing images or has scripting errors, that’s a recipe for disaster. If your content loads after your ads, the crawler has to wait for the rest of the Document Object Model (DOM) to load, and when this happens, it’s likely the crawler will just stop indexing.

In the past, Google had limited sites to no more than three AdSense blocks on a page, but they’ve since changed the rule. Now, rather than a limit, they will focus on penalizing sites that have more ads than publisher provided content. So, if the crawlers see more ad content before your actual content, you could be in trouble. Don’t worry about it too much if you’ve only got a few pages like this, but if you have an ad template on all pages, review it to ensure you’ve got a good balance between ads and content.

 

Best Practices for Ads on Your Site

Placement Matters

The main reason you’re getting traffic is because of the content you have to offer – not the ads. Yes, you’ll earn some money when people click those ads, but they should never be placed in such a way that detracts from your content. You could increase your bounce rate (thus negatively affecting your rankings) if you don’t think the placements through.

Eye-tracking studies have shown ads placed above and to the left get the most views. Above the fold ads aren’t an issue, as long as they don’t push down or distract from the main content of the page. When the ads get in the way, that’s what causes the poor user experience.

Less is More

Less is more is a great philosophy to live by in many types of design – and web design is no exception. Putting too many ads on a webpage may clutter the experience, which isn’t good for usability.

Ensure Your Ads Look Like Ads

Your ads should look like ads. That doesn’t mean you can’t design them in such a way that complements the styling of your website, but you must establish enough of a difference so that users clearly understand they are ads. Google doesn’t want you to mislead users for the purpose of getting clicks. When users think they’re clicking on something that will lead them to additional content on your website only to discover they’ve clicked an ad are taken somewhere they were not expecting, they don’t have a good experience. It’s upsetting, and when it happens too often, Google will take notice. Alternatively, you can turn to native advertising like sponsored content, so the ad fits the nature of your website.

 

To Sell Ads or Not to Sell Ads

Whether or not you should have ads on your site depends on the niche and purpose. If your purpose is to publish content – resulting in a website like Huffington Post – then ads are expected. But, if your website is your corporate business website, ads may not make sense. You’re monetizing the website in other ways, using it as a lead generation vehicle. Many e-commerce sites like Amazon advertise other related products, and that makes sense, too. Occasionally, you’ll see ads to take you offsite, but for the most part, it’s not a good idea to advertise on your business website – because the goal is to keep people on your website as long as you possibly can.

Ads, when implemented correctly, can be a tremendous source of revenue. With thought and planning, it is possible to incorporate ads without sacrificing the user experience. Think about your users, and ensure your website focuses on something other than ad revenue generation. People aren’t coming to your website to find ads to click – they are coming for helpful, valuable, information. If they click an ad and you make a bit of money, that’s just a fringe benefit.

Do you rely on ad revenue? Does this affect whether or not you use an ad blocker when you’re browsing? Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Categories
Social Media

How to Use Social Media to Build Trust With Potential Customers

Social media is often full of “noise” from brands and personal connections alike. The environment is cluttered simply because everyone wants to be on social media to connect with people. But, as we all know, simply having a profile on a social media network isn’t enough to make the platform work for you – and trying to be everywhere just doesn’t work. Trust is a critical component of building a customer base, and is absolutely necessary for customer retention.

It’s also quite a daunting task, and it can be hard to know where to start. So, let’s start with the basics – an overview of what your audience needs in order to trust you, and then a break down of how you can accomplish it.

 

What Does Your Audience Need to Trust You?

I think Steve Rayson, director of BuzzSumo, does a wonderful job breaking down the social media trust formula.

  • Authority: People are more likely to trust experts on a topic, so the quality of your content – both in terms of what originates with you, and what you share – and the quality of advice you offer when participating in conversations, builds your authority. To keep it going, stay on top of the latest news and trends in your industry, and share your thoughts.
  • Helpfulness: Ultimately, social media is a community of people. You’ll earn more trust when you are helpful to others, which means taking the time to comment on what others are saying, and answering questions. This means sharing content that can be useful to others, regardless of whether it originates with you or not.
  • Intimacy: You should be engaging with people and showing your brand personality. People trust others they know, so it is critical to humanize your brand. You must show your audience that there are people, not just a company, that’s tweeting or posting on Facebook.
  • Self-promotion: Whenever you post one of your articles, or a link that promotes your products or services, you’re being self-promotional. If all you’re posting on social media is self-promotional, then you will lose trust.

 

Be Transparent

This lets people know that you don’t have anything to hide. Of course you don’t want to reveal all the details about your company like internal policies and and sensitive financial information, but being transparent about what’s going on in your company is a good thing for building trust.

This also means resisting the urge to delete posts – with an exception to posts that are offensive to other users – even, and especially if they involve negative comments about your company. The better approach is to leave the post up and respond to it directly, so your audience sees you’re not hiding any aspect of your business. The fact is no business can keep 100% of their customers happy 100% of the time, and people know that. Trying to present your business as if that is the case definitely doesn’t do anything to help you build trust.

 

Be Responsive

Take the time to respond to as many questions and comments as you possibly can. This may be fairly easy in the beginning when you’re a small brand, but for larger brands, it may be impossible to respond to everything. When someone reaches out to you on social media, it’s an indication they are interested in your brand. If you respond to what they have to say, in a timely manner, then you’re showing this person (as well as anyone else in your audience who may see it) that you hear what the person has to say and care about the comments.

The key however, is to avoid using a formulaic response. Make sure you’re fully addressing the question or comment. Though it may take more time to write a personal response for each, it’s the better way to go. If there’s a complaint or other issue that can’t or shouldn’t be resolved on the public forum, invite the person to contact you by phone or email to resolve the situation. Redirect to the appropriate channel when you can’t solve the issue in 140 characters or less.

How can you make sure you’re not missing mentions, especially when more than 30% of tweets don’t include a twitter handle for your company? Use tools like Mention, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social to keep an eye out for various iterations of your handle.

Netflix, and several other brands, have a separate Twitter account dedicated to customer service where they respond to questions and comments from customers.

 

Entertain and Engage

While it’s true most of your posts should be about what’s going on in your industry, there must be room in your strategy to include entertainment and humor. Let’s say you find a short video or meme on Monday morning that makes you laugh out loud. As long as it’s appropriate for your brand, you should consider sharing it with your audience, since they’ll likely find it funny, too.

Sharing this kind of content helps to lower your audience’s defense, and humanizes your brand because it shows there is a real person behind the screen sharing the posts. It contributes to building a fun personality, and builds trust because it shows you’re about communicating with your audience, instead of just throwing your products and services.

 

Hold Yourselves Accountable

Regardless of the kind of company you operate, something bad will happen eventually. It’s just reality. You could miss a deadline, mess up a shipment, or find an employee subject to criminal charges. No matter the nature of the negative news surrounding your company, you must hold yourself accountable publicly on social media if you want to build, or keep, trust.

Rather than trying to cover up the incident or make excuses for why the situation occurred, acknowledge what caused the incident. Clarify details of the situation. If it’s possible to make it up to your followers in any way, do it. It shows your audience you acknowledge your mistakes (humanizing your brand in the process) and will do whatever it takes to correct them.

A few years back, Digornio Pizza made a big mistake on social media – jumping into a trending hashtag (#WhyIStayed) without doing research first. A hashtag where people were sharing their stories of domestic violence in response to a video of NFL player Ray Rice punching his then fiancé, the company made light of it. After the back lash, they published this tweet to apologize for the issue.

And here’s an example of what not to do.

A few years back, a restaurant was featured on Kitchen Nightmares. After the show aired, they responded to the social media backlash by jumping in angry, and outright insulting fans. If that wasn’t bad enough, the next day, they were claiming all their accounts were hacked, and they were in contact with the FBI. The brand page is gone, but BuzzFeed has an article with screenshots – proof that what you do online never really goes away.

 

Avoid Being Too Promotional

There’s nothing wrong with using social media to promote your business. The problem comes in when you’re doing it too much, or it’s the only thing you’re using social media for. When your followers feel like all you do is shove your business down their throats, they aren’t going to trust that you have their best interests in mind. It’s a good way to lose followers, or get completely ignored.

This means finding content to share that doesn’t always start with you – things your audience will find useful. You can do this with content curation tools, and by following the RSS feeds for industry blogs, as well as the competition, and any partners you have. Follow hashtags on Twitter, so you can see what others are sharing.

When you are being promotional, offer something exclusively to your followers – such as a free shipping code, a coupon, or a free product with an order of at least $X dollars. Run limited-time sales only for your social media followers.

 

Promote Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is a wonderful way to show your community you care. It helps boost the perceived value and ethics of your brand. Social media is a great platform to let people know about your efforts.

You shouldn’t use social media to brag about your efforts, but you can use it to discuss charitable contributions and volunteer initiatives you are part of, especially in your local community. Encourage your audience to make their own contributions, and you’ll not only build trust, but cultivate charity from your audience.

Lush Cosmetics is a brand built on natural and fresh ingredients, against animal cruelty, and for ethical ingredient sourcing. These values help bring customers. On their Facebook page, you see them promoting the fact they aim to have a range of self-preserving products because they do not require the use of synthetic preservatives.

Though there has been some backlash, Cheerios is using social media to promote their #BringBackTheBees campaign. The premise is great – but Lifehacker explains the flaw in their approach.

