#WebDev #SEO #SocialMedia #Brussels #Belgium

www.huguesdhf.com

[bestseotipstutorials]

SEO for Etsy: three tips to improve your store’s search visibility by Maddie Silverstein - Curating the best SEO news from across the web AD: SEMrush.com. The new tool for Search Engine Marketing. US database 40 000 000 keywords. Learn everything about your competitors!

[borislavkiprin]

Unicorn Companies: How They Choose Their Colors #infographic

[digital-marketing-in-the-ai-era]

10 rules for writing a good headline

1. Self-interest. What’s in it for the reader. 

2. Arouse curiosity. Make them STOP and ask, “How can that be?” or “What do they mean by that?” Then answer the question well. 

3. Does your ad SINGLE OUT your intended audience? 

4. Is it EASY to understand? 

5. Is it newsworthy? 

6. Is it believable? David Oglivy: “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” 

7. Quick results. 

8. Be specific. 

9. Something of value. 

10. Make it well known. Brand names and testimonials make people feel comfortable.

source: Murray Raphel "Mind Your Own Business,”

[webdeveloperplus-blog]

4 BEST PHP-Based Content Management Systems

Now, create a website without any technical knowledge or experience with HTML and manage it easily. To know more, http://bit.ly/22y0QEy

[snehasingh9012-blog]

CRB Tech Solutions Reviews - provides Latest SEO tips, tricks, and advice for improving websites ranking in search engine and also latest Entertainment trends

For showing the choosing minute a business a good web diagram is fit. Reasearch exhibits that rapidly in the wake of overview your site, paying little respect to the likelihood that it is for a little measure of a second, clients will settle on how they feel about your site and in this way your business.

[discovercleaningcompaniesm]

Tips modernized Creating SEO Friendly Website

Benefits of SEO website draw

If the business owners want to break the ice a website which has the capability of attracting a large number of potential visitors then there is the need anent implementing the SEO website design techniques. Creating SEO friendly website choice seize a main role in ranking the website favorable regard the higher search for beam engine positions. The use apropos of SEO device techniques beside help in increasing the human visitors as well as offer ethical self many benefits. The SEO techniques self-possession also prescription mutual regard improving the experience of the fiend this means that the previous users will keep in approaching the website for all that and more for their products and services.

Yourself is very arduous to create a beautiful and employable website for your clients. For achieving the benefits of the bear the palm website and revolutionary online troposphere, there is the need of SEO techniques. Researching engine optimization is one of the methods that help in improving the online obviousness of the website. Below are discussed some of the tips that are essential in designing SEO brotherly website. These tips will help ultra-ultra improving the design anent the website at the idem time increases the visibility of the website.

€ Keywords - Keywords thimblerig a absolute role good terms the hunting engine optimization process. Proper and pretty much competitive keywords must be familiar with for targeting the market quite the contrary the visitors will never be able until find inner man. There are certain factors to be considered in the process of creating a website:

The first step in the website dream up is to create a list of cogitable and relevant keywords. And these keywords charge be hand-me-down only in a amtrak number and be necessary never be found overly crowed.

The selected keywords must be given to the keyword research tool alike insomuch as Word tracker, Google Ad words Keyword tool and so in passage to.

The next step in creating the website is against finalize these keywords based on the try that you have done

The final step is to prepare for a launch with the keywords that they have selected and number one should breathe launched air lock the way simulacrum that three rose four related keywords in a page.

€ Placement of keywords - The keyword placement has a main role in the success of the website. The keywords must be placed entree the appanage positions of the website, but the reckon up to of times the keyword is used should never be more. There are some positions where the keywords rancidness be placed and those positions are title tag, meta descriptions, website slogans, H1, H2 and H3 tags, national links, footer links, URLs, Folder names and so on.

€ The website that is created must be beat the bushes engine navigation friendly, because the carefully navigation system makes website to be easily followed by the make after engines. It will abide identical good if the use of JavaScript is avoided as this is very difficult for the search engines to understand and there will be issues in ranking the website and too in website visibility.

€ URLs and Heraldic device names - the website mustiness incessantly involve a SEO friendly URL, this will imply the website to have place easily identified by the search engines and thereby increasing the search engine visibility.

€ The vested interest of website images self-imposed duty also abide considered, the images that are used forasmuch as the website must not a jot be washed up crowed as this will lead to watered-down ranking.

