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The #1 Reason Paid Ads (On Search, Social, and Display) Fail - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Pouring money into a paid ad campaign that's destined to fail isn't a sound growth strategy. Time and again, companies breaking into online ads don't see success due to the same issue: they aren't known to their audiences. There's no trust, no recognition, and so the cost per click remains high and rising.

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies the cycle many brands get trapped in and outlines a solution to make those paid ad campaigns worth the dollars you put behind them.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about the number one reason so many paid ad campaigns, especially from new companies and companies with new products or new ventures that they're going into, new markets and audiences they're addressing, fail. They just fall apart. I see this scenario play out so many times, especially in the startup and entrepreneurial world but, to be honest, across the marketing landscape.

Here's how it usually goes. You've got your CEO or your CMO or your business owner and they're like, "Hey, we have this great new product. Let's spread the word." So they talk to a marketer. It could be a contractor. It could be an agency. It could be someone in-house.

The marketer is like, "Okay, yeah, I'll buy some ads online, help us get the word out there and get us some traffic and conversions."

Then a few months later, you basically get this. "How's that paid ad campaign going?" "Well, not so good. I have bad news."

The cycle

Almost always, this is the result of a cycle that looks like this. You have a new company's campaign. The campaign is to sell something or get exposure for something, to try and drive visits back to a web page or a website, several pages on the site and then get conversions out of it. So you buy Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe LinkedIn and Twitter. You probably use the Google Display Network. You're probably using AdWords. All of these sources are trying to drive traffic to your web page and then get a conversion that turns into money.

Now, what happens is that these get a high cost per click. They start out with a high cost per click because it's a new campaign. So none of these platforms have experience with your campaign or your company. So you're naturally going to get a higher-than-normal cost per click until you prove to them that you get high engagement, at which point they bring the cost per click down. But instead of proving to them you get high engagement, you end up getting low engagement, low click-through rate, low conversion rate. People don't make it here. They don't make it there. Why is that?

Why does this happen?

Well, before we address that, let's talk about what happens here. When these are low, when you have a low engagement rate on the platform itself, when no one engages with your Facebook ads, no one engages with your Instagram ads, when no one clicks on your AdWords ad, when no one clicks on your display ads, the cost to show to more people goes up, and, as a result, these campaigns are much harder to make profitable and they're shown to far fewer people.

So your exposure to the audience you want to reach is smaller and the cost to reach each next person and to drive each next action goes up. This, fundamentally, is because...

The audience that you're trying to reach hasn't heard of you before. They don't know who you are.

They don't know, trust, or like you or your company product, they don't click. They don't click. They don't buy. They don't share. They don't like.

They don't do all the engagement things that would drive this high cost per click down, and, because of that, your campaigns suffer and struggle.

I see so many marketers who think like this, who say yes to new company campaigns that start with an advertising-first approach. I want to be clear, there are some exceptions to the rule. I have seen some brand new companies that fit a certain mold do very well with Instagram advertising for certain types of products that appeal to that audience and don't need a previously existing brand association. I've seen some players in the Google AdWords market do okay with this, some local businesses, some folks in areas where people don't expect to have knowledge and awareness of a brand already in the space where they're trying to discover them.

So it's not the case always that this fails, but very often, often enough that I'm calling this the number one reason I see paid ads fail.

The solution

There's only one solution and it's not pretty. The solution is...

You have to get known to your audience before you pour money into advertising.

Meaning you need to invest in organic channels — content or SEO or press and PR or sponsorships or events, what have you, anything that can get your brand name and the names of your product out there.

Brand advertising, in fact, can work for this. So television brand advertising, folks have noticed that TV brand advertising often drives the cost per click down and drives engagement and click-through rates up, because people have heard of you and they know who you are. Magazine and offline advertising works like this. Sometimes even display advertising can work this way.

The second option is to...

Advertise primarily or exclusively to an audience that already has experience with you.

The way you can do this is through systems like Google's retargeting and remarketing platforms. You can do the same thing with Facebook, through custom audiences of email addresses that you upload, same thing with Instagram, same thing with Twitter. You can target people who specifically only follow the accounts that you already own and control. Through these, you can get better engagement, better click-through rate, better conversion rate and drive down that cost per click and reach a broader audience.

But if you don't do these things first, a lot of times these types of investments fall flat on their face, and a lot of marketers, to be honest, and agencies and consultants lose their jobs as a result. I don't want that to happen to you. So invest in these first or find the niches where advertising can work for a first-time product. You're going to be a lot happier.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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13 Quick Tricks to Drive Traffic to Your Blog in Minutes

It happens to the best of bloggers.

You produce stellar content that’s helpful and easy to read.

You even publish a blog post a week – or more – to prove you’re serious about blogging.