Since the campaign is so new, we’ve yet to see a response from Cheerios about the criticism, but if and when we do – it ties back into holding yourselves accountable.

 

Trust Takes Time

Trust isn’t going to happen overnight. It will take a consistent effort, and there’s no set amount of time to determine when your audience will trust you. There’s no magic formula, and a number of factors determine a user’s trust level with you. Some users may trust you the second they like your page or begin following you on Twitter because they’ve heard about a positive experience with your brand from a friend or family member. Others will remain skeptical for quite a while.

Don’t stress it. Be human. Start the conversation. Make sure everything you post on social media adheres to your standards, and don’t be afraid of making mistakes. As long as you’re sincere and authentic, that’s all that matters. You can’t buy trust, but you can sell your trustworthy brand at a premium, so it pays to invest in building it.

Remember, it can take years to build trust, and only minutes to destroy it. Keep this in mind in everything you do in social media.

What makes you trust a brand on social? What are you doing on social to foster trust in your brand? Tell me in the comments below.

Categories
Content Marketing

14 Types of Evergreen Content to Include in Your Strategy

Evergreen content is timeless. This post itself, is an example of evergreen content. Even though it’s originally being posted to the blog in 2017, the information within the post will be relevant and useful to my audience for years to come. And, if changes in the industry mean some of the information becomes outdated, I can easily make edits to the post to keep it up to date.

Evergreen content is well optimized for keywords related to your niche or industry. It isn’t related to current news or trends. These have their place in online content, of course, but anything with an “expiration date” cannot be evergreen.

The good news is, you have a variety of evergreen content formats to work into your content strategy.

 

1. Case Studies

If you’ve got a client or two that have been successful using your products or services, reach out to them and ask if you can share their story with your audience. Case studies allow you to show off your expertise, while building trust with your audience. I’m a fan of this case study from Neil Patel, that teaches you how to write a case study.

You can also flip the standard case study on its head, if you have a scenario where something went wrong. Even though things didn’t work out as planned, this type of case study still provides valuable content because you can use it to teach people want not to do. And, admitting mistakes humanizes your brand. Think about your biggest mistakes and turn them into something people can learn from. They’ll appreciate it.

 

2. Original Research

Investing time and money into original research can be hard, but because it’s exclusive and unique to you, it’s worth it. You don’t have to hire a major firm like Forrester to handle the data collection for you.

You can collect data on your own with a Google Form, as long as you have the audience to send it to. If you don’t, you can use Google Surveys or a similar service to distribute the survey and collect the data for you. Pricing with Google Surveys ranges from 10 cents to $3.00 per completion, and may cost more if screening questions are required.

After collecting the data, format it into a blog post. Create a PDF with the results, and link it to the blog post. Or, make the research available for download if people sign up for your email list.

This approach is a good way to get backlinks because if you have data to support a point they’re making in their content; they will generally link back to your research as the source.

 

3. Stat Collections

If you can’t create your own original research, the next best thing you can do is to collect as many statistics as you possibly can.  It can be tempting to gather 10 or 15 and call it done, but instead, you should aim to get at least 100 if not more, data points from across your industry.

Expand upon it by adding your own commentary so your audience sees how they can use the stats. Or, design an infographic to go alongside the content and simplify it. To keep the content evergreen, you could update it every year – with something like “X stats for X industry in 20XX.” You could always link to previous editions on the current post.

 

4. How to Guides

Think about real problems your audience is facing, and how you can help solve hem. Create a guide that breaks down the main issue into simpler steps. This way, you’re teaching them something and providing real value because you’re solving a real problem.

There are two types of how-to guides you can focus on: Guides for beginners, and guides for advanced users.

True beginner guides are hard to find, simply because once we know something, it can be hard for us share the knowledge with others. I’ve written a few basic guides like this here on the blog, like How to Make User Generated Content Work for You. Because of the in-depth nature of the subject, I could easily create a series of guides on it in the future, and link them together to create an ultimate guide.

When it comes to a how to guide for advanced users, you’ll often find them easier to write. This is because you and the reader share expertise, and understand the common, technical language.

 

5. Resource Lists

Creating a list of resources to help people accomplish something is highly useful. Sometimes, our creative juices run a little dry, but we always have something like this to fall back on. You can start by thinking of the tools that are valuable to you in your daily life – and how those tools could help your audience. This post provides a list of more than 50 resources for free images. The more resources in your list, the better.

 

6. Free and Paid Tools for X Niche

Regardless of what niche you’re in, there are plenty of tools to help your audience. But, to provide real value, you’ll have to do more than just list them. You can do this by including screenshots, videos, tutorials, or your commentary with pros and cons. Keep notes in your editorial calendar so you can come back to these posts and update them from time to time to keep them current. I’ve written 26 Tools to Monitor Your Band (and the Competition!) as an example of this kind of content.

 

7. Books for X Niche or Goal

Much like the free and paid tools list, this should be a comprehensive list of books designed to help you learn more about a niche, or accomplish a goal. But, it can’t just be a list of books. Bonus points if you’ve read each of the books, or can get testimonials from people who have. Provide something of value – at the least, an overview of what you can expect to learn from the book, or why you felt it needed to be included on the list. If you choose to use affiliate links when linking to where to buy the book – make sure you properly disclose. Shopify has a great post on the 10 Must Read Books for Smart Online Marketers that you can use as an example. Beef it up with quotes from each book – and even add in some click to tweet boxes. Ask industry experts to throw in their suggestions and you’ll get a roundup post, too.

 

8. Mistakes in X Niche

For every right way there is do something – there’s a wrong way, or mistakes to be made along the way. No matter what your niche is, I’m sure there are plenty of mistakes you could write about to help your audience learn what not to do. For instance, I’ve written, 8 Business Blogging Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make and 7 Mistakes You’re Making on LinkedIn That Kill Your Brand Image.

 

9. Best/Worst Practices for X Goal

This can be two posts – one of the best practices to help you reach the goal, and one for the worst practices to help you reach the goal. These are similar to how to-guides because they aim to help solve problems, but you support with data and examples. Show why these practices are the best – by demonstrating who they’ve worked for. Show why these practices are the worst, by demonstrating how those who used them were negatively affected.

 

10. Tip Roundups

Ask a group of experts or influencers a single question, specific to your niche. Then, arrange the answers creatively. This post from Business Collective offers a good example.

 

11. Top Influencers in X Niche

There are tons of top influencer lists online, and the majority of them, even those found on big name sites are fairly superficial. They’re thrown together with the influencer’s name, photo, website, and something from their social media profiles. Sure, this works when you can’t get any of the influencers you want to feature to respond, but it’s not the best way to get the job done.

It’ll take more time and effort to do it this way, but you should reach out to the influencers yourself so you can get original contributions. Because influencers are busy people, recognize that you probably won’t get an answer from all them. And that means you’ll need to reach out to plenty more influencers than you actually want to highlight in your article. And, of course you’ll want something of value to add, so you end up with more than a list of quotes from a certain number of influencers.

Combine it with a kind of post I’ve already talked about – ask them to provide their favorite tool, resource, book, or a best practice. Ask them to admit to a mistake, or offer a tip. Then, you’ve got something that’s original, and of real value.

 

12. History of X Topic

History doesn’t have to be long or boring, as long as it’s visually engaging. If you’re looking to delve into infographics, this can be a great place to start. Research and get everything down, then think about the best way to visualize it. Often times, a timeline format works well. Need some inspiration? Take a look at these:

You can break these infographics down into smaller images for social media promotion, and include embed codes for easy distribution. When someone else posts it on their website, you’ll get a backlink. Plus, the images can help you out in Google Images, and Pinterest.

 

13. Glossary for X Topic or Niche

All right, I know dictionaries and glossaries are super boring to compile. But you know what they’re good for? Link building. When you’re dealing with a beginner audience, having a comprehensive resource of terms is helpful. And if you’ve created one, someone will link to your definitions if for no other reason than to avoid having to invest the time and resources in the creation of their own. But if you’re going to do it, do it right – crosslink everything. Include videos where appropriate. Make it available in a PDF format. The more comprehensive your resource, the greater the chance people will not only find real value, but link to it. Copyblogger’s Content Marketing Glossary knocks it out of the park… so make yours do the same.

 

14. Everything You Need to Know Guide

This type of content is the most time consuming, because it’s meant to be all encompassing. No matter the niche, there are plenty of things you can cover. And even though some of them may be worn out because they’ve been done so many times, there’s always a way you can make yours bigger and better. This guide on lawn care is an excellent example because it shows everything you need to know – from brief history, things to consider about your lawn mower and lawn itself, how often you mow, and more. It’s a great resource for people who just bought their first home after living in an apartment where the grounds were maintained for them. You can make more extensive guides on each subject, and link them together to create the master ultimate guide, and keep content regularly flowing.

 

Looking at Your Editorial Calendar

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post, so I’m giving you a bit of homework. Look at your editorial calendar and take note of the types of evergreen content you’re already using. How can you improve upon it? As you move into planning for the next month or quarter, what other kinds of content can you add?

Did I miss any of your favorite kinds of evergreen content? Share them with me in the comments below.

Categories
SEO

A Beginner’s Guide to Mastering Google Search Console

Once known as Google Webmaster Tools, the product was renamed in May 2015, to better represent its wider audience of users. Originally intended to help webmasters get a better view of what’s going on with a website, the resource provided valuable to other internet professionals, such as SEOs, designers, and marketing pros, thus the rebrand.