[digital-marketing-in-the-ai-era]

51% of Total Time Spent on the Internet Is on Mobiles 

source: Internet Trends Report

[analyticisms]

#FridayFunFact: echoing the penetration of Android OS, Chrome for mobile can boast 1 billion MAUs. Pretty impressive…and a reason why Google’s mobile search revenues are exploding.

[bestseotipstutorials]

The Only Time You Should Write Boring Content by @neilpatel by Neil Patel - Curating the best SEO news from across the web AD: SEMrush.com. The new tool for Search Engine Marketing. US database 40 000 000 keywords. Learn everything about your competitors!

[huguesdhf]

#cinegraph #cinegraphs

[georgeandersonseo]

How to Use SEO to Build Your Brand

For a lot of people, SEO is an afterthought.

It’s strange as even Google says that IF you have to hire an SEO, do so early rather than late, like when you’re just planning to launch a new site.

Now, why would Google say that?

Well, because SEO isn’t a topping that you can just pour on top of your site. It’s more of a base ingredient.

This applies to your BRAND as well. When you launch your brand (and your site), you shouldn’t dismiss SEO for later.

Why?

Because SEO is all about improving user experience — that’s why Google cares about a site’s speed, design, content, mobile-friendliness, and so on.

The ever-so-hyped UX v/s SEO is a hoax. And as a brand, providing a great user experience should be your priority as well.

SEO influences different aspects of the user experience.

In the following diagram, Peter Morville gives the simplest representation of how a user experience feel likes.

No matter what business you’re in, your user experience will be formed around how your users feel about you on the different aspects of the User Experience Honeycomb.

Your brand image is a reflection of how your users feel about you.

To make your users feel good about your brand, focus on the different user experience modules:

Useful: Your content should be useful and relevant.

Usable: Your site should be easy to navigate.

Desirable: Your design should appeal to your target audience.  

Findable: You should focus on content and make searching for information easy..

Accessible: Your site should be mindful of people with disabilities.

Credible: Your brand must show signs of authority and prompt trust.

Since the above attributes are the hallmarks of an ideal user experience, you should think of them when you build your brand.

Most of these attributes like being useful, usable, findable, accessible, credible map directly to SEO. After all, search engines gauge the overall user experience and decide if your site is the best result to show.

If you haven’t already optimized your brand for the search engines, this is the best time to start because you have to market to the MILLENNIALS. 

Millennials and their moments of need (and where your brand fits in)

Google identifies different micro-moments:

Want-to-know moments

Want-to-go moments

Want-to-do moments

Want-to-buy moments

All of us live many such micro-moments in our daily lives.

Simply put, micro-moments are moments of need. These are moments when we want to do something, and do it really fast. Because mobile phones are our most accessible devices, we use our smartphones and make buying decisions on the go.

Google shares a great story that shows how such moments trigger actions and lead to sales.

“Neel needed to find a laptop cover immediately.

Caught in the rain at uni, Neel worried about the safety of his new laptop, which got wet in his bag. Acting in the moment, he turned to his smartphone to find the best laptop covers. Within a few minutes, he discovered a new brand he loved, and decided where he was going to buy it. An hour later, he went in-store and made the purchase.”

Saw how rapid the buying cycle just got?

With mobiles, your prospects are a few clicks away from you.

Just like Neel, your target customers too might be searching for you. Even now as you read this.

Do you know in the above story, Neel ended up BUYING A BRAND THAT HE HAD JUST DISCOVERED THROUGH SEARCH. Yes, he didn’t know the brand before he made the search.

You or your product, too, can become the brand that interprets such moments of need and shows up when your prospects look for you.

You’ll be surprised to learn that 1 in 2 millennials have discovered and bought a new brand they knew little about by just searching on their phones.

You can be your target audience’s go-to brand and cater to their moments of needs. You can become their PREFERRED brand.

But for this to happen, you need to optimize it. And optimization brings our focus back to user experience because that’s what Google cares for.

So how do you cater to both the search engines as well your potential customers?

The answer likes in inbound methodology, because the inbound methodology is designed to help your users while generating quality leads for you.

Let’s see why the inbound methodology makes a brand successful and the role SEO plays in an inbound marketing strategy.

What’s the inbound methodology and how it helps in branding

I’m sure you have heard about the inbound methodology.

