Check This Inbound Marketing Plugin for WordPress

Feel overwhelmed by inbound marketing? Many small business owners and entrepreneurs know they need marketing but lack the proper skills, time, and money to execute a complete marketing campaign. After all, every investment you make and every minute spent must have a real ROI. I’m sure many of you have found tools that could make inbound marketing a cinch, but then you saw price tag and had a minor heart attack. Let’s face it– The majority of us small business owners are busy and inbound marketing takes a lot of time. As a small business owner, I was frustrated trying to find the right plugins to help me streamline my marketing efforts.

That was until I found Inbound Brew Pro.

Inbound Brew Pro is a WordPress marketing plugin that is a comprehensive and all-in-one tool for any marketer or small business owner that needs help with their inbound marketing. The premium wordpress plugin was released last month and did not disappoint!

It’s not easy staying up to date on SEO, lead generation, Google analytics, contact forms, custom emails, drip campaigns, CTA buttons, redirects, social media, lead management… The list goes on and on! I found it to be exhausting.

Inbound Brew Pro simplifies all of those steps for you, all in one easy-to-use plugin.

Inbound Brew Pro comes packed with a lot of features that both marketers and small and medium business owners will find useful if they are too small to have a dedicated marketing department or can’t afford the other expensive marketing tools out there.

Here are a few of the Pro version features:

-Create custom “Call to Actions” to turn your users into leads.
-On-page SEO optimization lets you get the best value out of the keywords you are trying to rank for.
-Stay on top of Google updates with updated sitemaps, robot.txt files, and 301 and 302 errors.
-Connect with your social media accounts to create share buttons and posting schedules.
-Create custom landing pages and contact forms without any coding experience.
-Integrates with Google Analytics, providing you complete control over your stat tracking and easily accessible

Let’s be honest. The last thing I want to do is code when working on my website. Inbound Brew Pro solved that problem for me, providing me with several ways to customize my website without needing to worry about CSS, HTML, or JavaScript.

Another cool feature is the Google Analytics that you see directly from your WordPress dashboard, in addition to auto-post and analytics with their social media integration, prime call to actions button generators, ability to make custom forms, robust email drip campaigns, lead scoring, and a whole slew of other automated marketing tools– No code required. The best part is, the Pro plan costs $35.
Considering some companies pay entire marketing departments thousands of dollars a month to do this stuff, $35 a month seems very reasonable.

Bottom line:

Inbound Brew Pro simplifies your marketing efforts, saves you time, and generates leads.
If you are busy with the operations of your business, marketing can seem too time consuming. Still, it is one of the most important ways to advertise your business. Inbound Brew Pro is a fantastic and affordable plugin and marketing tool that will save you time and help you streamline your marketing efforts.

Original post: Check This Inbound Marketing Plugin for WordPress

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Ever Considered Pay-per-Lead Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to get started in the online marketing world. The reason I love affiliate marketing is that you can test your online marketing skills with someone else’s product before going out and creating your own.

Creating your own products takes tons of time. There’s also no guarantee that it will sell. But if you sell someone else’s product and promote it and the product gets tons of sales, then you can use that same strategy when your create your own product.

When starting out, you can use pay per lead affiliate marketing. This is one of the most popular techniques in affiliate marketing and you get a better commission than display ads.

If you’re in the personal finance industry, check out LeadNetwork.com to generate your leads. It is a trusted and established company that is known for its high industry payouts.

The LeadNetwork creates products that are needed in the financial marketplace. The purpose is to connect lenders with consumers looking for installment loans, payday loans, and startup business loans.

Leadnetwork has high rates of conversion, proprietary technology, superb digital marketing materials, high ethical standards, a weekly payment schedule, and unwavering support for their publishers.

It works based off an auction-based system. This means that the lead is put at the highest price possible. From there, the price will gradually lower until a buyer is ready to complete the deal.

When you use this affiliate program, you get lifetime commissions. When you refer a new client you’ll continually generate commission from that client for forever.

With Leadnetwork they have a payment threshold of $100. Once you hit the $100 mark they can pay you through PayPal, Wire Transfer, EPESE, ePayments and Webmoney.

The leads you generate need to be based in the United States but you can be located anywhere in the world.

If your website is in the finance niche it could be very profitable for you to check out affiliate network mentioned above.

Original post: Ever Considered Pay-per-Lead Affiliate Marketing?

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5 Sites with Great Landing Pages

Landing pages can make or break a website’s success.

It’s true, trust me and I’ll tell you why.

The first thing you see when you visit a website is its landing page.

Now tell me, what website would you rather visit? One that has horrible colors, videos that start on their own, complete with loud sounds, or a website that is targeted towards your needs, is subtle, and direct in its approach?

The answer is easy.

The average user will give you around 7-10 seconds of their attention before leaving your website. You only have a few seconds to capture their attention and to appeal to them.
Whether you’re looking to design a fresh website, or update your existing one, here are 5 websites with great landing pages.

1. Pipedrive.com

Pipe Drive is another example of why minimalism is one of the best design methods for landing pages.

Media is an important tool that can be used to engage your audience, but if you use too much, you will overwhelm them and force them away.

Pipe Drive’s landing page features a mostly-white design, direct copy and a call to action right as you land on the page. Users are quickly engaged and encouraged to interact with the website.

2. Buddyloans.com

Buddy Loan’s landing page doesn’t blow you away with its media.

So, why did we choose this one?

The answer is simple. They offer loans and the first thing you are greeted by is a loan calculator call to action. If you are looking for a loan, you want to know the hard facts about the loan, like its term, interest rate, and other applicable details.

All of the text on this website’s call to action is direct and is appealing to a person that is looking to get a loan.

3. Quora.com

Quora has come a long way since its launch. It is the defacto question and answer website on the Internet.

So, what makes Quora’s landing page one of the best? It’s simplicity and the way it appeals to the individual.

The majority of questions and answers you see on Quora are targeted and decided based on your past behavior on the Internet.

At the time of writing this, my front page is filled with history, marketing, and some region-specific content. If you check yours, the results will be completely different.

4. Airbnb.com

Airbnb has done a lot to break the hotel industry. Much like Uber, it found a way to reinvent an established industry.

The popular home-sharing service’s landing page is media-rich and designed to entice you to visit a new location.

A media-rich approach works really well for a company like Airbnb because they are driven by volume of rentals and one of the best ways to get people to try something new is to create a sense of curiosity and wonder.

5. Zendesk.com

Zendesk’s landing page excels because of its light-hearted and welcoming color scheme, mixed with its approachable and to-the-point call to action and copy.

How many times have you sworn off a company because of bad customer service?

Customer service is an important part of any company. Zendesk’s welcoming color scheme is relaxing and sets the perfect tone for a company that helps streamline support services for other businesses.

Original post: 5 Sites with Great Landing Pages

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3 Ways to Use Photos to Improve Your Online Presence

You don’t have to know or be a photographer to have a great web presence, but it certainly helps. Images have become the currency of social media and many forms of online news and communication. Images distill thoughts into a form that can be consumed in an instant, much faster than the thousand words or so it would take to get across the same information. While writing is still important, it’s increasingly images that get people to pay attention to the written word. If you still aren’t sure how to use images to increase your online presence, here are three of the very best methods.

1) Use Professional Quality Images.

If you don’t so much as own a camera, you can still use amazing images if you have the right source. There are countless ways to buy great images at affordable rates, with so much variety available that you can find pictures tailored to your exact needs and specifications. If you go the stock photo route, it pays to do your homework. By digging into places that present uncommon and affordable results, you will be able to avail yourself of images that don’t look commonplace or unnatural for your purpose.

2) Use Original Images Sometimes.

Content creation is the name of the game online, and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Platforms like Instagram are full of images created by people of interest, which can be incredibly successful even if they aren’t of the highest quality. If you have a customer or fan base, you may be surprised how many people have an appetite for images of you or your brand. All you need is a phone to make creative, candid, original images that your fans won’t be able to find anywhere else. This creates a sense of intimacy and activity that some brands are surprisingly without.

3) Invest in Images That Dazzle.

If you don’t want to go the stock photo route and you aren’t the type to throw up images on social media platforms willy nilly, you might be the type of internet personality who invests in dazzling images and video. These images are a production. Whether they are taken in a studio, in nature, or under the sea, images that amaze with their quality, subject matter, and unusual perspective help brands take a step beyond conventional branding. Drones, underwater robots, adventures photographers, and innovative video techniques – all of these are strong ways to create pictures that impress people for their originality.

4) Bonus Tip: Don’t Forget About GIFs!

GIFs, or “graphics interchange format”, is like a self-contained looping video that shows a short period of content or action, often measured in just a few seconds. GIFs and memes are two of the most popular ways to communicate information, ideas, and jokes anywhere on the internet. You’ve likely seen them or used them before. They’re a great way to distill an important bit of video from your business, a humorous concept, or a thought-provoking message that pertains to your brand. Once you get hooked on making GIFs, you’ll use them all the time.