You genuinely care about your audience.

But sometimes, despite doing everything by the book, the traffic’s a dud.

That’s when the questions start – am I good enough to be doing this? Heck, does blogging even work as a legitimate business model? Am I wasting my time?

If that’s you, let me clear the air by quoting Jon Morrow, “Each and every one of us decides who we are. No, you may not be ready to be a popular blogger now, but you can become ready.”

Blogging works. We’ve seen a lot of proof around us for that. The problem is not blogging; it is doing things that don’t yield trust or traffic to your blog.

You see, a decade ago you could crank out a 300-word piece and get more content published, left, right and center. In those days, just having something published meant you could attract huge traffic. Because not many were doing it.

Gradually, the world caught up and more people started putting out better content. Longer, more in depth, more useful content. Bloggers started calling it “epic posts”.

Today, most of the world has caught up with “epic”. It’s no longer a differential point. It’s a given.

The secret to attracting more traffic is doing what others are not doing, or unwilling to do yet.

And what if I told you it could be done in under 30 minutes?

To make it easier for you, I have compiled a list of 13 quick tricks to drive traffic to your blog in minutes:

1. Add drama to your work

Spice things up by telling a story or starting out with a metaphor. Kevin Duncan of Be a Better Blogger uses this technique like no other. His posts open with engaging anecdotes that establish a connection with his readers right at the beginning.

The result? A hooked reader.

2. Pick a topic that attracts traffic

Needless to say, if your topic is dull, you are not going to attract much traffic any time soon. Start with Google Trends, BuzzSumo and Feedly to research what’s in demand. I suggest the “three-circle strategy” to pick a topic/niche when you’re starting out.

Here’s how it works:

Draw three circles on a piece of paper. In the first circle, write down all areas you’re knowledgeable about. In the second, write what interests you. And in the third circle, pick topics from the above two circles that are in demand.

Your sweet spot is where the three intersect.

3. Analyze your headlines before hitting “publish”

Use a headline analyzer like CoSchedule. Once you are done writing the post, copy and paste your draft headline into the free tool. It’s super-quick and effective.

Once you punch in a headline, the tool assigns it a “Headline Score”. It also gives your headline a grade based on the overall structure, grammar and readability. The report dissects your headline into “common words”, “uncommon words”, “emotional words” and “power words”. It tells you your headline “type” (this post is a “list type”) and does a length analysis. Lastly, you get some cool tips to improve your headline, all for free and in under a few minutes.

Here’s an example:

4. Go visual

Why? Because the human brain craves visuals. The last time I checked, humans had a shorter attention span (8 seconds) than that of a goldfish (9 seconds). The proof lies in the wildly popular visual platforms such as Facebook Timeline, Instagram and Pinterest.

We’re drowning in words and don’t have enough time to read every single blog post out there. If visuals, such as memes, videos, infographics, comics etc, can help you retain attention, why not give them a try?

Visme, Canva and Vine are just a few tools to get started in under minutes. For example, using templates in Visme, you can create stellar infographics for free within minutes.

5. Improve your blog’s loading time

As you probably know, Google considers loading time as an important factor in ranking websites. Research shows that 47% of readers now expect a page to load in 2 seconds.

Let’s start with the low lying fruit – the first thing you want to do is reduce the number of plugins you use. Plugins make your blog sluggish, so unless absolutely necessary, get rid of extra add-ons. Replace these with an all-in-one plugin, such as Jetpack for a more efficient loading time.

Compress images using Smush.it or use BJ Lazy Load for an image to load conditionally when the reader scrolls to the bottom of the page. An alternative is to use a CDN or a Content Delivery Network which is a network of webservers such as Incapsula.

6. Make social sharing easy

A recent study found that using social sharing buttons on posts leads to 7 times more mentions. Start with writing magnetic headlines that are short and brief (for platforms such as Twitter so there’s room for shortened URLs). Include hashtags and usernames when appropriate.

7. Join HARO and answer relevant queries

HARO or Help a Reporter is a “free publicity” service dedicated to bringing reporters and qualified sources together. As a blogger, you can be a story lead or an expert source for a reporter query. Signing up is free and it takes less than 10 minutes to briefly answer a HARO query, which can result in high-quality inbound links to your blog.

8. Convert a visitor into a lead

Add a solid call-to-action at the end of your posts that urges them to either read another of your posts, subscribe to your list, click a link to a landing page – do something.

Here’s an example:

Source: Forbes.com.

Use TrenDemon to add customizable calls-to-action based on visitors’ realtime engagement. It’s made up of several algorithms that analyze and identifies the pages that bring in most traffic and engagement, and helps optimize your marketing ROI.

A landing page is a dedicated page to convert a reader into a subscriber by offering a “freebie” or a “lead magnet”. A great alternative is GetResponse’s Landing Page Maker.