Instead of calling out to prospects, the inbound methodology draws them in by giving them what they need during different stages of their buying journey.

The inbound methodology is a philosophy rather than a marketing method. As many as 3 out of 4 marketers prefer an inbound approach to marketing.  

A whopping 84% small business owners use the inbound methodology predominantly. By adopting the inbound methodology, 92.7% companies saw increased leads.

If you want to build your brand fast, you will have to think about your target audience first, and that’s what the inbound methodology will help you with.

Before we see how SEO integrates with the inbound methodology, let’s see the four major stages in the inbound marketing method:

Stage #1 – Attract: This is where a prospect finds you (typically through the useful content you create).

Stage #2 – Convert: During the convert phase, you ask your site visitors to subscribe to your list and thus they enter your sales funnel.

Stage #3 – Close: The close phase is where you make your offer and get a sale.

Stage #4 – Delight: Once a sale is made, you drive your efforts to get the customers to use your products and reach their goals.

SEO is a big part of the inbound methodology because the inbound methodology starts with discovery where search engines play an important role.

The role of SEO in a brand’s inbound strategy

Since it’s established that inbound is the only way to go, let’s see how SEO fits into the picture.

Moz published the following graphic outlining the elements of the inbound methodology. If you look at the list, you can see that it starts with SEO. 

Other elements that follow it closely are content, networking, and social communities.

So if you want to build your brand using the inbound methodology, you need to work on your SEO, content, networking, social media, and other such things.

SEO helps with ALL OF THIS:

Optimizing content gets more traffic and leads.

Improving the social media performance builds higher engagement.

Networking with authorities (getting backlinks) lets you cash in on their reputations.

Traffic, leads, engagement — these are the lifeblood of a brand.

A brand’s other aspects like its story, design, and UX are also closely tied with SEO.

By using SEO to build your brand, you can make all the important brand and inbound marketing elements work in synergy.

Now it’s time to look at some of the most important concepts about your brand and see how SEO can be baked into them.

Storytelling and SEO

Every great brand has great brand stories.

We relate to stories because as humans we are hardwired to listen to stories, and that’s why brand stories are a powerful means of branding.

If you can carry your brand story well, you will be able to engage different senses of your users minds.

Besides, with more and more people realizing the importance of research-based and data-backed content, merely quality content is not enough. You need to do better than that.

Here’s where stories jump in.

They add a personal touch to an otherwise plain compilation of data.

Laura Busche defined a brand story perfectly when she wrote,

In essence, a brand is nothing more than the story that users recall when they think of you. Because this story is made up by every single touchpoint of our user’s experience…

While you may be a natural storyteller, you could still find it hard to tell your brand story. Busche has created a handy tool for you to help tell your brand story (I’ll show you how you can map SEO into this story in a bit).

In one of her posts, Forbes contributor, Susan Gunelius describes brand stories as:

Brand stories are not marketing materials. They are not ads, and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage. Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can.

Brand stories, however, aren’t stories that only talk about your brand. Instead, good brand stories are always about the customers, and how they used your product or services to meet their goals.

Because brand stories aren’t so much about the brand as they are about the users, it’s important to use the right messaging and language when creating them. You can do this confidently if you have researched your keywords well.

Basically, at the crux of any successful brand communication (including a brand story) lies a solid message architecture, and it’s this message architecture that needs to resonate with the target audience.

In one of my ebooks, I have shared the following process for creating a winning message architecture.

As you just saw, the first step to getting the messaging right is to tell your story using the right keywords.

A brand story doesn’t have to be fancy. Just ensure that you speak in a language that resonates with your target audience.

Once you create a list of keywords that gets your audience ticking, go back to the storyboard above, and see where those keywords fit.

For example, if you offer an invoicing solution for small businesses, your brand story could be about a small business owner who struggled with manual invoicing until he discovered your invoicing solution especially designed for small businesses.

Notice how naturally keywords fit into the context if you tell the right story. It’s almost effortless.

Content, Copywriting, and SEO

Whether you run a purely online business or whether you use your site to drive traffic to your brick and mortar store, content is what gets you traffic, leads, and sales.

Content is the cornerstone of a successful brand.

Because the inbound methodology begins with discovery, your brand needs to become discoverable. Optimizing your content for the right keywords is your first step to becoming more visible.

I have covered this topic in detail in one of my earlier posts on SEO copywriting (SEO copywriting is writing content that’s both user and search engine friendly).

