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On Branding: How a Digital Agency Goes Start-to-Finish with a Social Media Branding Strategy

Imagine having a way to control how you’re presented online, a way to identify yourself or your company and differentiate yourself from others.

Sounds a bit like social media, right? Sounds a bit like branding.

The two go hand-in-hand. Branding happens on social media, and social media is an outlet for the voice of your brand. Many people have found success with personal branding and company positioning online, andagencies have come along to help people with both.

One of these agencies, Januel + Johnson, was kind enough to let us peek inside the way they run social media for their digital agency and how an emphasis on branding extends to the very root of all the content, scheduling, and engagement they provide with Buffer. Get the specifics on how J + J find success for their clients with a 360-degree brand strategy, with social media and Buffer at the heart.

None of our content looks scheduled. Yet with Buffer, it all is. That’s one of the biggest things that people say all the time. In fact, I get so much high engagement that people always think that I’m online, but I’m not, which is awesome.

– C.J. Johnson, Januel + Johnson

Growing a following on the strength of branding

Many agencies begin as an extension of one’s expertise: web design, SEO, advertising.

For C.J. Johnson and Ambar Januel, their unique advantage is with branding.

Branding has been a huge asset for them both at the personal level. C.J., an actor and director who lives in Los Angeles at the heart of the entertainment industry, found Buffer early on and has grown his following to 57,000 on Twitter. This follower growth brought attention and led to opportunities to share what he had learned about social media marketing and personal branding with others.

My following kept growing because I was using Buffer to schedule posts. My content is all about images. Photos. Videos. Because I’m the person that’s behind the camera, I know it’ll be high-quality and customized.

I saw that type of content was really kicking up some serious action and engagement. What ended up happening was people started asking me, “Hey, how are you able to get all these followers? How are you able to do this systematically?”

Everybody I talked to, I would say, “I use Buffer.” I would give them tips. I eventually was able to turn that into what I have now, which is Januel and Johnson, J + J, a premium branding agency. We specialize in branding period. That’s from the creative aspect of it, the social media, the publicity, everything.

“None of our content looks scheduled”

Branding is the most significant selling point for Januel + Johnson, and a huge part of this branding effort is the social media presence. C.J. and his team want their clients to have great success on social. For Januel + Johnson, this all starts with the content.

Their emphasis is on visual content. They prioritize custom images for their clients, and they have the in-house production team to pull off some beautiful shots (C.J. leads a majority of the photoshoots for the team).

Their visual strategy includes a few go-to elements:

Custom images

Emoji

Gifs

This is the formula that worked for C.J. as he grew his following, and it’s been working for clients, too.

The overall effect of this specialized, visual content is that it’s impossible to tell what’s been scheduled and what hasn’t.

The secret, of course, is that a majority of it is scheduled, within the Buffer dashboard. Januel + Johnson ensure that every social media update is unique and special, be it with a custom image, an emoji, or a GIF. And the result is a Twitter feed that looks completely in-the-moment.

One of our strongest assets is that we provide clients with the information to figure out how to schedule posts efficiently and how to get the best results. One of our biggest tips is to customize the content to fit whatever that particular client is into and what networks they’re on. And Buffer is a key part of it. I believe I manage 32 accounts in Buffer — at one point it was 50. I’ve used Buffer in every sort of way you can think of.

Before I started my own agency, I was working for a digital arts company, and I was managing 100 accounts there. We’d do two to three posts per day, per account, per channel. It was LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+. Not only did those accounts see growth, but they always had consistent engagement. I think that that had a lot to do with the fact that I used two rules when it comes to content:

Be informative, be entertaining.

In any situation, there’s always a call to action. Even if it isn’t a specific, “Hey, have you checked this out?” or “Hey, visit us here,” I always have a link at the end of the post. That helps a lot. And I don’t do link shortening. I leave the link as-is. That’s just for branding purposes.

From the beginning we would do a mix of photos, emoji, and GIFs. We would have customized videos, customized photos, including a call to action link, including the emojis and including the GIFs. We’d shake it up. Nothing looks ordinary. None of our content looks scheduled. It all is. That’s one of the biggest things that people say all the time. In fact, I get so much high engagement that people always think that I’m online, but I’m not, which is awesome.

When it comes to social media content, the more unique you are with posts and the more consistent you are, the better results you get.

Looking for big results? Give it three months

Social media, with its real-time nature, tends to lend itself to an expectation of quick results.

Of course, this can’t always be the case (and rarely is), which is why a long-term social media strategy and a consistent brand on social are so key.

Januel + Johnson have found that three months tends to be the sweet spot for a strategy to take hold and for results to start coming in. They believe these first 90 days to be so key that they make this period a requirement for any new clients that they take on.

Our goal is to empower people in general. Entrepreneurs and creatives. That’s our number one goal.

Typically what we do is we have a three-month period. I like to call it a trial period even though it never is officially a trial. It’s basically a three-month minimum to work with us. Typically within those three months I see gangbuster results.

I think maybe it’s because the first month is that trial transitional phase.

The second month you’re building the system.

The third month you’re seeing out-of-control engagement.

I can tell you this, when the content is really, really good and it’s scheduled out to perfection, and everybody is doing the role of what they need to do to succeed, obviously, the results are awesome. Typically, when they’re not consistent about posting, or the content is not very good — looks like spam, looks redundant — then it’s just a mixed bag of results.

Week-in-the-life: A social media scheduling workflow

An emphasis on quality content raises a key question: How much time does it take to make and schedule all these awesome tweets and posts?

The content that Januel + Johnson creates includes:

Custom photos

Videos

Emoji

GIFs

Evergreen content

Events

Plus a good mix of scheduled updates …

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How to Measure Social Media Using Google Analytics Reports : Social Media Examiner

Do you want to see how social media impacts your business? Discover four ways to use Google Analytics to measure the impact of your social media marketing.