The Google Search Console is a free service that provides a great deal of information about your website and the people visiting it – but it’s not the same thing as Google Analytics.

If you want to know how to make it work for you – even as a business owner – this guide is for you.

 

Getting Starting: Adding and Verifying Your Site in Google Search Console

Before you can start using the tool, you have to add the website to your account, and verify that you either own it, are the webmaster for it, or are another authorized user. Because of the depth of information provided about a website, they aren’t just going to let everyone add any website they want to. If they did, it would be all too easy to get information on your competitors, and for your competitors to get the information on you.

All you have to do is log into your Search Console account. From there, you’ll see red button that reads “Add Property”.

At this point, your site is in your account, but you have to verify it before you can do anything else. There are multiple ways to verify your website, and you can choose the one that works best for you. There’s no need to use more than one method. If you don’t have the ability to upload files to the site, or experience working with HTML, you can choose alternate methods.

 

Adding an HTML Tag

From the dashboard, click “Manage Property” and then “Verify this property.” If you don’t see the HTML tag option under the “Recommended method” tab, then choose “Alternate methods” and choose “HTML tag.” This will give you the code you need for verification.

Copy the code and use your HTML editor to open the code for your website’s homepage. Paste the code from Google into <head> section of your HTML code. If there’s something else in the <head> section of your website, there’s no need to worry about where the code goes in relation to the other code. If you don’t have a <head> section, you can create one to verify the site.

Once you know the code has been added to your website, go back to the Google Search Console dashboard and click “Verify.” Google will check the site for the code. If it finds the code, you’ll be told the site has been verified. If it does not find the code, you’llget information about the errors.

Once the site is verified by Google Search Console, do not remove the code. Doing so will cause the site to revert to unverified.

 

Uploading an HTML File

You can only use this method if you have access to the root directory via FTP or the web hosting control panel.

From the dashboard, click “Manage Property” and then “Verify this property.” If you don’t see the HTML file upload option under the “Recommended method” tab, then choose “Alternate methods” and choose “HTML file upload.” This will allow you to download the file you need for verification.

Upload the file to the site’s root directory. You should not make any changes to the file – either in terms of the content or the file name. If changes are made, Google Search Console will not be able to complete verification.

Once you know the file has been uploaded to your website, go back to the Google Search Console dashboard and click “Verify.” Google will check the site for the file. If it finds the file, you’ll be told the site has been verified.

As with the HTML tag method above, do not delete the file after verification, or it will revert to unverified.

 

Verifying with Your Domain Name Provider

Your domain name provider is the company where you purchased your domain. Usually, this is the same as your web hosting company, but it does not have to be. When you verify using your domain provider, you’re proving to Google that you own the main domain – and everything associated with it. This is a good option for large websites.

From the dashboard, click “Manage Property” and then “Verify this property.” If you don’t see the domain name provider under the “Recommended method” tab, then choose “Alternate methods” and choose “Domain name provider.”

At this point, you’ll be asked to choose your provider from a list of the most commonly used, such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Bluehost. If you do not see your provider on this list, choose “Other.” You’ll then be presented with instructions on how to create a DNS TXT record for your provider. If this doesn’t work with your provider, you can create a CNAME record instead.

 

Adding Your Google Analytics Code

If you’re already using Google Analytics to keep an eye on your website’s traffic, this will likely be the easiest option for you. Check your site’s HTML code to make sure your tracking code is already in the <head> section of your homepage. If it’s not there, you’ll need to move in there for it to work.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, but want to kill two birds with one stone, follow these instructions to setup Google Analytics on your site. Then, check to make sure the code isn’t in the <body> section of your website. If it is, move it to the <head> code, then move forward.

From the dashboard, click “Manage Property” and then “Verify this property.” If you don’t see the Google Analytics tracking code on under the “Recommended method” tab, then choose “Alternate methods” and choose “Google Analytics tracking code.” You’ll be given a set of instructions to follow.

Once the site is verified, do not remove your Google Analytics code from your website, or it will revert to unverified.

 

Using the Google Tag Manager

If you’re already using Google Tag Manager for your site, this could be the easiest way to verify it. If you want to try this method, make sure your “View, Edit, and Manage” permissions enabled in the Tag Manager account. Look at your site’s HTML code to make sure the Tag Manager code is placed immediately after the <body> tag.

From the dashboard, click “Manage Property” and then “Verify this property.” If you don’t see the Google Tag Manager on under the “Recommended method” tab, then choose “Alternate methods” and choose “Google Tag Manager.”

Click Verify. If Google finds the code, you’ll get a message to let you know the site is verified. Once the site is verified, do not remove your Google Tag Manager code from your website, or it will no longer have a verified status.

 

Linking Google Analytics with Google Search Console

Though it may seem like Google Analytics and Google Search Console offer the same data, there are some notable differences between the two. Analytics provides more information about the people who are visiting your site. You’ll see how many visitors are coming, how they’re coming to your site, how long they’re hanging out there, and where they’re geographically coming from.

Search Console, on the other hand, provides more internal information, showing you the websites that link to you, if there is any kind of malware on your website, and the keywords queries that your site is showing up for.

The two platforms do not treat some information the same way, so if you think you’re looking at the same report, you’ll likely not getting the same information in both places. Linking the accounts together helps you get the most of the information found in both products. This integrates the data from both sources so you can get more reports that you can only access when the accounts are linked.

Once your site is added and verified in Search Console, choose the site you’re trying to connect. Look for the gear icon, click it, and select “Google Analytics Property.” Now, you’ll see a list of all the accounts in your account, so you just click the one that matches the property you want to link it to and you’re done. Totally easy, and totally worth the extra information you’ll get.

 

Adding Your Sitemap

Sitemaps help the search engine robots get information about how your website is organized, and the kind of content they can find there. It helps them see how often your website is updated, and the images and video content, too.

When you submit your sitemap to Google Search Console, you’re making it easier for Google because the robots get the information they need to index and rank your site more efficiently. You do not have to submit the sitemap, and there is no penalty if you choose not to. But, it’s a good idea to do this if:

  • You’re a new site and don’t have a lot of backlinks yet
  • You’re an incredibly large website
  • You have a website with a lot of pages that aren’t linked together well

You have to have your site verified before you can submit the sitemap.

From your dashboard, choose the site you want to submit the sitemap for, and then look for the “Crawl” option on the left. Under it, you should see the “Sitemaps” option. Click that, then click the “Add/Test Sitemap” option. Fill in the address of your sitemap. It’s often /sitemap.xml, but double check where it is on your site before you add it.

 

Checking Your Robots.txt File

Chances are there are directories and files on your website that you don’t want to have listed in the search engines. This is true of several directories in WordPress, such as wp-admin. You can use a robots.txt file to tell the search engines which files you don’t indexed. But, it’s important to remember these aren’t a surefire guarantee that robots will ignore them. While Google’s crawlers will accept these instructions, other crawlers from smaller or lesser known, and lesser reputable engines may not. Certain web crawlers may interpret the instructions differently. This file won’t stop other websites from linking to content you don’t want indexed.

You can find your robots.txt Tester under the Crawl menu on the left side of the screen. This will let you see what files are allowed to be indexed, and which ones aren’t. You can use the tool to make changes to the file, and see any errors it may find. It’s also possible to enter a URL to allow or disallow, and then run a test to see if the URL is something the crawler recognizes.

Changes made in the robots.txt file in the Google Search Console won’t be made on the actual file hosted on your site. You can download the edited file from the console, then upload it where the old one was on your host – in the root of your domain. Once that’s done, you can click “verify live version” to make sure Google knows you’ve updated the file and you want them to craw it again.

 

Fetch as Google

If you’ve made a lot of changes to your website, the quickest way to get those update indexed is to submit them manually, so the changes will appear in the results as soon as possible, rather than waiting on the next Google crawl.You can select the URL you want to submit, being mindful to use WWW if and only if your website uses the prefix. Under the Crawl menu on the left side, you’ll see the option to Fetch as Google.

Leave the next screen blank if you want to crawl the entire site – or fill in the URL of the page. Click Fetch and Render. It may take a few minutes, depending on the size and number of the pages you’re fetching.

After this is finished, you can click the “Submit to Index” button.  You can choose to crawl only this URL, or crawl this URL and its direct links. Choose the first one if you want to index only the single page, and the second option if you want to index the entire site.

Wait for the indexing to finish, andthen you’ll see your site show up in the search results in a few days.

 

Site Errors

You don’t want any errors on your website, but it’s possible something could happen and you’re not aware of it unless someone else tells you. Google’s Search Console can be that someone, letting you know if there are any problems when and if it finds them.

If you want to check your site for internal errors, select the site you want to check, then click “Crawl” > “Crawl Errors.” From here, you’ll see a list of URLs that have errors when Google bots crawl it. You can click the error to get more details about the error and when it happened.

Record the errors and include screenshots if appropriate. If you aren’t the one who handles the site errors, get in touch with the person who can handle everything.

 

Using the Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is a useful source of information as a webmaster and marketer. It helps you see what’s going on with your website internally, and ensures Google gets the information they need for indexing and ranking.

How do you use Google Search Console in your business?

