Infographic: 5 Growth Hacks You Should Know

Wikipedia defines “growth hacking” as “a marketing technique developed by technology startups which use creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure.”

This technique has been gaining a lot of attention lately, because it works! If you want to grow your audience and make your site more popular, you should definitely consider growth hacking!

To get you started, check out the infographic below created by Ruan Fourie. It contains 5 growth hacks for blogs.

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24 Clever Ways To Get Backlinks To Your Blog

Blogging is becoming increasingly popular as a hobby, as well as, as a source of earning. Either you make a blog for earning purposes, or as a hobby, in both of the cases, it is important to get traffic. One of the most popular ways to get traffic is via backlinks. These are the links on other blogs, websites and forums which redirect to your blog. Here we will discuss some of the methods which you can use to get quality backlinks to your blog.

HERE ARE SOME WAYS FOR THE HARD-WORKING BLOGGER

1. Build up Great Content

Whatever you may do, you can never deny the importance of quality content. Try to write the best content with accurate information, facts and figures from the most reliable sources. People are attracted by content if they like the content, they will share your link and refer people to your blog, earning you some quality backlinks. Make sure the content is genuine and is not updated. People love the most recent content. To know how to write a popular post, read this guide here.

2. Get a “Link To Us” page

On popular websites, there is a feature of linking to the blogs of the same niche. If you are doing great work in your field, you can get a link to us page on a popular website. You can get such pages by reviewing some of their products or featuring their products in your posts. Such pages generally are good sources of backlinks.

3. Get in the Eyes of People By Networking

Post actively on various forums and cite your own blog as a reference. People use such forums as a source of infotainment. If you post sensibly using accurate content, this can get you quality backlink with traffic of the related niche.

4. Social Media

Social media is the best backlink platform of this age. Use the social media like Facebook, Twitter, PinTrest, Google+ and Youtube to get backlinks. Create a Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitter Profile even before you start blogging. These are the chief sources of backlinks in the starts. Try to make these popular by getting as much likes as possible. Create captivating social media posts and link them to your blog. Present the posts in such a way that people are compelled to click on your link out of curiosity. You can use captivating pictures or catchy lines for that but remember never to disappoint the user.

5. Reveal Your Achievements

If you have achieved anything important in the field, share it with people on various forums. You can use the social, print and electronic media for it. People of this age follow facts and figures. Give them some facts about yourself to follow. When people come to know about your achievements in the Niche, they will follow your link.

6. Guest Blog

Look for the websites in your Niche which feature guest blogging. Go to them and write an attracting blog on your Niche. Once you have done that, link the blog to your own blog as the reference site. Guest blogs are one of the easiest and the most reliable ways of backlinks. This can serve as a good backlink too.

7. Find Unlinked Mentions

Find the websites which have mentioned you and not linked to you. Once you find such websites, email them thanking for mentioning you and ask them to link the mention to your blog. There are various tools on the web which can trace out the unlinked mentions of your blog on the web. This can be particularly useful if you are mentioned by a notable website.

8. Use Yahoo Answers

Many people use Yahoo Answers to get the answers of everyday problems. Answer the questions on Yahoo answers and mention your own blog as the reference site. If you do not know the answer, do research on the topic and then answer it but be authentic on the topic otherwise you will have a bad impression on the people and they may not like to visit your blog again Remember! If you satisfy a visitor, they come again otherwise, they do not.

9. Review Your Blog on Blog Review Forums

Blog review forums are the forums to review the blogs in order to make it easy for the new visitors to see which blog is a better one. Find some active blog review forums and post reviews to your blog on them. People often refer to such forums to discover some good quality bogs. You can get a lot of traffic from them. Do not forget to link them back to your blog. Again! Be honest.

10. Write Controversial Blog and Post your Link in a Forum

Controversial topics are fun and useful. They attract the supporters of both points of view. Write about the controversial topics but try not to be too partial about one of them as you may find yourself in trouble. Also if you are too biased towards one issue, the supporters of the adverse cause will start to dislike your page and never come to it again. Link these blog posts to your social media platforms and also on the forums related to your niche.