Short on budget? You can try LaunchEffect, a free launch theme, and start collecting leads even before you’ve launched a blog.

Of course, this post is about attracting traffic, so how does collecting leads help? It does — because once you have a thriving list you can always direct them to your blog through a series of well-written autoresponders and emails.

9. Come up with the optimum number of posts, then stick to it

What’s the optimum number? Research shows that the more a company blogged per month, the more traffic it attracted.

On the flip side, how much is too much? One of the easiest ways to figure it out is to watch your subscriber activity closely. Are you getting many unsubscribe requests because of “too much posting” like this blogger? His quick case study will help you to find your minimum viable posting.

10. Start a forum on your website

An active forum will not only serve as a useful community to your readers but also attract new traffic with the help of natural longtail keywords that go into it.

To do a quick search of active and popular forums in your niche, just search for your keyword + forum. Then, all you have to do is create a free account on the best forum(s) and use your brand name as a nickname. You can start contributing as well as studying these forums before you launch your own.

Starting your own forum is easy. For WordPress, you can install the free bbPress plugin. Here is a tutorial to set up bbPress in under minutes.

11. Connect with bloggers who send you traffic

Monitor Backlinks is a neat tool for SEO and web marketers. It notifies you every time you gain or lose a backlink; every time your competitor gains a high-value backlink and compares ranking with your competitors.

12. Respond to your blog comments thoughtfully

According to Neil Patel, responding to comments increases your traffic. The more you respond, the more number of words accumulate on the page. This is ideal from an SEO-perspective. Not only that, repeat traffic also builds over time because they look forward to new posts and even become subscribers to keep updated.

You can also control your traffic by adding a link in the comment URL box and directing them where you want. Neil increased visits to his “About” page by 5,137 visits a month by simply using this feature in the comment box.

Here is a useful guide to help you deal with different types of comments you get on the blog.

13. Build up your professional brand on Quora

It’s a great place to answer questions and build a legitimate following. You get immediate exposure to 1.5 million monthly visitors, and add links to your blog posts and articles as resources in your answers.

If you know everything about your topic, answering a question shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes. You want to follow all related topics too, just in case. You can also join in relevant conversations and educate your prospects better about your service/product (of course, no spamming).

Here’s a teaser for the topic Content Marketing (Fair warning: It can be addictive!):

The bottom line

I want to challenge you to try these techniques. Of course, not all of them will work for you so pick and choose a handful and run with it.

Gaining new traffic sounds like a lot of work, but it’s worth every minute. And with the above tips, you can boost traffic in 30 minutes or less. You may not feel it happen immediately, but stay consistent. You’ll see the results.

Eventually, the more you do these techniques, the more trust you will build. Writing epic posts is no longer enough – you want the right audience to read them too.

Guest Author: Pooja Lohana is an Online Business Coach + Writer & Editor. She helps entrepreneurs shine their blog and copy, and simplifies online marketing so they can make more sales and live the Un-9-5 life. Check out her step-by-step course on breaking into freelance writing.

The post 13 Quick Tricks to Drive Traffic to Your Blog in Minutes appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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6 Reasons Why You Should Consider Podcasting as a Content Marketing Channel in 2018

Podcasting has numerous benefits, however, producing an ongoing podcast is a hard nut to crack. It takes more effort than simply clicking ‘Record’ on your smartphone and then uploading it online.

According to a recent Edison Research report, around 98 million US citizens are listening to podcasts annually, with more than 50 million individuals listening to them on a monthly basis. Indeed, the present podcasting explosion has been presaged as the ideal age of podcasts.

Podcasting involves a tremendous amount of research, planning, acquiring technical skills, managing social media networks and engaging your target audience. Once a podcast is started, the only thing that is going to stay on top of your mind will be: what should the next episode be about?

For companies, podcasting can be a compelling opportunity to interact with your clientele, become noticeable among your competitors, and turn into an industry frontrunner and professional. However, you need to be very accurate about time management.

While only 3% of marketers are currently using podcasting for marketing purposes, around 32% actively wish to learn how to use it, and 23% intend to escalate their podcasting efforts.

Image Source: WebpageFX

Podcasting: Your shortcut to success

Did you know, MailChimp became a popular brand name overnight by simply running a 20-second ad at the start of every episode of the famous podcast, Serial?

This is just one illustration of a business taking advantage of podcasting, and it inspired several other companies to start producing their own podcasts.

Here’s why you should consider podcasting as a content marketing channel in 2018:

1. Practicing the art of subtle branding

Let’s face it: over-branding can actually kill your brand.

Around 57% of customers report that they avoid brands that bombard them with advertisements and other marketing messages. Podcasts can help you master the art of subtle branding!