Categories
Digital Marketing

Everything You Need to Know to Start Your Own Podcast

Podcasting is a type of online audio broadcasting. You record an audio file, usually MP3, then upload it online for people to stream and listen to. Alternatively, people can download the file and listen at their own convenience. The term “podcast” is a hybrid of iPod and broadcasting, since most people listened to the files on their iPods (or other MP3 players.)

Research shows podcast listening grew 23% between 2015 and 2016. Nearly a quarter of Americans age 12 and and up have listened to at least one podcast in the last month, representing a 17% increase from 2015. That may not sound like much, but 21% of America also uses Twitter.  And when you consider that monthly listenership has increased 75% since 2013, now could be the best time to add audio to your content marketing strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at how to get started with podcasting.

 

What’s Your Subject?

Obviously, your podcast needs to be related to your core business somehow, but, sometimes going too broad can be just as dangerous as going too niche. What kinds of material are you covering on your blog? That’s the kind of thing you should aim for with your podcast. Should you just read your blog posts out loud and call that your podcast? Nope. Just like you don’t want to post the exact same thing across all your social media platforms, you should offer a little something different that’s better for the format.

Strategically, podcasting is a less crowded space than blogging. There are way more bloggers out there than podcasters, and the format itself tends to lead to more engagement. When people listen to your podcast, they’re likely to stay tuned in longer than they would if they were just reading your blog. Many people listen to podcasts during the commute or workout.

 

Developing Your Podcast Calendar and Schedule

Once you get an idea of what your show will be about, brainstorm some topics, and think about how often you’ll do a show. Many podcasts are posted once a week, but how often you do it is up to you. Whatever you determine, make sure you can follow through with the expectation that you set for the audience. If you say you’re going to podcast once a week, posting new episodes every Wednesday – stick to it. If you don’t, you’ll have a hard time retaining an audience.

When you develop your editorial calendar, it’s a good idea to outline what you want to talk about on the episode. There’s no need to script everything out, because you don’t want to sound like you’re reading. Keep a conversational tone throughout the entire recording – especially if you’re actually conversing with someone as part of the show. This way you can rehearse a little bit before you actually start recording the show.

How the show actually goes is completely in your control, but this is a good starting guideline to follow.

  • Introduction (30-60 seconds): Who are you? What are you taking about in this episode?
  • Intro music (30-60 seconds): Think of this as your jingle. It should be used in every show, to make it easier for listeners to recognize the show.
  • Topic 1: 3 minutes – that’s a bit longer than most people realize, so make sure you have plenty of material. You don’t want to speak too fast or too slow, but you don’t necessarily want to run out of stuff to say, either. Time yourself a bit to see if you need to add or cut material before you actually start recording.
  • Topic 2: Same as above.
  • Interlude: 30 second break or music.
  • Topic 3: Same as topics 1 and 2.
  • Topic 4: Same as above.
  • Closing Remarks(2 minutes): Thank your audience for listening. Thank your guests for participating. Talk about what you will cover in the next show.
  • Closing Music (2 minutes): Repeat intro music.

 

Options for Your Show Format

Podcast formats aren’t set in stone, and can change as your show grows and evolves to meet the needs and desires of your audience. You can have a one-man show, which is what many people choose when starting out. Or, you can include one or more co-hosts, line up guests to feature on each episode, or simply have guests call in to participate.

Here’s the problem with sticking to a one-man show format: no matter how interesting you are, and how popular your subject, you may find yourself struggling to get subscribers, simply because the one-man approach isn’t as interesting as banter between two or three people.

If you’re going to have multiple co-hosts, or interview guests, it’s safe to say you’re not all going to be able to meet face-to-face every week, so that’s where Skype comes in to save the day.

If you’re a PC user:

Record calls with Pamela – it’s free, but there are premium versions with additional features starting at $16.67.

Edit with Audacity – it’s also free, but there’s a bit of a learning curve. Check out these tutorials to help you get the hang of it.

If you’re a Mac user:

Record calls using Call Recorder for Skype. It’ll set you back $29.95 after a free trial. There’s lifetime free updates, so once you make the investment, there’s no additional cost. If you want to record FaceTime calls – for use in video marketing– there’s an app for that, too. Buying them both together saves you $15, and you’re spending less than $45.

Edit with Garage Band – it’s free.

Pro Tip: Have each co-host record their audio via Skype and splice everything together in editing after everything’s recorded. You’ll end up with higher quality podcasts that way.

If you want to have guests call into your show – check out these options.

 

Choosing Your Microphone

Sure, you can totally start a podcast with nothing more that your smartphone – if you want the finished product to sound like exactly what it is – a recorded phone call. You don’t have to start with an absolute top-of-the-line microphone to test the concept, but you’ll definitely want something more than your speakerphone.

Start with a fairly barebones version – something cheap, but decent quality. If you find that your audience responds well to the podcast and it is taking off more than you expected, then you can easily justify the expense of an upgrade to better equipment. What you invest in at first needs to be enough to produce a quality end product, but doesn’t have to break the bank.

A good USB microphone will start around $60. You’ll want one that is dynamic, has good rejection, and is front-firing. It’s just a really fancy way of saying that it will pick up your voice clearly, but won’t pick up the background stuff in your recording environment.

Another option is to get a headset, so you have both headphones and a microphone. This will cost you about $30, and is a good option if you’re going to be working with guests or cohosts on your show. If you’d rather have the standalone mic, you can always buy a set of headphones, but it’s a good idea to purchase (or make) a mic stand so you’re not stuck in some weird position for the duration of recording.

 

Your Recording Space

You don’t have to have a fancy recording studio, but you want a quiet environment. Your audio editing software can get rid of a lot of background noise, and the right kind of microphone can help reduce the amount of background noise that’s picked up in the first place, but you don’t want to rely on the editing and production process to handle all of that for you.

Keep your mouth about four inches from your microphone, and if possible, at angle, so as you breath to make certain sounds, the air won’t go directly into the microphone, but past it. If you can’t adjust the angle of the microphone, you can use a pop filter to act as a barrier between your breath and the microphone. Try to keep the microphone away from the computer itself, too, because they can make a considerable amount of noise, too.

Since you probably can’t afford to sound proof the room you’ll be recording in, opt for a room that has carpeted floors, and soft walls. If you want to beef up the sound proofing, you can add carpet to the walls, or heavy curtains to hang around the walls.

 

Podcast Hosting and Distribution

When you’re done with the audio, you’ve got a number of options for hosting. You can host it yourself – but that’s an entirely separate blog post – or rely on one of the big hosting sites.

  • Soundcloud: Primarily targeted at musicians looking to share their music, this allows you to upload audio to share with anyone – making it an excellent option for podcasts, too. There are free and paid plans. The paid plans are worth it you want to know who has listened to your podcast, where they’re form, and other important analytics information you can use to make improvements.
  • Libsyn: This is one of the oldest podcasts hosts online. Though it’s not free, plans start at $5 a month and include 50 GB of bandwidth, so you’ve got plenty of room for growth before you have to start paying for a higher tier plan.

Plus, there’s always the option of getting your podcast listed on iTunes.

  • Create an RSS feed for your podcasts. LibSyn does this form you.
  • In the iTunes store, click on Podcasts. Then, look for Quick Links, and you’ll see the option to “Submit a Podcast.”
  • Enter your feed URL and submit.

You’ll have to wait for a review process, which is usually completed within 24 to 48 hours. If you’re approved, you’ll get an email to let you know. Generally, three to five days after approval, people can start searching for and finding your podcast in the iTunes store.

 

Promoting Your Podcast

Platforms like Soundcloud have their own promotional tools built in, allowing you to share to Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. Share your update when an episode goes live Pin that update with the iTunes URL. Remember, Soundcloud lets people play everything directly from Twitter, so create sound bites ands share them there. Tease the next episode on social 24 hours before it drops. Build an Instagram story about behind the scenes stuff.

It’s also possible to embed the audio directly into your blog posts – which brings me to another quick point. Transcribe your podcasts so that if you do embed them in your blog for promotional purposes, people have the option to read as they listen, or read instead of listening. You can find people to transcribe your podcasts on freelance marketplaces like Fiverr. Complete transcripts are helpful in terms of accessibility and SEO.

When you feature a guest, ask them to promote their appearance on your show to their audience.

Record several episodes in advance so you’re never at risk of falling behind. Release a few episodes on your launch day, so people aren’t upset there’s only one. Work on building your audience before your launch day. If you’ve already got access to an email list – send out a message to let them know when it’s coming and what they can expect.

Convert your audio to you a YouTube video. Include a transcript and closed captioning for accessibility and SEO. Promote that video on social media, too.

Submit your podcast to aggregators, such as: Podcast Addict, Stitcher, and Overcast.

Once you’re on iTunes, you have eight weeks to get it featured on the New and Noteworthy section, which will do wonders for your audience numbers. Those first two weeks are crucial. During this time – run a contestand giveaway whatever you can (requiring an iTunes review as an entry, host a party (real or virtual) on launch day, email your friends, get people you know to tweet about it, and post podcast themed content on your blog.

 

Podcasts Give You a New Way to Reach Your Audience

For the people who get burnt out reading blog posts and watching videos, podcasts are a great alternative. Plus, each podcast gives you additional content to repurpose, and the potential for more SEO juice.

What are some of your favorite podcasts? If you have one already, drop it in the comments below. I’d love to check it out.

 

 

 

Photo by Gavin Whitner

Categories
SEO

Do You Really Need to Switch Your Website to HTTPS?