11. Compare the top people of the Niche

People are always interested in the top people of a niche. Write articles and posts related to them. For example if your niche is cricket, compare Sean Watson and Brian Lara or if you are writing on cars compare Brain O’ corners driving with that of Dom. But never give a final verdict. Leave it up to the reader. Giving a verdict may spoil your reputation if you are not right. People are interested in such things and share them with their friends on various forums. Such posts will serve as a natural backlink.

12. Get Subscriptions

Prompt people to subscribe to your newsletter when they come to your site. If they do, email them daily or weekly headlights with links to your blog for details. Depending on the way you have designed the emails and the time you send them to the subscribors, you can get a number of visits from the emailed backlinks. This can be a helpful way of getting quality backlinks.

13. Use .gov and .edu

You cannot really use them. You want to be an educational institute or a government agency to do that. You can use them in a different way. Link to them. Request them to link to your site. You can do so by sending them an email describing your services related to the educational field or chrity works. Google greatly regards such referrals.

14. Create a Wikipedia Page related to your Niche

Wikipedia is written by users like us. Make a Wikipedia page related to your niche. Provide some information on it and mention your own blog in the references. Even if there are pages about everything related to you, edit them and add your links in the references. People regard Wikipedia and the mentions on Wikipedia as an authentic source.

15. Write Posts like 10 ways to…

People are attracted to such posts as 10 ways to clean a car blah blah blah blah. You can also use lines like 10 greatest mysteries, 10 creepiest stories depending on your niche and what may attract the target group. Such posts, even if they are not much authentic, get shared on the social media very often and are a good backlink source.

16. Troll People

Trolls are awesome. Publish an article like “Samsung Bought Apple” This is absolutely wrong but such posts get shared too much. Please remember disclosing within the same post that this is a troll but in such a way that no one can tell that in the first sight. If you fail this, you can be sued by Apple or Samsung or both of them none of which will be a great idea.

17. Use Graphical Content

A small neat diagram is worth 10,000 words. It is a Chinese saying and is considerably true. Graphics attract people much more than the written content. Try to incorporate appropriate and related graphics in the content. It can be videos, animations, pictures and other things like them. People share them on various forums giving you backlinks.

18. Review latest products in your Niche

People are generally interested in the latest products in the field. If you are running a blog on cars, for instance, post a review for the latest Audi and refer to your site for all the information about cars. It does not matter if you have driven the Audi or not. You can read the reviews from various sites and develop an understanding on what the car will be like. In this way people interested in cars will automatically come to your blog.

19. Create a News Section

News is always a matter of interest for many people. Create a section with news to attract the visitors looking for the latest news on the niche. Try to update this section very often. Updated news gets shared on the social media readily and are a source of backlinks to your blog.

20. Use the Newspapers and Magazines

Yes you can use them. They often feature experts of various fields. You can contact the editor to be featured as the expert of your niche. (If you have a good enough blog they will agree readily). In your interview, you can mention your blog as the source of authentic information on the subject. There are many people in the world still taking newspaper as the best source of information. They will definitely visit the blog you mentioned to find out more on the subject.

21. Broken Link Building

Visit the websites of your Niche and look for broken links on them. Once you have found one, you can ask the webmaster to include the link of an article of your own blog. In this way the traffic from that site to that article will come to the same article on your site. The webmasters are also happy to agree to you because he is suffering the loss of traffic due to the broken links. So providing him the related link will be good for him too.

22. Photo Attribution

Google has a service of searching with photos. A photo can be uploaded and searched. If you are running a blog having a large number of photos, you can attribute the photos to your blog and people interested in them will come to you to find out what the photos are about. This is useful for people who are running blogs containing the photos mostly they have captured themselves.