Do you want to see how social media impacts your business? Want to learn how Google Analytics can help? In this article you'll discover four ways you can use Google Analytics to measure the impact of your social media marketing.

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What You Need to Know About User Experience Design | SEJ

User experience is crucial in today's competitive digital marketplace. Make sure your message is heard by developing an impactful user experience.

Here are few reasons that points out why visual appearance is so important 

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5 Ways to Make Your Content Mobile-Friendly for Increased Traffic and Engagement

I think it’s safe to say that smartphones aren’t a fad.

Jokes aside, mobile internet usage has been going up year after year. In fact, the number of mobile users has now exceeded the number of desktop users.

All that means if you’re not optimizing your content and your website as a whole, you’re likely not making the most of your traffic. Additionally, it may be preventing you from getting more traffic.

In 2015, Google announced that it created a mobile-friendly algorithm, which the industry dubbed “mobilegeddon.” It didn’t have a huge effect, but some sites that were not mobile-friendly took a significant traffic hit.

Keep in mind that Google usually tests the waters before scaling things up.

Google has made it clear that it wants to serve mobile users mobile-friendly web pages, and it will likely become more and more important over time.

I hope I’ve convinced you that optimizing your website and content for mobile is worth the effort, even though it might seem like another chore to do.

Not only will it help you get more SEO traffic in both the short- and long-term, but it will also help you with your conversion rates because a smaller percentage of your traffic will bounce.

In this post, I’m going to show you the five main ways you can optimize content for mobile. I encourage you to put as many of them into effect as possible.

A Quick Definition of Mobile-Friendly

I don’t want to jump ahead too far. If you’re already familiar with what mobile-friendly means, feel free to skip ahead to the next section. Otherwise, it’s really not that complicated.

As the name implies, mobile-friendly content just means that content appears well not just on desktop computers but also on smaller mobile devices. That means that the text is easily readable, links and navigation are easily clickable, and it’s easy to consume the content in general.

Let’s begin with a test: It’s important to know where you stand. If your content is already mobile-friendly, you won’t need to do all the things in this post.

There are two main ways that you can test your site for mobile-friendliness. The first is with Google’s own mobile-friendly test tool, which is something that everyone should use.

Another option is to use a site like this mobile phone emulator, which lets you see what your site looks like on a variety of different phones. It won’t give you a grade like Google’s tool will, but you’ll be able to see if anything shows up weird.

A Quick Note on Responsive Design

You’ve probably heard about “responsive” design.

It’s typically used as a synonym for mobile-friendly design, although that’s technically not true. There are a few different strategies to create mobile-friendly websites, and using responsive design is just one of them. It means that as the screen’s size changes, the content adjusts to match that size. That being said, responsive design is a clear winner in most situations.

Because of that, some of the tactics I’m about to show you are based on the assumption that you will implement responsive design as opposed to one of the other methods for creating mobile-friendly pages.

1. Widths Should be in Terms of Percentages

All HTML elements (e.g., “divs”) have some sort of width assigned to them.

If you right-click any element on a web page and then choose “inspect element” (in Chrome), you’ll see a panel come up.

If you click on an element in the left window of the panel, the corresponding CSS (style properties) values will be displayed in the right window. You will typically see a value for “width” specified, like this example shows:

This value can be set in terms of pixels (essentially tiny blocks on the screen) or a percentage.

When you assign 50% as a value, that tells the browser to make that element 50% of the width of the screen (or of the section that it’s contained in).

This is a good thing because if the screen is smaller, that section still shrinks to fit half the screen, which keeps things looking how they should.

If you instead specify widths by pixels, the widths of those elements do not change as the screen size changes. If the width of a section in pixels is bigger than the screen size (common for phones), the user will have to scroll horizontally, which is a pain on mobile devices.

What you should do about widths: If you bought a good theme or hired competent developers, you don’t have to worry about this too much.

However, if you ever design your own landing pages or modify your theme, keep in mind to specify widths as percentages. If you’ve used pixels in the past, track those down and fix them now. This is a simple change that will make a big difference.

There is one exception, though. You can specify pixel widths if you know how to use media queries effectively.

What are media queries? Read on…

2. Use Media Queries to Make Your Site Responsive

The real key to using responsive design is to use media queries.

Again, if your site is already responsive, you don’t have to worry about this unless you start creating your own custom pages. But if the situation comes up, you’d better know how to handle it.

Have you ever wondered how some pages not only resize as the screen size changes but also reshape?

Certain sections might get wider or thinner than before, and other elements may move all together (navbars and sidebars). The answer is that the site uses media queries to truly make the site responsive.

Here’s what a basic media query looks like (you can find them in the CSS of some pages):

@media screen and (max-width: 1020px) {

#container, #header, #content, #footer {

float: none;

width: auto;

}

p{ font-size: 2em; }

}

There’s a lot to see here, so let’s break it down into simple chunks.

Right at the start of the line, the media query is labeled with the “@media” tag.

The “screen” part is standard to include and means that the media query will be applied based on-screen size.

The most important part is the stuff in the brackets.

You can specify both “min-width” and “max-width.” In this case, the max-width is 1020px. This means that when the screen is up to 1020 pixels wide, all the CSS code inside this media query should apply.

The code inside will be given priority over other codes for the specified elements.

Going back to the code, you can see a bunch of normal CSS code within the outside curly brackets for the overall media query.

You can see that when the screen is under 1020px wide, any elements with an id of “container,” “header,” “content,” or “footer,” will now have “auto” width and a float value of “none.”

