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Tag Archives: SEM

What is a winning blogging strategy

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, Bloging, Content Marketing, Google+, Marketing, Online Marketing

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Best Practices, Blog, Blogging, Google Analytics, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing, SEM, Social Media, social media tools

t’s pretty much common knowledge that these days, any business, particularly an online business, should have a blog. But how? And why? What is this platform going to do for your brand? Are you selling products? Are you building a community? Is it about building awareness? And most importantly, who’s it for?

These are all questions you should be asking yourself before you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards. Now let’s get onto the how… Check out our first five easy steps to a winning blogging strategy below:

Brainstorm

Whether you’re starting from scratch or you’ve already got something up and running, stop and get your team together! A brainstorm between your writers, marketing gurus and whoever else might be involved is a must for any successful blogging strategy. This brainstorm should be happening about once a month. If you’ve been blogging previously, get your analytics up in front of everyone – what posts have been successful? Which have been the most shared on social media? Take these factors into account when you’re coming up with topics for the next month.

If you haven’t started with content yet – no problem! This next tip’s for everyone: Have a close look at your competitor’s posts. Jot down any articles that have high share-rates. You should take inspiration from these, and write a related post.

Another one for the newbies: if you haven’t already decided on how many posts per week you’d like to publish, now’s the time to do it. Keep in mind you’re going to want to stay consistent, posting the same amount each week and on the same days too. Knowing these details will help you come up with a content calendar.

Schedule

Once you’ve decided on the number of posts you’ll be publishing per week, and per month, you’ll be able to create a rough plan for a content calendar. Do some research! Look into when your target audience is online the most. This is when you should be posting and promoting.

Clients

We know that we’ve talked about knowing your audience and clients before, so we’ll keep it brief. If you know your clients, you’ll know what they’re after in a blog. Whether it’s craft DIY tips, quirky ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage or informative marketing advice, you’ll know it and you’ll be able to provide it. Knowing your audience is also knowing the purpose of your blog, which is something that should be decided straight away in order to get your strategy underway. Check out these 5 Critical Tips for Identifying Your Target Audience from Technori.

Writers

If you’re just starting out, or your business is relatively small, you may have already decided that you’ll be writing the blog yourself. That’s completely understandable! Just be aware that there are a few things you should get your head around when it comes to creating great content. Firstly, you should make sure that you’re an avid reader of other blogs. This is great in terms of keeping an eye on the competition, but also knowing what’s out there in general, and knowing what’s possible within a blog platform. Reading will provide you with inspiration in terms of both structure and subject matter. Make sure you’ve got a list of go-to blog examples to devour.

The above still applies to writers that you’ve hired, but hiring the right writer is also crucial. Obviously, the right person depends on the purpose of your blog. For example, if your aim is to sell a complicated product, you’ll need a writer who is also an expert in what you’re selling. This writer will need to provide a lot of insight, and so it may be appropriate that in this instance, your product manager take on the blog themselves, or at least train the person you’ve brought on board.

Make sure your writers are great at creating catchy headlines. Obviously, these are the first things your audience are going to see – you want your headlines to inspire enthusiasm and interest, as well as be optimized for SEO (but we’ll get to that).

It’s one thing for you to know your audience, but make sure your writers know it too. Make communication with your writers a big priority – they should know not only your audience, but the goals of the business itself, what’s it all about? Check out these guidelines for creating great content.

Style Guides & Editors

The importance of the language you use on your online platforms should never be underestimated, but in this case – this isn’t all an editor and a style guide are for. Of course you don’t want spelling and grammatical errors throughout your content, but there’s something as equally important: consistent style and tone. It doesn’t matter if you have one writer or twenty – you want all your written content to be of a similar nature, it needs to represent your brand after all.

Early on in the content creating process, put together a style guide for your writers. This can list everything from preferred spellings and topics to cover to how to format headings. If your writers follow this carefully, you will be rewarded with consistency throughout your whole blog, no matter how many writers you have.

Analytics

Installing analytics is a must for every website owner. These are brilliant tools that allow you to track and measure your success, enabling you to identify successful posts, and use this information to create similar posts. The most commonly used tool is Google Analytics, which offers an extensive breakdown of your site, traffic and audience. Some of our favourite features?

  • Audience. This lets you view your demographic, their interests and behavior.
  • Acquisition. See where your traffic is coming from – is it direct or from an organic search? Is it from social media or an email marketing campaign?
  • ‘Real Time’. See how many people are on your site at this exact moment; what they’re looking at and where they are in the world.

It’s amazing what you can learn about your audience and your own content by reviewing your analytics on a regular basis. Did we mention it’s free?

Keyword Research

If you know your audience you’ll have a rough idea of what they’re searching for when they hop onto the world wide web. Once you’ve got this in mind, you can play ball seriously. There are a number of keyword planning tools available for you to choose from. There’s Google Adwords Keyword Planner which can tell you how often a term is searched for each month, as well as suggest similar terms to use. This is one of the few free tools available, some of the paid services include Market Samurai and Raven, which also offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Packages.

Another tool we’ve just discovered is ReSearch.ly. This service filters conversations from 1000 days of social data so you have insight into your target audience’s “influence, sentiments, demographics and psychographics”, allowing you to “get inside your reader’s head”. ReSearch.ly offers newbies 10 free searches before they have to subscribe, so have a play around, and see if it’s something that could work for you.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you can get your writers on board and discuss how to integrate these terms into your written and visual content. Think outside the box here, use your keywords in your image captions and alt tags, if possible have a category title using a keyword… Be sensible though, you still want your content to be super easy to read and share-friendly.