There’s been some recent buzz about switching your website from the standard HTTP to the more secure HTTPS. While many large websites, especially those in the e-commerce sector have been using it for years, Google announced it as a lightweight ranking signal back in 2014. That means it didn’t affect much, in fact, it only affected fewer than 1% of global queries. However, they said in that announcement they wanted to give webmasters time to make the switch over to HTTPS because they may strengthen the weight of the signal. They’re making this move to boost internet safety in the hopes that more of the web will shift over to HTTPS.

So, should you make the switch? It depends.

 

A Non-Technical Explanation of HTTPS

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a system for sending and receiving information across the internet. HTTPS is another version of that system, where the “s” stands for secure. The two methods follow the same basic protocols, but the HTTPS version is faster, and encrypted for better privacy. It’s a bit more complex than that of course, but that’s really all that matters for the non-technical SEO, and to your audience.

 

SEO Implications

When and if Google decides to place more weight on HTTPS as a ranking factor, you’ll be ahead of the game. You won’t have to scramble to make the change and hope it works well, meaning you should see a boost right away, rather than having to wait for it. That small boost may not seem like much, but if you’re running a large website, that boost could mean tens of thousands of extra visitors every month. If you’re just getting started, however, it’s likely you won’t see a difference in your search traffic.

 

It Fosters User Trust

One thing worth noting is the way HTTPS displays in the user’s browser. The screenshots come from Chrome, but similar messages are displayed in Firefox and other browsers, too.

But take a look at what happens if the website isn’t using HTTPS.

Simply because there’s no HTTPS in place, the browser displays a message that lets you know your connection isn’t private. That doesn’t necessarily mean your information is at risk, or that attackers are coming after the website, but for the less than web savvy user, it could signal major red flags, working against the trust factor.

All you have to do is click the “Advanced” link in the lower corner, and you’re given a chance to proceed to the original website anyway. In most cases, this is okay to do, but some people may be afraid of the warning and not realize it’s still safe.

If you just have a blog, and you don’t require anything more than their email address to get their opt-in consent, there’s no real reason to switch to HTTPS – unless you expect to get a significant amount of search traffic in the next few years. But, if you’re collecting any kind of personal information or accept payments on your website, you should have HTTPS at least on the pages collecting the sensitive data.

 

Making the Switch

Step 1: Select Your SSL Certificate

Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is the standard technology HTTPS uses. Your website must have an SSL certificate installed for it to become HTTPS. There are three different types of certificates to choose from:

  • Domain Validation:This is the basic (and therefore most affordable) option. It only covers encryption. These certificates are issued almost immediately.
  • Organization Validation:This includes encryption and authentication. If you’re collecting any kind of personal information, this is the option you should go with. These certificates are issued in about 24 hours.
  • Extended Validation:This is the most expensive option, but it provides top of the line security. It is the best level of security you can get under HTTPS. You don’t need it unless you’re a huge e-commerce website, or a website that collects important private information. This is the type of certificate big names like Twitter, and financial institutions use. These certificates are issued within three to five days.

Step 2: Buy Your SSL Certificate

You can buy SSL certificates from a lot of different websites, and because it’s possible to find different types at varying price points, it’s possible to shop around for the best deal. But, I recommend purchasing your certificate from your hosting company, since they sell them anyway, and most hosts will help you install them, too. It’s a measure of convenience worth looking into.

Hostgator, for instance, has SSL certificates starting at $39.99 a year, with extended validation certificates costing $269.99 a year.

Step 3: Install Your SSL Certificate

If your web host doesn’t install the SSL certificate on your server for you, start with Google, and search for the name of your hosting company and SSL certificate installation. If you can’t find anything, contact the company’s support. The process differs between hosts, so it’s impossible for me to provide a breakdown of each step required. Remember, SSL certificates are specific to your IP, so cannot be on shared hosting to install it. Some companies, like Bluehost, offer a shared certificate for those on shared accounts.

Step 4: Create a URL Map and Redirect Your Site

Currently, all your URLs are HTTP, and the HTTPS version is a completely different URL. It’s a pain, but it’s a simple process. Copy all your site’s pages and redirect all of the old HTTP versions to the new HTTPS pages.

If for any reason you want to make changes to your site structure or the URL format, now’s a good time to do it. If you’re using WordPress, you can add the 301 redirects to your .htaccess file. Each line needs to look like this: Redirect 301 /oldpage.html https://www.yoursite.com/newpage.htmlwhere you edit the bold parts.

Step 5: Update Internal Links

Hopefully, you’ve been using relative URLs – those that don’t specify an entire URL, but instead add something to the end of the domain. If you didn’t build it this way – instead using absolute URLs, where the entire URL is specified, you’ll have a bit more work to do.

Relative links won’t need nay work – because when you switch to HTTPS, the link will take you to the HTTPS version instead of the original HTTP. If you use absolute, though, you’ll have to change everything over to HTTPS yourself.

Step 6: Update Image Links and Any Others

I wish I could say you could be done when you’ve updated the site itself and all the links to pages on your site. But, you also have to update the links to resources, including styles sheets, scripts, and images.

Right click any page on your site and click “View source.” You’ll see a lot of tags that look like this: <script src=”http://www.domain.com/js/file.js” />

The issue is all files used on your site also use HTTPS. If the resources are located on your domain, you need to make sure they point to the correct HTTPS location. If you have both HTTP and HTTPS, you can use protocol relative URLs to ensure it pulls the correct version. <script src=”//www.domain.com/js/file.js” />tells it to pull whichever version the protocol is calling for – so if it’s coming from HTTP, it will pull that one.

If you’re using a content delivery network (CDN), make sure it supports HTTPS. Most do, but not all, so it’s worth double-checking. If yours doesn’t, you’ll need to switch to one that does. Your CDN should have instructions on how to implement HTTPS, but if they don’t, contact support.

To make sure you don’t miss any links that need updating, use a site crawling tool like Scream Frog SEO to get a full list, filtered by internal, external, and images to see what’s on your website. You don’t have to worry so much about the external ones, unless you happen to know they’ve also made the switch to HTTPS.

Once they’re all set to HTTPS, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Step 7: Add Your Site to Google Search Console – Again

It’s time to update your site in Google Search Console so Google starts to crawl it again. This way, you reduce the chances your traffic is negatively affected by the switch. The reason for this step is because the HTTPS version of your website, even though it may look the exact same, is considered a completely different website. Submit a new sitemap in your listing, too. Then, resubmit your old sitemap so Google will get the 301 redirects and update the listings.

Step 8: Testing to Make Sure Everything Went According to Plan

At this point, it’s time to test everything to make sure it went the way you intended. If everything ran smoothly, you should see no real change – other than maybe a small boost In your search rankings.

If you notice a traffic drop off that lasts more than a day or two, then it’s possible you have a problem and you need to go through the steps in this guide again. You should also ask your host or an SEO consultant to help you. Start by making sure your SSL certificate is installed correctly, using a free SSL server test. Put in your homepage URL and it will test everything for you. Click around the pages on your website and make sure that lock icon is showing up in your browser.

 

Technical SEO May Suck – But It Matters

I know not everyone loves the technical side of SEO, but the structure of your site matters just like the content on it. If you don’t address the technical side, you could have a site that would rank no problem, and still have trouble getting to rank where it could. HTTPS may not have that much ranking strength now, but it’s always better to try to be one step ahead.

Have you made the switch to HTTPS? Why or why not?

Categories
Digital Marketing

How to Make User Generated Content Work for You

User generated content, or UGC, refers to any kind of content created by users of a product or service. Most people think of reviews when it comes to UGC, but it encompasses everything from photos, blogs, videos, audio, tweets, forum posts, and more. You can use this content on your social media channels to promote your business.

What’s the first thing you do when you’re considering an online purchase? If you’re anything like me, and I bet you are, you search for reviews. You want to know what other people think of the product or service – regardless of whether it’s from a really big brand like Nike or Fitbit, or a small brand you’ve never heard before. I tend to do a bit more digging around if it’s a brand that’s not well known, just because I need to know more about the quality of the product and the validity of the service. If I see a lot of negative UGC, I trust it, and go looking for alternatives.

So if you’re doing that when you’re out shopping – you can bet that’s what your customers are doing. Because of that, UGC can help you, and set you apart from the competition if you use it the right way.

UGC is much like a free source of advertising for your business. Users provide this type of content for free because they want to share their experiences with others. When you ask them to use it, they appreciate the fact they were noticed by a brand they love. Because it’s not possible to share all the UGC out there from all your customers, let’s take a look at some of the other benefits.

 

Benefits of User Generated Content

  • Increased Engagement: Customers trust each other more than they do brands, so UGC gets more engagement. One study showed brand engagement increases by 28% when UGC is part of product videos. Plus, customers are twice as likely to share UGC with friends and family, compared to a piece of brand content.
  • Build Consumer Trust: UGC humanizes your brand, and more than half of customers trust UGC over the content you create for your brand website. As such, implementing UGC in your strategy helps to build better relationships with your customers and prospects.
  • SEO Boost: A study of 20 of the world’s largest brands revealed that a quarter of their search results are UGC. This means you’ll get more organic traffic, and more backlinks from content that’s linked to your site.
  • May Increase Conversion Rate: One report shows when customers see UGC while they’re shopping, the conversation rate increases by nearly 5%. And UGC interactions while shopping increases the conversion rate by nearly 10%.