Similarly, all text in paragraph tags (p), will have a font size of2.0 em.

Applying this is simple.

Load your webpage, and then drag a corner to make the screen smaller. If you notice that certain parts become hard to read at a certain point, create a media query. Change it so that your content elements become larger or smaller, whatever is needed to make the content more mobile-friendly.

Note that you can apply multiple media queries to a page. Just specify a maximum and minimum width, and make sure they don’t overlap.

3. Pop-Ups are Dangerous

I’ve certainly experimented with using pop-ups to collect email addresses on my sites, and you should try them on yours as well.

However, you have to be very careful.

Many cheap pop-up tools and plugins look fine on desktop screens but completely ruin the user experience on mobile devices. They’re often difficult to close, and sometimes you can’t even close them. Not surprisingly, they cause visitors to instantly close the window.

There are three main solutions to a pop-up problem on mobile devices:

Solution #1: Get Rid of Them

The first is to disable pop-ups for your mobile visitors. This is a good solution, but not all pop-up tools allow you to do this easily.

Solution #2: Simplify Them

Another solution is to make your forms as simple as possible to fill out (minimize the number of fields) and make them easy to close. This is probably the worst solution, but it’s still better than sticking with whatever default pop-up you’re currently serving.

Solution #3: Only Use Pop-Ups When a Visitor Clicks

This is another great option. If you’ve heard about content upgrades, you may have already seen it in action.

The idea here is that you don’t use pop-ups that come up after a visitor spends a certain amount of time on your pages. Instead, you offer them some sort of lead magnet and tell them to click a link to get it. Then, the pop-up will come up and ask for their information.

People are much more receptive to pop-ups in this situation because they’re the ones who asked for it.

Just to wrap up this topic, if your current pop-up tool can’t handle these modifications, it’s time to upgrade to one that can.

4. Strip Down the Distractions

One of the worst experiences for a mobile user is to load a page and then be swamped by several elements competing for their attention.

Sometimes, they don’t even load at the same time, so the page keeps shifting around as it loads, which is extremelyfrustrating.

Some of that comes down to coding, but most of it comes from having too many distractions on the page.

The typical sidebar is useless on mobile. It gets pushed down to the very bottom of the page and barely ever gets used. So, unless you can create a fancy sidebar like Google did, it’s probably better to remove it all together for mobile users. This goes for other elements as well, e.g., your navigation menus.

How do you remove them?

Simple: use media queries.

On the main “div” for the sidebar, as an example, give it a CSS value of “display:none;” when the screen size is small. Then it won’t show up.

Copywriters shine on mobile: As a final note here, remember that it’s even more difficult to read long content on mobile devices.

Keep your content as concise as possible. It’s better writing, and mobile users prefer it anyways.

5. Get Ahead of the Curve With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are still HTML pages, but they follow a specific format. Google has teamed up with a bunch of huge brands to create and support them. These pages get priority in the search results of mobile users forcertain relevant queries.

The whole point of them is that they load really fast for mobile users, which is why Google is encouraging content creators to make them.

If you’re interested in seeing a demo, use your mobile device, and search for something on g.co/ampdemo.

Should you create AMP? I can’t give you a definitive answer. On the one hand, they may help get you some extra traffic, but I haven’t experimented with them enough to conclude anything.

And while Google supports them, that doesn’t mean that they will become widely adopted. Google could end up shutting the project down sometime in the future.

The one downside is that you need to maintain two versions of your content. The good news is that it’s easy with WordPress because there’s actually a plugin for that—all you need to do is enable it.

Finally, if you’re interested in creating AMP on your own non-WordPress site, here’s the official tutorial. I’d create my own, but Google’s will always be better.

If you have the extra time and resources, I’d encourage you to test out AMP, but most businesses will be better off to wait a bit and see if they get adopted more widely first.

Conclusion

If you’re not optimizing your content for mobile users, you’re behind the curve and missing out on traffic (and wasting some of your current traffic). That’s why I gave you these five ways to optimize your content for mobile.

By now, you should know which of them apply to your website and how to start implementing them.

Try to put them into effect as soon as possible, and measure whether there are any changes in mobile traffic or engagement.

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Apple Reports Worst Quarter in More Than 10 Years

Apple disappointed its investors Tuesday night after posting its first decline in revenue in more than a decade.

The iPhone maker posted second quarter revenue of $50.6 billion, down from $58 billion in the year-ago quarter and missing analysts estimates by $1.4 billion. Wall Street was expecting revenue of $52 billion and earnings per share of $2. Apple’s actual earnings per share came in at $1.90.

Despite failing to meet expectations, Apple CEO Tim Cook put a positive spin on things.

“Our team executed extremely well in the face of strong macroeconomic headwinds,” Cook said in a press release. “We are very happy with the continued strong growth in revenue from Services, thanks to the incredible strength of the Apple ecosystem and our growing base of over one billion active devices.”

While the company did surpass expectation of iPhone sales, the Cupertino firm is down a lot since this time last year: from 61.2 million to 51.2 million. iPad sales also dropped from 12.6 million last year to 10.3 million while Mac sales were down to four million units compared to 4.6 million.

The news caused the firm’s stock to dip eight percent as investors showed their displeasure over Apple’s lack of second quarter growth.

Despite the slowing of sales, Cook is staying optimistic.

“The future of Apple is very bright,” he said during an earnings call with investors and analysts. “Our product pipeline has amazing innovations in store. We’re very excited about bringing together developers for our four major platforms at our Worldwide Developers Conference in June. We are forging ahead with important investments in research and development, in our infrastructure, and in our supply chain. We’ve made 15 acquisitions in the last four quarters to accelerate our product and Services roadmaps, and we’re always on the lookout for companies with great technology, talent, and strategic fit.”