As digital marketers, we are continuously reminded that storytelling is a vital instrument for consumer engagement. Through appropriate, enlightening, and valuable stories conveyed by evocative means, companies can connect with customers and develop a devoted audience.

One way to interact with your audience is a corporate blog. However, maintaining an attention-grabbing blog involves several SEO challenges and there is a high probability that your potential customers become more aware of brand involvement.

Therefore, podcasts such as audio content can help you implement a more subtle approach. This way, you can become an intrinsic element of the content itself. For example; eBay recently joined hands with Gimlet Creative to come up with its own podcast series titled ‘Open for Business’ that uses audio content for advertising purposes.

2. Easy to consume and mobile-friendly

Unlike blogs and videos, the beauty of podcasts lies in the fact that audio content can be more conveniently accessed on the go. It does not force users to abandon whatever they are doing just to concentrate wholly on your content. Whether they are working out or cooking, they can easily listen to your podcast.

According to HandMadeWritings, it is imperative for marketers to identify consumer behavior across multiple generations and to renovate their marketing approach accordingly. Therefore, with more and more consumers using smartphones today, it is also important to make your podcast mobile-friendly.

An interesting example of a company producing convenient-to-consume and enjoyable content is General Electric that started a science-fiction podcast titled ‘The Message’. Contrary to the eBay podcast, General Electric focused on the audience to succeed.

Image Source: e-Strategy Trends

3. Swift turnaround time

One of the reasons you should give podcasting a try is the quick turnaround time. Regardless of what audio software is used, the whole process of editing a podcast is very swift.

So, how do you come up with a quick podcast? Here are a few simple steps:

Record your discussion

Add a brief introduction to your company or product

Add theme music (it’s advisable to purchase it to prevent copyright infringement)

Listen to the recording to ensure that the sound is clear and your message is conveyed effectively

Edit to make it picture-perfect

Save it as an MP3 file

Voila! You’re ready to upload it to your site.

4. Reflection of true brand personality

Along with offering value for customers, podcasts can also reflect a company’s individuality and fundamental values. Rather than using written content for conveying what a brand stands for, it is often more convenient to do so by expressing it vocally.

For instance, Slack, a popular corporate messaging tool, has initiated its podcast series called, ‘The Slack Variety Pack’ that depicts a true picture of the company. This amusing, buoyant and somewhat geeky content engages its main audience impeccably. Consequently, it helps in further strengthening the connection with its customers.

5. Higher reach, wider audience

Once a podcast is published on iTunes, Stitcher or similar platforms, a company exposes its content to a broader audience at no cost. These platforms act as search engines that are used by individuals to look for podcasts along with popular songs. In this way, a brand receives the organic publicity that helps in snowballing its reach and growing its audience.

Moreover, podcasts facilitate companies in developing a loyalty of an extensive range of consumers. Audiences generally subscribe to a podcast series and frequently listen to them. Furthermore, there is a high possibility that the listeners may endorse your podcasts to their fellows, thereby, growing your reach significantly. It can ultimately yield enhanced traffic generation.

6. Fostering improved relationships with your customers

Although a podcast is a unidirectional platform, it can facilitate companies in developing better relationships with the customers. It makes your audience feel as if they recognize the individual talking on the podcast.

The primary reason why individuals listen to podcasts is that they feel something mutual between the speaker and the company being represented by the speaker.

In this way, fostering a good relationship aids in developing conviction, which emboldens the audience to stay connected with the company. All this results in enhanced conversion as individuals are more probable to do business with an acquaintance than an outsider.

Final word

Companies these days are progressively implementing podcasting to increase their projections. It’s an influential marketing tool that has gradually become the novel talk-radio on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets. In fact, the augmented usage of smartphones has resulted in the massive development of podcasting.

However, just as any other method of content marketing, the accomplishment of corporate podcasts depends on genuineness, value, and significance for customers. There is no single formula for success. Nonetheless, it seems more and more companies are enthusiastic to experiment with podcasting.

Guest Author: Donna Moores is a savvy content marketer and a contributing writer at Convince & Convert, SocialMediaToday, and Spin Sucks. She has gained an outstanding marketing experience within the biggest industries and businesses, which she pleasantly shares with the readers. You may reach out to Donna on Twitter or via LinkedIn.