 

Building Your UGC Strategy

Though a lot of businesses have tried UGC, only 27% of them have a strategy in place for its use. The content can get people talking about your business, and increase engagement while building trust, but it can only do this if its used correctly. If not, it can actually send your customers and followers in the other direction.

  • Know what you want from the UGC. What are your goals? Get specific. That can help you determine more about the social media platforms you should use, and the types of content you should aim to get. Do you want to increase followers? Do you want to increase engagement? Do you want to increase brand awareness?
  • Where will you be? There are a lot of social media platforms, and the reason there’s room for them in the market is because they all offer something a bit different. What works on Facebook can work on LinkedIn, if it’s adjusted accordingly. But posting the same thing verbatim across all your platforms is one of the quickest ways to fall flat. It’s important to consider the difference in demographics from platform to platform – and know that it’s okay to skip one or more of them. Focus on the ones where you know your audience is.
  • It’s okay to ask for UGC. This is particularly useful if you’re running a contest – asking people to submit photos and/or videos of your product in use in exchange for a prize of some sort. But, when you’re asking for it, make sure you know your goal and can be clear about what you’re asking for. Otherwise, you’re going to confuse the audience, which will decrease participation, and may even send people away from your website. Get specific about the rules of UGC. A lot of people will send you content, but if it’s useless because it includes profanity, for instance, you’re wasting time. Choose hashtags carefully to avoid falling victim to trolls.
  • Choose a type of UGC. When you’re working on a campaign, choose one type of content, and add a hashtag to make it easy to track across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For instance, you can ask people to submit images with a hashtag, much like Starbucks did with their white cup contest. Close to 4,000 entries were submitted within three weeks.
  • Focus on community. Because UGC sparks engagement, you’ll be building your community. Make sure anyone who speaks for your brand in the community follows along with the brand image you’ve created. This allows for consistency, and helps the community manager to better handle the customer and advocate connections.
  • Choose the best to promote across your channels. Not everything that’s submitted will be worthy of sharing because it won’t necessarily reflect your brand. You’re not looking for average – you’re looking for fabulous. What caught your eye? If it catches yours, will it catch others’ attention, too?
  • Recognize the users you promote. That awesome content came from someone, and that someone deserves recognition for their time, effort, and dedication to your brand. It’s up to you to choose the best way to do it – many brands do a social shout out, but for more labor intensive UGC, and especially the contest format, a prize should be awarded.
  • Give your customers the tools to share your content. If you want your audience to share your content, or create reviews to promote your content, then you need to give them tools to make it easier. According to consumers, only 16% of brands give people the resources they need.
  • Share stories. Sharing your customers’ stories, with permission, of course, is an important part of brand awareness. It’s more than a case-study. Storytelling can separate you from the competition, but it doesn’t have to be your story to make a difference in the eyes of your audience.

Successful UGC Case Studies

Snickers

The “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign. What began as a campaign using famous celebrities like Joe Pesci and Don Rickles, turned into something even more amazing when ownership shifted from the brand to the users. Customers took it upon themselves t create parodies and references all across the web, which helped the campaign earn a solid place in pop culture.

 

Jamberry

Direct sales company Jamberry uses UGC to highlight each of their nail wrap products. Each has their own hashtag which users are encouraged to use when they post photos on Instagram. When customers look at the product pages, they can see a feed of Instagram photos from people who are wearing that wrap. It helps them see what looks like on real people, which can help them determine which wraps and nail polishes they want to purchase.

 

Coca-Cola

The Share a Coke campaign has been a hit. What began as a campaign featuring hundreds of the most common names has morphed into something much larger. The cans and bottles went on to feature generic type labels, such as “friend”, “grill master”, and “bro.” And in 2016, they took the campaign even further – Share a Coke and a Song. These bottles and cans features 70 famous song lyrics on the labels. They took this approach because music is a universal language and they wanted to bring unity to their diversified customer base.

They partnered with Shazam to bring music directly to the displays in the store. Customers can scan the lyrics on the product or signage through Shazam and record a lip synced video to share across social media using the #ShareaCoke hashtag.

Plus, customers can customize and order their own bottles at the Coca-Cola website.

 

UGC is Becoming Essential to ecommerce Success

When users create content for your brand, you’re ahead of the game. You get access to content that cost you little to nothing to create. You increase brand awareness, build customer trust, and customer engagement. But, not all UGC is going to be singing your praises – and that’s part of the territory. The best thing you can do is have a plan of action to address the negative. Domino’s is a prime example of using the negative comments to launch one heck of a comeback.

How is your business using UGC? How have you found UGC influences your own purchasing habits?

Categories
Digital Marketing

16 of the Best Tips and Tricks to Hack Your Business Growth

Growth hacking is a different approach to marketing. It focuses on scalability. As your marketing efforts are designed to bring in more customers to grow your business, you can continue to put more into marketing while serving the growing customer base. Instead of traditional marketing, it focuses on using a series of shortcuts to drive growth. It’s about creativity and finding underserved ways to market your business.

Take for instance the way Airbnb engineers developed a way to post their listings to Craigslist (a site that at the time had way more traffic, thus getting them exposure) even though there was no API. Though Craiglist now doesn’t allow this sort of thing, it helped Airbnb get 11 times more listings in three years. Or, how Reddit first used fake users to populate the site, to make it look socially active. I mean after all, it’s a social site, and if there’s no content there, there’s no reason to stick around, right?

 

1. Break Goals into Smaller Attainable Goals

It’s super easy to focus all your attention on getting in with a new audience or releasing a life-changing product. But, to achieve growth hacking, either as a team or an individual, you’re better off focusing your attention on a series of short term, actionable, and achievable smaller goals, working on them one at a time.

For example:

  • Drive 10,000 people to product pages on your website.
  • Generate X leads from an email marketing blast, social media marketing, advertising, and influencer marketing before the end of the month/quarter.
  • Increase blog traffic by X% by X date.
  • Increase conversions of X site visitors using remarketing by the end of the month.

All of these goals contribute to business growth, but don’t get so overwhelming you shut down, or lose track of where you’re supposed to be going and what you’re supposed to be doing.

 

2. Measure Everything

If you expect to know when you’ve reached those goals, you’ll need to measure and know your numbers.

Once you know what domain name you’re going to use, setup Google Analytics as soon as possible. Learn your way around it with Google’s tutorials. Go beyond looking at the basics, and look at everything from demographics to time spent on the page, and events. Setup goals so you can see how well you’re meeting them. If you notice halfway through your time period you’re not on track, it can help you change strategies instead of falling short at the end of the month.

 

3. Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Take your email list and use it to create a Facebook lookalike audience. This allows you to target people who are similar to those who are already on your list. You can target them across both Facebook and Instagram, and ensure the people who respond to your ads are interested in what you have to offer.

 

4. Exit-Intent Popups Are Your Friend

Exit popups determine when someone is trying to leave your website and display a last minute offer. This strategy works particularly well for e-commerce companies. It directs your visitors back to whatever you’re asking for – a newsletter signup, an eBook download, or something else, before they leave on the off chance they’re never to return again.

 

5. Automation, Automation, Automation

CRM automation makes it easier to nurture your leads. Create a drip campaign to respond to users after they sign up – with whatever bonus you promised. Encourage them to take the first action necessary to move down the funnel. Then, add other email triggers to encourage other behaviors.

If they’ve abandoned their cart – send an email to remind them they left something in the cart. Or check and make sure nothing went wrong on your end that stopped them from completing the checkout process.

If they’ve been dormant a while – poke them and say hello. Offer them something to encourage activity or action.

If they’ve made a purchase, follow up with them and thank them. Then, give them time to use the product and ask them to submit their feedback. You’ll want those reviews and testimonials.

Social media automation helps save time because you can take an hour or so once a week and schedule out some tweets and Facebook posts. While it’s not a good idea to completely automate your social presence, you can use a tool like Buffer to make sure your social doesn’t go quiet. The optimized posting scheduler determines the best times to post throughout the day to get the best engagement. I do recommend you check in throughout the day for a few minutes here and there to respond to any tweets, and to show your audience a real person is behind the keyboard.

Bonus tip: Use Buffer to find out which tweets were the most popular, and schedule those again. It helps keep that old content alive and a steady flow of traffic coming it. But, don’t over do it. I wish I could give you a magic number, but it really depends on how much you’re tweeting, and how many followers you have. If you’re only tweeting three times a day, then clearly you don’t want to clog your feed with old stuff too much.

 

6. Send Weekend Newsletters Featuring Older Content

If you’ve been around as a startup long enough to have a relatively decent sized content archive full of evergreen content, you can capitalize on that mailing list by sending out newsletters on the weekends. You won’t have any extra work to do since you’re using older relevant content – and you can still drive a lot of traffic to your blog.

 

7. Enable One-Click Webinar Registration from Email

This little trick will pass the information along via URL once they click on the CTA link in your email. You’ll have to make sure your landing page is setup to receive the parameters. When this happens, the person will automatically be signed up for the webinar, so they don’t have to enter their information again. It’s all about making it as effortless as possible for users. Check this out for more details about how to set it up yourself.

 

8. Work Human Error into Your Email Sequences

When you’re building your automated follow up emails, you may want to think about adding human error into the sequence. You can send one email with a missing link or file – and then send another email within the next five minutes that includes the information that’s missing from the first email, as well as apology for the mistake. This really only works if you’ve already got links to other content in place throughout the email.