Apple is predicting revenue of between $41 billion and $43 billion for its third quarter.

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Why Small business should consider SEO?

Why Small business should consider SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the technique or bundle of strategies for making a website rank higher in the results of various search engines across the Internet including Google. Small businesses generally don’t pay heed to the best SEO service company India, Kolkata and elsewhere and think it to be a wasteful expenditure. But when a business, no matter how big or small it is, is backed…

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4 Data Metrics to Help Your SEO Skyrocket

Data measurement is crucial for SEO success. Without the proper metrics, a business owner will never truly understand how a site is performing, let alone how to improve it. As technology continues to become more advanced, so does the data that people have access to. The issue then becomes sifting through the information to determine which points are useful, and which are essentially worthless. Since every business is different, this is a personal decision for all business owners.

SEO experts track a myriad of different data points such as rankings, links, referrals, and more to gain a clear awareness of how well a site is operating. This, of course, in tandem, helps to map out the next phase of a client’s ranking strategy. If you don’t use a SEO firm, you still have access to the same data and can do it yourself; it just takes a bit of education and analysis.

While each business is unique and has various metrics that matter most to them, there are certain data metrics that are universal and should be analyzed by all. Here is the most critical data to be studied for obtaining increased SEO rankings:

Data Point 1: Shares of Referring Visits

Referring visits show how visitors ultimately found your site. It is vital to keep track of where these leads come from to gain leverage over traffic acquisition efforts. Each month, record contributions of each source for your site, including:

Direct Traffic: This refers to traffic received from bookmarks, typing in the URL directly, e-mail links without tracking codes, etc.

Search Traffic: This comes from search queries conducted in any major or minor search engine that ultimately led a person to your site.

Referral Traffic: This is derived from branding campaign links, promotional materials, trackable e-mails, or links across the Web.

Possessing this information is vital because the percentages and exact numbers will assist in identifying weaknesses and provide a basis for comparison over time. Use this data to track your marketing efforts and refine your acquisition plan for increased SEO benefits.

Data Point 2: Search Engine Referrals

In the United States, three major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) make up 95 percent of all search traffic. For most other countries, more than 80% of search traffic comes strictly from Google. Measuring how much of your traffic each of these engines sends your way is useful for several reasons:

It allows you to compare the volume contributed from each engine in correlation with its market share

It will provide key insights if your site experiences a drop; this is fundamental information for diagnosing the issue. If all engines drop equally, you can likely attribute the issue to accessibility. If it is only Google that sinks, you have likely been penalized and will need to dig deeper into updates like Panda and Penguin to see where the infraction occurred.

Certain SEO efforts will have a greater impact than others. On Google, gaining specific anchor text links from various domains have more effect than on other engines. Identifying certain tactics that work best on certain engines will help you to focus your efforts.

Data Point 3: Referrals by Terms and Phrases

Keywords always have been a critical factor to SEO. These are highly important to keep track of to gauge performance, identify terms that reign in significant volumes of traffic, and analyze new trends in keyword appeal.

Over the past 15 years, search traffic across the globe has risen consistently so to see a drop in referral quantity can be concerning. Check your keywords to determine if there has been a recent decline or if there is an issue with seasonal keywords – those that are most heavily used during certain times of the year. Your keyword strategy will most likely need to be dynamic; knowing exactly how your customers are searching for you is integral, and this often changes over time. Many businesses make the mistake of sticking with antiquated keywords, so don’t let this happen to you.

Data Point 4: Conversion Rates by Search Query

Conversions are the ultimate goal of any business; that is the entire point of the SEO game. Few metrics matter as much as conversions do. Your analytics tool will tell you what page a visitor lands on after conducting a search query; this will allow you to focus your efforts on optimizing those pages for a prime user experience and guide visitors through the conversion funnel to maximize potential.

The most valuable element to this, however, is establishing the keywords that consistently send visitors to your site that convert. This will allow you to focus your energy on ranking for these words to magnify your conversion capabilities. But this should only be the beginning of your keyword phrase referral study; dig deeper to uncover applicable data on how the conversation process matures throughout a consumer’s visit to your site.

Data and metrics are the key to understanding your SEO efforts and optimizations. If you are not tracking this vital informational, you have no way of knowing what is and is not working. By establishing a tracking schedule and making mindful decisions to elevate each metric over time, you have an astronomically better chance at SEO success.

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Facebook Marketing is Changing —Here’s What Small Businesses Can Do To Stay In The Game

Facebook is always trying to change things up to make itself more profitable. The year 2015 has seen changes to the News Feed, which affects the way that companies conduct Facebook marketing campaigns via their Facebook Pages. The new changes are probably affecting your marketing campaign plans so, to help you adjust, here are a few of the most common questions and their solutions.

Question 1: What is Facebook changing about its News Feed?

You have likely noticed Page posts are not showing up in News Feeds anymore. It is very rare that you see a Page post in a News Feed these days unless it is very popular and/or trending in some way. As a result, the level of engagement with your Facebook Page has probably gone down. Facebook is trying to remove the overly promotional elements to help improve the News Feed and associated user experience.

“As part of our ongoing survey that asked thousands upon thousands of people how they felt about their News Feeds,” Facebook said. “Many people said they wanted to see far more stories from their friends and their Pages, and far less promotional content.”

Facebook has listed three of the traits it found to be overly promotional

• Posts that use the same content as seen in adverts;

• Posts that only exist to make people buy stuff or install apps;

• Posts asking people to enter promotions without any real context.

Your organic distribution is going to decrease because of the new News Feed rules, which means you will need to switch to Facebook advertising if you want to push your products, services, brands or websites. If your Facebook Page is a big part of your marketing strategy, then it is time to re-evaluate your plans.