If all of this is new to you and you’re a little confused – no problem! Check out Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO & Keyword Research here.

Link

There’s one more thing to consider before you put your blog post out into the world: Links. Your post should be an authority on whatever subject you’ve chosen, but there will always be offshoot subjects you haven’t covered, or have covered in the past… Never miss an opportunity to provide your readers with more information, whether it’s from your own site or a fellow blogger’s. Creating internal links (these connect from one of your posts to another post on your site) are great because they keep your visitor on your site, exposing them to more of your content. This also means that you and your site keep more of the ‘link juice’ (yes, that’s a real thing). Alternatively, by linking to an external source, not only are you showing your readers that you’re a good sport, but you’re also starting a relationship with like-minded bloggers and paying it forward. This encourages others in your industry to interact with you and your brand, which ultimately brings more traffic your way.

Publish

That’s right, we’re finally here. You’ve done all the grunt work; the brainstorming, the researching, the writers’ training, the style sheet and you’ve trawled through your analytics… Now’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. Hit ‘Publish’ and give yourself a pat on the back, a cheeky afternoon beverage or a nap (or maybe all three). You deserve it.

Promote

Unfortunately, the work doesn’t end there. Now you’ve got to give your latest post the best shot of reaching the most people on the web. Firstly, be sure to include sharing options at the bottom (and top) of your posts. You want people to share your content quickly and easily, which means making sure there are as few steps for them as possible. Next, promote your new post across all your social media platforms – use call to actions to grab attention and prompt interest. Another detail to remember – get your writers on board with social media sharing as well. It’s equally beneficial to them, as it gets their name and work out there for readers, but creates brand awareness for you as well.

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Three Social Media Rules Your Business Needs to Break

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, community manager, Facebook, LInkedIn, Online Marketing, Pinterest, Yelp, YouTube

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Best Practices, Community Management, Facebook, Google Analytics, LINKEDIN FOR BUSINESS, Pinterest, SEM, Social Media, social media tools, Strategy


social media rules to break

If you stay up to date on social media trends and advice, you have likely heard that you need to post a lot of content, get as many fans/followers as you can, and post when most of your fans are online. Rules are meant to be broken, and I’ll explain why it is necessary to break each of these rules. 


1. Post a lot of content

Yes, you need to post content. A lot of it. But this stress on always posting can result in substandard content. On Facebook, you should never post more than twice a day, and even twice a day can be too much. Instead, aim for 5-7 times a week. When you post too much content, you increase your chance that you are just adding to the social media “noise”. Instead focus your effort on creating smaller amounts of high quality content. Quality over quantity.

Why to break this rule
The Facebook algorithm works in a way that it tries to guess what you want to see. One way this is accomplished is that if you normally click on a business’ Facebook page, it is more likely to show you their content. If your business is posting too much low quality content, people will stop clicking. And when you actually do post good content, less fans will see it.

Real world example
There is a restaurant I frequent that I “like” on Facebook. They post any and everything on their Facebook page (they post about 5-10 times a day), whether it is related to the restaurant or not. The result is that I NEVER see their content in my news feed because I first ignored their nonsense posts. What good is my like if they never get their message to me?

2. Get as many fans as you can

We all want more fans. But if these fans are never going to purchase your product or service, what good are they? Social media can easily become a popularity contest: “we have more fans than you.” But worthless fans are, well, worthless. Actually, they can be much worse than worthless….

Why to break this rule
Remember that Facebook algorithm? Another way it works is that when you post content, it shows it to a handful of your fans. If these fans interact with your content, Facebook then shows it to more of your fans. If you have fans that don’t actually like your product/service, they won’t interact with your posts. This means that it will be more difficult to reach your fans who actually are actually interested in your business.

Real world example
While doing consulting work with an Italian restaurant, we quickly learned that if we focused our Facebook advertising to the local area, we received two-three “likes” for every dollar we spent. When we just aimed for total likes, we doubled that number. We could have spent a relatively small amount of money and gotten hundreds of likes. The problem was that the likes all came from Italy, a demographic that was unlikely to ever visit the restaurant or interact with the content. Aim for quality fans over a large quantity of fans.

3. Always post when the most fans are online

You want to get your message out to fans, and you want that message to reach the most screens as possible. Knowing when your fans are online is essential. The Facebook newsfeed works in a way that rewards current content, and makes older content unlikely to show in a person’s newsfeed.

Why to break this commandment
You certainly need to post when most of your fans are online, but you do not need to do it religiously. Focus most of your posting at peak hours, but switch up your timing once or twice a week. This is important because certain fans have different Facebook use habits. This means that if you always post at the same time, you are likely missing fans that have different schedules.

Real world example
We found that a sports rehabilitation physician had more success with his posts after he varied up his posting schedule. He often included exercise tips, and saw his engagement increase after he started posting later in the day. By posting later in the day, he was able to reach fans that otherwise had been missing his posts. Now, these fans are more likely to see all of his posts, no matter the time of day he posts.