The post 6 Reasons Why You Should Consider Podcasting as a Content Marketing Channel in 2018 appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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New CEO to take the reigns at Catena Media

Citing extensive international commercial experience from a variety of industries, including iGaming, publishing, consumer electronics and mobile telecommunication, the Stockholm-listed industry affiliate marketing firm also states “a proven track record in M&A, organisational efficiency and creating ... from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2FLukZQ via Affiliate Marketing

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Polish bookie launches Income Access powered <b>affiliate</b> strategy

In addition, Income Access' technology will allow a maximisation of online traffic and raised conversion rates via the affiliate marketing channel. Lorenzo Pellegrino, CEO of Income Access and Digital Wallets at Paysafe, said: “With the largest economy in Eastern Europe and enjoying one of the strongest ... from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2F9HXkx via Affiliate Marketing

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Fuse Advocates for More Latino Representation in Hollywood

“We want to help them get the conversation going – they are the watchdog of Latinos in media, and they are there to elevate Latino voices on air and online, and that's what we are here to do,” said Judi Lopez, Fuse senior vice president of distribution and affiliate marketing. “It's important that we're ... from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2FM1wAp via Affiliate Marketing

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UK online gambling operators probed for withdrawal roadblocks

Meanwhile, this week saw the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announce the results of a “global intelligence-gathering operation” that found “significant issues” with affiliate marketing. The probe flagged 221 of the 902 websites studied for “further action.” The ICO says the probe's main ... from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2tafqcW via Affiliate Marketing

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Making Claims to AI? You're Probably Using Machine Learning

At first glance, the real win behind machine learning for performance marketers appears to be the processing and analysing of data in larger quantities in real-time. Webgains is just one of several global affiliate networks working on a number of machine learning products; According to CEO Richard ... from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2FLDNAp via Affiliate Marketing

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Soleo Wins Big at <b>Affiliate</b> Summit West with Ringba Giveaway

The teams from Ringba and Soleo both thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the Affiliate Summit West; they were among 6,000 digital marketers who gathered in Las Vegas. The large group of attendees was made up of online publishers, bloggers, media owners, traffic sources, advertisers, global brands, ... from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2F7ZbPc via Affiliate Marketing

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Suning.com Sees 500% Rise in Net Profits for 2017

Suning.com, the retail subsidiary of Suning Holdings Group, who focuses on traffic management, merchandising and affiliate marketing, optimising customer experience and improving Omni-channel operation capabilities, has taken the advantages to meet new opportunities in 2017. During the reporting ... from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2FMvAvF via Affiliate Marketing

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How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer

Posted by Daniel_Marks

Almost every consultant or in-house SEO will be asked at some point to investigate an organic traffic drop. I’ve investigated quite a few, so I thought I’d share some steps I’ve found helpful when doing so.

Is it just normal noise?

Before you sound the alarm and get lost down a rabbit hole, you should make sure that the drop you’re seeing is actually real. This involves answering two questions:

A.) Do you trust the data?

This might seem trivial, but at least a quarter of the traffic drops I’ve seen were simply due to data problems.

The best way to check on this is to sense-check other metrics that might be impacted by data problems. Does anything else look funky? If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? Are you flat-out missing data for certain days or page types or devices, etc.? Thankfully, data problems will usually make themselves pretty obvious once you start turning over a few rocks.

One of the more common sources of data issues is simply missing data for a day.

B.) Is this just normal variance?

Metrics go up and down all the time for no discernible reason. One way to quantify this is to use your historical standard deviation for SEO traffic.

For example, you could plot your weekly SEO traffic for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation (using the STDEV function on Google Sheets or Excel makes this very easy) to figure out if a drop in weekly traffic is abnormal. You’d expect about 16% of weeks to be one standard deviation below your weekly average just by sheer luck. You could therefore set a one-standard-deviation threshold before investigating traffic drops, for example (but you should adjust this threshold to whatever is appropriate for your business). You can also look at the standard deviation for your year-over-year or week-over-week SEO traffic if that’s where you’re seeing the drop (i.e. plot your % change in YoY SEO traffic by week for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation).

SEO traffic is usually pretty noisy, especially on a short time frame like a week.

Let’s assume you’ve decided this is indeed a real traffic drop. Now what? I’d recommend trying to answer the eleven questions below, at least one of them will usually identify the culprit.

Questions to ask yourself when facing an organic traffic drop

1. Was there a recent Google algorithm update?

MozCast, Search Engine Land, and Moz’s algorithm history are all good resources here.

Expedia seems to have been penalized by a Penguin-related update.

If there was an algorithm update, do you have any reason to suspect you’d be impacted? It can sometimes be difficult to understand the exact nature of a Google update, but it’s worth tracking down any information you can to make sure your site isn’t at risk of being hit.

2. Is the drop specific to any segment?

One of the more useful practices whenever you’re looking at aggregated data (such as a site’s overall search traffic) is to segment the data until you find something interesting. In this case, we’d be looking for a segment that has dropped in traffic much more than any other. This is often the first step in tracking down the root cause of the issue. The two segments I’ve found most useful in diagnosing SEO traffic drops specifically:

Device type (mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet)

Page type (product pages vs. category pages vs. blog posts vs. homepage etc.)