23. Get Translated

This is important to make yourself more popular. Translating to your local language and that of some nearby areas can be effective as everyone cannot understand all the posts in English. Once you translate a post, you can post it like Read in Spanish “Audi A8 E-tron”. This will now attract the people who cannot read anything other than Spanish. If you are running a blog or website on a very large scale like the global scale, consider translating it to French Chinese and Spanish. Everyone does not understand English.

24. Compete With the competitor

This is a very good trick. If you are out of ideas of getting backlinks, you can use this and it works almost all of the times. Simply google out your competitor and see where is he listed. You can then use the same ways to backlink your own page. With this particular method, you will not only have more backlinks but will also be able to be a step ahead of your competitor by posting you link where he has. We believe that you are better than them. And if not yet, you will be because you’ve come here.

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How To Win With Rev Share Programs

How To Win With Rev Share Programs

How to Create a Powerful Event Kick-Off Video

You’ve built up the hype. Now you have to live up to it.

You’re holding a major event for your key audiences. It’ll be full of thought leadership, engaging speakers, networking, excitement, and more, more, more. You’ve marketed the event well, and put a lot of bottoms in a lot of seats. But now, how do you start off the event? How do you make your audience glad they came, and happy they shelled out the ticket price?

With video, of course. But what should a kick-off event video be like? What should you avoid? How is it different from creating exciting pre-event videos? Well, here are a few things to consider.

What is the message you want to portray?

Video is all about telling a story that your audience can see, hear, and almost touch—it’s so real, it’s like they’re inside the video. It’s an incredibly powerful medium for sharing a message. So, it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: you must think carefully about the message you want to share with your audience. Who are they? What do they care about? Why did they come to this event? What will make them get off their phones or stop talking to their neighbours long enough to watch a kick-off video? And what impression would you like to leave them with once the video is over?

That video montage of past years’ attendees dancing at event parties and smiling for “candid” shots? Nope.

Don’t get me wrong: a video montage of past footage set to upbeat music has its time and place. It’s great for pre-event hype. It shows all the fun people can have at your event. But here’s the thing: your attendees are already at your event. Now is the time to slow down the party train, and begin to create that powerful message, that lasting story of your event. Your attendees are ready to listen, learn, and be amazed about all the things they can take action on when the event is over and they’re back to work. So aim to inspire them and kick their minds into high gear.

Did you know 100% of event attendees attend events?

Okay, so you don’t want to go overboard with the fluffy high-energy video clips that lack real “meat”. But try to stay away from the other end of the spectrum, as well. Would you be inspired to get cracking on learning everything you could at an event if it was kicked off with a bunch of facts or statistics? A kick-off event video doesn’t need to be straight-laced, plying audiences with a bunch of figures, or start off with a serious talking head getting straight down to business. The sessions will be plenty informative enough, so let your event kick-off video have a thrilling and encouraging tone.

Show, don’t sell.

Finally, remember the goal of your event. Is it thought leadership? Is it announcing the newest corporate direction or product line? Whatever it is, attendees probably don’t want to feel like they paid just to be sold to. They want to learn and discover what will make their own lives easier and better. Show them what you have to offer them, and give them every opportunity to make the most of the event without feeling like they’re being chased down and pressured to buy whatever your company is selling.

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Now, what is the experience of that message?

A message and a script is only part of making a video, obviously. What about the rest of it? The branding, the music, the colors…while some techniques may be similar as when you’re making any other video, it’s useful to keep these things in mind:

Is the video representative of the event or company brand?

Part of the power of a video is the branding behind it. Your brand offers a unified experience; your kick-off event video should have similar colors, tone, and style to the rest of your event and your pre-event marketing materials. Consider this pre-event video and kick-off video, both created for Space Camp, the video marketing summit in 2015.

Pre-event video:

Event Kick-off video:

They offer a similar storyline or theme (you want each video to offer something unique, but still feel relevant to what you will be offering at the event). They have a similar tone and style—one continues the inspirational feeling of the other, and their “look and feel” is consistent. They feel like they belong to the same event experience, which only helps to strengthen that experience.

Attendees don’t just experience a video. They affect the experience.

