by Karl Hudson | Jul 15, 2015 | Online Marketing
Before you start your content marketing plan you need to take the inventory of your resources. By knowing what kind of methods you are applying and whether they are or aren’t working for you, you can then begin making the necessary improvements. Ask yourself a series of questions such as whether you need someone to write compelling content about your business, whether you need compelling images within your content, whether video content marketing is necessary for your business or whether there is someone who can create and engage loyal followers.
Content marketing: tips that can give life to your business
Defining your target audience
To begin to produce content, you must understand who you want to aim it at. Once you know your audience you must know what your content is aimed to do. You need to craft your content to fit your audience. The most effective way to go about this would be to begin by creating a list of your target prospects as well as outlining your results. This exercise will change your approach towards content development.
Tell them your story
Your content development strategy shouldn’t consist of you talking endlessly about your product. If you do this, you’re going to struggle to see the results. Prospects need you to engage them and convince them to perform the actions you want them to. How do you connect with them? Stop talking about your product and start talking about your story.
Mapping it out
Map out your strategy before you start writing and/or designing content. You may consider creating spreadsheets that log your content topics. However, this can be a bit tiresome and stressful. A solution would be to tackle a topic at a time as you come up with different headlines.
Your consumers want to know why you do what you do. Forget the marketing lingo and talk to them like a real person would.
Getting out there
Even the best literary skills and best designed infographics can fail you when they don’t reach enough people. You need to get out there and market every single piece of information you put on the web. Make full use of your social media presence, take up PPC advertising, send emails to your consumers, etc. The point is to make sure your target audience finds out about that blog post, new article, announcement, etc. Social media may just be the most effective way to reach many people and tell them about your new content. Use analytics tools to reach influencers as well to help you share your new content.
Mix things up
Blog posts and article writing used to be the number one way to develop a firm content strategy. Although they are still of importance, there are other ways to develop content. You can use videos, podcasts, eBooks, infographics, etc. Go through articles on your blog and think of how to transform them into videos or any other type of content.
Have you been looking for ways to enhance your content? Is 2015 the year that you transform your content and make it reader worthy? Follow the tips above to give your consumers the content you need. This shouldn’t be difficult. You can hire a team of professionals to do all the work for you as you rest assured that things will never be the same again.
Know what we can offer at https://old.getmediawise.com/online-marketing/
by Karl Hudson | Apr 27, 2015 | Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Reputation Management
Those who truly understand social marketing have reaped great rewards from it. Those who are busy following this group of successful people have had trouble explaining the time and money they put into this venture. A social media marketing strategy needs to achieve the following: authenticity, consistency, patience, and great content. Two traits that contribute to failure are laziness and inexperience. These are some of the mistakes you have been making:
Expecting something from nothing
Posting on Facebook or Twitter once a month while having your annual blog post is great… if you’re looking to maintain your audience of loyal friends and your employees. People use social media to have conversations. They want to engage others as well as be engaged. They want to learn from authoritative people and get access to information they would never have had access to while offline. Your monthly blog post just doesn’t give this to them. You probably don’t even go through the comments made after you write down your 5 paragraphs. Wow. When you stick to these methods, you will end up drastically reducing your chances of prospects finding you.
Being a poor listener
You are going to have to apply the same listening skills you apply in face to face conversations on the online web. How do you listen online? By giving others time to speak. Who are the ‘others’? Lost fans need not get carried away with this one. The others are clients, consumers, industry experts, etc. Never rush to make comments without reading status updates or tweet carefully. Ask questions not to show your intellect, but to feed your curiosity.
Concentrating on making a sale and not connecting
Want to lose followers at lightning speeds? Just try making a sale with every tweet or status update you post. Everyone wants their social marketing strategies to give them high ROI so they make the critical mistake of always concentrating on profiting. Social media marketing is about forming relationships with consumers. You need to get to know them. They don’t want you to constantly remind them about the new products you have on sale.
You think about yourself too much
This is one of the quickest ways to lose your online following. If your social marketing revolves around how great you are, how much experience you have, how privileged others would be to work with you, etc. you are missing the whole point of social media. Be a giver, not a taker. People are looking for interesting stuff to read. If you give them this, you are creating a group of loyal consumers one person at a time.