There are many strategies that will produce an effective imaging strategy for your career, business, or brand. The most important thing is to do it, whichever one you choose! For people who have not always used the internet, the image-first nature of today’s web may seem unfamiliar. Even so, it’s here to stay and anyone who wants to make a place for themselves online, or to expand their current reach, needs to use images that are compelling, brand enhancing, and on the cutting edge of convention, taste, and trend.

Original post: 3 Ways to Use Photos to Improve Your Online Presence

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Language Barriers in the Online World

How much do they really limit your reach?
Though worldwide internet access is increasing, it may not be as effective in connecting the world as we might think. English, as by far the most common lingua franca, or “bridge language”, is one of only 10 languages that the World Bank estimates comprise about eighty percent of all online content, English making up nearly two-thirds of that. So, is English-only content enough for the reach you’re looking for?

How many people actually understand English?
At an estimate, 21% of the worldwide population, both online and offline, understand English, this equates to about 26% of the online population – although half of all online content is in English. Basically, if you’re content is exclusively English, 76 percent of your potential reach is, ultimately, beyond your reach due to a language barrier.

The Aim of Your Content
Whether or not you should expand your language base is relative to the aim of your online content. If you run a local business, and your target market is primarily English speaking, it may not be worth the time and effort to translate your website. However, if you run an online company that sells overseas, a large proportion of your target market may not speak English. In this case, considering a translate option for your site may expand your market and increase international sales.

How do I translate my content?
Many web browsers, like Google Chrome, have a translate function built into the browser; however, these translators tend to translate word for word, which can be quite inaccurate as the grammar and syntax of different languages can be significantly different.

If you want your content to be accessible to a specific target market or people group, or just more widely accessible, it may be worth your while to hire someone to translate pages or articles for you – even if you only translate into one or two of the world’s most popular languages. There are web based companies that offer translation services as well as freelance translators

Cost of translating a web page
Most translation services will charge anything from 10 cents to 30 cents per word, depending on the complexity of the language. Others have hourly rates or charge per page or per website. As a general rule, freelance translators will be cheaper, though the translation quality may not always be as good.

What if I can’t get my content translated?
If you find translating content is too much hassle, or not worth the overhead, it’s not always necessary. If much of your prospective market has some English as a second language, make your writing fairly simple – just to get your point across. An alternative is to customize pages so that pages accessed from primarily non-English speaking countries will display more or less the same content, but with more basic language.

Essentially, do some research to see if translating your site, or some of the content, is worth it. If so, it’s a great opportunity to extend your reach in the online world.

Original post: Language Barriers in the Online World

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7 Ways To Use Video On Your Blog To Get More Engagement

You’ve probably used or are using video to make your posts more effective, but has it ever occurred to you that there are several other innovative ways you can use video to amplify your blog’s impact? Yes, they do exist, but it’s a little unfortunate that the majority of us haven’t learnt these tricks.

Don’t fret though, because we dug them up and, today, we present them to you just so that you may have a better opportunity to make your blog posts more inventive, engaging, and successful.

1. Add Text Content

Simply embedding the video without providing a context won’t draw in enough viewership. In fact, this might turn away a part of your audience as they might not be convinced enough to watch the video. It’s, thus, a great idea to introduce the video with beautiful and captivating sentences, and if possible, add a few short paragraphs that lead into it. Applying this to your explainer, how-to, or testimonials video is a sure way to convince your prospective audience to watch it. If you do it well enough, they will watch through to the end.

2. Interact With The Audience

Part of your video content should have a section where you encourage your audience to leave their comments or other feedback. In fact, make it your mission to always fit a question for your audience. Such feedback gives you a chance to interact with your audience and squeeze out lessons you can use to make your content better. Also, such discussions could be helpful to other viewers and, in other cases, it presents an opportunity for you to respond to your audience’s concerns.

3. Customize Your Video

Viewer experience largely depends on how well you customize your video. It’s really a huge mistake to embed a video on your blog post and fail to fit it within the post’s boundaries or give it aesthetic additions and other functionalities that could optimize its function.

Setting a particular start time or allowing/disallowing related videos to show up when the current one is complete are just few of the many aspects you can adjust as you wish.

This might be a challenge for some people, especially those who’ve not embraced the technical aspects of embedding a video, but the least you can do to make your video attractive is to ensure its width doesn’t go beyond the blog post’s column.

4. Make The Post And Video Mobile-Friendly

Smartphones are more popular today than ever, and nowadays, more people use their phones to access blogs and other platforms. It’s reported that the majority of this users spend well over 50% of their time on their cellphones, mostly accessing websites and viewing videos. So, since the majority of them will access your blog from a mobile device, customize your blog and video such that they will be friendly to these users as well. This way, you will engage a larger audience.

5. Embed It Close To The Top

There’s a section of your audience that will only care about your post once their eyes land on a video embedded in it. This means that keeping it way below is sure to work to your disadvantage in most cases. But note that this will largely depend on the type of content in your blog.

6. Make It Short

Many studies today agree that a lot of people often lose their attention after hitting the one-minute mark. So, it’s only best that all the videos you embed on your post are short. Videos that have had the most impact today are those that run for 30-45 seconds.

Some viewers will even be discouraged to check out the video if they realize that it’s long. However, in the case where you have to create a video that is longer than one minute, ensure the introduction is incredibly captivating and the accompanying content so fascinating that your audience will sit through to the end.

7. Quality Matters

No matter how impeccable your video content is, your readers aren’t going to watch even a second of it if its quality is wanting. For instance, if the video’s highest resolution is 240p, many will be discouraged to watch it. It’s, therefore, advised that you aim for the higher resolutions.

Sound quality, transitions, and other related aspects also have to be considered. Keep in mind that uploading top quality videos might take you ages if your internet is average or poor. Therefore, before you start to edit it, that’s something else you’ll have to put into consideration.

Wrap Up

In summary, embedding a video on your blog post is good but doing the entire process creatively and expertly is what makes all the difference. The seven ways we’ve mentioned are tested and proven and, if applied well, they will get you the engagement level and viewership you’ve always wished for. So, pay extra attention to each and, if possible, seek expert help where it’s necessary.

VideoRemix is a video software company that allows users to create, edit, personalize, and publish production-quality video campaigns to engage their audience. Clients can feature these dynamic videos on websites, landing pages, video-sharing sites, and Facebook.

Original post: 7 Ways To Use Video On Your Blog To Get More Engagement

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4 Ways to Promote Your Business with Video

Did you know that almost 80% off all Internet traffic is made of video? And did you know that every day over five billion videos are watched it on YouTube? Video is huge, and if you’re not using it to promote your business you are missing out on a big opportunity. Below you will find four ways that you can use to promote your business with video content.

1. Create marketing videos

YouTube has over one billion active users many of them are searching for general information, tutorials, how-to videos and so on. If you create a marketing videos targeting specific keywords related to your business you could attract those users. The cool thing is that you don’t even need to know how to record video. You can leverage libraries like VideoBlocks to download ready to go motion graphics and then simply customize eat to your business.

2. Convert your existing content into video

If you don’t know what kind of videos that you can create, you can simply transform your existing content into videos. For example, you can convert your blog posts into videos. Second, if you have a marketing material like e-books or reports you can also convert them into videos.

3. Create a YouTube channel

As long as you plan to create a more than a couple of videos, and you should, then creating your own YouTube channel is a must. By promoting your YouTube channel on your website and on social networks you should be able to increase their popularity off your videos. Here is a post with 18 tips you can use to promote your YouTube channel.

4. Use explainer videos on key pages

Research confirms that video can increased conversion rates significantly. This means that you should have at least one video on your sales pages, newsletter sign-up pages, and so on. There are many online tools that can help you to create an explainer video for your product or service, and those will help your potential customers to better evaluate and understand your offering.

Original post: 4 Ways to Promote Your Business with Video

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Your Small Business Needs a Blog and Here is Why

Small businesses can gain a lot from taking advantage of technology and by using a website builder. One of the easiest and most important ways to utilize this is to start a blog. A blog is a tool that allows you to reach people and engage with them. There is no other method for marketing and engagement that is as effective as blogging. When you create a blog, it allows you to essentially speak to your target audience. This makes you more real and relatable to them, allowing for a deeper human aspect with your business.

Offer Promotional Material

When you are blogging, you want to ensure that the content is varied and valuable. You can make some blogs centered around promotional materials, such as coupons or special sales that are coming up. You can also create content about new products and services that you are launching. It is estimated that marketers who blog get about 67 percent more leads compared to those who do not blog.

Search Engine Optimization

People need to be able to find your business website to see what you have to offer. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest factors in getting your website better search engine placement. While you want to utilize it on all pages, it is easier to take advantage of this method with your content. You start by doing keyword research to see what people are searching for. For example, if you sell a productivity application for mobile devices, you want to see which keywords people use to find information on these apps.