But there will likely be plenty of other segments that might make sense to look at for your business (for example, product category).

3. Are you being penalized?

This is unlikely, but it’s also usually pretty quick to disprove. Look at Search Console for any messages related to penalties and search for your brand name on Google. If you’re not showing up, then you might be penalized.

Rap Genius (now Genius) was penalized for their link building tactics and didn’t show up for their own brand name on Google.

4. Did the drop coincide with a major site change?

This can take a thousand different forms (did you migrate a bunch of URLs, move to a different JavaScript framework, update all your title tags, remove your navigation menu, etc?). If this is the case, and you have a reasonable hypothesis for how this could impact SEO traffic, you might have found your culprit.

Hulu.com saw a pretty big drop in SEO traffic after changing their JavaScript framework.

5. Did you lose ranking share to a competitor?

There are a bunch of tools that can tell you if you’ve lost rankings to a competitor:

BrightEdge’s Share of Voice

GetStat’s Share of Voice

SEMrush’s Rankings Distribution Report

If you've lost rankings, it’s worth investigating the specific keywords that you’ve lost and figuring out if there’s a trend. Did your competitors launch a new page type? Did they add content to their pages? Do they have more internal links pointing to these pages than you do?

GetStat’s Share of Voice report lets you quickly see whether a competitor is usurping your rankings

It could also just be a new competitor that’s entered the scene.

6. Did it coincide with a rise in direct or dark traffic?

If so, make sure you haven’t changed how you’re classifying this traffic on your end. Otherwise, you might simply be re-classifying organic traffic as direct or dark traffic.

7. Has there been a change to the search engine results pages you care about?

You can either use Moz’s SERP features report, or manually look at the SERPs you care about to figure out if their design has materially changed. It’s possible that Google is now answering many of your relevant queries directly in search results, put an image carousel on them, added a local pack, etc. — all of which would likely decrease your organic search traffic.

Celebritynetworth.com lost most of its SEO traffic because of rich snippets like the one above.

8. Is the drop specific to branded or unbranded traffic?

If you have historical Search Console data, you can look at number of branded clicks vs. unbranded clicks over time. You could also look at this data through AdWords if you spend on paid search. Another simple proxy to branded traffic is homepage traffic (for most sites, the majority of homepage traffic will be branded). If the drop is specific to branded search then it’s probably a brand problem, not an SEO problem.

9. Did a bunch of pages drop out of the index?

Search Console’s Index Status Report will make it clear if you suddenly have way fewer URLs being indexed. If this is the case, you might be accidentally disallowing or noindexing URLs (through robots.txt, meta tags on the page, or HTTP headers).

Search Console’s Index Status Report is a quick way to make sure you’re not accidentally noindexing or disallowing large portions of your site.

10. Did your number of referring domains and/or links drop?

It’s possible that a large number of your backlinks have been removed or are no longer accessible for whatever reason.

Ahrefs can be a quick way to determine if you’ve lost backlinks and also offers very handy reports for your lost backlinks or referring domains that will allow you to identify why you might have lost these links.

A sudden drop in backlinks could be the reason you’re seeing a traffic drop.

11. Is SEM cannibalizing SEO traffic?

It’s possible that your paid search team has recently ramped up their spend and that this is eating into your SEO traffic. You should be able to check on this pretty quickly by plotting your SEM vs. SEO traffic. If it’s not obvious after doing this whether it’s a factor, then it can be worth pausing your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and seeing if SEO traffic rebounds for those pages.

To be clear, some level of cannibalization between SEM and SEO is inevitable, but it’s still worth understanding how much of your traffic is being cannibalized and whether the incremental clicks your SEM campaigns are driving outweigh the loss in SEO traffic (in my experience they usually do outweigh the loss in SEO traffic, but still worth checking!).

If your SEM vs. SEO traffic graph looks similar to the (slightly extreme) one above, then SEM campaigns might be cannibalizing your SEO traffic.

That’s all I’ve got — hopefully at least one of these questions will lead you to the root cause of an organic search traffic drop. Are there any other questions that you’ve found particularly helpful for diagnosing traffic drops? Let me know in the comments.

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The Untapped Social Network With 10x the Potential of Twitter

Social networks have changed the way we communicate…

But their use and relevance are constantly on the hop.

I remember when the world was consumed by MySpace. If you didn’t have a MySpace page you were digitally irrelevant. Now there is a generation of teens and pre-teens who don’t even know what MySpace is.

Then there was Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Instagram. Snapchat.

Which social network is going to become obsolete next?

The social networks today are smarter than they were 20 years ago. They have seen the fate of platforms like MySpace and are desperate to adapt. They are always on the lookout for the next trend that they can woo users with and entice engagement.