The experience that a viewer would have watching your video alone at their desk with headphones would be very different from watching your video at the event. When will the video play during the event? Will it be the “introduction” to the event, before even the host or speaker appears on stage?

At Space Camp, the kick-off video welcomed attendees into the event. There were no speakers on stage to announce the video. It was important that the experience of it was powerful enough to attract the whole audience’s attention. So what did we do? Pre-roll footage and music was used to attract attention; when attendees walked into the space and took their seats, they were greeted with visually appealing space images which attracted their attention to the giant screen. Then, a voiceover started, saying “Incoming message!”, followed by the video. Unlike the pre-event video, which used only music and text on screen, it was key to use a voiceover for the event kick-off video to attract and hold viewers’ attention in a loud and bustling place. The powerful message and the way it was displayed to the crowd was the perfect opener to the event and a great way to introduce Michael Litt, Vidyard’s CEO to the stage.

The opening of the video isn’t the only thing you need to think about when you’re on location. Keep in mind how a large audience will experience the video together. For example, if your script is humorous, you need to build in time to allow the audience to laugh, which will be louder and last longer than one viewer watching alone. When you cut scenes or change shots, consider the experience you want your whole audience to have.

Location is everything.

You may also notice the size of the Space Camp event kick-off video compared to the pre-event video. Not only the number of people, but the physical attributes of your event location must be considered when you’re creating your kick-off masterpiece.

For example, We knew the screen at the Space Camp location was quite long, so the video had to be created accordingly, with everything happening in certain sections of the screen so that no matter where attendees were sitting, everyone could enjoy the video equally. Even sound can be experienced differently when you’re in the event space; it needs to be adjusted properly so it is at a consistent level throughout playback—then you won’t cause speakers to boom or rattle, and attendees won’t wish they could take out their headphones!

Want to learn more about how to use video to make your events awesome? We’re talking selling out all the tickets, tracking the impact of the event, and even finding new business? Well, here’s a webinar for you!

The post How to Create a Powerful Event Kick-Off Video appeared first on Vidyard.

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Wild Animals Inventing Flying Umbrellas? Yep, Slack’s New Video is Whack

The other day, Slack’s latest and (dare I say?) most incredible video came to my attention. There are no words … just check it out:

This was actually a TV spot and it is just so … out there! I mean, really, before we dig into the meat of this video, can we just pause for a moment and consider how off-the-wall this concept is? I just … it’s just … ah, amazing! I feel like half the reason I kept watching was just because it was so unusual! Slack definitely got me for the full duration of the video! Oh, and they also produced a blooper reel – which is just hilarious, since there obviously wasn’t a blooper reel to begin with (because, you know, those animals weren’t actually filmed in real life … or real at all, for that matter). We’ll get to the bloopers in a bit.

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For now, let’s take a look at what we can all learn from Slack’s stroke of brilliance.

Show the Product, Naturally

We all have a need to create a video that explains what our product is and what the main value prop is. Slack’s out-of-the-box thinking can teach us two things about doing this in our own videos:

1. They showed us (instead of telling us) why their product was so great in the form of a story, from start to finish. Everyone was getting covered in rain on a rainy day and even those who did use umbrellas, struggled. There’s your pain point. Your conflict. Then you see the whole team work together to solve the problem – from concept to prototype to production to reality.
2. They incorporated their product into the natural environment. In other words, there were very few shots of a mouse moving along a desktop screen. Which makes sense, because very few people want to see that – at least at the early stage of the buying process that this video is appealing to. Slack added messages into the general office scene which makes the video more interesting to watch and also alludes to the fact that Slack’s product really does fit seamlessly into your life … or an owl’s life anyway!

    

Build out Strong, Supporting Assets

Slack stretched beyond their TV spot to incorporate a supporting campaign. The video was accompanied by a landing page, which was smartly referred to in the final CTA of the video: http://ift.tt/1Pov8Tj. What I love about their landing page is that it is really campaign-focused, even down to the imagery throughout. You see Slack messages from Geoff the lion and Alan the prawn. What’s also great about this landing page is that, while being customized to this specific campaign, it still stays very true to Slack’s messaging overall. Their tagline always stays close to something about amazing teams or teams doing amazing things. If you go to their home page (one of four or five versions of it!), you’ll likely read that Slack is a messaging app for teams … of some sort.