Question 2: What do the Facebook News feed changes going to mean to businesses that cannot afford to spend money on Facebook advertising?

Economics suggests that more people are going to use Facebook advertising now, which is going to push up the price if you want to appear in prominent positions on the website. If you do not have the budget to risk on Facebook advertising, then here is what you should do:

1. Evaluate your current marketing strategy and continue to create content that people will want to look at on Facebook. If the content is engaging, then people will still visit your Facebook Page even if it is not featured on news feeds.

2. Make sure you use the correct link format when you post any links on your Facebook Page, and do not bury them in photo captions.

3. Keep testing your marketing strategies on Facebook to see how your engagement is being affected. Do not post general comments such as greeting for the season. Post things that are specific to your niche and see how the results differ.

4. Post your videos and images onto Instagram and then cross-post them to Facebook.

5. The social media content calendar is very handy and helpful if you want to organize your posts on Facebook.

Question 3: What should I do if my business has a small advertising budget and is able to spare some for Facebook advertising?

Facebook advertising does have functions that accommodate people with small budgets. Your business will not be placed as prominently as those with bigger budgets will, but that doesn’t mean your campaign will be completely lacking in potential. For example, if you were to target your adverts to a very small and tight group, you may have more success achieving a convertible level of prominence. A business that has a smaller advertising budget may use Facebook boost posts to target their posts at their preferred audience.

Facebook marketing tips to help improve your reach

Know your audience on Facebook

You are supposed to know your target audience anyway, but if you want to succeed with Facebook advertising, you need to know your general demographic information and you need to gather as much information as possible to target your customers more tightly so that you need not spend as much money.

Avoid trying to sell on Facebook

Facebook is reacting to sales-driven posts by making them less prominent. Trying to get people’s attention and educate them about your brand is OK, but Facebook will work against you if you are trying to make sales, and if you are trying to pull people off of Facebook.

Post some of your best content on Facebook

This may seem like silly advice, since your content is more permanent and valuable on your website, however, there is nothing stopping you from posting your best content on Facebook and then waiting a few weeks for it to be forgotten before posting it in your website. Followed content and content that is doing well on other social media networks may help improve its exposure on Facebook.

Allow your employees the chance to go on your Facebook page

Have your employees visit your Facebook page and click likes, make comments and share things with their own profiles. These likes and engagement elements will help make your content more prominent. However, spam likes, shares and comments will have your content disregarded.

Respond to people

Do not respond to the trolls or people being negative. They are not the silent majority, so do not worry about them. Respond to the people that ask real questions or make good comments. Especially respond to the funny ones because you want them to return and keep adding good stuff to your page.

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Top 5 things to consider while writing an article

Top 5 things to consider while writing an article

A convincing article can enhance the credibility of your website for sure. So it is quite necessary to create an eye catchy and useful article. If you are running your business website and you are willing to enhance its visibility and followers then you should write a captivating and useful content for it. If you require an expert help in this regard then you can utilize article writing services…

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Search engine marketing services and things about it

Search engine marketing services and things about it

In today’s competitive world only website creation for your business is not sufficient by any mean. You have to make efforts in the direction of making your website rank higher on search engines. If you are thinking in the same way then you can take assistance of providers of Search engine marketing services. These services can help you in improving the ranking of your website on search engines.

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5 common mistakes made during writing articles

5 common mistakes made during writing articles

If an imperfect writer makes mistake in his / her article then its ok, because they are imperfect, but if a perfect person do this same mistake then it’s too bad, because if you are a perfect writer then you should have perfection in your article. If you are regularly doing same mistake then don’t worry, because no one is perfect in this world, but you have to improve yourself, never lose an…

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10 Best Instagram Tools for Business

Someone smart once said, “If you want to stay ahead in the competition, you have to be where your customers are.” Lori Ruff transformed this piece of advice and came up with something like this, “Social media is here. It’s not going away; not a passing fad. Be where your customers are: in social media.”

That’s awesome, because we probably already knew this, believed it, and have implemented it into our marketing strategies. In fact, many have already begun building their brand on the platform theFast Company calls “the best social and mobile platform for brands to reach audiences that are willing to engage”—Instagram of course. And if you’re not already marketing on Instagram, you’re missing out.

So, if you are an astute marketer who loves to share inspirational instantaneous square snaps with your customers and prospects every now and then, here are a few apps that will further your Instagram marketing efforts and allow you to be more efficient with the app.

1. Iconosquare: Formerly known as Statigr.am, Iconoquare has always been on the top of list for best tools to use with your Instagram profile. The app will provide you with advanced statistics based on various indicators such as total number of likes received, average number of likes and comments per photo, most liked photos, follower growth charts and more. Iconoquare has been used by top companies such as Coca-Cola, Gap, Starbucks and Victoria Secret.

Availability: PC and Mac

Price: $200/month

2. Latergramme: If you’re already busy managing your daily business routine, managing your Instagram posts can become unnecessarily time-consuming. Latergramme was introduced to provide Instagram users and businesses with an easy-to-use tool to manage and schedule their posts on Instagram. It has more than 250,000 global users.

Availability: App store and Google Play

Price: Free (optional paid plan)

3. Repost: Did you think re-tweets were only for Twitter? Well, technically, they are only for Twitter, but there is a way you can actually enable the “re-post” option on Instagram—by using the Repost app. If you find something worth “reposting” while giving the original poster full credit, go ahead and give Repost a try.

Availability: App Store and Google Play

Price: Free (paid plan has more options)

4. Instagram Business Tools: Instagram itself seems like a very simple app with a small number of options, but only a few years ago the developers announced an introduction of a new suite of business tools built especially for brands. The tools cater to three main purposes:

To provide analytics so you can see how far you are getting at with increasing brand awareness, reach, impressions, engagement, and other insights.