 

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Twitter for Marketing and PR – A Comprehensive Cheat Sheet

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Twitter

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Advertising, Best Practices, cheat sheet, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing, SEM, Social Media, Twitter

witter offers a social network and microblogging service that is the go-to place for real-time rumors, news, customer complaints and service. All messages or “tweets” are capped at 140 characters, which enforces brevity and clarity of thought.

Twitter Cheat Sheet

It’s also the originator of the hashtag, at least in its modern sense and usage. Twitter is in the process of rolling out a major profile redesign, with a greater focus on photos and content cards.

The People

Twitter claims to have 18 percent of all Internet users as account holders. Its users tend to be city dwellers (20 percent). The numbers drop to 14 and 12 percent in suburban and rural communities respectively. Users are usually younger adults, and they’re more likely to access the site on a mobile device (60 percent).

The Challenges

Twitter is rapid-fire copy. To stand out, brands need to consider clever wording and visual media. The new profiles will dedicate significantly more real estate to the header photo, offering brands additional space for creative imagery.

The Tips

Twitter - Social Media Updates1. Optimize your bio. You could fill your bio with hashtags and humor, but if you intend to use Twitter for business, your bio needs to be a miniature version of your LinkedIn profile. You can be funny but make sure to share essential information about who you are, what you do, and where to find you.

2. Set up searches. If you want to turn conversations into conversions, you have to monitor mentions of your brand as well as relevant and competitive keywords.

3. Don’t forget the hashtag. If you want to track tweets and conversations, use a hashtag. It not only lets conversations be found more easily, but also allows you to measure your Twitter efforts.

4. Use Promoted Tweets. If you want your message to reach more people, you’ll have to pay to do it. Two tips for Promoted Tweets: define and target your audience and don’t run your promotion for too long. If you need to run it for an extended length of time, find different ways of stating your message.

5. Implement Twitter Cards. You can share Vine videos or attach images to your tweets, but if you want to provide a richer experience, you’ll want to delve into Twitter Cards. By adding some HTML to your website, any tweets of your content will include applicable visual media.

6. For Twitter’s official guidelines, go to Twitter for Business.

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Pinterest Announces It Will Be Rolling Out Ads

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Pinterest

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Marketing, Metrics, Online Marketing, Pinterest, Pinterst, SEM, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social network, Social Networks

Pinterest announced that they will be rolling out ads in the next quarter, great news right? Yes, but before you start putting together your next Pinterest Campaign, you might want to put together funding. Rumor has it that Pinterest will follow Twitters lead in pricing these promotions.  So, what will entice brands to pony up? Pinterest hits that proverbial “sweet spot” demographically and is uniquely qualified for commerce integration.

bii pinterest dem1

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we looked at the demographic breakdowns of the major social networks, as well as each one’s unique characteristics. Pinterest has a high-income user base that’s very interested in using the site for shopping inspiration.

Here are some of the top statistics on Pinterest’s users:

  • The scrapbooking social network skews especially toward higher-income consumers, and especially women.
  • Over two out of five U.S. Internet users who are between the ages of 18 and 50 have used Pinterest.
  • Pinterest is extremely popular  among iPad users, meaning brands have a strong canvas to showcase their offerings. Pinterest users already account for 48.2% of all social media sharing on iPads.
  • What exactly are they sharing? Well, food and drink-related content accounts for 18% of all items shared, the most of any category, according to the classification scheme devised by ShareThis.
  • The best time to post on Pinterest is either between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. or 8 p.m. and 1 a.m., but you’ll want to avoid the late afternoon between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., when many suburban families are sitting down for dinner and watching the nightly news.

In full, the special report: 

  • Analyzes gender, income, and age statistics for each social network
  • Breaks down the best data for Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+
  • Includes 16 charts and datasets that provide an in-depth picture of demographics on each of the major social networks
  • Discusses mobile activity on social media and its relative weight on each of the platforms
  • Looks at daypart statistics to gauge how demographics drives daily activity peaks on each of the networks
  • Examines how international the user bases of each social network have become

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The Art of Good Blog Writting

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Bloging, Google SEO

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Best Practices, Blogging, Engagement, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO, Social Media

Do you blog? Feel like you’re trying to reinvent the wheel time and again?blogging
Looking for some ideas to simplify your content creation process?

What follows are 26 tips, from A-Z, to help you create optimal blog posts every time you sit down to write.

Anatomically Correct

A blog post contains several areas that require our attention and care. Pamela Seiplerefers to six parts of the anatomy of a lead-generating blog post:

♣ Eye-catching title
♣ In-text links to landing pages
♣ Sidebar/banner calls to action
♣ Social sharing buttons
♣ Call to action at the bottom
♣ Relevancy—making sure the post is relevant from top to bottom

Parts of the blog anatomy.

Example of more anatomical parts to include in your blog posts.

Blogging Platform

By knowing the ins and outs of your blogging platform, you’ll ensure that your posts look as good as they can. Take the time to master the visual editor (or raw HTML, if you prefer) so that you know how to format a post, insert an image and embed a video or podcast.
Whether you’re working in platforms such as WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous, it’s good to stay up to date on the features and new versions.
If you’re not comfortable with the more technical aspects of blogging, try to find someone who can be a resource for you to answer questions as they arise.

Categories

Whether your new blog post is a stand-alone article or part of a series you’re writing, it should fit into your blog categories as well as your overall corporate content strategy. Meaning that you want to stay on topic and have your posts fit into the categories you’ve established.