And this landing page and campaign was no different: Slack is for amazing teams. Plus, as another extension of this campaign that the audience can stay engaged with, Slack even produced that blooper reel I mentioned earlier. And man – do content-hungry internet goers LOVE blooper reels!

I don’t know what it is about blooper reels, do we just love seeing other people (or ahem, animals) screw up? Whatever the reason, this is almost always a good addition to a video campaign. It’s a real, engagement-boosting initiative in any campaign, that’s for sure.

Infuse Brand Colors into Video

Speaking of branding with consistent taglines, did you notice how frequently the scenes of this video incorporated Slack’s brand colors? Let me remind you. Here’s the Slack’s logo:

And here is the animals’ office:

Or… here’s the Slack logo:

And here are the flying umbrellas:

This color infusion is a super subtle branding strategy that helps Slack tell the same story and convey the same feelings across multiple assets. It helps with brand consistency. Here, it’s not overbearing and it’s certainly not in every scene, but it was definitely a conscious effort (which, by the way, is a lot easier to add in when it’s an animated film!).

Make the Point Clearer with a Metaphor

I’ve talked about the value of metaphorical concepts in video before, like when we took a deep dive into the video for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ lost and found puppy. And the concept has proven true in this video, too. What do I mean by metaphor in video? Well let’s just say that there aren’t actually teams of animals using Slack.

Not only does this metaphorical representation make the video more interesting to watch (than, say, a bunch of humans building an innovative product together – snore), but it also actually helps Slack prove their point and drive it further home: any kind of team can benefit from Slack’s collaboration app. Yes, even animals.

Be Aspirational

No, I’m not suggesting that we all want to be a beatboxing prawn or a world-traveling beaver (and no, I don’t think he’s Canadian), but we do aspire to be innovative. And you don’t get much more innovative than a flying umbrella. What does your audience crave? How can you help them get closer to who they aspire to be? This is what you should be representing in your videos.

And in Slack’s case, the voiceover at the end really seals the deal when he says “all kinds of people and all kinds of teams use Slack to do amazing things”. It was at this point that I caught myself mentally ‘hoorahing’: “Yeah! I want to do amazing things!”. You, too? Maybe it was just me.

A Word of Caution

Okay, I do have to come down from my high for just a second. A real shame, I know.

I want to warn you, that while this concept was just crazy (amazingly crazy, but still crazy), it works for Slack because their product is relatively simple to understand. Just make sure you don’t come up with a concept so abstract that no one has a clue what’s going on or what the heck you do.

Now, back to it … how much did you love that video?!

The post Wild Animals Inventing Flying Umbrellas? Yep, Slack’s New Video is Whack appeared first on Vidyard.

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Get the Hype WordPress Theme for Free!

WordPress is a wonderful content management system. I have been using it for 10 years more or less, and I have built all sorts of websites using it, from blogs to business sites and online apps.

That being said, getting an ecommerce site running out of WordPress is not so simple. You have two main options to make your life easier: you can either use a plugin, but those tend to be complex, or use a theme that is already optmized for some ecommerce plataform.

One of the best ecommerce platforms around is Shopify, and if you want to use that I have good news for you: the guys from Themezilla are giving away one of their premium themes which integrates directly with Shopify using their new ‘Zillacommerce’ feature.

Starting today (February 10th) and for one month, you’ll be able to download the theme free of charge.

Using the Hype theme you’ll be able to start selling online easily. Here are some of the features:

– Manage as many products as you want
– Offer a simple checkout for your customers
– Track sales and other numbers
– Integrate with marketing tools and shopping carts
– Keep all your WordPress website functionality

You can get all the details, view a demo and download the theme here. Enjoy!

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