Here’s a quick rehash:

Tip #1 – Use keywords

Keywords matter to both users as well as the search engines.

Keywords tell the search engines that you have the relevant content to offer.

New sites often find it hard to outrank established sites for relevant keywords. A good solution is to target longtail keywords in such cases. Longtail keywords are less competitive and generate better leads.

Tip #2 – Work on the headline

Copyblogger shares an interesting 80/20 rule of headlines:

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.

A good headline entices people to click through your content.

But writing good headlines is hard. So when you sit to write headlines, don’t start from scratch.

Use the following tools to get a headstart:

HubSpot Blog Topic Generator

Blog Title Generator by Impact

Blog Title Generator by SEOPresser

Content Idea Generator by Portent

All these tools need you to input your keyword, and then they return with snappy and clickworthy titles.

Also, there’s this masterpiece content from Jon Morrow: A swipe file with 52 headlines templates that you can use. (Note: You will have to subscribe to get access.)

Tip #3 – Optimize tags

Placing keywords in tags is important. By optimizing tags, you can do solid on-page SEO for each piece of content you post.

Make sure you use your target keywords in the following 3 tags:

Title

Meta-description (doesn’t contribute to SEO directly, but is visible to the users and influences the CTR)

URL

To learn more about how you can build your brand using content, read my guide on content marketing.

UX and SEO

UXmote states that every $1 invested in UX can have a return of up to $100 for your business.

UX and SEO often appear to be conflicting. But most of these “conflicts” are myths. In fact, UX and SEO work great together.

Your site is your brand’s online touchpoint. You HAVE to extend a great user experience. Each time. While there are a zillion things that contribute to user experience, the following three almost always matter the most:

1. Responsiveness

Mediative Labs reported that 70% mobile searches result in action being taken within an hour as opposed a week for desktop.

Post Google’s Mobile Friendly update, if your site is not responsive, Google won’t display it in the mobile search results.

Without a responsive site, you won’t have access to the hundreds of millennials who are turning to their mobiles in their moments of need.

Besides, the users who will land on your site directly will also have a poor site experience. About 57% users won’t recommend your business if you don’t optimize your site for mobile.

To make your site user-friendly, test your site using Google’s mobile-friendly test tool. See if Google finds it to be mobile-friendly.

If it’s not, try to go for a responsive design rather than creating a separate mobile version. A responsive design adapts seamlessly to devices of different resolutions.

2. Speed

Speed matters. Users expect a site to load in 2 seconds.

Google’s search guru, Urs Hoelzle, says,

When you speed up service, people become more engaged – and when people become more engaged, they click and buy more.

The key is engagement.

Slow speed kills engagement. People abandon slow sites quickly.

As Google cares about user experience, it uses speed as a ranking factor as well.

Unoptimized images, cheap hosting, and uncompressed code often bring down a site’s speed. This post has many tips for making a site blazing fast.

3. Navigation

The following description by Nielsen is perhaps the best way to tell how frustrating a poor navigation experience can get:

Uncovering navigation shouldn’t be a major task: Make it permanently visible on the page. Small children like minesweeping (passing the mouse around the screen to see what’s hidden), but teenagers don’t like it, and adults hate it.

To design a user-friendly navigation, you should first create your site’s information architecture.

Design and SEO

You might have noticed serious decisions every time a big brand gets a new logo or touches up an existing one. This is so because people are emotionally attached to the visuals of their favorite brands.

If you’ve been catching up with AirBnB news, you might know that AirBnB recently rebranded its logo to make it easy for people to draw. Their logo is a symbol called “belo” and represents the emotion of belonging.

AirBnB believes that their new logo will get people to feel a deeper sense of belonging

Good logos invoke the right feelings in the target audience. How you visualize your brand’s logo depends on your business and your personal preferences among other things.

But just like your logo, your site is also a big part of your visual branding.

Luckily, its design can be optimized for the search engines.

To create a search-engine friendly site, Google’s Webmasters Guidelines are a good starting point.

Three tips to make your design SEO-friendly:

Tip #1 – Offer value first

In one of its algorithm updates, Google penalized sites that showed a lot of ads within the fold area.

This was considered as offering a bad user experience because the ads came in the way of the user.

Google recommends offering value right away, so don’t make users scroll down and look hard to spot the information for which they landed on your site.