Ad insights tell you how “impressionable” and far-reaching your ads and campaigns were.

Ad staging allows you and your team to create, preview, and collaborate on a soon-to-be released campaign.

Availability: Mac and PC

Price: Varies

5. Instaquote: This app is another one by Red Cactus, the developer of Repost. Instaquote allows users to create text images, add words to a photo, and share thoughts or quotes in beautiful ways. With more than 20 design templates, high quality backgrounds and a plethora of options, you can give your followers something to love about the way you share words for inspiration.

Availability: App Store and Google Play

Price: Free (with some pro templates)

6. PicFlow: As an extension to your fabulous quote creation, Red Cactus also offers users a tool for creating spectacular video slideshows. Combine a few photos, tamper with the timings, add audio to the background, choose from transitions, and hit post. This is a brilliant way to create professional looking collages—ones that your followers will “like” a lot.

Availability: App Store

Price: Free (with some pro options)

7. Postso: Here’s a tool that will solve all your posting and scheduling problems if you tend to be a busy bee with only a little amount of time to do all the planning. With Postso, you can share pictures, videos and links at a specified time at a future date. You can also specify which “location” you want to target. This is a team-friendly tool that will give control access to others working with you.

Availability: Mac and PC

Price: Free trial (then $14.95 per month)

8. Crowdfire: Here’s a great app for managing your followers as well as unfollowers. Formerly known as JustUnfollow, Crowdfire has more than 10 million users and has been used by popular businesses such as Tech Crunch, Social Times and the Crozdesk. The application was created in 2010 with the intention of finding out who “unfollowed” you on Twitter. Later, it transformed into a tool with several more features to help you effectively manage your account. Crowdfire can not only help track who unfollowed you (so you may unfollow them as well if you like), but also find inactive users, find relevant users to follow, provide stats on how your updates affect followers/unfollowers, and check the relationship between your Twitter and Instagram account.

Availability: Mac, PC, App store and Play Store

Price: Free

9. Tag Board: Tag Board makes following and tracking tags much easier. This is a tool for all hashtag loving businesses that need to know which popular tags to follow, as well as a clear view of hashtags that you might have created or used across various social platforms. Tagboard basically puts all recent posts on a popular hashtag in one place whether it was shared on Instagram, Twitter, Google+, Vine, Flickr, or any other popular platform.

Availability: Mac and PC

Price: Free (paid for more options)

10. Piquora: Piquora is visual marketing app that will enable you to drive user engagement, increase ROI and sales, and do much more. With Pirquora the focus is on authentic user-generated photos. Piquora uses a UGC search engine to curate and suggest the best photos for your posts that can pull content based on geography, languages and specific locations. You can get rights for the photo using Piquora in just a few clicks. Additionally, you can collaborate with an entire team using a calendar and track your results using Piquora data and analytics. Popular brands using this software include Etsy, Conde Nast and Shutterfly.

Availability: PC and Mac

Price: contact for pricing

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Five Trusted Link Building Techniques that Work in 2015

Internet marketers are always searching for the latest, greatest technique to boost numbers. While it’s important, especially in digital marketing, to always keep one eye on what lies ahead, it’s also equally (if not more) important to remain focused on what has and currently is working for you.

When it comes to link building, lots of things have changed over the years. As search engines have cracked down on spammy and automated techniques, it’s important now more than ever to be using trusted and true strategies that actually work. While there are lots of new creative link building techniques, there are also the powerful strategies that have been around for sometime and are continuing to produce great results.

So, what are the five most trusted link building techniques that you can count on in 2015 (and beyond)? Check them out here.

Guest Posting

The most tried and true of all techniques lives on!

Yes, it’s 2015, and yes, guest posting is still one of the most tried and true link building techniques. Don’t let people tell you guest posting is dead, because it’s not. While it’s quite clear and obviousthat guest posting has significantly changed from what it used to be, it’s by no means dead, and in fact it’s alive and well.

In terms of how guest posting has changed, it’s in fact become a much more legit form of link building than it used to be. While what once might’ve been easily automated and done in large scale numbers is now pretty much unattainable unless completed on a more personal level. Conducting real outreach to quality blogs, with real accomplished writers and journalists, is how you’re going to get links in today’s digital marketing climate.

Guest posting in 2015 is less about the link you’re getting, and more about the quality blog postyou’re posting. The link is an added benefit!

How-To Guides

Become an information powerhouse, and get links while you’re at it!

Creating informative, niche how-to guides and hosting them on your website or blog is another great step to take in order to start gaining valuable links. It might take a significant amount of time or a lot of effort to create a guide valuable enough to really help you get good links, but the time and effort you put in will come back to you tenfold.

Using videos, images, quotes, and more in your how-to guides is imperative if you want to see them turn into link building powerhouses. Once you’ve built up a solid guide (or, for best results, multiple guides) it’s time to start promoting them. Conduct blogger and influencer outreach to a variety of different outlets, and share the guide with them. Share it constantly on social media, and be sure to target niche specific people and blogs.

Building how-to guides is a link building strategy that, with enough effort put in now, will pay off for many years to come.

Expert Interviews

Be the source of expert information, and the links will follow.

Conducting interviews with experts in the niche you’re link building continues to be one of the greatest ways to gain a high number of valuable links. While it’s a strategy that requires a lot of waiting, and a lot of time to put together and finally get live, it’s something that is almost a sure-fire bet to get a number of great links while at the same time networking with some of the more known names in the industry.