It makes it feel less automated, helps humanize your brand – we all make mistakes, after all. Open rates may not change much, but conversions tend to go up on the second email. You can’t use this trick too much, so consider saving it for an email you’re really hoping converts well.

 

9. Test, Test, and Test Some More

Run split tests on everything. You can test everything from a blog title to email subject lines, CTAs, site colors, site layout, text placement, copy…and more. If there’s an element of online marketing, it can be tested. Avoid running multiple split tests on the website at the same time, so you can tell which element triggered the higher response. You can however, run a website element test at the same time you run an email subject line split test. There are many platforms out there to help you with this, such as: Optimizely, Omniconvert, and Visual Website Optimizer.

As you figure out what works, test it again to see if you’ve found something better. When you see the winner, use it in your site full time, and move onto another test.

Test your headlines with a headline analyzer tool like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. This way you can see improvements to make to the headline before you even publish your content.

 

10. Wait to Fill Positions You Think You Need To

Employee salary and hourly wage is a big drain on your startup budget. If you and your co-founder can’t get the work done, hire freelancers or other contracted workers before you hire someone else to work full-time.

 

11. Turn Your 404 Page Into a Landing Page

Sometimes people get lost on your site – clicking a mistyped link, getting linked to something you’ve sense removed, or typing the wrong thing the in address bar. Whatever causes them to get lost doesn’t matter, as long as you’re capitalizing on it. You can offer something of value and include a CTA so that even though they’re not where they need to be, you can still connect with them. Give away an eBook, a cheat sheet or checklist, or encourage signups for a course you’re offering.

 

12. Engage in Online Communities

Spending time on Reddit, LinkedIn, and Quora, as well as in other online communities where your audience can be found is highly useful. When you’re answering questions and providing useful material to the community, it’s a great way to get more website traffic.

 

13. Use Google Customer Match

You can target your best leads across the entire Google network (YouTube, Gmail, and Google Search) through Google Customer Match. All you have to do is upload your list of contacts, and you can target those users specifically across the various platforms.

 

14. Highlight Top Customer Testimonials on Your Landing Pages

Credibility is everything in sales, and if your visitors don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy from you. In some cases, it could be the only thing that separates you from the competition. Featuring some of your best customer testimonials on your landing pages will help increase trust, and as a result, conversions.

 

15. Keep Your Social Media Ratio in Check

Your ratio of following to followers is important. If you want to see what’s going on with your Twitter and Instagram audiences, you can use StatusBrew or Crowdfire to see who’s following you, and who’s not following you back. It makes it easy to unfollow accounts that aren’t active anymore, and keeps your list clean and organized so you can get the most out of your social media experience. Statusbrew also works for Facebook.

 

16. Growth Hacking Gets You to Your Destination Faster

It’s often said you should focus on the journey rather than the destination. And while it’s true that there are valuable lessons to learn along the journey from startup to enterprise, we all know when money’s involved, we want to make more of it as fast as we possibly can. And when traditional marketing methods are played out – or you’re in a completely saturated market where you have to do something different to make it, growth hacking is the answer.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the growth hacking techniques that are out there – just a few of my favorites. I’d love to hear some about what’s worked for you. What are your favorite growth hacking tips?

Categories
SEO

Using WordPress? Here’s an SEO Checklist for You

All kinds of things go into how Google and other search engines rank your website compared to your competition. Though no one really knows exactly how the algorithm works, we know there are many factors they consider, ranging from the cleanliness of the code itself, to keywords, time spent on site, age of the domain, and more. Some factors have more bearing on the rank than others, of course – and that’s why SEO is such a complicated science.

WordPress is a wildly popular content management system that’s user-friendly, too. If you’re using it to manage your website, here are some tips to ensure you’re building it with SEO in mind.

 

Use an SEO Plugin

One of the major selling points of WordPress as a platform is how good it is in terms of SEO right out of the box. But, it’s always a good idea to install an SEO plugin so you get full control over the optimization process.

To list all available SEO plugins would not only bore us both, but would take much more time than I have to dedicate to this article, so I’ll skip over the junk and get you straight to the two that are the most popular. They’re popular because they’re free, of course, but more important than the price tag is the fact that they do a good job at giving you control over the SEO.

Yoast SEO: This plugin allows you to get a page and keyword analysis, generates a sitemap, enables breadcrumbs, add social media and schema markup, and more. It’s a robust SEO plugin.

All-in-One SEO Pack: This plugin is older, but not as feature rich. It’s ad supported, but if that bothers you, there’s a premium version that will remove them. It will give you control of the meta description, and let you change a number of variables.

Now, there’s a chance the theme you’re using also gives you some SEO control – as many premium themes do have this built in. But, even though you’ll have fields for title and meta description, you won’t have as many features and tools as you would with Yoast or All-in-One. I wish I could tell you these plugins will actually do the SEO for you – but that’s not the case. And what fun would that be anyway?

 

Setup Permalinks

The default WordPress permalink setup isn’t clean, because it inserts the date and name in the URL. It creates a lengthier URL and one that Google’s not exactly fond of. It doesn’t mean you won’t get ranked, but changing the permalinks to something Google likes a bit better? Always a good idea.

 

Choose a Keyword for Each Post

There’s definitely not as much emphasis on keyword density as there used to be, but Google still looks for, and uses keywords as part of the ranking algorithm. What matters now is how naturally the keyword, and related words and phrases are woven into the post. Keyword stuffing just doesn’t’ work anymore, and hasn’t worked in quite some time.

Each post you write should be centered around that focus keyword, and use it, naturally, multiple times throughout the course of the content. Aim for a rating of around .5% – so the more words you have in your overall post; the more instances of the focus keyword you can safely get away with – as long as you’re not including it just to include it.

 

Write a Damn Good Title and Meta Description

Your title tag is what the search engines will show as your link in the results. When possible, include that focus keyword as close to the beginning of the title as you can. Your title tag does not have to be the same as your blog post title – though WordPress will by default, use your blog post title as your title tag.

Your meta description is the small piece of information that displays in Google under your link in the search engine results page. This is basically free advertising for your business, and is your chance to convince the users to click on your site instead of another one in the list.

Many SEO plugins include the meta keywords feature, but you don’t need to use them. Though search engine algorithms used to rely on them in determining rank, which is why you see a field for them, they no longer do. But, if for any reason you’re trying to rank on a global level, specifically in search engines like Baidu and Yandex, those still rely on meta keywords in their algorithms.

 

Use Header Tags Appropriately

The Google bots check header tags (H1, H2, H3, and so on…) to determine how relevant your site content is. In terms of best practices, it’s a good idea to have a single H1 tag, with multiple H2 and H3 tags nested in a hierarchy as appropriate to the content. It’s important not to abuse the use of headers for SEO – their primary purpose is to break up the text and make it easier for your audience to read.

 

Image File Names

Google Images chooses and ranks images, so it makes sense to boost your chances of appearing in the SERPS by using image file names to your advantage. Before you upload your content to the WordPress media library, change the name of the file to something that uses your keywords, or describes your image. Use hyphens in the file name so you make it easier for the bots to read – because files with hyphens are read as individual words. Only use your focus keywords on your featured image, if possible – because it’s better to use words that actually describe the image than match your keyword – if they don’t mesh up completely.

 

Always Include Image Alt Descriptions

ALT tags label the alternative text displayed when someone hovers over your images on your WordPress website. These are good for SEO because it’s another chance to use your keyword – as long as it relevantly describes the image. These are used to describe the photos for people who have low vision or are blind. The screen reader will read the ALT text to allow the user to get an idea of what the photo displays. You can add the ALT text directly within the WordPress media library upload screen.

 

Use the Image Title Tag Wisely

The image title tag isn’t necessary for SEO since Google and Bing do not crawl it – but it can help you add a CTA in a tooltip type style.

 

Word Count

Content is still king. Google’s first priority is keeping their users happy, so the higher-quality longer-form content that really dives deep into an issue is generally a better approach. Typically, posting shorter articles more frequently doesn’t do much to help you in terms of ranking, but this of course can vary depending on your niche. As a news site, it is expected that you’ll have multiple shorter updates.

The average length of the top 10 search results ranges from roughly 2,450 words in position one to barely over 2,000 words in position 10. The key is to not write words for the sake of words – fluff doesn’t add value. Google, and users, look for value in the content they read.

 

URL Length

Google likes websites, not just WordPress based sites, that are structured, clean, and organized. Part of this includes the use of short URLs. One study showed that shorter links can improve CTR by as much as 250%. WordPress will generate your URL based on the title of your post, which means you can end up with some pretty long ones. However, there’s a box that allows you to edit the permalink to shorten it.

 

Dofollow vs. Nofollow Links

By default, all WordPress links are do-follow. When Google crawls a website and sees dofollow links, the link juice passes between that link and the site its linked to. It helps build authority, and can affect your rankings in Google – hence the practice of link building. Typically speaking, the more dofollow links you have to your site, the better but it does get a bit more complex than that. I’ll have another post on the art of backlinking soon.

Nofollow links on the other hand, tell Google it should not pass link juice and to ignore them. Nofollow links can still generate traffic, so they are still important, even if they have no bearing on your link juice.

If you have affiliate links on your site, you should always add the rel=nofollow tag. There are WordPress plugins that can assist with this if you’re not HTML savvy. This ensures Google doesn’t think you’re just adding links for the sake of making money, which is something they frown upon.