Once you know the top two to three keywords, you build valuable and accurate content around them to drive traffic to your website. Just remember that while the keywords are important, the most critical aspect of your content is quality.

Market Research

You have to know what your audience wants and your blog is an excellent way to assess this. Your website builder can implement different tools to aid you in tracking activity so that you can analyze what is attracting visitors and what is not. The backend of your website has analytics to show you information, such as where your traffic is coming from, where and how it is being shared, and the content types that are the most popular. Use this information to help direct your blogging strategy.

Enhance Credibility

Businesses must be credible in order to succeed. A blog is an opportunity for you to create a presence for your brand within your specific niche. When you blogand provide valuable information to your customers, you make your brand more trustworthy. Remember that success begins with providing something of value to your target audience.

Your blogging can help to increase your company’s value to the public by not only supplying them with products or services, but also with important information that is related. In fact, approximately 60 percent of consumers have a more positive outlook on companies that provide high-quality and valuable custom content.

Network More Efficiently

Networking with fellow businesses, professionals, and your customers is important to grow your company. When you blog, you get to meet people and engage with those that can be beneficial for your business. Make sure to read comments, answer questions, and work to develop relationships through your blog. Over time, the relationships that you do make could further your credibility and enhance your bottom line. Just ensure that your interactions are genuine.

With this information, the next step is getting your small business blog up and running. You do not need a complicated setup or anything fancy. In fact, keeping it simple will be the most beneficial. Just make sure that the content is sharable and that it is true and honest.

Original post: Your Small Business Needs a Blog and Here is Why

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5 Web Marketing Strategies for Startups Interested in Efficiency

So you’re a new business owner and you’re cash strapped. You’ve sown everything you have into your venture and worked hard to get things off the ground. Now you want to see some growth, and you recognize that the web offers a treasure trove of potential sales that you haven’t really tapped into. You’re on the right track, as the Internet offers startups the chance to compete with bigger, more established competitors. There are some risk to web marketing for up and comers, though. You can spend time and money on a marketing venture that just doesn’t bring returns.

Here are five strategies to help you invest those web marketing dollars efficiently in hopes of seeing sizable returns.
 
1. Believe in remarketing
 
Depending upon what you’re selling, remarketing might be the best way to get the most out of your marketing dollars. Remarketing is placing your ads strategically where they’re seen by people who are purchasing complementary items or services. For instance, if you’re an upstart private jet brokerage that’s looking for long-term clients, you might remarket to those people who have visited luxury car buying websites. You’ll know that these people have money and the willingness to spend extravagantly. This way, you won’t have to worry about your ad dollars being invested on people who have no ability to purchase your services.
 
2. Be careful with pay-per-click advertising
 
You may want to limit your pay-per-click advertising until you have a better grasp of who you’re targeting and how to target them. Budget control is key for startups in the competitive entrepreneurial world. Pay-per-click advertising seems to make sense because it provides the certainty that your ad dollars will lead to engagement.

Problematically, though, you may not have strong conversion rates in the beginning, especially if your website isn’t as functional as it might be later. Make sure you limit your exposure to pay-per-click marketing until you’re absolutely certain of your website’s ability to process requests quickly and without incident.
 
3. Piggyback your web marketing and offline marketing efforts
 
Let’s say you’re a startup that’s splitting marketing dollars between the Internet and offline ventures. You might spend a few hundred dollars sponsoring a hole in a celebrity charity golf tournament, or you may invest in a sponsorship agreement with a small-time professional athlete. It’s possible to have all of your momentum moving together in the right direction. Make sure that your web content highlights the ways in which your company is getting out into the community. Web marketing that highlights your offline marketing in an organic way can build credibility for your brand and make your offline marketing more effective at the same time. It’s critical to have these two forces working in the same direction if possible.
 
4. Avoid web marketing companies that lack familiarity with your field
 
If you’re going to pay money to a web marketing company, they better deliver results. Given the constraints of the web marketing budget for most startups, going with a major web marketing firm can be a risk. To mitigate this risk, you’ll want to choose a marketing arm that has familiarity with your field. Some agencies market restaurants well. Others are better for purely online businesses. Find a marketing agency that has a demonstrated record of success in dealing with companies like yours. This way, you’ll be able to see measurable results sooner and get your cash flow up.
 
5. Become an authority in your field
 
There are many ways today that you can become an authority on your own business ventures. You might write articles for publication through LinkedIn. You may share useful advice to consumers and prospective clients through your Facebook page and Twitter feed. If you work to become an expert in your field, you’ll build relationships with other important and meaningful people. From this, you may benefit from free marketing, as individuals will share, comment, and otherwise engage with your content.

Many startups make the mistake of thinking that all of their web content must try to convert sales. This isn’t true. In reality, some of your content should be designed to build your credibility so your company can fully engage with long-term clients and with other leaders in your industry.
 
Web marketing is far from easy, and it’s not an exact science. If you’re going to come out ahead as a startup company, you’ll need to have a smart, measured approach. Do everything you can to maximize the momentum of your marketing dollars, be careful how much you invest in pay-per-click services, work to be an industry authority, and don’t be afraid to remarket to people who seem like an excellent target demographic for you.

By utilizing these strategies, you’ll put yourself ahead other new business owners looking to exploit the power of the Internet.

Original post: 5 Web Marketing Strategies for Startups Interested in Efficiency

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Top 20 Tools To Boost Team’s Productivity

Pulling together a collaborative and productive team with all the right skills to grow your business could be the hard part. This challenge happens far more often than you would think.
But the good news is that you can overcome your team’s productivity issues with the right tools.

There is a sea of tools out there for every facet of team productivity. In this article, we will narrow down the choice and take a look at the top tools that every member of your team can use to boost their effectiveness.

From your business analyst to your account executive, here are the top 20 tools for maximizing the productivity of all your team members.

Communication Tools

1. Chanty

Chanty is an AI-powered business messenger and a single notification center focused on refining business processes for small and medium teams. It helps businesses become more productive by featuring instant messages with an unlimited searchable history, plenty of storage space, robust file sharing and uniting notifications from multiple software services in a single place.

Pricing: Free (the product is at beta stage).

2. Slack

Slack is a well-known team communication tool from Silicon Valley. This feature-rich messaging
app operates in private and public channels and also has voice and video calling. In addition to advanced chatting features, Slack has many shortcuts, hacks and integrations with third-party platforms that help to increase team productivity.

Pricing: Free basics, Standard plan: $6.67 per user per month, Plus plan: $15 per user per month.

3. Fleep

Fleep is a team messenger attempting to link up project collaboration and team communication. Here you can schedule lightweight tasks chatting with team members and invited business partners. A bonus is that Fleep features an unlimited message history as well as unlimited integrations in its free package.

Pricing: Free; Premium plan starts from €5 per user per month (advanced file-sharing and premium support).

4. Microsoft Teams

If you decide to build a communication hub around already used Office 365, the simplest choice is Microsoft Teams — a chat that combines conversations and teamwork tools with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, and much more.

Pricing: Starting at $5 per user per month.

5. HipChat

HipChat is a conservative-looking instant messenger with fast one-to-one and group video calls and handy screen sharing feature. It should be mentioned that HipChat offers self-hosting which makes IT departments happy.
Pricing: Free; Plus plan starts from $2 per user per month.

Video Conferencing Tools

6. Zoom

To be honest, Zoom is pretty cool with its HD video conferencing, screen sharing from desktop or mobile and recording features. Following this, Zoom allows you to create the collaborative whiteboard and send group texts, images and audio files during meetings.

Pricing: Free; Pro plan starts from $14.99 per month per host (the person who schedules, starts and controls the settings in a meeting).

7. GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting is a popular choice due to its HD-quality video, screen sharing, personalized meeting URLs, a whiteboard feature, and the ability to connect to meetings via desktop or mobile. Additional bonus: options to translate control settings — perfect for global teams.

Pricing: from $19 per month.

8. Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is both fun and easy to use and looks great. You can choose which groups of people you want to invite to your Google Hangouts session, making it easy to start a video conference in seconds.

Pricing: Free, Business Plan starts at €4 per user per month.

9. Skype for Business

And then, of course, there is the old faithful Skype which has been around forever. It is a proven solution for instant messaging, voice, and video calls. Skype for Business has all the primary features of the other tools here except toll-free numbers, which GoToMeeting has.

Pricing: Starting from $2 per user per month.

10. appear.in

Similar to Skype, appear.in lets you create online meeting rooms for video calls. It is a great tool for teams that already use a chat, but also need a tool for online video calls. Top features include:

-Claiming your own personal video room,
-Setting a custom background image of the room,
-Locking the room for private conversations,
-Sending messages and links in text chat during meetings,
-Sharing your screen.

Pricing: Free up to 8 people, Premium coming soon.

Document Collaboration Tools (File Storage and File Sharing)

11. Dropbox

In short, Dropbox is a cloud-based platform that allows users to store and share files. It is scaleable so Dropbox is good for both teams and individuals. Files synchronize seamlessly across all devices. Account owners can grant others access to storage folders as well as single files. Distributed workers can have shared access to digital assets (files, spreadsheets, documents, photos) regardless of their physical location.