Craft a personal email with a number of questions for the expert that you’d like to interview. If you want this piece to just focus on one expert, that’s fine, but ideally you’ll craft a blog post or content page with quotes and analysis from a handful of experts, as this will likely get you the most links. Once you’ve collected the answers and quotes, and have packaged the content together, reach back out to the expert with what you’ve come up with. If you put a lot of work into it, it will show, and you’ll likely get some social shares and a link back to your work.

Consider reaching out to many more experts than you want or think you’ll need, because chances are many will flat or ignore your emails for whatever reason.

Event Sponsorships

Look to find sponsorship opportunities in your niche, and you’ll get relevant links.

Sponsoring events is another excellent link building strategy that companies across many niches are utilizing in 2015. Depending on the size of the event and level of sponsorship, the potential of gaining a huge number of quality links is substantial. Events such as conferences typically list every single sponsor, and as other blogs start writing about the event there’s a chance you’ll get some links back that way too.

While sponsoring events is a great way to get links, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a chance these links will eventually get removed. Use various search queries to find good events that you can sponsor.

Scholarships

One of the more up and coming link building techniques that more and more companies are starting to utilize is offering scholarships. Offering scholarships sort of follows the same idea as sponsoring an event, but scholarships will likely result in more links from more higher quality sites (and possibly for a cheaper price, too).

There are a myriad of locations out on the web that compile lists of scholarships available to high school or college students, as a helpful resource. Sponsoring a scholarship by offering, say, $1,000 to the winner will help your company appear on these lists. You build a page on your website with all the information needed to apply for the scholarship, and promote that page out to the scholarship aggregators.

While the initial startup cost of offering a scholarship might be high, chances are you’ll see a nice return on investment due to the number of high quality EDU links you’ll be getting.

What works for you?

All in all, these five strategies have worked for businesses small and large, for many years. Unless something dramatically changes, they’ll continue working in the future, too. But, just like with any online marketing strategy, it really boils down to what works best for you and your business, as it might vary dramatically from another business!

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Four Elements That Drive Title Tag Click-Throughs

When you look at the search engine results pages (SERPs) you’d be correct to assume that the website that ranks first gets the most clicks. The data on this varies, with some studies showing that the first link gets as much as 53 percent of clicks while others place it at a more modest 32 percent.

When we are looking at 15 percent or less of clicks for the second spot and beyond, we need to do all we can to encourage users to click our results.

Today I’m going to share four elements that can help drive more clicks that are based within one of the most foundational on-page SEO elements – the title tag.

Quick Review

Your title tag is that blue clickable snippet of text that appears in the search engines. Here’s what SiteProNews’ looks like:

The full title tag is “SiteProNews – Breaking News, Technology News, and Social Media News” but Google has a character limitation which is why it is cut off.

Basic SEO title tag best practices tell us that our title tags should contain our main keywords (ex. Technology News) that we want to rank for which has resulted in a lot of brands keyword stuffing their title tags so that they end up like this:

The thing is, Google is smart enough to know that Cartridgeworld.com offers all these products so it doesn’t need to jam all these keywords into its title tag. Going after keywords is very important, but I’d like to introduce you to a way to construct title tags that use one or more of the following four elements to drive more click-throughs:

Low Price

Freshness

Volume

Speed

Note: This is not to be confused with local SEO best practices for titles tags that suggest placing the city and state within the title tag. If you can do that and incorporate some of the below for your local results, you’d likely be in a good place.

Low Price Title Tag

If you are a low price leader or that is something you use to market your services, incorporate this in your title tags. For example, it’s easy to see why the Geico title encourages click-through for a search for “car insurance.” It tells you why you should click the ad:

As a consumer, you’d likely look at these three options, see Geico’s low price offering and choose to click that link first. Where’s the incentive to click through to the others and furthermore does Farmers really need to keyword stuff their title tag with “car insurance” and “auto insurance?” Me thinks not.

Freshness Title Tag

Bottom line, Google likes fresh, new content. If you can showcase this in your title tags you’ll encourage others to click. Check out the below title tags. It’s clear that if you were a consumer searching for “cell phone reviews” you’d want to know you’d be getting the most recent information possible (from 2015).

Laptopmage.com takes click-through chances up a notch with the insertion of the word “best” in front of its title tag. This title tag is a great example of a freshness element (2015) as well as an adjective that is associated with quality (best).

Volume Title Tags

If you have a nice list of items that you are discussing in your content, you should mention them in your title tag. For example, check out this result for “things to do in Park City Utah” and you’ll see how Trip Advisor capitalizes on the volume title tag where its competitors do not:

Merely addressing how many items there are for visitors to do gives a searcher more incentive to click that link over the others. Understanding that 30 things to do is a fairly robust amount, there is sure to be something that peaks your interest in this list and Trip Advisor knows that.

Speed Title Tag

Does your brand offer a service or product that boasts speed as the main selling point? Check out these results for “get a bachelor’s degree online” and notice how much more effective the DIY Degree (doityourselfdegree.com) speed claim is:

Doityourselfdegree.com makes good use of additional click-through elements within its meta description, mentioning price (1/20th the cost of a four-year degree). Understanding its ideal client is someone who values efficiency – hence the search for an online degree – it does a good job of capturing the main selling point of the service within its title tag to encourage click-through.

Click-Through Incentives are Not Unique to Title Tags

Increasing the click-through rates of our digital messages is nothing new, although it seems that not enough brands are taking advantage of consumer psychology elements within their title tags. One place where we are all familiar with these elements is within pay-per-click ads.

Click-throughs Encouraged in PPC

Taking our low price example for the search “car insurance,” it’s obvious that a lot of brands are taking advantage of psychological click-through elements within their paid Google ads:

These types of CTR-friendly titles are evident all throughout PPC ads and can often be duplicated for organic search results.