Deleting negative comments
You would think it counterintuitive to leave negative comments on your blog for everyone to see. After all, you don’t want your consumers finding out about a flaw in your product, right? Wrong. Negative comments present you with a unique opportunity to transform an unsatisfied consumer into a satisfied one… in public! This will give you a chance to look good in front of your other consumers- a re-assurance they needed that they did indeed make the right choice by investing in you.
These are just some of the most critical mistakes businesses make when going about their social media marketing. Learn from others’ mistakes and don’t let this be you. There is nothing as important as securing a strong online presence.
by Karl Hudson | Apr 17, 2014 | Online Marketing, SEO
The answer is simple – inbound linking cannot hurt your search ranking. How is this known for certain? Well, for one, if inbound were to hurt your rank, your competitors would continually link to your site from link farms. Such a scenario is beyond your control. For this reason, Google cannot penalize your site for any inbound linking.
On the other hand, you can be penalized for illegitimate external linking. It is highly advised that you not link to any website or group of sites that may be involved in shady or unethical search practices. Doing so could result in being black-listed by Google, ultimately ruining your SEO strategy. Avoid this situation at all costs and ensure that all external links point to trusted and reliable sources.
Having been involved in the internet industry for a large part of my working life, I have spent a lot of time researching and browsing the internet and reading websites, mainly for client design research, but also for occasional personal use. The one thing that I find most disappointing, is the apparent lack of thought going into website creation and it’s purpose, which in turn creates a missed opportunity for many e-businesses to become successful.
My personal perspective on e-businesses and their websites, is that if they don’t take pride in their websites and show to their customers a passion for what they do, chances are, they won’t take pride in their products, and the passion for providing good customer service will also be missing.
What you must remember, is that your web site is a direct reflection of you and your business. The appearance of your site is the most important factor in determining your potential success rate. In short, if your site doesn’t look professional or pleasing to the eyes at first glance, the majority of people will assume your products and/or services to be of similar poor standard.
At the other end of the scale, you could fall into the trap of going overboard with the design and over complicate things with incorporating high costing flashy graphics. You may end up with a great looking and highly aesthetic web site, but the danger with this is that your site may prove unreliable and at times may take too long to load. There is nothing worse for a customer than trying to visit a slow loading site, and most will close the browser window in complete frustration. As i’m sure you will be able to work out, this will ultimately cost you business.
The other major consideration (if not the most important) when designing a website is your content. Not just links, but content with passion, relativity, and understanding to the customer. When someone is searching for something in particular and they visit your web site, they’re visiting for a reason. Your site has something they want, Whether this be your product, service, and/or information. If they are unable to obtain what they’re looking for, they move on to the next site and so on. To be able to get your visitors to stay and look around your website, you must give them a reason to. Providing them with quality content will achieve this goal.
There have been countless other lists and articles on the subject of website designing mistakes, but I have compiled my own list, from a designer’s perspective, of some pitfalls to look out for when considering either designing a website or purchasing a template. Remember that the simple, clear, informative and well designed sites are the most successful. If you are a current e-business and your sales aren’t what you had hoped, consider the above and take some time to look openly and honestly at your site. Spending money on improving your website is a much better investment than throwing money away on trying to advertise and market a site that just isn’t good enough to sell your product or services.
If you are looking for a template or a custom designed website, be aware of the above and be prepared to ask your chosen designer or template provider questions to ensure that your hard earned money doesn’t go to waste on an inferior design, which contains any of the above. Asking questions won’t cost you a penny, and in doing so could actually save you a lot of money over the long term. Getting your website right first time is vital in terms of saving money and time. The earlier your website is up and running properly, the quicker you will be able to reap the rewards of a successful e-business.
The prime mistake Newbies make is to put their website name into the Anchor Text. Unless your website contains your keywords this is a waste of a perfectly good link. Remember that Google puts a very big importance on those Anchor texts and they should always use your keywords.
The second mistake is trying to put every single keyword into your anchor text and give that to everyone. There are two mistakes with this technique. 1.) Google assigns weight to each word in anchor text so if there are a lot of filler words (common in long sentences), they will “dilute” your target words.