Tip #2 – Don’t embed keywords into images

Hero images are all the rage these days. It’s common to see sites with huge images often with the most important 2-3 sentences about their business embedded into the images.

This hurts SEO because search engines can’t read images. By adding content to images, you lose SEO value.

Important keyword-rich content should be placed as text and not added to images.

Tip #3 – Use sitemaps

If you’re launching a new brand (and site), a sitemap becomes even more important. Sitemaps help search engines understand the structure of your site. They also help users find the important pages on your site.

There are several tools you can use to create a sitemap.

Social Media and SEO

Upon being asked about the reasons they followed brands on social media, some of the popular responses from the respondents hinted at their interest in:

Coupons/promotional offers updates

Buying

Content updates

Accessibility

Do you get what these reasons mean for your brand?

How incredible it can be for a brand to have a following on social media that wants to know about its product and content updates.

Today, social media is indispensable to a business.

About social media and SEO…

We need to be over the debate if social media signals are factored in the ranking algorithm. The truth is: people care about social media, and so you should too.

People want to connect with brands on social media. They like it more if brands are responsive. Besides, social media is a big traffic referral.

When you optimize your social profiles and posts on social media, you become more visible and searchable on social media.

I’ve been saying this for a long time now, social sites like Facebook and Twitter are the new search engines.

People are no longer looking for keywords just in Google. They’re using Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and many other social sites. 76% marketers admitted to using Social Media for better SEO.

Clearly, it’s time to start treating social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter like independent search engines.

Facebook sure is taking its search functionality seriously. It states:

Welcome to Search FYI. With over 1.5 billion searches per day and over 2 trillion posts in our index, search is an important, long-term effort at Facebook.

In another study, 74% companies and 82% agencies that Social Media is an important element in their SEO strategy.

To build your brand on social media, SEO can be an unbeatable solution.

Easy ways to integrate social with branding:

Tip #1: Choose the right social media

Choosing the right social media platform is at the heart of social media marketing success.

Most people commit the mistake of creating profiles on every social media platform out there. This is a sure way to FAIL because your target audience cannot possibly be active everywhere. And without engaged followers, no social media campaign can work.

For example:

Let’s say you have an open source auditing tool and your target audience are VPs or C-level executives in software firms.

Where do you think such people normally hangout?

LinkedIn or Pinterest?

Yes, you’re right. It’s very unlikely to find such professionals on Pinterest.

Likewise, if you run an interior decorating boutique targeting women in their mid-30s, Pinterest will work better for you.

Before choosing a social media platform, see where your target audience is active.

In this guide, I’ve shown how some of the top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Yelp stack up against each other. You can refer it to get a headstart in choosing the right social media platform to be present on.

Tip #2: Create meaningful social profiles

Your social media profile is not a place to get cute (even for your personal brand).

It’s best to describe yourself and your brand in a professional way. This can go a long way in positioning you as an authority before your target audience.

As you can see in my Twitter profile, I use a simple description that pretty much summarizes what I do and how I expect people to know me.

Tip #3: Optimize social posts

Since social posts drive a lot of traffic, you should optimize them for higher visibility and clickability. Using the right hashtags in your messages will make your brand more discoverable and boost your brand’s engagement rate.

Curlate analyzed interactions on Instagram to find that brand posts with two hashtags got an engagement rate of 2.9%.

Tip #4: Network

Social Media offers a great platform to connect with influencers. By connecting with influencers and sharing their content, you can get them to reciprocate. If your offering is remarkable, you’ll be surprised with the exposure influencers could get you.

Brand reputation and SEO

Whether you’re just launching your brand or are already in business, your reputation will reach people before you.

Google shared in a study how 55% millennials ignore brands that have poor reviews.

In another research, 88% consumers stated that they trusted online reviews as good as personal recommendations.

It’s clear: when it comes to trusting a brand, most people rely on reviews. And because reviews are user-generated content, they’re given importance by the search engines as well.

As the online reputation management brand, Reputation 911, puts it:

Brand reputation refers to how a particular brand (whether for an individual or a company) is viewed by others. A favorable brand reputation means consumers trust your company, and feel good about purchasing your goods or services. An unfavorable brand reputation, however, will cause consumers to distrust your company and be hesitant about purchasing your products or services.

Reviews are important because Google takes note of them. In fact, Google stresses the need for online stores to post honest reviews to offer real unique value to the users.