Click-throughs Encouraged in Social Media Ads

In social media ads the title tag equivalent, or “Headline” for Facebook ads specifically, is also a very important factor that contributes to click-throughs. It is also a place to experiment with different headlines to see which one’s work best.

Grant Cooper, CEO of social media management company Social Vantage, says it always split-tests different headlines to see which ones increase the CTR of the ad. “We have found that ads with a controversial headline or ads that contain a headline with an enticing offer perform much better than ads that have a very broad and uninteresting headline.”

Cooper provided an example of two ads, one with the low price element included in the headline and one without.

The ad on the right (the one without any click-through textual elements) had a CTR of 1.1 percent while the ad with the price claim had a CTR of 3.2 percent. While there are some other textual elements that differed between the two ads the headline with the low price offer clearly worked best and demonstrated triple the click-through of the ad without.

Most of us know these trends to be true with social or PPC ads so why aren’t more of us adopting them for the arguably more important organic title tags?

Look at PPC and Social Media Headlines for Title Tags Ideas

If you want to get some ideas as to what title tags may work best for you or your clients, just take a look at the ads that come up for searches that you are going for. You’ll likely see some creative use of language that can help you to both maintain some of your keyword goals as well as increase the click-through conversion rates of your title tags.

Title Tag Recap

You can always try to use one of these four elements to improve your click-throughs of title tags. The more people that land on your site the better off you’ll be, especially if you can make good on whatever you are claiming in the SERPs.

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5 Tips to Save Time on Curating Content for Social Media

Businesses and social media managers use content curation to save time on content creation. But ironically, oftentimes content curation too becomes a time-consuming process. If you’ve ever run manual searches on Google to find content you can share on social media, you know exactly just how hard it can be to maintain a continuous stream of content for your social media updates.

Here are few tips to help simplify the process of content curation, without having to spend hours on it every day:

1. Automate the Content Curation Process

Owing to the volume of conversations on social media, you will have to post several times a day on each of your social accounts for your audience to notice you and engage with the content you share. However, logging into each of your social accounts manually to share content as and when you find it will turn out to be erratic and ineffective. It will also disrupt the rest of your tasks for a work day causing severe loss of productivity.

Social media automation holds the solution to this problem. Content discovery tools like DrumUpand Feedly help automate the content curation process, giving you all the content you need in one place. Some tools even let you schedule posts to multiple accounts for days, weeks and even months in advance, saving you the hassle of having to share posts manually.

(Disclosure: I write for the DrumUp Blog)

2. Curate Content from Influencers

Influencers enjoy large followings on social media because they share high quality content. One of the ways to save time on curation is to follow such influencers and share their content. This will add to your stream of content and also help you start a conversation with them.

Tools like Followerwonk are useful in identifying influencers among your followers. You can also use the tool to search Twitter by keywords in Bios and profiles, and categorizing them by the number of followers they have, their location etc.

You can also use tools like Newsle to keep track of all the publications by and mentions of the influencers in your Facebook and LinkedIn networks.

3. Cut Back on the Number of Social Profiles

Sure, having a presence on an innumerable number of social media platforms will help you reach a much wider audience. But if you’re going to be stacking social media profiles for your business, also remember that you will have to produce and share more and more content to stay active on all those platforms. That means you’ll end up spending an increasing amount of time on content curation and social media management.

Rather than spreading yourself too thin across social networks, study your target audience to understand their social media preferences. Identify two or three platforms on which they’re most active and focus your efforts on building a strong presence on those select platforms.

4. Follow a Content Curation Schedule

While content recommendation engines will save you the effort of having to run manual searches for content, you will still have to invest some time in reviewing the suggested content to decide what you want to share. In fact, this is the most essential step in the content curation process, without which you’ll only be doing content aggregation.

When you’re reviewing the content suggestions made by a content discovery tool like DrumUp or Scoop.it, allocate a specific amount of time for the task. You can curate content as frequently as it suits your social media activity patterns. Process the content suggestions in batches, so the effort you invest each time will last you a few days or weeks.

5. Use Analytics to Curate the Right Kind of Content

Analytics is an important element of social media management. It’s also critical at the level of content curation because the insights you get from these tools help you identify the kind of posts that are receiving the highest engagement. In effect, it helps you understand the content preferences of your audience.

With this knowledge you will be able to tailor the content you share to match audience preferences, ensuring that you don’t waste any time on sharing content that wouldn’t work anyway. Consequently, you’ll also see an improvement in engagement levels across all your social accounts.

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ProRiters turned 1 today!

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Google Unleashes Cloud Dataproc

Creating clusters quickly, at minimal cost, and managing them with ease are just some of the selling points to the latest Google product.

Google announced Wednesday it has, in beta form, launched Cloud Dataproc. It’s a managed Spark and Hadoop service that lets users take advantage of open source data tools for batch processing, querying, streaming and machine learning.

“Cloud Dataproc automation helps you create clusters quickly, manage them easily, and save money by turning clusters off when you don’t need them. With less time and money spent on administration, you can focus on your jobs and your data,” explained product manager James Malone in ablog post.

Google explained users will only pay for what they use with minute-by-minute billing meaning finances shouldn’t be a concern for those who want to use Spark and Hadoop clusters without the assistance of an administrator or special software.

Greg DeMichillie, director of product management for Google Cloud Platform, told Tech Crunchusers will be able to spin up a Hadoop cluster in less than a minute-and-a-half. That’s much quicker than other services.

“In this space, there is no one-size that fits for all,” DeMichillie said. “We think this is going to be a really important addition to our overall portfolio.”

Cloud Dataproc officially launched Wednesday and features built-in integration with Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud Logging, and Cloud Monitoring, giving users a complete and robust data platform.