For example, HubSpot has nine categories on their blog. Posts are written to fit in with each of these categories. Writing about category topics such as analytics, blogging, email marketing, HubSpot TV, etc., allows both readers and writers to stay focused on what they can expect to see on HubSpot’s blog.

When you choose your categories, ask yourself, do they make sense, and do they fit into the objectives of my business? Having clearly defined blog categories will help youcontinue generating meaningful content and topics for your blog.

Write posts that fit into your categories.

Description

Most search engines will use a maximum of 160 characters for your post description on their results pages. If you don’t create a meta-description (defined as a “…concise summary of your page’s content”), a search engine will often take the first 160 characters it finds on your page instead.
Note too, that when you create a meta-description that is fewer than 160 characters, you’ll see the full description in the search engine. Otherwise it will be cut off.

An example of how a post’s description appears in Google search results with and without the meta-description.

Editorial Calendar

Bloggers find editorial calendars helpful for scheduling and organizing topics for posts. Some people use their calendars to track more elaborate details.
Michele Linn suggests using specific tabs in a spreadsheet to track info for each post such as: post date, author, tentative title, keywords, categories, tags, call to action and status. She says “By tracking more than topic and date it will help to make sure the key elements you need for SEO, digital optimization and conversion are accounted for.”

Fine-Tune and Revise

Like other forms of writing, a blog post is rarely completed in one draft. Many writers find it helpful to take a post through several revisions and fine-tune the post as you go along. Check grammar, spelling and punctuation, and make certain that all of your links are working.

Guidelines for Writing for Search Engines

By following a few tips and best practices, you can increase the chance that your blog post will be found by search engines—by Google in particular.

The State University of New York at Plattsburgh offers these helpful writing tips:

♣ Google likes text
♣ Google likes formatting
♣ Google likes freshness
♣ Google likes accessibility
♣ Google likes outbound hyperlinks
♣ Googlebot isn’t psychic, so remember to link your pages
♣ Google likes you to tell it where you are
♣ Google likes experts

Headings

Joost de Valk offers some good suggestions regarding blog headings. He writes, “The heading structure of your pages is one of the very important aspects of on-page SEO. It defines which parts of your content are important, and how they’re interconnected. Because they have different goals, a single post needs another heading structure than your blog’s homepage or your category archives.”
He offers five basic principles about heading structure:
♣ The most important heading on the page should be the H1
♣ There is usually only one H1 on any page
♣ Subheadings should be H2s, sub-subheadings should be H3s, etc.
♣ Each heading should contain valuable keywords; if not, it’s a wasted heading
♣ For longer pieces of content, a heading is what helps a reader skip to the parts that he/she finds interesting

Headings should contain valuable keywords.

Images

Blog posts are made up of more than words and headings.
Judy Dunn recommends five ways the right photo can increase readership and blog views:

♣ Convey the overall feeling or emotion of your post
♣ Illustrate a metaphor or analogy that is part of your main idea
♣ Evoke surprise or curiosity
♣ Complement your headline
♣ Make your reader smile
Judy points out too that readers are visual learners and images can help people take in and retain information better.
#10: Journalistic Approach
Bloggers can learn a lot from traditional journalists and the ways that they approach their news stories.
Mickie Kennedy offers five things that bloggers can learn from journalists:
♣ Get your facts straight
♣ Trust has to be earned
♣ Give credit to your sources
♣ The inverted pyramid works (basic overview in first paragraph and then delve into more details in subsequent paragraphs)
♣ Editing and proofreading are essential

Killer SEO and Blog Design

Cyrus Shepard makes an important case for having a beautiful blog. He says, “…the overall design of your site is the first thing visitors see and it significantly influences bounce rate, page views and conversions.”

Cyrus suggests that certain elements on the page will add to a blog’s success:

♣ Search box
♣ RSS feed
♣ Breadcrumbs (helping users navigate),
♣ Flat site architecture by minimizing the number of clicks it takes to reach your content
♣ Images
♣ Keep your best content above the fold
♣ Link to your best content
♣ Don’t overdo links
♣ Watch ad space
♣ Encourage comments
♣ Add sharing buttons
♣ Test the blog for speed
♣ Check your blog in different browsers
♣ Pick a powerhouse blogging platform (e.g., WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr)
For a resource that will help remind you of these killer SEO suggestions, check out Cyrus’ infographic, Blog Design for Killer Search Engine Optimization.

Lists

Lists have become a very popular type of blog post.

Nate Riggs offers three types for bloggers to consider: brief, detailed and hybrid lists.
The brief list has little description but can entice readers to bookmark the post to use the list as a resource down the road or to share it across their own networks.

In a detailed list, each bullet is a complete thought and serves as a good way to communicate complex information.

The hybrid list combines the elements of short and detailed lists, often with descriptive narratives or explanations in paragraphs between the actual lists.

Nate’s post has a lot of useful information about lists as a powerful content marketing tactic and is a good example of a hybrid list.

Metrics for Blogging

Magdalena Georgieva identifies five metrics to keep an eye on to know how your blogging is going: visitors, leads, subscribers, inbound links and social media shares.
As Magdalena says, “Measure the performance of your business blog regularly toidentify weaknesses in the content you’re producing, what topics your audience truly cares about, and what blogging tactics work for you.”

When you find topics and approaches that work particularly well, try to replicate those efforts and be willing to let go of features that aren’t performing well. Magdalena recommends looking at your five most successful blog posts and asking, “What do they have in common?”