In its research of Google’s ranking algorithm factors, Moz attributed an 8.4% contribution to review signals.

A good SEO strategy always includes a provision for online reviews. Especially for local businesses. Along with proactively seeking reviews, an effective SEO strategy also combats negative SEO by closely monitoring a brand’s mentions.

3 to-dos to create a stellar online reputation:

1. Ask for reviews

Making sure that you offer really good experiences can motivate customers to leave a review.

Reviews don’t always have to come from your customers, they can be from influencers or popular blogs in your niche.

I have found that the best way to get reviews from influencers is to reach out to the ones who have reviewed competitive brands in the past.

For example, if you sell an invoicing software, you can just Google reviews about your competitor products using a query like:

[competitor]+ reviews

Once you know which blogs have reviewed them, you can reach out to all those blogs and request them to review your product.

Here’s a fill-in-the-blank template that I shared previously for reaching out when requesting reviews:

Hi (blogger name),

I came across your review for (competing product) today and was impressed with how detailed you were.

I actually just released my own keyword research tool, called (product name). I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it yet.

Considering how great your previous reviews have been, I wanted to see if you’d be up for giving my product a try. (I’ll provide you with a free license, of course).

The reason why I believe (my product name) stands out from all the others on the market is because of feature X: (describe feature).

If you’re interested, just let me know.

Thanks for your time,

(Your name)

Using crowd-sourced review platforms like Yelp could also help your business show up in the top results when someone looks for you.

While reviews on such sites are looked upon as more unbiased and genuine, they could create duplicate content issues if you embed a ton of them on your site.

(To find a complete guide to getting great ratings, read this post.)

2. Monitor brand mentions

The best way to keep a handle on your brand’s online mentions is to set up Google alerts. With Google Alerts, every time your brand is mentioned, you will receive an email notification. You can choose to be notified in real-time or once in a day or week.

To create an alert, visit Google Alerts.

Enter your brand’s name (This could be your name if you want to monitor your personal brand).

You can choose to create multiple alerts.

Creating Google Alerts doesn’t just help you in discovering when you are mentioned on the net, but it also helps you participate in discussions timely.

This is especially helpful in combating negative reviews.

3. Fight negative SEO

Unfortunately, your competitors or spammers can take resort to black hat SEO practices to damage your online reputation.

If you notice that your brand is being targeted on social media by fake profiles or if you start seeing incoming links from spammy sites, it could be a sign of negative SEO.

Again, staying alert is the best defense.

Low-quality backlinks can influence Google’s opinion about a site and can cause rankings to hurt, therefore, when you see spammy backlinks, disavow them.

Disavowing backlinks is a way to tell Google to ignore them. Disavowing links is a somewhat drastic step but might be necessary in cases of negative SEO.

To disavow links, you need to create a simple text file with spammy incoming links and then upload it using your Google disavow links tool page.

Remember: A good reputation might be an intangible concept, but it’s the single most important factor that can take you places.

Conclusion

As a brand, you don’t just want people to identify your logo or trademarks, but you also want them to discover and connect with you.

Looking relevant to the search engines is the key to getting discovered, and speaking in the language of your target audience helps them connect. SEO helps with both these.

It doesn’t matter whether your business is online and offline, using SEO as its building block will help you connect with your target audience in their preferred way.

Whether it’s your site’s copy, content, experience, social media profiles, online reviews, or simply how it looks, SEO will add value.

How do you plan to tie SEO tactics with your brand? And if you’re already using some of these, how has it impacted your brand’s visibility and overall engagement?

from English – Neil Patel http://ift.tt/21gbzlm

[webswiftseo-blog]

Long article but a good one.

[americanexpresstravel-deactivat]

7 Strategies for Explosive Business Growth

Adapted from Rieva Lesonsky, CEO, President & Founder, GrowBiz Media on American Express® OPEN Forum.

See the full article here to read more on OPEN Forum.

[socialmediadaily]

[ayeshaambreen]

Want to improve your social media marketing? Practice these rules.

[bethreekles]

Kicking off a week of posts all about getting noticed on social media: How to Make the Most Out of Twitter as a Writer!

Those of you who’ve been keeping an eye on my Tumblr blog and my Twitter over the last month or so will know I’ve been doing a lot of research into using various social media products for business or just to promote your blog.