Pricing: Free, Business Plans start from $8.25 per user per month.

12. Google Drive

Google Drive is a handy hub for creating, sharing, collaborating, and storing documents and presentations. For distributed workers, pulling together a presentation from three different content creators is simple and fast thanks to user access controls and link sharing.

Pricing: The first 15GB of storage is free; the price for additional storage starts from $1.99 per user per month.

13. Evernote Business

Evernote is the tried-and-true titan in note taking and note sharing. The business plan allows you to take and manage notes and then share them with your team. Its primary and most powerful features are the Notebook Stacks and the tagging system that let you find anything in seconds. It also features a Web Clipper browser extension for capturing ideas while surfing the net, and mobile apps for taking down notes, even voice ones, from wherever you are.

Pricing: Evernote Business is priced at $10 per person per month.

Project Management Tools

14. Wrike

Wrike combines simple design with efficient project management tools. It is a powerful tool for managing and collaborating on projects. You can manage and customize the entire flow of work — from incoming requests, to delegating tasks, reviewing initial drafts, providing feedback and approving revisions. Plus: custom workflows and statuses, Gantt charts, customizable reports, time tracking, board view.
Pricing: Free up to five users; Professional plan with five users: $49/month, ten users: $99 per month, 15 users: $149 per month.

15. Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects is a part of the Zoho software bundle. Features include task lists with multiple tasks and milestones, document and file management, time tracking and timesheets, team intranet and shared calendar.
Pricing: Express plan (up to 20 projects) $25/month, Premium plan (up to 50 projects) $50/month, Enterprise plan (unlimited projects) $99/month. CRM and other additional features come with an extra price tag.

16. Trello

Trello is a multifunctional kanban-style dashboard for organizing teammates ideas and keeping track of project progress. It is a good project management tool for small teams with simple projects. Trello lets you create multiple task boards, organize task lists by dates or priority, comment and collaborate, attach pictures and files.

Pricing: Free with extra cost of $5 per month for Trello Gold.

17. Basecamp

Basecamp is used by thousands of teams all around the world. Basecamp makes it easy to manage the project clients for quick feedback on small changes and updates. It takes only 10 minutes to set up this easy-to-use tool. It provides the minimal amount of features needed for efficient project management.
Pricing: $29 per month for unlimited users.

18. Asana

One of the most well-known project management tools, Asana allows users to assign tasks to other members, add followers to projects, manage tasks and monitor deadlines. It can be very useful also as a to-do list or calendar for strategic planning.
Pricing: Free plan for up to 15 team members; Paid plan starts from $9.99 per user per month.

Time Tracking Tools

19. Toggl

Toggl is a hassle-free time tracking software that integrates with tens of different project management tools. It is perfect for companies with many different departments. Additional features: offline time tracking and mobile functionalities.

Pricing: $10 per user per month; Paid plans start at $20 per user per month.

20. TimeBoy

TimeBoy helps you manage as many workers, projects and workspaces as you need in order to run your business seamlessly. It enables you to have a complete overview of your team productivity, generate and export reports, and get insights on how the work hours are actually spent. The company also offers in-depth integrations with project management software.

Pricing: Free (the product is at beta stage).

Summary
The 20 productivity tools listed above just scratch the surface when it comes to applications that you can use to boost effectiveness among your teammates and throughout your business. Are there any other products that deserve a place here? Leave a comment mentioning the productivity tool you can’t live without.

Original post: Top 20 Tools To Boost Team’s Productivity

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Copywriting Then and Now Is Like Chalk and Cheese

Millions of advertising and marketing campaigns solely depend on copywriting. History clearly indicates the power of copywriting and its role in brand positioning. From stories to billboards, to print advertisements, to soap operas, to TV commercials, to web series, to social platforms, crafting a copy for various collaterals has come a long way. Copywriting is exploding in an unprecedented way leading to new metrics. Read this before you write another copy.

Gone are the days, where a bunch of creative and talented folks sat together and broke their heads to flex the muscles of their vocabulary and make their ideas more glamorous. Word gamblers saw huge success through their stylish and more sophisticated works in earlier days. Copywriting was considered an art then. As exponential masters of the language, copywriters had their power. Their works were more formal and got heads turning – ears flapping too.

This culture is slowly turning upside down. ,

Copywriters today are forced to go with the consumers. The scare to get denounced and to be tagged as an obsolete is eating many today. Don’t mistake this to copywriting apocalypse. Getting closer to digital excellence is a task that gets tricky many times. Today, there is a purpose to have a clear vision to tackle the trend and to achieve copywriting excellence. This calls for a refinement in strategies and mastering new skills that can boost your performance.

“The purpose of advertising is to sell. That is what the client is paying for and if that goal does not permeate every idea you get, every word you write, every picture you take, you are a phony and you ought to get out of the business.”
William Bill Bernbach.

Stop being creative at your risk

Creativity and spontaneity have taken a different approach in this digital age copywriting profession. With the arrival of the internet, social media and search engine optimization, there is more to copywriting than to merely being creative. The ways content are created and shared are different today. Traditional media forms have digital versions now. Media evolution is taking place all over the world. Brands need to hold this thought and act.

So, what are those powerful changes an online copywriter is expected to employ today to interweave with the innovations but still carry out the human touch?

First and foremost, copywriters need to understand that copywriting today demands a different set of skills in terms of creating, optimizing and delivering. You need to learn to deliver personalization today. With thousands of options set before them, customers look for that so called “personalized touch” to give a nod to your brand.

You can understand this better through the journey of a top beverage company in the World – Coca Cola

Coca-Cola Innovates New Spaces Quickly and Boldly

Coca-Cola, the most admired and the best-known brand has been making people associate with the brand generation to generation. The Company continues to make changes by evaluating its progress across the experiences that it has been creating, the process, technologies and above all with the people and data. Right from its launch in 1886 where it came up with a unique style of using Spencerian Script logo, the brand has been creating millions of moments through its marketing campaigns every year and every time it came up with a new promotion.

Whether it is for advertising or another form of marketing campaign, the company has never failed to connect with the audience. The brand has consistently moulded its copywriting strategies to accommodate various forms like prints, hoardings, radio ads, television commercial, blogs, newsletters, emails, white papers, e-books, podcasts, video productions, audio clips, webinars, Power Point presentations, social-media content, webpage content, mobile content and much more to come.

From “Delicious and Refreshing,” tagline of the 1890s to the revolutionary jingle of 1971 that read, “I would like to buy the world a Coke,” the company has stood unique in presenting itself to the public. Its advertising budget surpassed $100,000 back in the 1900s which became a big talk in the market. The company saw yet another ground-breaking response in 2015 when it tipped off the “Drinkable” ad campaign to launch Coke Zero. This campaign removed all barriers. It’s first ever 30-second holiday commercial on television back in 2016 for its, “Taste the Feeling,” campaign made the season special for all its evangelists.

It is a privilege when customers coin a new name to your brand. This happened with Coca-Cola. The name Coke was created by none other than Coca-Cola fans. Coke continues to teach every marketer even after these 130 years. The company is re-inventing big way by generating real-time content all 365 days. This helps in innovating new spaces and going in line with consumer’s taste.

“Taking into account shifting user trends and emerging technologies and tools at our fingertips, we’ve doubled down on visual storytelling—original video content, photo galleries, infographics and more—over the past two years. Now, roughly half of the dozen pieces of content we produce and publish each week include video, said Jay Moye, global editor-in-chief, Coca-Cola Journey.
From tagline to a billboard, Coca Cola has shown its excellence consistently sharpening its saw of copywriting.

Yes, with changing times, copywriting has undergone various changes. Today the focus is on the distribution of creativity, greater connectivity and consumer empowerment.

Re-work with some unconventional ideas

• One of the vast and much-explored opportunities of digital copywriting today is to follow SEO.
• So, provide the search engines with the clarity of what your content is all about.
• Involve in market research
• Infuse data and analytics
• Inculcate the idea of using psychology
• Be short and different but authoritative and relevant
• Take advantage of Video technology
• A third of World’s entire population is going to get hooked to social media by 2020. Understand how online information is shared via social platforms.
• Understand the influencers

Future of Copywriting is Predictable

The race for an exciting copy will still continue. Today, you have a chance to prove your existence by being SEO and mobile friendly. Tomorrow, there can be another dominating method. Automated content development technologies and automated editors are in the race for future strategies. Such innovations can help in getting a raft of variables; permutations and combinations to one single idea which is slightly not possible with humans given the limitation of time for each project.

Future technological innovations can still have serious ramifications over copywriting. But, there cannot be any hindrance to creativity. With each innovation, copywriting can get stronger. Thinking can get bigger. Harness the innovations and confidently craft your ideas, carpentering words and phrases that suit to this era. Persuade the audience into taking a specific action. You can surely make empathic leaps. Let your creativity evoke emotions.