Names, Titles and Bio

Not only are readers interested in the content in your blog post, they also want to know who wrote the post and their role at your organization.

Sometimes you’ll come across a thoroughly researched and well-written post only to find an attribution of “admin.” Even if the blog is only written by you and you’re the administrator of the blog, be sure to include your name, title and a way for readers to contact you.

Original vs. Curated Content

The type of post you write can contain completely original content or can consist of content that you’ve curated.

Pamela Seiple addresses the issue of curated content and makes an important point when she says, “There’s a misconception among marketers that curated content is lazy and unoriginal, but we think it’s the complete opposite. It takes time and careful evaluation to create quality curated content and the result is oftentimes a very valuable piece of content that helps people seeking information on a given topic to cut through the clutter on the web and save time.”

Publish and Promote

Kristi Hines speaks about the publishing and promoting stages of creating a successful blog post. Kristi says that one thing you want to do during the publishing stage is toensure that your post has some kind of call to action. “Think about what you want people to do once they’ve read the post….”

Promoting a blog post can involve a fair amount of thought and strategy, as you’ll see from Kristi’s approach. She has a different plan in place for “averagely awesome posts, awesome posts and killer awesome posts.”

What differs for the three types of posts is how many social networks she shares the posts with, whether she includes the post in her writing portfolio and whether it’s included in her custom RSS feed or utilizes blog commenting promotion and direct messaging partners in social media to see if they’ll help spread the word.
Kristi describes promotion as taking from a few minutes to a few hours, and recommends taking the time to build a good foundation before you expect to execute a successful blog promotion.

Questions

What are you going to write about post after post, week after week, year after year? Sometimes thinking about content for your blog can seem daunting.

Lee Odden offers a great piece of advice: “One particularly effective way to get content ideas for blogging comes from reviewing web analytics for the kinds of questions people type into search engines like Google or Bing that deliver visitors.”

In one example, Lee said that he noticed that numerous visitors each month were typing in the question “What does a community manger do?” and search engines were sending them to one of his posts about that topic. He used it as an opportunity to explore other related questions about social community managers and providing content in the form of answers.

What questions are your web visitors asking before they arrive on your pages? How can you maximize your content to answer readers’ questions?

Research

Well-researched blog posts can differentiate your content from your competitors’. Being known as a go-to source in your industry will help make your blog stand out. Where do you go to research posts?

I find that utilizing a variety of sources helps me gather the information I’m seeking.
For example, while I can often find a lot of useful content via web-based searches, sometimes there’s nothing like a visit to the library or a bookstore where I often will discover a helpful book on the shelf that I wouldn’t have known existed if I hadn’t been standing there physically eyeballing them.

Oli Gardner makes a good case for using social media research for your blog posts. He suggests ten social media research strategies:
♣ StumbleUpon
♣ Infographics
♣ Twitter real-time searches
♣ Facebook events
♣ Experts who are using LinkedIn
♣ Uncovering quotes with Delicious
♣ Letting users tell you within the comments section of your blog and others
♣ Creating roundup mega-lists with Delicious and StumbleUpon
♣ Apps on Facebook
♣ Delicious and Google Marketplace
♣ YouTube and the UrbanDictionary

Stand Out

When you’ve been blogging in a competitive marketplace for a while, chances are good that you’ll see other bloggers writing on topics similar to yours. It doesn’t mean that you have to stay away from the topic completely; rather you can use it as an opportunity to see what worked and didn’t work in their post and write yours in a way that will help you to stand out in the topic area.

By reading the comments on similar blog posts, you will get a great view of what questions and thoughts people had after reading the post and you can take a slightly different angle by making sure you cover those areas in your article.

Title

How important is the title of your blog post? Simply put, very important!

Brian Clark writes that the title is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader.

He says, “Without a headline or post title that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.

But a headline can do more than simply grab attention. A great headline can alsocommunicate a full message to its intended audience, and it absolutely must lure the reader into your body text.”

User-Centered Content

Possibly one of the worst mistakes a blog post can make is missing the mark of its readers, forgetting who they are and their needs and interests.

Georgy Cohen goes as far as to say that content can serve as customer service and that to be helpful, content should be user-focused (asking what our users’ problems and priorities are), communicated clearly and presented in succinct language.

Valuable Content

In the perfect blogging world, creating valuable content would be at the top of every blogger’s list for their post objectives.

While our definitions about valuable content may vary, Ahava Leibtag has created a very helpful step-by-step checklist that reminds us to ask five questions:

♣ Can the user find the content
♣ Can the user read the content
♣ Can the user understand the content
♣ Will the user want to take action
♣ Will the user share the content
She suggests:
♣ Findable content includes: an H1 tag; at least two H2 tags; metadata including title, descriptors and keywords; links to other related content; alt tags for images.
♣ Readable content includes: an inverted-pyramid writing style, chunking, bullets, numbered lists, following the style guide.
♣ Understandable content includes: an appropriate content type (text, video), indication that you considered the users’ persona, context, respect for the users’ reading level, articulating an old idea in a new way.
♣ Actionable content includes: a call to action, a place to comment, an invitation to share, links to related content, a direct summary of what to do.
♣ Shareable content includes: something to provoke an emotional response, a reason to share, a request to share, an easy way to share, personalization.
Download the checklist for future reference.