So, for those of you who are looking to grow your blog audience, or your readership, using Twitter, here are some of the tips I’ve picked up.

Don’t follow wildly in the hopes that everyone will follow you back – target your followers. There are some great tools online – even just the advanced twitter search – to find people in your category and niche, and follow them. It’s likely they’ll follow back, and they might help grow your audience.

YOU NEED A PROFILE PICTURE. People will think you’re spam if you keep the egg.

YOU ALSO NEED A GOOD BIO. Keywords are very important here. You want it to be personal, maybe showing off some of your personality (quirky, dry humour, enthusiastic fangirl, business-focused, etc.). You’ve got a limited amount of characters to get across who you are and what you do. So use them wisely.

AND, make sure that you link to your blog/website!

Try and notice when your audience are online: if they’re mostly teenagers in the UK, then try putting out key Tweets after school, when kids will be coming home and checking their phones they’ve had to keep in their bag all day.

Use some scheduling tools, like dlvr.it or Hootsuite – both free, online tools. Create content in advance and schedule it, especially during vacations and periods where you know you’ll be busy.

PHOTOS. I’ve only just found this out myself, but apparently, Tweets with photos are waaaay more likely to be replied to, retweeted, favourites, links clicked on, than those without photos. Use some things like Pinwords, Fotor, Phonto, and Canva to create images for your posts that you can add to Twitter.

UBER-IMPORTANT: if you have a post that you want to share, then you have to post a link with it!! If you want people to check out a new tag on your blog, add the link. You can shrink the link (Hootsuite lets you do this too) to conserve characters, but people are much more likely to go and look at the post if you give them the link RIGHT THERE for them to click on.

INTERACT! Talk to other people, comment on their Tweets, favourite their Tweets, mention them if you find content you think they’ll appreciate – and don’t just push your own blog/books. Talk about other blogs you like, other authors you’re reading you think your readers would enjoy, even just a vine you like. You want to try and create some sense of community, and hopefully you also want to seem approachable on Twitter, too.

Hopefully, that will be enough to get you started if you’re a bit of a stranger to the Twittersphere and don’t really know what to do with Twitter. If you found this post helpful, I’d love to know!

Do you have any top tips for using Twitter? 

xo

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[huguesdhf]

#huguesdhf

[bethreekles]

A Detailed Guide to Creating Your Writer’s Blog, in 9 Easy Steps

Second up in my week of social media and blogging advice (mainly for writers), I decided to write a guide to setting up a blog. I mean, sure, loads of us have blogs now. I know my personal blog is just a mish-mash of Captain Swan fanfic, gifs of actors and Taylor Swift, Harry Potter headcanons, and text posts. There’s no theme. That’s what I struggled with more when it came to building my writer’s blog.

This is going to be a step-by-step, how-to guide for any of you who are struggling to figure out how to create a blog for yourself as a writer. And, if you’re trying to broaden your audience and get more people interested in your work as a writer, it’s a good idea to add a blog to your online profile.

  Step 1: Get Your Blog.

Pick a site – Wordpress, Tumblr, and Blogger are some of the most popular – and register. Create an account, pick a url (try and get your penname/writer name in the url if you can!) and voila. Step one is complete.

Step 2: Pick a theme.

Now, Tumblr and Wordpress offer free themes that you’re able to customise (to some extent), and I think Blogger does too. Pick one that appeals to you. It might be something bold and colourful, something sleek and modern. If you’re not sure, maybe take a look at websites/blogs for other authors in the same genre as you write to see what their aesthetic is, and use that for inspiration. Try and go for something that’s easy to read, but not too boring. And make any customisations to the colours that you can and want to.

Step 3: Your Profile.

Now this is one of the most important points.

Some blog layouts will show your profile photo – so make sure you have one! It doesn’t have to be artsy and wonderful, but a clear headshot of you will do the job. And almost all blogs show some description on all pages – whether at the top or in a sidebar. You want to treat this like your Twitter bio – use keywords, explain who you are and what you do, and show your personality.

However, you don’t need a long, in-depth ‘about you’ piece here. Save that one for the 'about you’ page.

Step 4: Create Pages.

You’ll want to add an ‘About’ page, as I just mentioned – and there are some great tips here to how to create a killer about page – explaining who you are and what you do, in more depth. Throw in some photos, too!