Original post: Copywriting Then and Now Is Like Chalk and Cheese

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3 Different Ways to Do Keyword Research

One of the most important, highly valued and high return activity in the SEO field, keyword research begins by just entering a word in the search query box. Essential to a website’s success, keyword research can prove to be a boon if implemented correctly and can lead your site to higher ranking success.

In this article, we will be quickly covering 3 different ways to go about doing keyword research. So, let’s get started:

1. The Usual Way of Keyword Research

It’s now extremely easy to find out the right targeted keywords for your website using Mondovo’s Keyword Research Tool . You can retrieve search volumes, suggestions, and generate combinations quickly.

You can narrow down based on the global results or on the basis of countries. In fact, you can even retrieve the search volume for every keyword in a particular city or country.

Once the results are generated, you will see the full list of keywords along with the related terms, Google & Amazon auto suggestions, Facebook, Quora and Twitter search for that particular keyword as well as the latest Google trends. You can even export these keywords in CSV or XLS format.

There’s also a difficulty checker in the tool which can help you gauge the approximate difficulty for a certain keyword. Apart from that, you can also view a breakdown of the strongest and weakest sites competing for that keyword.

And lastly, you can optimize your keywords better through smarter targeting. There are inbuilt user intent parameters – terms that are commercial, e-commerce related, questions, positive or negative in sentiment.

2. Keyword Research by Finding Out Competitor’s Keywords

Another smarter way to approach keyword research is by finding out the keywords your competitors’ are ranking for. This is made easy using Mondovo’s Competitor Keywords.

To get started, you only need to enter the website URL, select exact page or across the domain, select the country and click on Search.

Once the report is generated, you will see the number of organic keywords the site or a certain page is ranking for.

Using the filters available, you can then filter the keywords based on current position, previous position, search volume, CPC and traffic.

You can also see the adwords keywords, if any, along with the ad copies.

Using all this data, you can then optimize your own website, your own content, blog articles etc. to rank for some of the most competitive terms and beat your competitors at their own game.

3. Keyword Research Through Search Volume

We all are familiar with Google Keyword Planner wherein we can get search volume data for a set of keywords. However, the problem lies with Keyword Planner showing the data in ranges wherein as a search marketer, the ideal solution would be to have the exact search volume data.

This problem is resolved by the Bulk Search Volume tool. You can now get to find the exact monthly search volume as well as the CPC cost.

Apart from that, you can also get the exact search volume for keywords for any language and in any country. There’s also the difficulty score that can tell you how easy/difficult it is to target a particular keyword. And lastly, you can also get to know the related keywords for a particular keyword entered by you.

So, if you’re running an advertising campaign or if you’re looking for the right set of terms for your website or for a blog article, using the bulk search volume tool is indeed the right choice for you.

Original post: 3 Different Ways to Do Keyword Research

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How to Increase The Chance your Content Will Rank Well in Google

As website owners, we all want to create quality content that not only is interesting and engaging to our audiences but often, also serves to promote and ideally sell our affiliates products. Your website can be big business and mean big bucks if you know how to use it.

Ok, so now you might be wondering, is there a way that it is possible to stack the odds in your favor when it comes to ranking on Google? Ranking on search engines is important; when was the last time you visited the second page of a search engine query?

Well, the folks over at Content Refined, a content marketing service seem to think so. Is creating content feeling like a shot in the dark? Are you frustrated with wasting time and money on having articles written that just don’t produce results in terms of ranking in search engines? Below, we share some of Content Refined’s tried and tested strategies on how to increase the chance your content will rank well in Google.

1. Targeted and Relevant Keyword Research, Which Creates Interesting and Engaging Article Titles

Content Refined is a start to finish content marketing service. This means that they will do your keyword research, create titles, write your articles and then edit and publish your articles to optimize them for your website.

Content Refined utilizes a keyword research tool call SECockpit to complete keyword research for their clients. The way Content Refined is different when selecting keywords for your article is that they filter keywords to fit specific sets of data. For Content Refined, that metric is a keyword that is searched at least 500 times per month but has less than a 30% competition score.

The fun doesn’t stop there however. Content Refined will also analyze what other sites are ranking for a given keyword. Even if a keyword is statistically right for use on your site, the team looks at what other sites are ranking for the keyword. This way, they ensure that they aren’t pitting their clients against massive, domain authority sites that they will realistically never be able to outrank.

2. Already Strong Writing Enriched Using MarketMuse To Ensure In-Depth Coverage of A Given Topic

Content Refined only uses native English speaking writers to create their articles. This is a good first step to ensure proper flow and grammar for an article. However, Content Refined goes the extra mile to ensure that not only are the articles interesting with good readability but also that they cover topics in depth. The best way to ensure in-depth coverage of a topic? There is a tool called MarketMuse that Content Refined uses. Users can plug an article title into the program and get back a variety of relevant information about the selected keyword. Not only will MarketMuse produce a list of relevant keywords that should be mentioned or touched upon in the article, but it will also yield the current content score of an article along with the average content scores of competing articles and the overall best content score for a selected keyword from the competition. In addition, MarketMuse will supply its customers with a list of competing articles, so that you can scope out the competition.

Data analysis has shown a moderate to strong correlation between a high MarketMuse score and a good ranking in search engine results.

3. A Statistically Driven Standard That All Articles Ideally Meet

Ideally, Content Refined articles meet a specific benchmark in terms of data and their team believes that articles that fit this criterion are likely to rank on search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

For Content Refined, that standard is a competition score under 30% and a MarketMuse score of over 40. In a real life scenario, this should result in a quality, well-rounded and in-depth article that features an interesting topic with a keyword that isn’t dominated by big, established domain authorities. Content Refined has uncovered that articles that meet this metric have between 80-90% chance of ranking on the first page of a search engine. Combine this with the fact that the service also only uses keywords that are searched at least 500 times a month and you have the opportunity to create some really fantastic, relevant and useful content.

The Content Refined process is based in finding out what people are looking for that isn’t necessarily being extensively or properly covered on the web. The method is to create useful content that is backed up by researched data, instead of using what we call the “spray-and-pray” method, which involves peppering your sites with heaps of articles, some of which may interest your audience and much that may not. The problem with the “spray-and-pray” is that you can end up losing readership if you post too much content that is useless or irrelevant to your audience and “spraying-and-praying” can also end up being very expensive.

To conclude, we all want to make money off our websites; that’s why we have them. However, it can be difficult, time consuming and costly to work out the exact metric for your site. If you are tired of creating content that doesn’t provide predictable results, the tips and tricks of the trade mentioned in this article may be able to help you rank on Google with a higher degree of certainty. Content Refined openly shares their process because they believe knowledge is power and that nobody should be deprived of the ability to create an awesome niche website.

If you don’t have the time to manage all these different tools on top of your singular or multiple websites, you can also take advantage of Content Refined’s start-to-finish content creation process by checking out one of the many available packages here: http://ift.tt/2vJJCeg. With a variety of packages available, you are bound to find something that suits your specific needs.

Original post: How to Increase The Chance your Content Will Rank Well in Google

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How to Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post

Google is perhaps the biggest source of traffic for most blogs and websites.If you don’t optimize your blog posts for search engines, then you’re missing out on high quality blog visitors. On the other hand, if you over optimize or wrongly optimize your blog posts, then your blog might get penalized and lose even its existing traffic. If you optimize your blog post the right way, then it will improve the search engine rankings as well as drive more blog traffic.

Here are 7 steps to write an seo-friendly blog post.

1. Pick a topic
The first step is to pick a topic that is relevant and useful to your readers. If people like your blog post they’ll share your content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn and spend more time on your site, without bouncing off quickly. This will send social signals telling search engines that your content is valuable, and rank your blog posts higher.

2. Do keyword research
Once you’ve decided what you want to write about, it’s important to come up with a list of high-traffic keywords that you can target with your blog post. You’ll need to include these keywords at different points of your blog post (described below) when you optimize it.

You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner to get keyword ideas for your topic. Simply type in your blog post topic in Keyword Planner and Google will provide a list of keyword ideas along with their monthly search volume and competition information (low, medium, high).

Pick one high traffic keyword relevant to your topic, as your main target keyword, and 4-5 related long-tail keywords that you’ll include in your post.

3. Write naturally
Before you optimize your blog post, you need to write a great article in the first place. If your content is not good, it won’t rank well, no matter how much you optimize it. So write a blog post naturally, keeping your readers in mind. Will they find it interesting? Will it help your readers? How will they use the information in your post?

This means structuring your content into paragraphs, and using complete sentences.

4. Use headings
Use headings (H1,H2,H3) to break your content into easy-to-understand sections. Headings make it easy for Google to understand the subtopics covered in your blog post and helps improve search engine rankings. Headings also enable readers to quickly scan your post, understand the main points and easily read it.

Generally, the title is displayed in H1 heading, and each subtopic in your post should have its on own sub heading H2. If you need to use H3 sub headings, ensure that they are used after H2.