Word Count

How many words should you have in your blog post? Some blogs have set parameters for optimal length and put a value on whether a post is short or long.

Corey Eridon has an interesting perspective on word count and suggests that focusing on blog word count might not be as important as you think it is. “Some topics take 100 words to explain, some take 1,000, and that’s okay.”

Corey suggests that writers focus instead on whether posts are optimized for mobile, use effective formatting, communicate in a clear manner and that outlining the points you want to cover may ultimately be a better use of your time and energy.

If you’re restricted to shorter posts by the parameters set up in advance for your blog, then you could also follow Corey’s advice to link to longer-form content you’ve developed around the topic.

Bottom line: Don’t let the quantity of words dictate the quality of your post.

(E)xcerpt

On the heels of our discussion about blog word count, a shorter blog post can also be an excerpt or summary of what readers will find in your longer-form content—e.g., eBook or white paper—but it needn’t be restricted to words.

You can also use an excerpt of the transcript or a brief description to demonstrate what information the users will learn if they watch your video or listen to your podcast.

Your Story

Readers like to get to know how writers tick and often appreciate hearing a few personal details and insights from the person who has taken them on a journey through a post. While business blogs shouldn’t be thought of as personal journal entries, you can tell your readers a little bit about how you operate.

For example, I stated above that writing curated posts like the 26 tips series here on Social Media Examiner is one of my favorite types of posts to write. (Truth be told, curated posts are also some of my favorite types to read.)

In the description of “research” above, I also shared how research is one of my favorite parts of blogging and how I enjoy researching both online and offline by doing the footwork of visiting libraries and bookstores in search of materials.

Zone for Writing

Ideas for blog posts come at all times—when you’re driving in your car, sitting at your desk, and yes, even in the middle of the night!

Chances are good though that the actual writing of the post will happen in multiple drafts and revisions, and depending on how you work, it may take place over a period of days.

What can be helpful is to create a time and place where you can get into the zone for writing and allow yourself to go with it, with as few interruptions as possible.
What do you think? How do you keep your blog posts consistent and dynamic? What tips would you add? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

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Responsive Design Vs Mobile Site

02 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Mobil Web, Responsive Web, Responsive Web Design, Web Site Design, WordPress

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Mobile, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO, Social Media

With mobile traffic gaining more market share over the past few years, it’s more important than ever for websites to have a mobile version of their webpage, a specific version tailored to smaller screens and fast load time. And with it has come a wider adoption of using responsive design for mobile users versus the traditional mobile sites.

In the eyes of Google, does response design or traditional mobile design leverage a higher SEO value? Fortunately, Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts tackled this issue in a recent webmaster help video.

Responsive Design vs. a Mobile Site

First, a lot of people have questions about what exactly is a responsive design. It is definitely something that’s newer, and many webmasters still don’t have a lot of experience designing with it. However, responsive design quickly becoming the go-to format and is gaining exponential popularity because of the way it scales for any type of screen size, whether it’s a desktop or an iPhone.

“Responsive design just means that the page works totally fine whether you access for site URL with a desktop browser or whether you access that URL with mobile browser,” Cutts said. “Things will rescale, the page size will be taken into account.”

The second common mobile design is simply a lightweight version of the site, they can be easily read on small mobile screens but without a lot of the elements on a page that take longer to load. It is most often placed on mobile.example.com or m.example.com on the domain.

“Another way to do it is depending on the user agent that’s coming you would do a redirect, so that a mobile phone, a mobile smartphone, might get redirected to a mobile-dot version of your page,” Cutts said.

Cutts said that both ways of doing it are proper ways of dealing with mobile traffic, and that they have a lot of help documents available to webmasters to ensure they are doing everything correctly, particularly ensuring rel=canonical is being used for mobile versions of sites.

Cutts: Responsive Design is the Smarter Option

For SEO value, he states responsive design is the smarter way to go for SEO, primarily because you can have issues when creating a mobile version of the page if you aren’t implementing it correctly.

“In general, I wouldn’t worry about a site that is using responsive design losing SEO benefits because by definition you’ve got the same URL,” Cutts said. “So in theory, if you do a mobile version of the site, if you don’t handle that well and you don’t do the rel=canonical and all those sorts of things, then you might, in theory, divide the PageRank between those two pages. But if you have responsive design then everything is handled from one URL, so the PageRank doesn’t get divided, everything works fine.”

Bottom Line

There are fewer SEO drawbacks when using responsive design versus a lightweight mobile version of the website, but a mobile site can work just as well as a responsive design, as long as the webmaster utilizes the mobile tools available to them from Google, to ensure there aren’t any SEO problems such as split PageRank or duplicate content issues.

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Why Google’s New Hummingbird Algorithm is Good News for Serious Content Creators

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Google Analytics, Google SEO, Google+

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

algorithm, Best Practices, Google Analytics, Marketing, Metrics, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO, social media tools

Image of a Hummingbird

On October 3rd, 2013 Google announced a major search algorithm release called Hummingbird.

Uh-oh.

Does this mean your content-driven business is in jeopardy? Is keyword researchdead? Are you going to have to reengineer your entire content strategy?

There’s no question that the Hummingbird algorithm is only the beginning of change in search optimization, but smart content creators can be prepared to thrive in this — and any — environment that may come in the future.

This release is basically a platform that enables Google to better handle “conversational” search queries.