If you have a book online, an ebook, a published book – whatever it is, if you have some of your original content out there, make a page for it. Add a photo of your cover, if you can, and, if you’re published, add links to wherever people can buy your books. (You’ll want to insert the link into the text: eg. Check out my books on my website!, rather than saying ‘click here:’ and then copy and pasting the link outright. It’ll look tidier if you put the link in the text.)

Are you selling a service/product? Maybe freelancing? Create a page explaining any services you provide.

You might want to add pages to links of press coverage you’ve had, or a portfolio of work you’ve done, too.

And, importantly: A contact page. Some blogs will allow you to input an email form, so people can contact you directly from your blog via email. Tumblr has the ask box feature. Also tell people how they can get in touch with you otherwise – are you on Twitter? Can they message you on your Facebook page? Do you have a website with an email form? (Maybe don’t give our your email address and phone number directly on your blog – you might end up with some spam.)

As for the contact form - there are plenty of free html codes for them available online if you do a quick Google for them! And html is not half as scary as you think - just copy and paste the code for the contact form between the <head> tags of your blog’s/website’s code, and you’re done!

Step 5: Start blogging!

The main issue here will be content. I know, it’s hard. And it might be slow going. But persevere.

You might want to start out with a ‘hello’ post – just introducing yourself to this blogging community. You could add a post about (each of) your books, with a cover and a blurb and a link to where to buy them. You could do some personal blogs (but see Step 8 for more on this). You could do some behind-the-scenes blogs. Writing advice. Book recommendations. Book reviews. What you’re currently working on/reading. A write-up of an event you did/went to recently. Try and make it relevant to what your niche is – in this case, bookish!

Step 6: Spread the word.

Get on any other platforms you’re using – Twitter, a Facebook page (and maybe your personal Facebook, too!), any other blogs you have, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, writing platforms – and spread the word about your new blog! But, be sure to add a link to your blog when you’re doing this!!!

Step 7: Keep going!

You may not get a massive influx of followers. Now all of your audience from one platform will cross over to this one. And that’s okay. The point of this is to grow your audience, and by tapping into another platform, you’re able to give access to people who haven’t noticed you yet. Follow relevant blogs (eg. book bloggers/other writers), reblog some of their content, and keep posting your own original content, too. And don’t try wildly following blogs in the hope of getting followed back – it doesn’t always work, and you’re better off having a small following entirely made up of your target audience than 10,000 followers who, frankly, don’t give a shit about what you’ve got to say.

Step 8: Be personable, but keep it professional. Maybe. If that’s your thing.

It can be hard to know when to draw the line between keeping your private and personal life separate on your blog. And it’s totally fine to talk about things going on in your life – but as with any social network, avoid bitching/venting about someone in particular, even if you don’t name them directly (especially if it’s someone you’re working with!). Like, a post saying that you haven’t updated in a while because you’ve been stressed out with work, or that you won’t be posting for a while because your mother is sick and you need to take care of her – those are fine! As are sharing some likes/hobbies/interests outside of your niche. If you’re not comfortable talking about your personal life on your blog, that’s absolutely fine too – but try to be personable in the way you write your posts.

Step 9: Interact! Be friendly, and become part of the community.

You can’t just post things that are only about your work. People get sick of product being pushed down their throat, so try to offer them something different – even if it’s a cute gif of a cat or a funny vine! Reblog from others, link to other people’s content that you found interesting, talk about other books and other writers.

One cool idea I saw when I was searching for blog content ideas for writers is to sell your work by not selling it: as in, make a post about ‘if you liked these books, you’ll like mine’, or ‘if you liked my book, try these’.

Bonus tip: check out Top Ten Tuesdays, by The Broke and the Bookish – they pick a theme for each week, and you make a blog post about your top ten on that theme. It’ll give you a weekly content post – and you barely have to think about it!

I hope that’s been a helpful post! Do you guys have any tips you’d like to share for starting a bookish blog? It’d be great if you could share them here!

xo

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[writersrelief-deactivated202404]

Every social network has its own inherent culture and etiquette. If you want your Facebook author page to act as the fan-building machine it’s capable of being, you must know how to navigate the unwritten rules of online interaction. Such as: Is it okay to put up a quick, short post when you’re pressed for time? Or, should you attempt to reason with negative online trolls? Knowing the right etiquette for every situation will help you connect with your audience and build your fan base.

Click the image to read on.