Use your main target keyword once in your title. Typically, Google shows about 50-60 characters of your Title. So keep your post title within this limit. You can also use your long-tail keywords in some of the sub headings to rank your post for a wide range of keywords and search phrases. However, avoid overusing keywords in headings. Otherwise, you may get penalized for keyword stuffing.

5. Optimize Meta Description
Meta description is the 1-2 lines of text that appears below your blog post title, in search engine results. It helps search engines understand the topic of your blog post, so it’s one of the most factors that affects search rankings.

When you’re adding meta description, you need to provide 1-2 lines of complete and meaningful sentences describing the content of your blog post. Google displays only up to 150 characters of meta description, so ensure that your meta description is within this limit.

Meta description is a great place to include your main target keyword as well as a related long-tail keyword. However, if you try to stuff too many keywords, or use meaningless phrases in it, then Google will simply ignore your description.

Nevertheless, most users look at the title & meta description in search results to decide if they should click the link or not. So ensure that your post title & meta description are not only keyword-rich, but also click worthy.

6. Optimize Images
Images play an important role in SEO – they make your post visually appealing and more likely to be shared. They also make it easier for people to read and understand your post.

Most search engine (including Google) are text-based, and can’t understand images. So you need to add descriptive text, wherever possible, to help search engine understand what your images are about.

When you use an image for your post, ensure that you use descriptive file names. For example, “seo-friendly-blog.jpg” is better than “bsd213.jpg”. If you use multiple images, you can also use long-tail related keywords in their filenames. This will help search engines rank them better.

Similarly, you should also add a keyword-rich ALT tag to your images. ALT tag is basically used to describe your image, and helps search engines understand images better. When you upload your image to WordPress (or other platforms), you’ll see a form with a textbox to enter ALT text. In the above example, you can add something like “how to create seo-friendly blog post” for your image.

7. Add Internal Links
When you write a blog post, ensure that you’re linking to at least 2-3 other articles on your blog. This not only improves SEO score of your blog but boosts the crawlability of those articles.

However, ensure that you’re linking only to relevant articles from your blog. For example, if you’re writing about “how to do SEO” it makes sense to link to posts about “building links” and “doing keyword research”. However, linking to something like “how to install wordpress” is not relevant.

Conclusion
Hopefully, the above tips will help you optimize your blog post to rank better for more keywords and search terms. The trick is to target the right high-traffic keywords, write a super useful & interesting blog post around them, and include those keywords throughout your content. If your blog uses WordPress, then you can use the free Yoast SEO Plugin that allows you to easily optimize your blog post for search engines.

Sreeram Sreenivasan is an entrepreneur & digital marketer who writes for Fedingo Blog about various blogging, marketing & business growth topics.

Original post: How to Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post

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5 Reasons Why You’re Losing Twitter Followers

Twitter is an important resource for promoting a blog or other websites but just like all social media platforms, it’s not a place for endless sales pitches, particularly if you’re seeking to build up organic traffic. Obviously, the more followers you have, the better, but it’s the quality of these followers that really matters. After all, your goal should be to increase the number of engaged followers who pay attention and, preferably, interact, with your tweets. If you find yourself losing engaged followers, it’s probably time to make some drastic changes to your Twitter marketing strategy.
 
#1. You’re Shouting, Not Sharing
 
A major function of Twitter is the retweet, which basically means sharing a tweet from one account on another one. Just like all social networks, Twitter is very much about community-building, and sharing is an important part of that. If all you’re doing is publishing your own tweets, particularly if they’re of a salesy tone, your followers will quickly become disassociated from you.

Twitter marketers who automate their campaigns are at a particularly high risk of being seen as spammers, so it’s always important to retain the human element by sharing and conversing.
 
#2. You’re Using Hashtags Excessively
 
Hashtags have long been a powerful and important function on Twitter to such an extent that other major social networks are also using them. Unfortunately, however, hashtags are often abused by unscrupulous marketers desperately vying for attention by using irrelevant hashtags. It also looks bad and becomes difficult to read if there are loads of hashtags in a single tweet. It is especially important to only use hashtags that are completely relevant to the content of your tweet and to any link you might be sharing.
 
#3. You’re Not Tweeting Enough
 
Twitter is a particularly noisy platform where the average lifespan of a tweet has been found to be around 18 minutes before it gets buried and rarely seen again. As such, it’s important to be regularly active to remain visible, and this is precisely why many marketers automate their tweets. Automation can help a lot, provided you don’t lose your voice to it and, consequently, the human element. Of course, you can also tweet too frequently, but neglecting your profile for weeks or even days can take you right back to square one. After all, many users regularly unfollow inactive accounts.
 
#4. You’re Being Too Salesy
 
This point is closely related to the first one, but it’s extremely important nonetheless, and it’s one of the most common mistakes of all among inexperienced digital marketers. People use Twitter to find interesting content, not to be bombarded with cringeworthy sales-speak like that of a typical estate agent or used-car salesman.

Of course, your goal will be to promote your business, but it’s important to do so in such a way that you have something interesting and/or entertaining to offer. Ideally, you should keep self-promotion down to no more than 10% of your tweets.
 
#5. You’re Not Diversifying Your Content
 
An endless stream of boringly similar tweets is a common sign of a fully automated account of the type that most Twitter users just hate. Diversifying your content will help you reach out to a wider audience, though it is important not to deviate too much from your niche to the extent that you’ll annoy your following.

Most importantly, you should remember to share other people’s content and curate other online content to keep your Twitter feed fresh and full of new perspectives. Oftentimes, people will return the favour by sharing your content. Be sure to share different content formats too, particularly those of the visual kind like infographics.
 
Final Words
 
There are more than 300-million active users on Twitter, and while the figure might not be nearly as close to that of Facebook, it’s important to remember that it’s a very different type of platform. For a start, it’s generally much easier to build up an audience on Twitter without paying for advertising. It’s also easier to stand out, provided you make every effort to share and publish interesting content and reach out to the right people. Building an audience, however, is just one side of the story. Retaining valuable followers, by contrast, requires a consistent and long-term effort.

Vairo is an online entrepreneur and founder of WPWarfare.com. His passion is content marketing, blogging and WordPress in general, which is why he dedicates every spare minute he has to writing, hoping to share an arsenal of practical and useful information with others.

Original post: 5 Reasons Why You’re Losing Twitter Followers

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How Technology is Influencing Online Business

Innovation drives the future, and technology is the main catalyst that fuels rapid evolution. High competition to capture profitable markets have pushed entrepreneurs to invest huge sums in developing technologies that baffle all alien life forms. Creative brains have given birth to complex bots and algorithms that interact itself, track, monitor, and analyse trillions of data, all with a persistent ambition to poke and probe the customer, “all to grab their attention”.

Every commercial institution across the world is on a race to equip and adapt with modern technologies that can influence people. Marketing is one in the strand which needs to be addressed. The complexity of analysing and understanding customers lead to the creation of new marketing tool where customers can gauge prices, compare features, customize, ask for a live demo, etc. Advanced robotics and machine learning algorithms evolved to form networks of the cognitive system that helps entrepreneurs to make informed decisions. Yes, we are looking towards a future that will be super ceded by radical breeds of AI enabled technology.

In this article, we will take a succinct overview of how few technologies will influence your online business. Let’s start small rather delve straight to complex technical jargons.

#1 Hyper personalized websites or eCommerce marketplaces

Fundamentally every business is the same regardless of whether it’s offline or online. The biggest change is noted when people start to leverage the unprecedented opportunity that technology accompanied. In a broader sense, new technological advancements started to manifest itself by simplifying people’s life. This main factor persuaded a bunch of tech savvy minions to migrate to comprehensive displays where they stayed for hours, exchanging information and interacting with other minions they find on the platform. Enlightened with the realisation of this incremental shift, where a high populous permeate from offline to online, it became an obligation for businesses to reflect their values in the online realm.

Seth Godin recited that, Don’t find customers for your products, instead find products for your customers. Great words. Over time, everyone’s taste and preferences changes and your customers are no exceptions. The best example is, consider that you’re a business that caters the needs of infants. Your business model started to proliferate and you started to notice a substantial turnover, all of a sudden, out of bloom you realized that you are not able to make repeated sales. The primary investigation revealed that all the sales were made for infants under one category “kids below 2 years old”. A design flaw on the website created the presumption among customers that the business only caters to one category “baby products – kids below 2 years old”. On the contrary, the child was growing and their needs must be met, forcing the parents to leave your business and look for another one that could cater a wider market.

In the above example, the business entity failed to reflect their business values in totality, limiting them to address only a small segment of the whole market. The best practice for the business would be to use technology to plot the customer needs and create an enticing eCommerce website that showcases their business as a whole. A hyper personalised website that sends a strong message, Hey we are a business specialised in delivering high quality service that caters the entire market, Our business to cater your child’s need from infancy till he grows to a charming toddler. Which beguiles the customer to believe, and drive higher customer satisfaction.