 

Internal Linking

Interlinks are links that point from one place to another on your website. You’ll see I do it often, but only when relevant – such as when I’m discussing a subject I’ve already written about in detail in another post on the blog.

It’s a good thing to link to other content on your site because it helps your visitors navigate and spend more time on your site. It helps establish structure and hierarchy for your information, and they help spread link juice throughout your site since they are do follow. The number of interlinks you should include varies depending on content length.

 

External Linking

Just like you should link to other pages and posts on your website, you should link to high authority domains, related to your content. This helps your SEO by letting Google know that you are linking out to high quality content that’s relevant to yours, but also improves the user experience by making it easy for them to get more information, if they want to.

It can also help you establish relationships with other websites, which can help you get more backlinks.

 

Sitemaps

Search engines use sitemaps to understand the structure and hierarchy of your website, whether or WordPress or not, and will ensure better crawling. Sitemaps are not required, because the crawlers will work without it. But, creating a sitemap is always a good thing because it lets you get more data about what’s going on with your site.

If you use the Yoast SEO plugin I talked about at the beginning of the article, it will generate a sitemap for you.

 

Schema

While many WordPress themes have Schema already coded into them – some don’t. You can learn more about Schema and how it impacts your website rankings here… and validate your schema with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Social signals play a role in SEO, but not the role you may think. Simply having a profile on social media isn’t enough. It’s the traffic and engagement you get to your site from social media that helps improve your rankings. You can learn more about it from this article at Search Engine Journal.

 

HTTPS

This is nothing but an added layer of security to your HTTP, with the use of a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate you can purchase from your host. Google has said it is an official a ranking factor – and though it is a small one, it can give you a competitive advantage.

 

This is Just the Beginning

SEO may not literally be alive, but it is growing and evolving constantly. What worked in the early days doesn’t work now, and what works now, will likely only be a fraction of what must be considered in the future. As Google continues to weed out poor quality content to better serve its users, we can expect to see more changes that always favor the websites that have focused on providing high quality information to their audience.

Doing SEO on your website today, doesn’t mean you’re done tomorrow. You’ll need to pay attention to the analytics and rankings, bearing in mind that it does take time to propagate and see a change in the ranks. And you never know when the competition will be increasing their SEO efforts in an attempt to outrank you. Always keep your eye on the ball.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Native Advertising: Why It Works And Why You Should Do it Now

Native advertising is paid content that’s made to match the look and feel of the website it’s presented on, so it looks more like organic content. It encompasses many content formats, ranging from articles to infographics and videos. This type of content appears to provide value to the audience, but the end goal to sell a product or service remains the same. Native ad spend is expected to reach $21 billion by 2018, up from $4.7 billion in 2013.

Native advertising is part of content marketing, and the strategy helps increase your content distribution and reach.

 

How Native Advertising Works

Native advertising, named this way because the ads look native to their environment, works to circumvent banner blindness. It also remains in place despite the fact that 46% of millennials, and 26% of people in general, are now using some form of ad blocker on their desktop devices. Though the numbers are slightly different for mobile devices, people are tired of seeing ads. By providing advertisements in a non-obtrusive way, the user experience isn’t affected, but users are still exposed to the ads. Consumers interact with native ads anywhere from 20% to 60% more than they do with standard banner ads, allowing for a greater ROI.

It’s a win-win situation for marketers, advertisers, and publishers. Publishers are becoming increasingly more selective about the advertising they’ll allow on the websites, for fear of turning off readers. They need the advertising dollars to keep the platform up and running for their readership. Marketers need publishers to consent to advertisements so they can get their message out to the right audience.

Native advertising generally leads to higher click-through rates, and when done correctly, can even increase engagement rates.

Take for instance the Tic Tac Vote for the Next Flavour Campaign. Tic Tac Canada partnered with BuzzFeed to develop a series of sponsored posts and an embedded Tic Tac game app. BuzzFeed articles remained true to their listicle style, featuring titles such as “Can You Make It Through This Post Without Smiling?” and “11 Reasons Why The Year 2000 Was The Best“. The posts ended with an interactive voting game, where readers were able to vote for the next Tic Tac flavor.

This approach gave BuzzFeed highly sharable humor, but it also helped Tic Tac because BuzzFeed has such a large following. As a result of the partnership, the contest got more than 40,000 unique entries.

 

Investing in Native Advertising

Native advertising is a pay-for-play game, just like PPC and social media advertising. I wish I could tell you how much you should spend and where. But the reality is that only you can decide what kind of budget you have available for marketing and advertising – and what portion of your budge you want to allocate to native advertising.

I will suggest that you start small. Watch how the first ads go, and then when you see the response you’re looking for, scale up. Try allocating a small budget to a few publishers, with some unique approaches to each.

The more popular your publisher, the more you can expect to spend. Some will include the cost of content creation, while others will add to it if you expect them to do the work. According to this article from Digiday, you should expect to spent $10,000 on a campaign with the Daily Mail, and $30,000 on a campaign with the Huffington Post. Both of those publishers operate on a cost-per-view model, guaranteeing 40,000 views and 3 million impressions, respectively. For that price tag – your single article of content is included.

If you’re suffering from sticker shock, realize there are much smaller publishers that can deliver value with less of an initial investment. And remember, research shows native ads have an 18% higher lift in purchase intent and 9% lit in brand affinity responses compared to traditional banner ads. Plus, 32% of consumers will share native ads with friends or family compared to only 19% for banner ads.

 

Step-by-Step Guide to Native Advertising

Begin by selecting the type of content you’re going to use for native advertising, so you can then choose a publisher for content placement. The most common form of native advertising is the sponsored blog post, or sponsored article, which according to Hexagram’s State of Native Advertising Report come in at 65% and 63% respectively. The goal of your sponsored content is to provide entertaining or helpful information, relevant to the publisher audience. The piece should be so well done that readers engage, and share it with others in their networks.

A friend of mine mentioned the other day that she saw an article pop up in her Facebook feed from Good Housekeeping. The content was actually a video about what to look for when picking a good smartphone, but it was also working to plug the Samsung Galaxy S7 for Walmart. A closer inspect of the Good Housekeeping website reveals partnerships where they’ve created content for Walmart, Splenda, and L’Oreal cosmetics.

After you choose the type of content you’re going to create – come up with a list of publishers where the content could be a fit. Obviously, you don’t want to pitch a sponsored blog post to a site that focuses on video content only, or a sponsored infographic to a site that doesn’t match a place where your audience would most likely to be spending their time online.

Pitch your content angle to the publishers you’re most interested in working with. This way, you’re only working to produce content you know will be accepted. If more than one publisher accepts the same angle, you can always go back and adjust it to create a new piece of native advertising content.

Get to work on the content, submit, and wait for it to be published. Take your time. If you’re not confident in your content creation abilities, reach out to to some quality freelancers. Search LinkedIn, or look to agencies who provide content through their own network of writers.

Alternatively, you can always produce the content first, and find a publisher to fit it later. If there isn’t a publisher who will agree to run it, it can be adjusted and run on the company blog, or used in another part of the marketing strategy later. All content assets can be made to have value – it’s just a matter of where and when to use them.

Remember, native content goes beyond blog posts, articles, graphics, and videos. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, there are six core types of native ad formats, which are outlined in the Native Advertising Playbook.

  • In-feed units: Appear on news outlets and social media, labeled as “sponsor content”
  • Paid search units: Advertisers pay to be listed at the top of search engine results for certain keywords
  • Recommendation widgets: These pull related content from “around the web” based on keywords or topics, and then list them at the bottom of an article. You’ll see these on various media outlet websites, especially Huffington Post and the like.
  • In-ad with native element units: These are placed next to editorial content based on contextual relevance and keywords, but link to another website.
  • Custom units: These are unique and platform specific, such as customized playlists on Pandora and Spotify
  • Promoted listings: Similar to the paid search units, but appear only on ecommerce sites like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon. You may also see them referred to as “featured listings.”

 

Avoiding Mistakes in Your Native Advertising Strategy

No matter what your native advertising strategy entails, you must take steps to remain in compliance with the FTC guidelines. The FTC Act of 1983 prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” This means you must be completely transparent, making sure to distinguish the native ad content from other forms of content on your website. If there’s a possibility your ad could mislead consumers, there must be a disclosure. Said disclosure must be clear and prominently displayed. If you’re not sure how to handle this, the official FTC guidelines provide a number of examples to assist you.

When developing your disclosure, make sure it uses clear language, in a font and color that’s easy to read. The disclosure should be placed as close as possible to the related ads, and must stand out from the background on the page. If the disclosure is placed on a video ad, it must remain on the screen long enough for viewers to notice, read, and understand it. If the disclosure is included as part of an audio ad, it must be read at a speed that’s easy for people to follow and using words customers will understand.

 

Native Advertising Is the Wave of the Future

The fact is, people are constantly inundated with advertising, everywhere they look – online and off – in the home and outside of it, too. Because we see so many ads all the time, it’s hard to really remember any of them – and to really pay attention. The native advertising approach builds them into what we’re already looking at, and keeps it relevant to what we’re willing to pay attention to. After all, if we’re reading an article, we’re obviously interested, right?

As a web user, do you mind sponsored content and native advertising? Do you like knowing that you’re being sold to while you’re being informed and entertained? As a marketer, what experience do you have with native advertising? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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