To illustrate this, consider the difference between these two queries:

  1. “golden gate pictures”
  2. “give me some pictures of the golden gate bridge”

 

The first query is formed the way people have learned to enter entries using a keyboard. This has been our primary input method since web search was born.

Keyboards are not natural human devices, and even for fast typists they are a bit of an awkward device to use, so learning to abbreviate queries to talk to a search engine is a generally accepted practice.

However, the rise of mobile device usage brings some new challenges.

The mobile keyboard cometh

While many continue to type with the keyboards on phones and tablets, they are a bit more awkward to use.

Over time, people are going to increasingly gravitate to voice search in environments where that is acceptable (e.g. environments where speaking to your device is not seen as intrusive).

Voice queries are far more likely to fall into the pattern of the second query above — natural language queries.

As in all things search, Google wants to dominate mobile search too.

Google wants to process “real” speech patterns

Having the best platform for processing conversational queries is an important part of that, and that’s where Hummingbird fits in, though it’s just the beginning of a long process.

Think of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm as a two-year-old child. So far it’s learned a few very basic concepts.

These concepts represent building blocks, and it is now possible to teach it even more concepts going forward. It appears that a lot of this learning is derived from the rich array of information that Google has on all search queries done on the web, including the query sequences.

For example, consider the following query sequence, starting with the user asking “give me some pictures of the transamerica building”:

 

The user looks at these results, and then decides to ask the next question, “how tall is it”:

 

Note that the latter query recognizes the word “it” as referring to the Transamerica Building because that was identified in the prior query. This is part of the sophistication of natural language queries.

Another example is the notion of comparison queries. Consider the query “pomegranate vs cranberry juice”:

 

The Knowledge Graph

These examples involve Google’s Knowledge Graph, where natural language search benefits from the ability to pull real-time answers to queries that understand the specific context of the query.

Note that the Knowledge Graph has accepted some forms of conversational queries for a while, but a big part of Hummingbird was about expanding this capability to the rest of Google search.

I have seen people argue about whether or not Hummingbird was just a front end translator for search queries, or whether it is really about understanding more complex types of user intent.

The practical examples we have now may behave more like the former, but make no mistake that Google wants to be able to do the latter as well.

The mind reading algorithm

Google wants to understand what is on your mind, well, before its on your mind.

Consider Google Now as ultimately being part of this mix. Imagine being able to have Google address search queries like these:

  1. Where do I find someone that can install my surround sound system?
  2. What year did the Sox lose that one game playoff?
  3. What are the predictions for the price of gas next summer?
  4. What time is my dinner on Tuesday night, where is it, and how do I get there?

No, these queries will not work right now, but it gives you some idea of where this is all headed.

These all require quite a bit of semantic analysis, as well as pulling in additional information including your personal context.

The 4th question I added was to show that Google is not likely to care if the search is happening across web sites, in your address book, or both. Not all of this is Hummingbird, per se, but it is all part of the larger landscape.

To give you an idea on how long this has taken to build, Google’s Amit Singhal first filed a patent called Search queries improved based on query semantic information in March of 2003. In short, development of this technology has taken a very long time, and is a very big deal.

The implications of a Hummingbird search world

It is important to remember that this step forward being described by Google as a new platform.

Like the Caffeine release Google did in June of 2010, the real import of this is yet to come. Google will be able to implement many more capabilities in the future. The implications to search in the long term are potentially huge.

For you as a publisher, the implications are more straightforward. Here are a few things to think about:

1. Will keywords go away?

Not entirely. The language you use is a key part of a semantic analysis of your content.

Hopefully, you abandoned the idea of using the same phrases over and over again in your content a long time ago. It will remain wise to have a straightforward definition of what the page is about in the page title.

I’ll elaborate a bit more on this in point 3 below.

2. Will Google make the long tail of search go away?

Not really. Some of the aspects that trigger long tail type search results may actually be inferred by Google rather than contained in the query. Or they may be in the user’s query itself. Some long tail user queries may also get distilled down to a simpler head term.

There will definitely be shifts here, but the exact path this will take is hard to project. In the long term though, the long tail will be defined by long tail human desires and needs, not keyword strings.

The language you use still matters, because it helps you communicate to users and Google what needs and desires you answer.

3. You need to understand your prospect’s possible intents

That is what Google is trying to do. They are trying to understand the human need, and provide that person with what they need.

Over time, users will be retrained to avoid short simple keyword-ese type queries and just say what they want. Note that this evolution is not likely to be rapid, as Google still has a long way to go still!

As a publisher, you should focus more attention on building pages for each of the different basic needs and intentions of the potential customers for your products and services. Start mapping those needs and use cases and design your site’s architecture, content, and use of language to address those.

In other words, know your audience. Doing this really well takes work, but it starts with knowing your potential customers or clients and why they might buy what you have to sell, and identifying the information they need first.

4. Semantic relevance is the new king

We used to speak about content being king, and that in some sense is still true, but it is becoming more complex than that now.

You now need to think about content that truly addresses specific wants and needs. Does your content communicate relevance to a specific want or need?

In addition, you can’t overlook the need to communicate your overall authority in a specific topic area. Do you answer the need better than anyone else?

While much of being seen as an authority involves other signals such as links, and perhaps some weight related to social shares and interaction, it also involvescreating in-depth content that does more than scratch the surface of a need.

Are you more in-depth than anyone else? If someone has some very specific scenarios for using your product or service, does your content communicate that you address it? Does your content really stand out in some way?