#2 IoT – Continuous coordination and collaboration

Internet of Things, a phrase that echoed in our ears for past couple of years, and still we are not acquainted with. IoT is a network of electronic peripherals that are interlinked to a common network, where they share data and collaborate, to gradually learn individual systems and progress along the experience curve to work as a single unit “a smart system”. The main purpose of IoT will be to present a digital economy that enables smart homes, smart offices, etc.

The importance of IoT in business can be highlighted with a simple example, Consider your online business/ eCommerce store is selling T-shirts. With IoT all devices in your office “Garage” will be able to stay connected and share data with each other with a concordant view to make smart decisions, thereby ensuring a seamless flow of operations. Here the system will work as a single unit, learning the operational flow from one department to another and will cognitively make prudent decisions in-case it finds any flaw in the seamless operation. If the AI recognises that the demand for a particular lenin has gone up, then the system coordinates with the concerned department and will discern the reason behind the increasing demand. Once the reason is analysed with data from the planning /forecasting department the AI will make informed decision to source an order or will notify the reason behind its action.

IoT also plays an important role to present a delightful customer experience. Let’s see how IoT will benefit you as a customer. Consider that one of your friends is having his birthday next week. You getting too indulged in the business forgot your mates birthday. How IoT will benefit you is, it will go through different profiles and connections you have and will intimate you about his birthday. The system will recognise it and will intimate you about your friends birthday and will ping you with suggestions, like what present you friend likes the most, or what he was searching two days back (a bit extreme when comes to privacy breach, Who knows the future), what he was presented last year, etc. Keeping you updated, and offering a plethora of opportunities to strengthen relationship. May be the insights you collect will help you to decide which colour he likes and can present him a T-shirt of the same.

#3 In app marketing the best way your lead gets incentivised

The great news is, In app marketing is an amazing way to keep continuous interaction with your customers. OHhh, forgot to mention the challenge. Stats published on BuildFire.com says that out of 100 apps downloaded 33.3% of them are only open once. Shocking information isn’t it. The main reason is that a majority of them (app’s) become obsolete before they hit the market, and the remaining failed to meet the customer expectation.

Most businesses use the strategy of incentivising in app traffic (usually done with virtual money). A hope to tickle with the curiosity, and expecting that the prospect at one point will convert into paying customers. Yes and No. No, because of your service, regardless of what is not adding value to the user. Then there is a high probability that the user may leave when the incentive gets over.

What when the answer is yes? As a user, he finds value in your business and continues with the service. In most cases, the user finds value with the continuous education and lead nurturing the organization rolls out. So, by the time the incentive gets over he is well aware why he should not send your app to the trash.

Release an app, build an enticing microsite, and drive traffic to the microsite. For eg: your website is selling high end mobile peripherals, in that case, use your app to drive targeted traffic to your micro website. You can always brainstorm and come up with some alluring marketing strategies, to attract interested people/ early adopters to stay tuned and be the first one to buy products on the release date. Frequently send reminders, offers, discounts etc through the app. Make sure the visitor will see value in your business model.

#4 Google semantics for prioritising information based on the context

Semantics have paved way for business intelligence systems, International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that by 2020 the amount of data produced from the point of sale system to sensors will reach 4.4 zettabytes. Which comprises a pile of structured and unstructured data. Data, when analysed, gives indepth knowledge about the relationship each data points have with one another, helping us glean compelling opportunities and obtain business benefits. The application of semantics and meta knowledge in the field of IoT has gained worldwide attention.

The future of business is driven by quality, and quality is comprised of deviants. So, how do we evaluate and quantify the reasonings behind an engagement? As a business how do we evaluate sentimental interactions with our business? How could an aircraft manufacturer like Boeing find the intangible reason behind a purchase? Beyond the huge markdown what motivated the airline to consider them over their rival Airbus. Both businesses provide state of the art cutting edge technologies.

With semantics, the entity will be able to deduce the complexity of analysing individual behaviour and will be able to find the reasoning behind a purchase. Semantics give meaning to the whole data available, scrapping intuitions, giving it a clarity, which helps to make precise informed decisions. The aircraft manufacturer can dig deep into data and analyse which variant of their aeroplanes are more preferred my businesses in that region. Why they preferred a 747 over a 737, Is the airline operating long haul services to busy destinations, Have they mentioned any information about their current load factor, How frequently customers mentioned their experience flying in a 747, How customers respond to the airline’s services, social mentions of the aircraft, etc.

What semantics does is, in its core, it will consider all these factors and will use the available bits of information to canvas clarity. With the internet revolution, even the manufacturer will be able to collect, analyse, and suggest the airline, why a 747 will be much better for their business than any other variants.

#5 Automation – To build strong relationship with prospects

With a rapidly evolving digital world, innovation is one strand that we cannot say no to. Why? COMPETITION, a simple but compelling word that exigence the importance of time, making time as one of the scarcest resource available to business. Even with the realisation that there are only 24 hours a day, every entrepreneur is searching for the extra 10 min, which they believe could make a dramatic influence. With technology and innovation, we come to fathom that we are not just a glob that revolves around a bright red hot ball, we are just one among the millions or billions. We are in a course, too busy running around to find the cosmic source which gives birth to the single celled alien that over time transformed into a fully grown sentient with feelings and emotions.

As time is the scarcest resource, we with our hocus pocus created the wonder “automation”. An effective strategy to stay tuned for day to day operations. Technology wants to reduce the distance between people, offering them common platforms where they can continuously interact and exchange information. But what if, you have customers who need your presence halfway across the globe. What in case you need to respond to time bound customer queries? To the least, How will you show your gratitude to a customer who signed up with you late night? The answer lies in this one sentence, Adapt technology and embrace automation. (Note: automation should not be at the cost of compromising your entities value in recognition to a general message. It needs to be a well addressed and a personalized note, reflecting your business values).

Automation needs to be streamlined to that of an efficient marketing machine. Social channels have become one peculiar stop among millennials. Stats published on BrandWatch.com says that there are 2.3 billion social media users, and 91% retail brand uses two or more social channels. This information itself pinpoint the importance why businesses need to stay connected, social media. Social media is an important channel for businesses to stay alive.

Parting Notes:

Technology has changed the way we administer business and wade through our professional life. Don’t take my word for granted. Look around you. You will be able to plot patterns reflecting a transformation, wondering the penetration of technology into our personal lives. Technology is forcing us to showcase an omnichannel presence, making it more mandatory for businesses to keep up with the radical trends and customer shift (channel hopping). Every business needs to incorporate a synergic approach to welcome technology that can productively reduce the distance between organizational values and customers. Once the values converge with the customer’s belief then a business can claim that technology has been used to deliver a purpose.

Original post: How Technology is Influencing Online Business

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4 Simple Ideas for Great Blog Video Content

Contrary to popular belief you don’t need Hollywood-esque production value to create great video content for your blog. Frankly speaking some of the best blog video content stems from fairly simple ideas that are properly executed to create compelling content.

If you would like to create great blog video content, here are a few simple ideas that should give you a good place to start:

How-to guides and tutorials

Creating a guide or tutorial that shows viewers how to perform a certain task that they may be interested in or helps them to solve a particular problem is inherently useful. As far as informative content goes it is hard to beat a good guide, and if you get a bit creative you could really make it stand out. At the heart of every good guide is a simple set of step-by-step instructions, and once you figure out what those are the only thing you really need to do is decide on the best way to show the audience how to perform each step. Check out a great site called HowToGeek.com for more examples.

Interviews

Although often overlooked, interviews can be a great type of content. This guy built a whole website just with interviews! Bear in mind you don’t have to interview a ‘celebrity’ – anyone who can speak from a position of authority about the topic or has a unique perspective could make for a great interview. If it isn’t possible to record a face-to-face interview with a subject, you could even record footage from a video call instead.

Personal stories

Telling a story related to your blog’s niche can be a powerful way to foster an emotional response – particularly if the story is inspiring, humorous, touching, or something else of that nature. The video itself can either be a simple vlog, or it could incorporate other elements to help you to ‘show’ certain parts of the story.

Product reviews

Reviews have always been a popular form of blog content – video or otherwise. The advantage of recording product reviews as videos is that you can showcase the product better and pinpoint precise areas of interest to the viewer. As an added benefit product reviews are an excellent way to promote products that you feel are useful.

As you can see none of these ideas are particularly complicated, and most can be recorded with a simple video camera or a video recorder. Not only can it record the footage that you need but it also has a built-in editor that will let you edit and improve the videos that you record.

At the end of the day it doesn’t take dazzling special effects or a spectacular cinematic approach to create great blog video content. Initially you may want to experiment with different types of ideas, so that you can get a feel for what the audience on your blog responds to – and based on the ideas listed above you should already be able to come up with some topics worth pursuing.

Original post: 4 Simple Ideas for Great Blog Video Content

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A Novice’s Guide to Understanding the Benefits of SEO for Businesses

I have a small website for my garage business; will SEO be helpful for me?