Live video, automated messaging and disappearing snippets of our life are hot at the moment. But are you ready for the next big trend in social?

Why you should care about what is coming next

I remember when I first started out on Twitter. There were only about 5 million users at the time (there are now over 330 million), and people were genuinely engaged and interactive.

By publishing visually eye-catching and helpful content about digital marketing, people took notice. I could proliferate my message and create a splash in a not-so-crowded neighborhood.

In a sense I was lucky. I rode the Twitter wave, and soon became a figure of influence.

But today it is much harder to create a similar influence on Twitter and many of the other established social media platforms. Engagement has dropped for new users. True followers are hard to find. And they are making just about everyone pay to get the same attention that was once free.

So if you want to use social media to influence people to know, like, trust, and buy from you – adaptation is a necessity.

You need to have your finger on the pulse of what is coming next, what is trending, and what will enable you to create a significant impact at scale in the shortest time frame possible.

But how do you know what is coming next? How can you ride the next wave of social growth?

Here’s a shortcut…

The next big thing in social

More and more people are turning to voice as a medium for communication. Unlike text-based communication, voice conveys emotion, tone, and subtleties that text is unable to capture.

Not convinced? These stats might change your mind:

The average human can speak 150 words per minute, but only type 40 words at the same time.

Comscore estimates that by 2020 over 50% of all searches will be done by voice.

There were 35x more Google voice search queries in 2016 than there were in 2008.

60% of people using voice as a medium of communication have only started in the last year.

Ok, so voice is on the rise… but what does that have to do with social media? How can you make the most of this trend?

The new social network that is disrupting the way we consume social content

HearMeOut is a voice-based social network built around 42-second voice recordings.

The beauty of this fast-growing social network is the opportunity it presents for people like you and me to tap into a HUGE new audience. With voice taking over our home, our cars, and even our messengers, people are rapidly switching to audio for their daily needs.

But you better move fast, HearMeOut have partnered with Ford Motors and are currently the only social app in Ford entertainment systems, a natural fit for a voice-based social network, which is building traction.

Hundreds of influencers are already using the HearMeOut app, taking advantage of what voice can do for the brands they work with and even their own personal brand. They are even using this app with their existing social networks by sharing a voice post on Twitter and essentially creating “Voice Tweets”.  Their 2.0 version, which was just released, has a homepage full of content and feature opportunities for brands and influencers.

Why voice?

With the ability to listen to your social feed when driving, running or any other hands-free activity, voice-based social adds more “screen time” to peoples days, expanding the reach for advertisers.

Voice not only expands the time users can be social but with over 256 million visually impaired individuals globally who have been widely overlooked for years, a voice-based social network is an accessible opportunity to be “social” like never before.

Voice-based advertising is also an emerging trend that you should be aware of. Unlike static text or image ads, you can actually have a conversation (albeit limited) with voice ads. This approach to advertising is interactive, engaging, and highly effective for brands as a competitive differentiator.

Now is the time for brands and influencers to be early adopters of this voice-based social trend. It’s also an opportunity for emerging influencers to skip the “queue” of more crowded and mature mediums like Twitter or Facebook.

There is enough evidence to suggest that voice and video are where all digital activity is going.

Will you be the one standing there on top of the pops when the hockey-stick growth comes for HearMeOut?

The post The Untapped Social Network With 10x the Potential of Twitter appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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10 Amazing Facts About Pinterest Marketing That Will Surprise You

Pinning 5 years ago was a physical act. We pinned notes to the fridge, the corkboard or the planner nailed to the wall of the kitchen.

Today it is a digital virtual activity as people pin images to a social network called “Pinterest”.  In the online world of social media with boring linear timelines, Pinterest dared to make a splash with crooked lined boxes (or pins as they call it).

Since its inception in 2010, Pinterest has enjoyed an exponential rise in users and viewers. While some call it a niche website, owing to user statistics of more than 60% women and 50% parents, Pinterest is actually one of the most popular and the  most useful social media networking sites around.

Some serious numbers on Pinterest influencers

Want to hit a female audience, communicate with a designer or connect with someone in New York? Then, Pinterest ticks a few of those boxes.

Here are some more fabulous facts from an excerpt from the infographic on the hellosociety.com blog

79% are female

58% use Pinterest on a tablet

88% purchase a product they pinned

49% purchased 5 or more products they pinned

Don’t believe us? Here are 10 amazing facts about Pinterest marketing you might not know about.

 1. Pinterest is the fastest growing website by overall member growth

Pinterest surprised everyone when researches founded that Pinterest took the lead with 57% growth while Facebook’s member base grew by 6% by overall member growth. In fact, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and even Google+ all grew faster than Facebook.