What’s it to you?

As noted above, this is going to be a journey for all of us.

While Google’s eventual destination is easy to imagine (think Star Trek’s on board computer), Hummingbird has only scratched the surface, and the steps along the way are hard to predict. That will be driven by very specific developments in technology.

For you, as an author, blogger, publisher though, your path is reasonably clear as well. Focus on becoming the recognized authority in your space.

Thanks to Bill Slawski of Go Fish Digital for input on some of the specifics of this article (note that all the speculations are mine, not Bill’s :) ).

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Pinterest Drives More Traffic to Publishers Than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit Combined

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Pinterest

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Metrics, Online Marketing, Pinterest, Pinterst, SEM, Social Media Marketing, web traffic

Pinterest-thumb
Facebook accounted for more than 10% of overall traffic to publishers in September, by far the most of any social network, according to data released Tuesday from Shareaholic, a social plugin service that collects data from 200,000 publishers reaching 250 million monthly unique visitors collectively.

SEE ALSO: Top 20 Fashion Accounts to Follow on Pinterest

Pinterest drove 3.68% of traffic to publishers in September, the second highest of the social networks on the list and three times as much as Twitter, which ranked third. In fact, Pinterest’s share of overall visits increased by 66% year-over-year, more than any other social network. Pinterest now drives more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google+ combined.

shareaholic1

While most of the social networks tracked in the study showed significant year-over-year gains in referring traffic to publishers, referral traffic from Reddit and StumbleUpon declined 35% and 27.5%, respectively. Google+ remained essentially stagnant year-over-year and continues to refer the least traffic to publishers of the major social networks included in the study.

 

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Bing SEO Ranking Factors 2013 Study By SearchMetrics (do they really matter?)

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Bing Search Engine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Analytics, Best Practices, Bing, Search Engine Metrics, SEM

Article by Barry Schwarts via Search Engine Land

Searchmetrics has released their SEO ranking factors for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, today. Similar to their Google ranking factors, Searchmetrics analyzed 10,000 popular keywords and 300,000 websites appearing in the top 30 search results and looked at how various factors correlated with rankings.

searchmetrics-bing-ranking-factors

The top five key findings were:

(1) Top brands rank higher on Bing, as they do in Google.

(2) Backlink numbers are closely linked to higher rankings on Bing

(3) Social signals closely linked to higher rankings

(4) Quality content is important for search rankings

(5) On page technical factors are a must have

Here is a chart showing the Bing ranking factors by importance:

Bing v Google rank correlation chart_Jul13

The interesting part also is that when Searchmetrics compared the first page of search results on Bing and Google, they showed that 24.7% of the URLs listed were the same and 37.3% of the domains were the same. This clearly shows there is a difference in the results between Google and Bing.

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5 Ways to Incorporate Social Media into Your Mailing List

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Bloging, Email Marketing, Google+, LInkedIn, Multi Channel Marketing, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Advertising, Best Practices, Blogging, Facebook, Online Marketing, Pinterest, SEM, Social Media

Want to get more mileage and benefits from your mailing list? Then be sure to socialize your updates and newsletters. The following tips will help you simultaneously grow your list and your social media audience.

1. Add social profile links to each newsletter.

Want to increase a particular social media audience, such as your Facebook fans or Twitter followers? If so, include a link to to it in each of your e-mail updates and newsletters. You can try focusing on building each audience one at a time or include both.

When it comes to the verbiage, be specific. Include a link or image that says “Become a fan on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” in order to increase the likelihood that people will do just those things.

2. Encourage social sharing.

If your mailing list service provider allows it, include social sharing options in your newsletter itself. As people share your latest newsletter with their friends, their friends will be tempted to sign up to it as well.

Also be sure to encourage that people forward the newsletter to their friends. To increase the odds of people signing up for your newsletter when it has been shared, include a link to the signup page for your newsletter.

3. Share your newsletter on your social profiles.

Take the web-based version of your best newsletters and share the link to them on your main social profiles. For example, if you have a great deal for mailing list subscribers, be sure to tweet about it so people can jump on your mailing list to get it.

Another great way to share your newsletter on social media besides tweets and Facebook posts is to pin an image from your newsletter to Pinterest. Then, you can capitalize on Pinterest traffic to your newsletter and hopefully convert it into subscribers.

4. Add ClicktoTweet to tweetable quotes.

People love to tweet little snippets, quotes, and facts. ClicktoTweetallows you to create a custom status update that people can share just by clicking on the link provided by the tool. So if you have a tweetable bite in your newsletter, make a quick “Tweet this” link so that people will share the text and a link to your newsletter.

5. Direct e-mail readers to discuss on your social profiles.

Don’t let your e-mails become a one-way street. To increase the chances of mailing list subscribers becoming Facebook fans, create a discussion on your Facebook page and include the link to that post on your wall in the newsletter. This way, you not only gain fans and boost the engagement on your Facebook page, but you also show your subscribers that you care about them and what they have to say.

Last But Not Least, Don’t Forget to Measure Your Results

If you’re using MailChimp, Constant Contact, or SendGrid, you can sign up for a free trial account on SumAll and connect your mailing list service provider along with your social networks.

This way, you can measure the boost in fans or followers after your mailing list goes out. Or, if you encouraged engagement from your newsletter to your social profile, you can correlate the change in advocacy.

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