Will SEO help my e-commerce startup?

I have just outsourced SEO for my website, will I get more leads?

These are some of the questions that cross the minds of newbies going for SEO. To understand how you can benefit from SEO, you’ll have to learn the basics of SEO first & then see how a persisting SEO campaign can boost your business.

So What Is SEO?

It stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the techniques of bringing your website on the front page of various Search Engines e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
These techniques aim at increasing the quality and volume of traffic to your website with the help of organic search engine results.

Traffic Quality

Although you would love to have any type of visitors (except hackers though) to your site, however, if you are running a garage business and the Google is driving traffic for garbage business, will it be of any use? No. The quality of traffic refers to visitors that are relevant to your website offerings and may lead to some fruitful results.

Volume of Traffic

Once you have the right kind of visitors coming from the search engine, the more the traffic, the better it is.

Organic Traffic

Traffic to your website from inorganic means may give a temporary spike in business, but in the long term, only the organic traffic is the way forward as you won’t have to pay for it.

How SEO Benefits Your Business?

Business owners and managers are constantly looking for ways to enhance their businesses. When the traditional ways of doing business are increasingly becoming costly, the digital ways are cheaper and tend to be more efficient as well.

While having a website is the first step in online business, the sustainability and growth come from persistent SEO campaigns. The benefits of such campaigns are realized in the due course of time. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages:

Increased Traffic:

When your website appears in the top position on search engines, it starts to get a lot of clicks, and this shows in the form of increased traffic. With SEO, the site has keywords that are frequently used by the visitors to find information on the internet or making purchases as well.

Enhanced Usability

All SEO efforts are aimed at making it easier for the website crawlers to navigate and index a website, but simultaneously these efforts make the website more user-friendly as well.

The various on-page efforts which add search-friendly keywords to the site also improve the navigation structure of different inner pages as well. If these efforts make it easy for the search engines to rank your site, they also make it easy to find relevant information on the site.

Increased Branding

It is critical for you that your website can be easily recalled by the relevant users while they are looking for information or buying a product related to you. This easy recall is the result of sustained efforts of SEO to rank the website on the first page of the various search engines.

This branding is done by the search engine optimization and is very much needed in any business. Remember how we tend to trust results that pop up in the top? When more and more pages of your website rank high in the search engine results page the better will be the brand building for your site.

More Effective

When it comes to marketing, there are various channels for it. But these different channels have their costs-benefits. From TV ads to posters to direct marketing, all are focused towards promoting businesses. But the effectiveness of these ways varies. When it comes to SEO, it is de facto the most cost-effective marketing method as it directly targets the visitors looking for the products and services.

SEO is the best inbound strategy as it enhances the experiences of the visitors coming to the website seeking goods and services. The traffic coming to the site as a result of your SEO efforts is more qualified than other marketing methods making it more cost effective than the others.

Round The Clock Marketing

One of the biggest benefits of the search engine optimization is that your site opens a 24*7 marketing channel. Your optimized site ranks on the result page not just for a single day but every day and throughout the year and until you want.

Better ROI

With SEO, you can be assured of the results that can be tracked for relevance and ROI. You can track the improvement in rankings, traffic, and conversions. The analytics provides even the granular information about the geography and the profile of the visitors who have visited the site. In the case of the e-commerce sites, you can track the path that the customers have taken to complete the sale. You can even identify the keywords your customers have chosen to reach the desired product or the service offered. If you have no e-commerce site, you can monitor the form fill-outs and the other things to calculate the effectiveness of the SEO campaign.

Higher SERP Means More Leads & More Business

With essential search engine optimization, higher ranking positions result in more productive results. It means more customers coming from the contact forms, more likes for the information provided by you or increase in the followers for your brand. All in all, it results in more business for you through the organic ways.

In The End

To avail the benefits of SEO, you must:

-Have a visitor friendly website that users find easy to navigate
-Have compelling content which is informative and complete.
-Optimize the website for robots and crawlers for improved indexing and navigation.
-Believe in persistence, as SEO brings in long term benefits than short-term fixes.

Original post: A Novice’s Guide to Understanding the Benefits of SEO for Businesses

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How to Unleash Blogging for Better Conversion

Blogging is a free-flowing source of information and people read lots of rich and valuable research. More than three fourths of the digital marketers in the world blog frequently. Content Marketing has become the main source of attracting people to your website and by presenting useful information that help your readers it converts your readers into your subscribers.

Most marketers know that blogs have insane potential to turn your visitors into your customers. But, conversions through blogging thus depends on various other factors other than the content you write.

To convert your blog into a lead magnet there are many components that need to fix for optimizing your blog for better lead generation or conversion.

Create a proper blog structure

First and foremost, you need to create a proper blog structure, which is easy to navigate and provide all the option to subscribe any piece of information. Conversions through blogging depends heavily on your blog structure. The structure of a blog, in turn, is affected by various blog elements like:

Sticky Header: A sticky header will consist of all necessary information about the company services and products, culture, and working methodology. No matter how much you scroll down it will remain with the webpage on the top place. This makes users to find any service related information easily.

Blog Categories: The list of blog categories must be placed right below the header with a subscription on the right side. Giving an easy option for readers to navigate through different category section on your blog will make them to consider the content. That’s how they will subscribe it to get updates on regular basis.

Subscription Option: An easy subscription will always add new contacts to your lead generation sheet. Thus, providing an easy subscription box on the top of your blog post or at the right-side column of your blog homepage is considered most effective. However, you can pull more contacts by showing pop-ups on your blog on different time intervals.

Search Bar: The search bar should be placed just below the category section for the users to look up other pieces of content if they want to.

A blog structure defines the extent of good user experience (UX) and easy navigation and thus must be designed strategically.

Place Call-to-Action (CTA) to boost conversion

A Call-to-Action (CTA) if placed strategically have the potential to turn your blog into a lead generating machine.

Basically, a CTA is the box through which your users can join the readers community and that’s how you’ll be able to collect leads on your blog.

However, the placement of a CTA is based on user behavior. And a personalized CTA works 42% better than an untargeted one since that is created based on user behavior.

By analyzing the different behavior of users on your webpage or blog you can place a CTA in three different styles on your blog, which are as follow:

The Inline CTA is used correctly only if it is placed after ample information that has been given related to the CTA in the blog.

The Sidebar CTA is placed on the side of the blog, which is mainly for gated content subscription or other important events in the industry.

The Bottom CTA is placed after the entire blog post. Once a reader gets finished with post reading then it is a smart way to show him a way to subscribe the information on regular basis.

Isn’t it clever? To analyze different user behavior on your blog you can take help of Hotjar. The heatmap tool will show you different user actions on the different section on your blog. This will help you place CTA strategically on your blog homepage and posts.

Empower engagement on your blog post

Engagement on your blog shows the level of involvement, thus it is always good to interact with your audience. By letting your readers get in touch with your blog post through social network is a popular yet most effective way to engage people with the content. But, to achieve higher engagement level on your blog you need to place social sharing plugins at the right place.

Only 45% of marketers think that their Facebook efforts are effective. This is due to wrong placement of social sharing buttons and social engagement counter. The social sharing buttons can be placed on the sidebar and below the post.

The sidebar social sharing counter should be sticky so that the user gets the opportunity to share the content whenever he feels like without having to search for it.

You can also give an option to share your post on their social networks by placing a social sharing counter at the end of your post.

However, using the Click to Tweet plugin will increase the chances of the article being shared by providing a stat or fact within the post for the user to directly tweet it.

Integrate Optin Forms to collect more leads

Optin forms are the most efficient way to pull readers into your customer’s list.
The optin form needs to be integrated to the blog in a way that it doesn’t pop up before enough information has been provided to the reader.

An optin form must no doubt include the mandatory fields, but it also needs to be as short as possible. The optin form can be integrated in various sections in different styles.

An exit overlay pop up comes up when the user shows an intent to quit the blog page. The time intent pop up turns up after the user has spent certain amount of time on the blog page. The scroll intent CTA pops up after a certain extent of scrolling has been done by the reader. The sticky header and footer CTA pops up are placed in the header and footer respectively.

Optimize the loading speed of your blog

The content and the design of an entire blog page will go down the drain if the blog page doesn’t load fast. More than 40% of people abandon a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load thus, a webpage must load within or less than 3 seconds.
Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to optimize webpages for mobile devices with quick loading speed. Google AMP has been introduced keeping both speed and mobile first approach in mind. Integrating Google AMP to your website will not only push your page up the SERP but will also make sure than it comes up in a carousel, on top, that only accommodates AMP pages.

Wrapping up

To create a conversion oriented blog, you must fix your blog with above mentioned inbound marketing tips.

These elements and tips must be used keeping your audience in mind. The blog structure, the placement of CTAs, optin forms and social sharing buttons play a huge role in giving the user a good experience on your blog page which in turns boosts ROI easily.

Original post: How to Unleash Blogging for Better Conversion

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