   2. It is the second social networks by growth in members

Research out today from the Global Web Index notes that Tumblr’s active user base in the last six months grew by 120% and Pinterest takes the second place with 111% growth. Surprisingly, Facebook took the last place with only 2 percent of growth.

 3. Pinners are into arts and crafts…

There are literally hundreds of thousands of arts and crafts pins on Pinterest. These pins are usually link outs to websites though there are some that are actual photos of the pinner’s arts and craft projects.  In fact, tutorials, guides, and do-it-yourself pins have a 42% higher click rate compared with all other types of pins.

 4. They like to spend!

Pinners aren’t merely window shoppers. They actually like to buy stuff based on the pins they see. What’s more, several social media surveys show that Pinterest users not only buy more, they also spend more. Shopify users referred by Pinterest, for example, spend an average of $80 compared to Facebook referral of $40.

5. It boasts billions of pins

Yes, you read that right. Billions. Those 70 million users aren’t just there to lurk around. They have generated thirty billion pins (by mid-2014) in less than four years.  These pins range from products, interior design, architecture, clothing, places, tutorials, and even fan art and fan fiction.

6.  Those “pins” have a huge potential to go viral

Think Twitter is viral? It has nothing on Pinterest. Over 80% of pins are re-pins, compared to 1.4% of tweets re-tweeted. The powers that be behind this viral ability are Pinterest’s search function and category algorithms. While Twitter rely on trends that are every-changing, Pinterest has categories that are pretty much grouped based on similarity and tagging.

Imagine that you are a mom of three boys, one of which is soon celebrating his seventh birthday. You’ve created a board to organize your party décor inspirations and are now searching for a cake design. You see one and re-pin it to your board. That pin has already been repinned twenty times. When someone else sees it on your board and like it, they re-pin it to their board too. This could go on and on across different users and different boards over the course of months.

7. Those “pins” live longer

The average useful lifespan of a Tweet is measured in minutes. Facebook posts exist in newsfeeds for a few hours. Want to take a guess on how long an average pin can remain relevant? Not minutes, not hours, and not even days. We’re talking about months.

An average pin can come up in search months after it was posted. Its longevity can be attributed to the way it is used compared with other social media sites. While Facebook and Twitter are mostly used to reminisce the past or analyse the present, Pinterest is used to plan. Boards are created by the users to be aspirational – weddings, do-it-yourself decorating, arts and crafts, and party recipes – which means that pins can be repinned so many times over as long as there are users.

8. It drives consumer purchasing behaviour

For its users, Pinterest is product review, shopping catalogue, tester, and advice column all in one. About 25% of consumers reported buying a product or service after discovering it on Pinterest. Again, it all hinges on the attractiveness of the products as presented in the tweets. If, for example, someone is looking for bathroom floor mats, they are more likely to buy it (plus the whole set) if they see on Pinterest how it looks like on an actual bathroom as compared to hanging on a store rack.

9. Pins aren’t seen as ads…even when they are

The beauty about Pinterest ads is that they don’t look like ads. They aren’t treated as ads either. Pinterest users are smart and shun any blatant advertising. Retailers acknowledge this and adapted to the artsy look of the platform, doing away with traditional advertising and just hinged on the viral ability of the photos.

Ads (as illustrated in the several Michael Kors sponsored pins above) are mostly beautifully presented items. Some even include these items actually being used or worn in an outside setting. The pins take it away from a store setting and illustrate its real life use.

10. Pinterest is very good place to promote a business

Pinterest pins are worth more than Facebook likes. Consumers referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to actually purchase than those referred by Facebook; Pinterest grabs around 41% of ecommerce traffic compared to other social media sites. Case in point: twenty-five percent of Fortune Global 100 companies have Pinterest accounts, which is pretty impressive considering Pinterest’s age (as compared with other older social media networking sites).

All in all, the popularity of Pinterest is due to several factors, namely, its use, how it is presented, and the relevance of its content. It doesn’t matter what other people say. Pinterest is clearly not just a niche site. Now, the question is, do you have a Pinterest account yet?

Guest Author: Yohana Petrovic is a writer and blogger. She has 10 years` experience in educating and now she is a proofreader at http://globalessays.org/  . You can reach her on Facebook: Yohana Petrovic or on Twitter: @YohanaPetrovic     

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FREE Webinar – Discover the 3 Steps To LinkedIn Mastery

Over the past couple of months I’ve received a ton of emails from readers asking me to share more insight in and around LinkedIn so I’ve decided to hold another webinar with Alex Pirouz, founder of Linkfluencer.

The first one I held a few months back was well received with over 3000 people registering for the session. Click here to register

Read more at http://ift.tt/1vyMGFM

  The post 10 Amazing Facts About Pinterest Marketing That Will Surprise You appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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