According to two recent surveys, conducted by Forrester Research and Gartner Group, ecommerce sites are losing $1.1 to $1.3 billion in revenue each year due to customers click- away caused by slow loading sites. If a page takes too long to load, your potential customer will not wait. Ultimately costing you business.
Make sure you include proper META tags in the HTML of each page of your web site. META tags are HTML code that enable the search engines to determine what keywords are relevant to a specific site. About 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from the eight major search engines. It would be a good idea to make sure you’ve done your homework and fully understand how to optimize your web pages prior to designing your site. This will save you a lot of headaches in the long run. For further information on META tags read the tutorial entitled, “Building Your Site.”
Be cautious when selecting your background and text colors. Busy backgrounds make text difficult to read and draw the attention away from the text. Always be consistent with your background theme on each page of your site. Your site should be nicely organized and uniform throughout. Keep in mind, colors affect your mood and will have an affect on your visitors as well. Bright colors such as yellow and orange, cause you to become more cheerful or happy, while colors such as blue and purple have a calming effect. Dark colors such as brown and black have a depressing effect. A good rule of thumb would be to use colors based upon the type of effect you’re trying to achieve.
Your main page should specifically let your visitors know exactly what you’re offering. How many times have you visited a site and never figured out exactly what they were selling? If your potential customer can’t find your product or service, they definitely won’t waste a lot of time looking for it. They’ll go on to the next site and probably never return. They’re visiting your site for a specific purpose. They want something your site offers. Whether it is information, a product or service.
Design your site to be easily navigated. Place your navigation links together at the top, bottom, left or right side of the page. Use tables to neatly align your links. If you are planning on using graphic buttons to navigate your site, keep in mind that with each graphic you add to your page, it will take that much longer for your page to load. If you only have a handful of navigational links, using graphic buttons will be fine. If you have over six links, it would be wise to simply use text links to keep your load time down.
If you must use frames, use them sparingly. Frames, if not properly used, can make your site look unprofessional. Avoid making your visitors have to scroll from side to side to view your content. This can be very irritating and cause your visitors to leave. If you must use frames, offer your visitors a choice. Frames verses No Frames. Try to keep the number of clicks required to get from your main page to any other page on your site down to four. Keep in mind, your visitors may enter your site from pages other than your main. Always have good navigational links on every page and place your company logo on each page.
Design a quality e-book to give to your visitors. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. If you can create a web page, you can create an e-book. The focus of your e-book should compliment your web site. Simply write about your passion. If your passion is sales, then you could share some of your knowledge and experience by designing your e-book to provide a complete sales training guide. If your passion is home based business, you could write an e-book about how to start your own home based business. If you’re writing about your true passion then you shouldn’t have any trouble coming up with something to write about. For further information on e-books, read the article entitled, “How to Create an E-book and Drive Massive Traffic to Your Site by Giving It Away.”
Having been involved in the internet industry for a large part of my working life, I have spent a lot of time researching and browsing the internet and reading websites, mainly for client design research, but also for occasional personal use. The one thing that I find most disappointing, is the apparent lack of thought going into website creation and it’s purpose, which in turn creates a missed opportunity for many e-businesses to become successful.
More of this at https://old.getmediawise.com/
by Karl Hudson | Apr 17, 2014 | Advanced SEO Techniques, Online Marketing, SEO
The importance of anchor text with respect to a linking strategy cannot be overstated. Back-links are a huge part of the search engine algorithm. When initiating a linking campaign, it is vital that external sites link using the appropriate keywords and terms in the anchor text.
Almost always, linking candidates will use the company name as anchor text. This does not provide any type of description of the target company’s products or services. Sure, it may be great for branding purposes, but it isn’t usually needed. In most cases, companies already rank very high (if not first) for searches that incorporate their brand.
Here is an example using fictional company “Acme Plumbing Supplies”:
Most people will link simply using the terms “Acme”. This is alright, but it does not describe the company’s products or services, nor provide any context. By adding the word “plumbing” or term “plumbing supplies” (i.e. “Acme Plumbing” or “Acme Plumbing Supplies”), you may be able to drive additional traffic that may not have otherwise attained the corporate site.
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